Kat reads some books, 2021

Hello everyone, Happy New Year.

Last year's thread is here - https://www.librarything.com/topic/314871#

To say some more now it is 2021, let's hope for a better year.

I do have some goals for this year. The first is to read more, I'll post about that below. In doing so I am going to focus on two books at a time. I'm not forcing myself to finish things I go cold on, but I have so many unfinished that I'm not altogether cold about and many others I want to read I should be able to move on to another quickly, if I let myself stay alive to what I am feeling for.

I don't exactly read from the 1001 books to read list, but I do know I have read 118 of those books, and several more unfinished. I'd quite like to have chalked off some more of those, especially some cornerstones to our world, at a slightly greater rate of progress.

Some recent reading also made me think I may be able to try to squeeze in a poetry collection or a play on top of this, hopefully each week or two. That would be a big increase. But at present I do have time for it. I'm aso focusing a bit on books I already have (root) and am cutting back on the purchasing (again).

I'm going to list titles read below. I'll save building my wall of covers for the end of the year, partly in hopes the LT issue of not displaying all the amazon pictures resolves.

If you've read last year's thread I'm also going to read through my previous threads, or start that (will I want to go on?) - I already read the first, an interesting experience I'll speak of below too.

Books read in 2021:

January
~ Educating Rita by Willy Russell - comments and some more comments here
~ Wild, an elemental journey by Jay Griffiths Kindle ed. - comments
~ No one is too small to make a difference by Greta Thunberg kindle ed. - comments
~ My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe kindle ed. - comments
~ Sparrow Tree by Gwyneth Lewis (+ 2x rereads) - my comments
~ Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An essay in contrast by George Steiner - my comments
~ Swan: poems and prose poems (+1x reread) by Mary Oliver my comments here
~ The Persians by Aeschylus trans. E. D. A. Morshead in The Complete works of Aeschylus (Delphi, kindle ed.)
Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus trans. Herbert Weir Smyth ibid.
The Suppliants by Aeschylus trans. Herbert Weir Smyth ibid. comments on these three plays here
February
~ My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite - my comments
~ Tragedy, the Greeks and Us by Simon Critchley kindle ed. comments here
March
~ The Three Marriages: Reimagining work, self and relationship by David Whyte Audiobook - my comments
~ New and Selected Poems v.1 by Mary Oliver my comments
~ Writing as a way of Healing: How telling our stories transforms our lives by Louise DeSalvo - comments here
~ The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker (Reread) my comments here
April
~ Travelling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker kindle ed. - my comments here
~ Long Life: essays and other writings by Mary Oliver kindle ed. my comments (following on from New Selected poems)
~ Art in the Light of Conscience: eight essays on poetry by Marina Tsvetaeva translated with introduction by Angela Livingstone Kindle ed. my comments
~ Zen in the art of writing by Ray Bradbury my comments
May
~ This is Yarrow by Tara Bergin
~ Diary of a Film by Niven Govinden Kindle ed. my comments
~ Frank Cioffi: the philosopher in shirt-sleeves by David Ellis and Nicholas Bunnin Kindle ed. - my comments
~ Landing Light by Don Paterson
~ For Esme ~ with Love and Squalor by J. D. Salinger - my comments
~ Falling Awake by Alice Oswald
June
~ Armada by Brian Patten Kindle ed. my comments here
~ Letters summer 1926, Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, Rainer Maria Rilke --- my comments
July
~ The Whole & Rain-domed Universe by Colette Bryce
~ The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell -- my comments here
~ Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher Kindle ed.
August
~ Cutting it Short by Bohumil Hrabal in The little town where time stood still Kindle ed. -- my comments here
~ Agamemnon by Aeschylus in The complete works of Aeschylus Kindle ed.
September
~ A Book of Life by Peter Kingsley
October
~ Tongues of Fire by Sean Hewitt Kindle ed.
~ In the Dark Places of Wisdom by Peter Kingsley reread my comments here
November
~ Conversations with McCartney by Paul du Noyer Kindle ed. comments here
~ Memento Mori by Muriel Spark -- my comments here
December
~ Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters Kindle ed. -- my comments here
~ Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges -- my comments here
~ The Little Town Where Time Stood Still by Bohumil Hrabal Kindle ed. -- my comments here

what to use this space for . . . for now, currently reading:


Hope Abandoned by Nadezdha Mandelstam

(rereading the poetry I've not posted about yet)

Happy New Year! I'll look forward to following along with your reading. Cheers!

>3 rocketjk: thanks and a Happy New Year to you too. I'm looking forward to it and to following yourself and others.

thinking about reading more -

I just read this, which I came across coincidentally or maybe the algorithms are tracking me too well:

https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-make-a-daily-habit-of-reading-more-books

It's not as if I have a standing start. But I do have times I get diverted from reading (tsundoku - does that lead to sudoku?) - but some big events in the last year, also just a lot on my mind for a long time. So I have a sense of livening my approach up a bit and as I say in post 1 I have some ideas as to directions.

January ** The Lake House ** Disclosure ** My Neighbour Totoro ** Nausicaa ** Pretend it's a City **

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/12/30/john-steinbeck-new-year

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/31/the-guardian-view-of-brexi... Colonised.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/02/foucault-that-noise-th... -- vital, there are two I know well, yet still do (one of which I am convinced if I did not most people locally would think I was one of the other side)

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jan/02/george-saunders-these-trenches-wer...
"You write about the virtues of revision and that slow, incremental process that is vital to telling good and truthful stories. With that in mind, what are your feelings about social media, which thrives off instantaneous reaction?)
There’s something wonderful about the spontaneity of social media, but I think at this point it’s becoming 100% toxic for people to be firing off the top of their brains. One of the things this book says is that the deeper parts of our brain are actually more empathic. If you revise something 20 times, for a mysterious reason, it becomes more social, empathic and compassionate. With Chekhov, you feel he’s always saying: “Well, what else?”, “Is there anything else I should know?”, or “Maybe I’m wrong.” And all of that seems to be designed to foster love, or at least some kind of relation to the other that’s got possibility. So I’m not a fan of social media. I’m not on it. And I won’t be, because I think it’s killing us, actually. I really do."

https://www.britannica.com/topic/brainwashing

Interesting interview with Oliver Stone - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p091pfzv

https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/05/02/albert-camus-create-dangerously/

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/01/25/eccentricity-as-feminism/ (Olga Tokarczuk on Leonora Carrington)

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jan/30/find-of-the-century-medieval-hoa...

https://www.them.us/story/study-trans-cisgender-children-gender-identities

>4 tonikat: I have to admit that when I saw this . . .

how-to-make-a-daily-habit-of-reading-more-books

. . . the first thing I thought was, "Am I really supposed to read more books every day? And just how many books am I supposed to read each day?"

Ha! I crack myself up.

>6 rocketjk: lol you're speaking from a different position to myself, but yes it does have a one size fits all approach, maybe assuming those that don't need it won't read it. I suppose I already knew my answers anyway, it confirmed some of them and just happened along. Hopefully my new pastures are emerging.

>4 tonikat: That is an interesting article. I usually aim to start the new year with an improved reading programme. It is always quite difficult because of the celebrations the night before. This year I was convinced it would be different because of Covid-19 and no New Years eve celebrations. The morning did not get off to a good start, when just as I opened a book, Lynn (my wife) shouted up to me from the floor below that she had seen a rat. We are at the moment seemingly fighting a losing battle against a rat infestation (we live in an old farmhouse) and so the morning was spent filling in any gaps which a rat might have been able to crawl through. Then the telephone rang our near neighbours (the only people we see during our now self imposed confinement) asked us to come over for an apéro as they were feeling a bit down. Three hours later after sharing four bottles of fizzy wine we got home and I went upstairs and picked up that book, within five minutes I had fallen asleep and woke up just in time to see Doctor Who on the TV. It is now 10pm and I have still to open up my new thread on LT. 5 minutes reading time on the first day of the new year is not a great start

>8 baswood: all that i can understand -- yet the virus has morphed life here for me beyond that, New Years eve on my own, stil stayed up till 2am and then a bit longer getting to sleep due in part to neighbours, but that was fine really it wasn't bad noise and quite glad someone had people to make noise with. So I got up really late. But then nothign to disturb me, phone calls ok, but telly not turning on today, so plenty of time for reading only 90 mins left of Wild, an elemental journey then tonight I took my plan to heart - I saw Educating Rita on tv again before christmas and ordered a copy of the play to read and see how it differed, as some are v. critical of the film on that score, so one book down . . . this is not like me at all, but I feel quite good for all this, its what i moaned about needing when work had me overloaded to have much space left in head to read. I have not seen Dr Who of course. And France too . . . only today i think Jay Griffiths, yes, was talking about how after 1968 lots of rebellious types headed for the mountains of South West France when things did not change (their way). I have faith you'll get further demain. I plan to see someone on Sunday, maybe.

Happy new year!

I am trying to get back to plays and poetry again this year so I will be interested to see what you read. ;)

>10 AnnieMod: and Happy New year to you too -- and likewise for your reads :)

Hi Toni - happy 2021. I like those covers up in there, currently, in >2 tonikat:.

Happy New Year and thanks for that great article in >4 tonikat:, Kat. I was mentioning to someone recently that my reading output has progressively nosedived in the past four years, and I started thinking of why that was. Clearly Trump's presidency had a lot to do with it, which other friends mentioned as well, as I had a heightened sense of anxiety, anger and despair, which have all dissipated to a moderate degree but haven't gone away completely. My attention span dropped off accordingly, as I spent more time following the unending sh*t show that was coming from the White House, along with way too much time on social media and online reading articles and posts that fed my seething outrage. I also stayed inside much more than I had before, especially as I became more distrustful of a segment of the American population, and I'm much more easily distracted when I'm not reading outside of my house. 2020 brought its own set of challenges, as I stopped taking public transit to and from work, which cut 30-60+ minutes of reading time out of my schedule, and not traveling, especially to Europe, also cut severely into my reading, as did the time I spent caring for my ailing elderly parents and social distancing. I'll be nearly completely protected against SARS-CoV-2 by the end of this month, which will make me feel more comfortable going outdoors and reading in cafes again (while still practicing recommended pubic health measures), as will paying closer attention to the amount of time I spend online.

>12 dchaikin: and to you Dan -- I'm liking those two too, will try and finish Wild today.

>13 kidzdoc: Happy New Year Darryl. I hear what you're saying re Trump, it's certainly something I have been very aware of even here amidst our connected or disconnected shenanigans and am hoping this month goes smoothly. In some ways it's all driven me to read more again and circumstances push me back to my core reading values, but as my posts may indicate that is quite complicated, like I've been far from something simple to me (I can go on and on about it and there is stuff I would not say here and which I challenge too, the impact of treatment on my arts based views has not been good, in some ways they were stamped on). I always think of you as a massive reader, so it is interesting to hear of your own struggles, and that is something true for all -- that one size fits all to the article has a good side to it, a realistic side to it which can get lost to many I guess, rendering all readers human to those less experienced.

I definitely hear you on going out - I go out a lot as a trans person, but one thing I tend not to do is go out for a walk as such from home. There may be nothign to it. But partly what may happen (does sometimes, maybe not as bad as what you may think of), and what may be noted, it also feels like another step in decision making that hits home. Amongst other things. It is a huge wake up call to someone from a lot of privilege that I had not really understood clearly, the whole process.

Happy New Year, Kat!

My reading fell off a bit without my two-plus hours of commute five days a week—into that space has seeped exercise in the morning and cooking more/eating earlier/corresponding via phone and mail in the evenings. But I have to say it's an OK tradeoff in some ways... at the very least, I'm much less worn out without those two hours standing on a packed subway. I used to say I'd do anything to get rid of that commute, and I'm not sure if this counts as anything... and anyway, my time use can be tweaked. Here's to good reading this year, no matter how much or when.

currently on course to read 365 books this year . . . enjoying this whilst it lasts . . . (rare)

>15 lisapeet: oh posted that before i saw your comment -- yes good no matter how much or when . . . sometimes I need to be careful what i wish for, in fact, aren't their some fairy stories good on that theme, there was me fed up with a job that diverted me so, though there are some silver linings in change the change is still changing. Here's to good changing with the changes for you too Lisa and Happy New Year :)

Adults keep saying: ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’
But I don’t want your hope.
I don’t want you to be hopeful.
I want you to panic.
I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.
And then I want you to act.
I want you to act as you would in a crisis.
I want you to act as if our house is on fire.
Because it is.

Thunberg, Greta. No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference (p. 24). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.



No one is too small to make a difference by Greta Thunberg (Kindle ed. 71 pages (if that))

My first write up of the year for my third read. This is short, less than an hour's reading, made up of her speeches as she has campaigned since 2018 regarding the dangers of climate change and our very slow response, which she sees as negligible really in the face of what should be done. They are very effective speeches -- and it is sad they had to come down to a sixteen year old. But good for her and for the children she mobilises and, I hope, good for all of us if it makes any difference. She says we have, more or less, until 2030 to tackle greenhouse gases and she counts the years, days, hours, and now I shall.

Just before Christmas I was lucky to attend a talk with Ray Monk about his experience of going vegan and the ecological reasons to do so. I was prompted then, and by his very good reasons, and after this can see this is something I can start to do. I was only just starting to learn to cook anyway, bang go a lot of options and I shall have to learn about vegan food and supplements . . . so I will start with a book and maybe for me, unlike him, I can phase it in, I'd be lost if I did it altogether just like that.

She begins by making the case unpolitically, that this crisis faces us all, but underneath it all it is very political and also she is at times very critical of competitive political systems that do not allow change, I think that will have been well noted. I hope she can be part of bringing change so the (human) planet does not do what it usually does and wait and see and deal with the consequences as best they can, those that are resourced best placed to do so.

"You don’t listen to the science because you are only interested in solutions that will enable you to carry on like before. Like now. And those answers don’t exist any more. Because you did not act in time.

Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling."

Thunberg, Greta. No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference (p. 67). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

>17 tonikat: Interesting review and nice quotes. Vegan is not an option I would consider, but I understand the need to do much more than we do. Making small steps is nice, but not sufficient anymore. I hope she will be listened, and I should start thinking about taking greater steps.

Great review of No one is too small to make a difference, Kat. I have noticed that an increasing number of preteens and teenagers I care for in the hospital have adopted a vegan lifestyle, especially when their parents haven't, and I now wonder how much influence that Greta Thunberg has had on them. Unfortunately a high percentage of these new vegans have gone overboard, and are admitted to our service due to anorexia nervosa and other eating disorders, as they go overboard in their beliefs and refuse to eat anything they view as "unhealthy". I'm sure that the vast majority of older kids who adopt a vegan lifestyle do so without putting their health at risk, but I'm now curious to see if Greta Thunberg's well intentioned and much needed wake up call to the world's citizens may be having an unexpected negative impact on some kids (hopefully and probably not, though).

I hardly ever eat red meat, but I do love chicken and seafood, along with eggs and cheeses, so the best I could do would be to become a complete or relative pescetarian (and, if my/our retirement plans come to fruition, I may have my fill of fresh seafood starting in the latter part of this decade).

>19 kidzdoc: sounds good. We will see how far I get with this . . . I start to imagine walking passed Indian takeaways after a long walk on a saturday evening and needing my fix. Greta Thunberg really doesn't say that much abotu it in this book, but global farming is a huge factor. Interesting about anorexia amongst all that for that generation, I'll look out for more info on that possibility.

>18 raton-liseur: we will see how far I get, it may not be very far at all.

edit - how strange, today is GT's birthday. Not why I read her. It was also my Dad's birthday and:

"God lives in every kind person."

Tolstoy, Leo. Wise Thoughts for Every Day: On God, Love, the Human Spirit, and Living a Good Life (Kindle Location 146). Arcade Publishing. Kindle Edition. - 3rd January.

And then I think how Tolstoy was also a non meat eater I think.

Appreciating your pace. Thanks for the review. I appreciate her and her message. I want to not be discouraged by the American complacency.

thanks Dan, we shall see how long it lasts, not to mention when the longer books come back.





Rita: It's burnt.
Frank: Burnt?
Rita: So are all the Chekhov books you lent me. Denny found out I was in the pill again; it was my fault, I left me prescription out. He burnt all me books.
Frank: Oh Christ!
Rita: I'm sorry. I'll buy y' some more.
Frank: I wasn't referring to the books. Sod the books.
Rita: Why can't he just let me get on with me learnin'? You'd think I was havin' a bloody affair the way he behaves.
Frank: And aren't you?

Educating Rita, Scene 5 p51.



Educating Rita by Willy Russell
Educating Rita d. Lewis Gilbert

Just before Christmas the film of this play was on tv. I'd not seen it for a long while. Many people, soem very significant to me, have told me over the years how much they love this film, I do too, though maybe I took it for granted a bit at first. One person's love for it changed that for me. Now it seems a gem and to speak of a time and possibilities that I wonder if they are still there.

The film is a gem. Michael Caine and Julie Walters' voices and performances were with me through my read through. It was criticised by some, e.g Roger Ebert (whom I usually found reliable) for going away from the original play. But then Ebert also write that Rita was a Cockney. No. She is very much a Scouser, that speaks through everything. This criticism of the difference partly fuelled my wish to read the play. It is a film about class. It is a film about a woman struggling for her own identity and against the pressures of her class and society. But it is also a film that I think taught me a few things about poetics and their relative importance. So when Ebert thought the conversations in the play said more I was interested.

The story for those that don't know, is about Rita a working class hairdresser who asks questions of life and is seeking answers. She does this by enroling in our Open University to study English literature. This is a university set up in the sixties to help adults gain university education - it (used to) transmit lectures on bbc2. I'm not sure how it works now. it seems to me that Rita has got there without any previous studies, I'm not sure how possible that was even then, maybe she had done some basic courses. I am not sure if it would be possible now. Frank is an alcoholic university lecturer. He was once a young poet. He seems to hate himself in academia and seems quite tied up in many ways, yet he has an ear for Rita, her cheek, her wit, uncontained by academia. At first he resists teaching her, she needs a good teacher. She likes him though and insists.

The play then proceeds through secenes just set in Franks study, her tutorials. She reads, i'll say that for her (has this partly inspired me to my recent efforts), one week she reads three novels. But progress on her workm is slow. But whilst it is we learn about her obstacles - her husband as above who feels she needs to have a baby (she's 26!), her class and social network who just don't seem interested in what she is. Rita wants to change, but she may not have realised how much will have to. Frank is I think inspired by her, and he's a poet by nature, he's a bit besotted by her. But his issues keep on growing, a hatred really of himself.

the film was also written by Willy Russell and i think it's most unfair to criticse it as different. It is a bit lighter on soem of the literary study, a bit. Where it goes away from the play to show us their lives elsewhere it seems very true to me. Frank may be shown a bit more fully. It is an interesting effect I guess in the play that the transformations are just in the study -- not unlike a therapy encounter.

For me there is an education of Rita in orthodox terms as she moves towards actually sitting an exam. But overall there is a sentimental education of her as she starts to gain this grail but then learns what may happen if you reach for it wrongly, or hold it wrongly. For Frank too i think there is development, his issues become critical. For me that may bring hope of soem release from them -- which in itself may be more obviosu in the film than the play. In the play it is interesting that perhaps he gains this less clearly, remains himself, despite a haircut, though is destination is also still set (though in the play still tethered).

And the poetics I mention? They are what Frank would teach and yet hates himself for not attaining, or doubts in himself. It's an interesting thing this doubt thing in arts education and writing - I know many successful writers that doubt work that others love. I've noticed, often after handing work in that is very succesful students and authors often think it worthless for a while, and then it does brilliantly. Anyway, how can I say it - Frank is not fooled by the rules of English literature - he consistently identifies what is most important (one reason he hates his inablity to act on it?). He's no snob. He sees Rita as a gem from the start and seems not to want to change her. Rita does not know of the binds that may come of education (nor of being middel class?) -- will she learn? Watch it / read it and see. Frank's comments taught me a lot. I wasn't studying English but I probably always had an ear for them, but they must have gone with my best teachers at getting to the point in arts . . . their life giving-ness, their uncontainability. How poetry really does not have a lot to do with academia at all. Yet still all the traps are there, for us to live and learn of.

That life force seems so well drawn in this Scouse woman, and shown by Julie Walters. The copy I was able to get was an old GCSE tect, it came with an introduction by the author 'educating the author', well worth reading for context.

As things change and have changed it seems a gleaming play of possibility, of the possibility of growth, social mobility and how what is so often on top may learn from those so often looked down on. I can only hope that such things remain possible.

edit - it is also a film in which worlds collide, male and female but very much social, educated and uneducated, upper class academia and uneducated -- their mutual misunderstandings are wonderful and their finding of something real in each other.

Had to look up Scouse. Enjoyed your review. You left me wondering how it all plays out.

He burnt all me books.
For a second there I thought we were in that QUESTIONS for the AVID READER thread.

>23 dchaikin: thank Dan - think Beatles.

>24 lisapeet: I was thinking that as I typed it in :)

meter maid... ??

>22 tonikat: That brings back happy memories of my OU days :-)

It’s not meant to be a realistic picture of how the OU works, of course: they’d never have recruited a jaded old alcoholic like the Caine character, and they certainly never had the budget for individual tutorials. But the Julie Walters character is pretty realistic, except that most of the literature students I met did have children, and that was exactly why they had had to drop out of education first time round.

>26 dchaikin: lol of course - but no, think accent

>27 thorold: I'm a bit disappointed by not recruiting Frank. Hmm I need to think a bit more on Frank. Also that they didn't have individual tutorials even back then. But happy memories are what I am after.

>22 tonikat: I have a fairly recent degree in English Literature from the Open University. You still don’t need any prior qualifications at all, but there are introductory courses to ease people in gradually.

Two gems to start the year Kat. I am vegetarian in the summer, but not so much in the winter. I do find cooking for vegans a chore. We do all we can to alleviate climate change, my only consolation is that I will be dead before it really hits. I am hoping that covid-19 will open some eyes, but I keep hearing politicians saying we will soon be "getting back to normal" and I shudder.

Educating Rita - excellent film

Perhaps one way to ease in veganism, and to allow yourself the occasional Indian take-out is to try something like Bittman's Eat Vegan Before 6:00?

Great review of Educating Rita, Kat! That sounds like a movie I would enjoy.

>30 SandDune: thank you, good to know.

>31 baswood: thanks Barry. and >32 ELiz_M: I'm thinking I may start with a day or two per week - I have a book now to help me prepare, it may take a little while.

>33 kidzdoc: I hope you do :)

>28 tonikat: 🙂 Liverpool accent...of course. Seems my wires were crossed again.

no problem Dan -- mine are most of the time

Meanwhile, whilst my own progress on going Vegan is slow, I now learn there is a thing, Veganuary -- I have found the oat milk in the supermarket and am very slowly making some progress . . . oat milk, hmmm, may not need sugar in tea

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/05/veganuary-record-number-peop...

After all that, I dug it out and watched it again — thanks for prompting that, really enjoyed it!

I spotted two authentic OU details: the letter she was clutching when she first came to his office looked like actual OU stationery, and there’s the opening few seconds of an OU broadcast. But that’s it, for the rest she’s being taught more like a part-time student at the conventional university where Frank teaches (which is Trinity College Dublin in the film, even though they all seem to be from the other side of the Irish Sea). And even the summer school is unrealistic: no self-adhesive lapel badges!

And there was a reference to the play on University Challenge the other day — they asked which author she borrowed the name Rita from. Never underestimate the connectedness of trivia...

Cool, and thanks about those details. I knew about Trinity, and the French Chateau is Irish too. Trivia is an awesome thing. I wondered whether their weekly meetings says something of the commitment each is making, maybe that is deliberately out of line with the convention (and she is his first student), it might also speak of that affairish nature of it? It might also say something of his perception of her need? He, she, they both, all need the weekly meetings -- says something also of lit as response to crisis of life, and of their lives, they are calling up the forces of life? (in the play she also comes to drift from that intensity with him. Whilst he of course gives her an invitation -- and maybe how she handles that is education too, for her and all round? There is a lot not spoken, wheels turning, that is very well worked out.)

edits - apologies have come back at leats twice to this to add.

I also just looked up Rita Mae Brown, whom i did not know anything of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_Mae_Brown

I wonder if this, very subtly and especially in reference to Rita/Susan being pressured to have a baby introduces a theme of sexuality I'd not really thought of, as part of the stream of the feminism and her right to do what she wants as a woman. Where she is from is judging her as odd/strange for what she does, queer possibly, and whilst Rita seems so embedded in soem ways in the culture maybe it is a pressure or awareness anyone dirfting from the norm may know, a way people may label.

But from wiki -- this is interesting, as in a way Rita too may be refusing easy labels:

"Brown also does not consider herself a "lesbian writer" because she believes art is about connection and not about divisive labels.17 In a 2015 interview for The Washington Post, Brown was asked if she thought awards in gay and lesbian literature were important; she replied:

"I love language, I love literature, I love history, and I'm not even remotely interested in being gay. I find that one of those completely useless and confining categories. Those are definitions from our oppressors, if you will. I would use them warily. I would certainly not define myself — ever — in the terms of my oppressor. If you accept these terms, you're now lumped in a group. Now, you may need to be lumped in a group politically in order to fight that oppression; I understand that, but I don't accept it.""

She's gone on my to read list.


I also think we may be on to something with it being exceptional that they meet as they do, yet they do. "Only connect" we here throughout the film and they both seem to seek it.

I just looked Willy Russell up on Wikipedia: I'd never realised that he himself was a hairdresser who went back to college in his 20s. That puts all sorts of extra shades of meaning into it.

I suppose the weekly tutorials are there for dramatic reasons: he needs those focussed dialogues to bring out what's happening in both their lives. Realistic distance-learning wouldn't do that. He's writing a play, not a documentary about the OU, we can accept that it's not how education runs in real life.

Rita Mae Brown is fun, at least in her early books. I suppose Russell picked her in the first place because she can stand for bold unconventionality from Susan/Rita's perspective and for trashy station-bookstall titillation from a "sophisticated" viewpoint. There's that telling comment from Frank near the end when he asks her if she's going to start calling herself Virginia or Emily now, making it clear that he always saw her excitement about RMB as naive. I'm sure you're right that Rita isn't ready to label herself by the end of the play, but the possibility of a lesbian undertone adds a layer.

Yes it does add a layer -- even if just breaking the norm risks the label.

I do think there is something now about them both needing their meetings that might drive them (the meetings) -- also think of her lunchtime excursion across town when she has seen a play to tell him. Frank does make that comment, as you say, but as she drifts from attending he's also feeling rejected (and as she has drifted from what he values in her as she gets lost for a while whilst finding her way, lost in new ways of being inauthentic). He also says he liked Rubyfruit jungle, I can't remember if it is in the film, I think it is (I don't thinbk I am imagining that, I think it is at a point she's not listening to him as much). I think they are both giving each other something they need. It is interesting that he looks for more in their relationship and Rita/Susan is in charge and does not have to go down that line.

The introduction that came with my play included Willy Russell's 'Educating the author' -- I should have made that clearer and his background, just a few pages, said an awful lot.

"My book is a contradiction of its epigraph.

Emily Dickinson once wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson; “Candor–my Preceptor–is the only wile.” This is the right way to put it.

In his Introduction to In the American Grain , William Carlos Williams said he had tried to rename things seen. I regret the false configuration–under the old misappellation–of Emily Dickinson. But I love his book.

The ambiguous paths of kinship pull me in opposite ways at once.

As a poet I feel closer to Williams’ writing about writing, even when he goes haywire in “Jacataqua,” than I do to most critical studies of Dickinson’s work by professional scholars. When Williams writes: “Never a woman, never a poet…. Never a poet saw sun here,” I think that he says one thing and means another. A poet is never just a woman or a man. Every poet is salted with fire. A poet is a mirror, a transcriber. Here “we have salt in ourselves and peace one with the other.”

Howe, Susan. My Emily Dickinson (Introduction) (New Directions Paperbook) . New Directions. Kindle Edition.



My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe

Susan Howe is a poet. I have not read her poetry. This book seeks to understand Emily Dickinson better, better than much of the criticism that Susan Howe had come across of Emily Dickinson.

It's a book I have read over an extended period, I added it to my collection in June 2017. I've come back to it several times. Once restarting it and also going back a way. It's not long. She has a very poetic way with it, often chasing a line of thought, which to me left me wondering where is this going at times, but then concluding with a paragraph or a sentence that clarifies it all and the relevance to Emily Dickinson. It also refers to a lot of nineteenth century (and other) literature with a familiarity I just don't have, if I have any at all. Though she supplies generous quotations from what she speaks of. At times I have wondered what will I take from this book, yet I think I take a great deal, if not in individual points remembered on the hoof, then in approach and introduction to her Emily Dickinson. Now I have read it all I can see me being able to go back over. The final section that considers her relationship to Col. Higginson in itself is invaluable in how it spells out clearly both his early rebelliousness (that went on sometime and may have appealed to Dickinson) and how he is not simply as sometimes portrayed in Dickinson scholarship and also clarifies the importance of this relationship to Dickinson. Amd then I remember the early passages on New England too, something I am not as familiar with, and of course on religion there and earlier writers. It's very clearly bringing to life some of the depths of Emily Dickinson's thought, references, influences and expression of her being in these and in relation to them. At times I was not in tune with it - she speaks of Emily Dickinson's parataxis and I think uses that herself, so when I was not feeling lucid and feeling I followed, I did not follow, and until I got to that clarification that was when I struggled, but it was worth sticking with. It also offers a close reading, especially of the poem known by its first line 'My Life had stood - a loaded gun' (Fr 764). It is a book I am grateful for and having reached the end understand better. Maybe also as I am also now more familiar with Dickinson herself.

"I felt its urgent demand in the blood. I could hear its call. Its whistling disturbed me by day and its howl woke me in the night. I heard the drum of the sun. Every path was a calling cadence, the flight of every bird a beckoning, the colour of ice an invitation: come. The forest was a fiddler, wickedly good, eyes intense and shining with a fast dance. Every leaf in every breeze was a toe tapping out the same rhythm and every mountaintop lifting out of cloud intrigued my mind, for the wind at the peaks was the flautist, licking his lips, dangerously mesmerizing me with inaudible melodies that I strained to hear, my ears yearning for the horizon of sound. This was the calling, the vehement, irresistible demand of the feral angel—take flight. All that is wild is winged—life, mind and language—and knows the feel of air in the soaring “flight, silhouetted in the primal.”

This book was the result of many years’ yearning. A longing for something whose character I perceived only indistinctly at first but that gradually became clearer during my journeys. In looking for wilderness, I was not looking for miles of landscape to be nicely photographed and neatly framed, but for the quality of wildness, which—like art, sex, love and all the other intoxicants—has a rising swing ringing through it. A drinker of wildness, I was tipsy with it before I began and roaring drunk by the end."

Griffiths, Jay. Wild (Kindle Locations 195-201). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.



Wild: An Elemental Journey by Jay Griffiths (Now known as Savage Grace: a journey in wildness in the USA)

I attended some webinars last summer from Swedenborg House with Dr William Rowlandson of University of Kent, they were called 'To the Waters and the Wild'. I'm a 'long live the weeds and the wilderness yet' kinda girl, maybe more in theory than camping under the stars. They were very stimulating and one recommendation was this book. I read half last summer and came back to it over the holidays.

The quotation I've given is the first two paragraphs. They say a lot, both of her poetic style and of her aims. She travels to and in the Amazon, the arctic, amongst sea living people, to Australia and to West Papua (amidst its difficult situation with the State is seen as part of - Indonesia). She has a gift for getting on with people, including indiginous people, respecting them, gaining their respect and hears and records their stories - making it very clear how they understand the wild they are in, have a relationship to it much deeper and usually much more ecologically aware than that of the West or whatever colonisers oppress them. She is very clear about the methods of oppression and also relates their historical and ongoing impacts, to some extent anyway. She also charts the impact on her of being able to spend time in the wild, its boon to her. Along the way we learn many things. Get a parallel sense of reconnection - not least in following her often poetic essays that make up the chapters. It is a lovely book, sadly often of unlovely things that make me wonder about my choice of words, but you may know what I mean. It also closes very wonderfully in considering a time of challenge for her and again very beautifully then puts the world together again, in ways that spoke very much to my interests. It validated my view of tragedy and comedy. Yet also taught me about them, brought more to life, from her life. I shall read her other books now.

I read of colonisation as a History student and am most grateful for her for going out there to bring a report from contemporary times. And for doing it so beautifully. I went to her website the other day and found again a quotation from John Berger about this book - it seems more aphorism than blurb -- if such a person says such things about this book, well it probably tells you far more than anything I can write here. So:

“Reality is such that both language and imagination have to exaggerate in order to confront it truly. Living with such exaggeration you need a very good head for heights and a lot of bravery. In this book Jay Griffiths has both. If bravery itself could write (by definition it can’t), it would write, I believe, like she does.”
JOHN BERGER

Nice pair of reviews Kat. Enjoyed these thoughts and quotes.

Enjoyed the extracts and your review

Great review of Wild: An Elemental Journey, Kat.

>43 tonikat: "To the Waters and the Wild" is a quote from Yeats, I believe. What significance does that have? Or is it a reference to just the meaning of those lines in Yeat's poem "The Stolen Child"? Maybe it is just using that phrase to refer to what she was seeking in her book Wild; An Elemental Journey

>47 sallypursell: that was the title of a wholly seperate course with someone else, that was where I learned of the book (or was reminded of it, as at least one episode i am sure I have heard discussed on the radio in the past). The course was good.

Jay Griffiths argues that the wild is different from wasteland. That wild is pictured by the west not as it is but how we see it, especially by men. It's often seen as female, unruly, barren, dangerous -- whilst she goes there and meets indiginous people who explain the riches they see, she's very interested in language and the riches of their words for things and places -- she is in tune with their view of it as sacred and their relationship to it in those terms. She sees the wests views as barren, unholy in a way. Motivated by a need to dominate and exploit resources the way the west wants.

I start to wonder if that is simply not the take over a world view that cannot hack real alternatives, insisting its science and religion are the one. And then I start to think that that view itself seems to need to learn the contact with the sacredness of ecosystems that is in these local and regional views of native people. If it is to start to save itself from the harm it is wreaking to the planet.

The unrelated course covered some similar ground but also looked at other things too, the supernatural for exmaple.

>43 tonikat: Really enjoyed this review. I'm very much drawn to books like this, but haven't read a book on the wild from this perspective. Another addition to my WL pile.

>49 AlisonY: thanks :) enjoy.

You can read and listen to Gwyneth Lewis' 'Sparrow Tree' here - https://poetryarchive.org/poem/sparrow-tree/

"I had this tree
Where the sparrows nested
My aviary

. . . "



Sparrow Tree by Gwyneth Lewis

In late 2019 I read Quantum Poetics by Gwyneth Lewis, twice, I enjoyed it so much. I've read this twice. I also have her recent co-authored book of welsh poems with Rowan Williams. She's a former welsh poet laureate and writes in Welsh as well as English (not here). All in all making her very well established and someone to listen to to learn from, I think.

I find this quite a spare volume of poetry, it really makes me review my own poetry. It seems to clearly have a theme of childlessness, possibly. I don't know, it is lightly done. It can seem that way, but I want to be cautious. One reason I want to be cautious is that that spareness is not direct, aspects of her theme seem to be there for you to notice, or maybe not.

This stands out for me as I have my own collection of poems that has been forthcoming for several years and which I have often wondered if it is too direct or declarative - although its narrative is not exactly my own it may seem to tell too clear a story. Having read this I started to think of my own as a school child's idea of a book of poetry (I have wondered this before but it has returned). I have hundreds of other poems that I've written since and thought might be the basis of another collection. But this really has me thinking of shoving my working title and coming up with a kicking collection from all of them, getting rid of poems I am a bit personally fond of, that fit the structure of the drafts but which simply don't quite fly as my very best do. And be less direct. Just have a collection of flight. Though I do wonder if and when it might be published and whether i am publishable (lots of them have individually been published). An established poet friend thinks the first collectuion is good, the publisher too (who hasn't responded to this idea) but, this collection sings me to listen to this. Tell it slant, make it spare, leave it for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.

Her poem 'What do birds say?' is found here https://poetryarchive.org/poem/what-do-birds-say/

But it ends (with the correct placement of commas):

" . . .

On Sunday I heard
The sparrow say,
'We' Bird and I
Enfolded together:

Syrinx, logos, feather, cry."

Those last four words give her the parts of the book.

Syrinx of course is the pipe in the throat or maybe just pipes. Reading Peter Kinglsey last year I'm very aware of how much they are associated with some mystical experience, in Parmenides' poem with his journey to that dark place, part of taking him there. In so many ways the depth of what she is considering is not directly spoken I think and emerges as you read and reread. Maybe this is what sub-textual means, though there are allusions, I think. Its a book that seems to sum up somehow, or to take stock. At least that si my impression, but ever so lightly. Though it is part of my taste to be clear.

There are recompenses too in these poems, but overall I have a sense of coming to terms, of sadness and joy in that too, still joy, but review of journey/s. The more I think about it the more i think it has concocted a great depth of a cry maybe of life, from life. It makes me think again of a sort of riddling approach, not something I focus on so much.

You can read a whole load of comments from reviews on her website here -- probably by people better qualified than me - - http://gwynethlewis.com/books_sparrowtree.shtml. At the bottom of that link are some of her own comments on the poems, she doesn't mention anything about the theme I thought I noticed. Is it bad form to say anything?

"Literary criticism should arise out of a debt of love."

George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoyesky p3.



Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in Contrast by George Steiner

Ok, breathe Toni and try to make some sense of these mountain ranges. As I made my way through it did occur to me that writing briefly on all this might be just a tad of a task, but then we have all met that. To try and remain on track I'm going to use some subheads for once.

me and this book

I'm not sure how long I have been aware of this book, but its title alone led to much thought. That and I knew I quite liked listening to Steiner on tv and radio. When I did my Counselling MA I read some of it, not far in. Early on he quotes Sartre, I remembered this as (or read an edition with a different translation) as:

'the ontology of the novelist makes itself known in the ontology of the novel' (and at the time i was thinking about ontology and Heidegger very much). But I find here it is: 'The metaphysics of the novelist make themselves known in the structure of the novel'. No! you know what, No! it's not that either, looking it up now it is "the technique of a novel always refers us back to the metaphysic of the novelist". What is my mind doing to it!

But yes! What a good quote, I've often thought of it and beyond novels too.

I couldn't go too far with it though. I definitely felt I had not read enough of these two authors. But I did get a copy a few years later. And it has been in the background. In fact from my reading I was probably aware of a contrast a long time ago and am sure I had heard of this before. The book has sat on my shelf, but it has been in my imagination as I went.

me and these authors

I've been aware of Tolstoy since I was very young (very) as my father was reading him. He's been an idea in my mind ever since, especially since one day we planted roses together (I was about three). I read Sebastopol sketches in my early twenties or maybe late teens, it was recommended by Hemingway in A Moveable Feast. It spoke to me, but something felt lacking in me to go on I suppose to the big novels, things were messy for me. Whilst I liked much of his style I may also have been a bit disappointed in him somehow, it's a long time since I read it. Maybe in my messiness I had not 'got it', though I got a lot of his tone. I've never wanted to reread it apart from some bits.

I bought some Tolstoy but did not read it. I seem to have lost my copy of the Kreutzer Sonata now, and Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (which is in my sights now. But I did start reading him a little on that MA - I read A Confession then and not long after (in my threads) The Gospel in brief. Some late short stories too over the years. Then a summer course in which we read Anna Karenina, Resurrection and Hadji Murat (I'd never have stuck at them myself I am sure, nor have thought they could be tackled like that). And after that I read What is Art, which I love so much (and is sadly not given much room in this book. He makes no mention at all of Wise Thoughts for Every Day which Tolstoy was most proud of at the end of his life, of all his work and which I also love/)

I think uni put Dostoyevsky on my radar. We read some of Notes from underground in a philosophy class. I am sure the teacher spoke enthusiastically. In my first summer I tried to read Crime and Punishment but stalled about a third of the way through and then made myself read it the next summer (afte a very bad year and one in which I was probably depressed and also had been quite ill). I felt then, before I read Berlin's reaction at all, that he had made a murderer of me. Yet idiot that I can be I thought 'no Kat, try the Brothers Karamazov' and read this after graduation. What a toil. I did not enjoy it in many ways. I am not sure I understood it, in my own ambiguity its ambiguity was magnified, I was definitely seriously depressed by then. I did love some of it, a sense of elusive grace, the Grand Inquisitor of course (a big reason I wanted to read it to see how he was dealt and responded to (and was a bit disappointed by the silence of the response, an answer that was not immediate but had to be dwelt on - that stayed with me I think, much as I sought answers superficially). Overall I have not dared read Dostoevsky since, nor in fact have I had much enthusiasm to do so. I think my advice to anyone would very much to be that you need to be spiritually quite clear in yourself, centred to do so, maybe - it is exhausting. I wonder if to have that experience of being made a murderer (empathically) it meant I was reading him wrong (Berlin too?), he is writing in another mode of experience. I have read one or two short stories I think since (Gentle Folk on a course), but even now after the enthusiasm of this book I almost feel the need of reading him somehow in safety. His tone is also not naturally my own, though it definitely impacted me when I struggled.

Overview of the book

Steiner opens by giving an overview of the European novel and argues that at the edges, in the USA (Melville) and Russia the novel went beyond a sort of secular and middle class sense making of the world. In my lack of readness of much of this it was inyeresting, though of course it also felt like a broad brush stroke - I struggle to find Dickens secular or not visionary (at least at times). But overall it's an interesting case that may explain why I put a sentimental education down for in a sense being so realist it lost something.

He then considers Tolstoy and then Dostoevsky.

He argues Tolstoy's kinship to Homer, one that Tolstoy himself pointed to -- and this the epic nature of his work. Whilst he recognsies Tolstoy's drama (this was new to me) he situates the landed Tolstoy and an epic double view of life that looks at its turmoil (tragedy) but does not lose that contrast with a stable view of life in its changes, the turning of the world, the seasons. An awareness he likens to that painting of Icarus falling into the sea whilst peasants plough their fields unaware. The height of this being seen in the contrast between Anna's narrative and that of Levin in Anna Karenina.

He makes a wonderful and so true point as to Tolstoy's humainity -- and how this is reflected in how he makes all of his characters human, and understandable. He contrasts this to an incident in Proust where two characters in quite different circumstances are not granted names.

Dostoevsky he situates as a tragic dramatist writing in the form of his time, the novel. This makes a lot of sense to me. He highlights the ambivalences in Dostoevsky, these people who (in I think his) memroable phrase at the heights of existential crises 'dance around their own souls'. Sadly that I recognise in crisis. To me that is a time of having lost exactly that mode Tolstoy stays with so well. He writes appreciatively of Notes from underground which I must read all of now - it is a book that simulatneously attarcts me and repels me. He argues that it is more succesful than Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

He goes on to quote largely from The Idiot and The Possessed -- speaking a lot of the ambiguous characters of Prince Muishkin and Stavrogin -- both possibly messianic but also possibly diabolic somehow. It helps greatly and I begin to think I may try them. Very cautiously. I may have got lost in terms of overview especially in The Brothers Karamazov which I may need to try again . . . one day (in another translation). I don't think he says this but I wondered if his point (D's) in their ambiguity might be something on the lines of how humans trying to embody such ability necessarily cannot contain it as Christ could as he was divine. That would be a contrast with the human Christ of Tolstoy, it speaks to me somehow, but is something I shall have to explore. Reading of The Idiot I sadly think I may encounter myself, it had already been recommended to me due to its portrayal of epilepsy, so I have a copy. Maybe I need a companion to dare these depths.

Or are they depths. As I read I consistently thought that Tolstoy's view may be the cure to such moments of soul dancing, or part of it, another mode the grasp of which was lost. Or else obviously too maybe Dostoevsky's mode which so terrifyingly is able to write so clearly of these moments.

some of my response

It may be I was stimulated to read this having read the end of Wild: An elemental journey and Jay Griffith's consideration of tragedy and comedy. Something made me want to get hold of these two better, at long last. In the early pages (before I got to Dostoevsky's section) I had an idea for an essay I am going to try to write on tragedy and it has all fed into that -- and I started to read The Iliad and as I take a break from that that has led to greek tragedy and also to reading of it in Steiner's next book and also Simon Critchley.

Steiner is a very good appreciator. But I did not agree with his lack of impressedness of three moments of clarity in (my as yet unread) war and Peace -- the fact Tolstoy wrote so simply about these to me does transmit the nature of the experiences, peak experiences of insight really, and of grace, that lived with them and for Pierre I have no doubt could make imprisonment bearable. They are secrets of life. They also to me, whilst he decries the mystical in Tolstoy, are in fact mystical, gnostic I am thinking.

To me this is not entirely in contrast with Dostoevsky whom he lauds for his mystical vision and the intensity of the dramatic he shows and the twists and turns of it. I think they just approach things from very different paths, or modes. Maybe both seem not to know each others' flavour somehow -- and I wonder if those two flavours are actually hard to keep track of when in the midst of the other.

He cites Gorky quite a bit and also speaks of how some hoped to be able to unify the Tolstoyan and Dostoevskyan view - reminds me of the idea of a unified physics theory in fact. I'm not sure we need to, we just need to learn how to place the two paths -- both true. To me they give a great overview of human experience. I prefer the Tolstoyan in my day to day bit definitely recognise the Dostoyevskyan and respect it. It seems to me there is an extent to which Dostoyevsky seems to allow room for unexplained action in his work, great leaps, and dances around the soul. Whilst Tolstoy understands, does not entirely leave unity to find unity, somehow does not know compromise, perhaps even perversion, a certain sort of lostness, even when lost he can frame it. (There is a Russian film of recent years called Freaks, that makes me think of Dostoyevsky - somehow he knows of the effect of challenge to the ego, to the soul, and the people that have trodden such paths -- but the film always reminde dme of Dostoyevsky's approach in some ways).

Steiner is quite critical of this in Tolstoy I think, or of lines like that. I found it a cheap shot to compare such views, Tolstoy, to Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor - an argument he only gave in one way -- as he does towards the end of the book, before again recognising the greatness of both. For me it misunderstood Tolstoy and his clarity. I've been lost somewhat like Dostoyevsky's characters and it was for lack of finding my way back to a Tolstoyan view. I found it strange he lauds the moments of grace e.g. that Alyosha finds in The Brothers Karamazov yet did not see the differently presented moments of Tolstoy cited above as comparable, from different directions and shown differently. It is a grace we have both paths so well shown.

edit - it just occurred to me (again) that Dostoevsky's characters take their decisions and errors, sins, very seriously -- and I wondered about Tolstoy if he does but somehow doesn't too -- the impact seems to be that Dostoevsky's characters flirt (or worse) with seeing themselves as less than human, whilst Tolstoy as I said above always sees the fully human humanness of humans. I need to think about that more. I always felt I floundered a bit with Dostoyesvky as I do not know orthodox theology really. I suppos eit says a lot of Tolstoy's faith and beliefs, perhaps. It also makes me think of the seriousness that takes hold in tragedy in general, how all encomapssing that becomes, losing track of those epic horizons.

edit edit - they also may get lost and overwhelmed in weighing their choices as they apprehend their meaning (e.g. Raskolnikov finding reasosn to do what he does). I wonder how true that is of other tragedy.

I haven't mentioned that he said quite a bit about how Tolstoy thought Shakespeare a poor dramatist, and crazy as it may seem I can see what he means, a bit. He felt he did not create real situations for his characters I think - despite all those history plays based on the real thing (and Dostoyevsky too took so much from real life). I do see something in it though, But it sems to get to the nub of how Tolstoy does not follow people making error on error, lost in the labyrinth, he breaks those chains to get an overview somehow and perspective (does Tolstoy 'read' Shakespeare wrong somehow?). Since I learned of this view of his i sometimes like to think he and Shakespeare may laugh about it in heaven, as they are talking about exactly the same thing, humans.

Wow! What a fascinating post and explanations of the book itself and your reactions to it. I have read much more Doesoevsky (who's writing I've found very rewarding) than Tolstoy. Anyway, thanks for those insights.

>53 rocketjk: thanks, am very glad it spoke to someone :)

Enjoyed reading your thoughts on Tolstoy or Dostoevsky

Thanks Barry.

Thinking about all this, it is without doubt that I read Dostoevsky as he was so talked of by my philosophy teacher, and whilst i had done really well in my first year exam (the best of them) I wasn't allowed by my family to switch to philosophy as a joint honour. Which I've realised had a big impact on that depression, and what did I do when i could - I read such things (and also came to stop reading them). I've only seen that clearly this week as lots else happened. Which is interesting given what i am reading, and himself. Life is strange.

>52 tonikat: You'll like this . . . If you've been on my CR thread once or twice, you'll know that I've been gradually reading through the large stack of old magazines that somehow or other appeared in the closet of my home office. Right now I'm reading through a copy of the July 1959 Harpers Magazine. I picked the magazine up last night and realized I was up to a piece called "Notes from Eastern Europe" written by, you guessed it, George Steiner. In the "Among Our Contributors" section at the front of the magazine, we read . . .

"George Steiner sent in his 'Notes from Eastern Europe' after an extended trip which was part of a year he is spending as a Fulbright professor at the University of Innsbruck. He is a young American born in Paris who was educated at the University of Chicago and Harvard and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. After some years on the staff of the Economist, he worked at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. He will rerturn to Princeton to give a Gauss Seminar in Criticism this fall. His new book, Tostoy or Dostoevsky, is reviewed this month. (!!)

I have only glanced over the review, which is extremely positive. It begins, "It is demonstrably absurd to pretend to capture the nuances and profundities of as scholarly and dedicated a work as this in a paragraph." The reviewer, Katherine Gauss Jackson, points out the same sentence about literary criticism arising out of a "debt of love" that you did. The review concludes, "It is a book to read and learn from many times over."

>52 tonikat: That looks very interesting. My exposure to both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy happened—and ended—in high school, obscured by both time and the thick haze of bong smoke. I'd like to revisit them both at some point, and that sounds like it might be a good place to jump off from.

>58 lisapeet: hope the jumping is fun

>57 rocketjk: thanks for that - he is a big deal. I have found what I have tried of Harold Bloom not to click with me. I've not tried James Woods yet. I tend to prefer writers and poets essays too. I am thinking I may try and work my way through all of Steiner. I learned a lot from his scholarship -- and ought to be very careful about how I have disagreed with him (it sh/could be the subject of essays and careful argument). I did have a sense in the first chapter of a mind striving to make sense of the world -- partly it is the old criticism as he has it -- strangely for me I started to sense a need in that, that maybe as I am a lot older I don't have. It will be intersting to see how he develops as I read on, if I do (we know how slow i can be). I was aware I must be much older than he was when he wrote it. He seems very well read of them both too, and of diaries and lots of secondary literature. That quote I made was an easy one to choose, it is lovely, as is that whole paragraph, but it is the first sentence in the book so all in all it solved the which quote do I choose problem . . . now I see why I read on one day in a library all those years ago. I'm interested in the review, agree on the possible rereading.

coincidence? synchronicity? there was a comedy on the radio here that had a lovely word - coinciclasm :) though it is more propitious than a clasm this. I'm drifting (another catchphrase - Nebulous).

>52 tonikat: terrific post and enjoyed the follow up comments. Nabokov adored Tolstoy and notoriously didn’t like Dostoyevsky. But he confronts himself on Dostoyevsky in The Gift (it’s only a paragraph buried in there near end). So his dislike is overstated. He clearly had appreciation for both authors. I imagine he read Steiner. Wonder what he thought about it.

>59 tonikat: "he is a big deal."

Yep. When I owned my used bookstore I used to get asked for books of his relatively frequently.

>61 rocketjk: Interesting, sorry misread your post as him newish to you and coming upon that mag.

-- this is not like me at all, but yes i had to go back and correct the opening quote, I was always so careful, but not been in the academy for a long time.

>60 dchaikin: thx Dan. Its interesting Nabokov hated Zhivago whilst loving Tolstoy, to whom I'd have thought it related.

>62 tonikat: "Its interesting Nabokov hated Zhivago whilst loving Tolstoy, to whom I'd have thought it related."

I know that Nabokov also heavily criticized Conrad's novel Victory when it was first published, not, as I understand it, because he thought it was a bad book, per se, but because in 1915, he felt that Conrad was still writing as if it were still the Victorian Era. So I would conjecture that Nabokov might have liked Zhivago if it had come out during Tolstoy's time rather than in the 1950s. Just a guess. My sum total of knowledge about Nabokov's dislike of Dr. Zhivago comes from that sentence you just wrote to Dan. :)

February ** Kissin encores, proms '97 ** The Dig ** Medbh McGuckian: Portrait of a Poet ** Painters Painting ** Joan Didion: the centre cannot hold**

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/leave-of-the-wind-rene-char-g-w-ireland/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/01/as-a-body-hers-is-perfection-aliso... -- intro to the letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolfe

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/03/the-assault-on-truth-by-peter-obor...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaJVm1j_mfA Guillermo del Toro interviews the Coen brothers

https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/interviews/jean-claude-carriere-conversat... - a beautiful interview with the late writer

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/19/poetry-world-prepares-to-mark-bice...

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/dropping-out-literary-guide-thoreau-hawthorne...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/23/john-keats-five-poets-on-his-best-... John Keats

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/27/what-mary-olivers-critics-dont-und...

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n10/clarence-brown/every-slightest-pebble Clarence Brown on Anna Akhmatova

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/02/24/farewell-to-ferlinghetti/

>63 rocketjk: I just don't know either. My guess, so far, given he loved Pasternak's poetry is based on my own very small knowledge and day dreams. It is from his own index card planning of plots - i am thinking, from what i know that Pasternak proceeded more organically and this might bother him, a disruption to order in a way. But it si my imaginative working guess that's all. And I don't knwo maybe Pasternak used index cards, though i somehow doubt it. I also think I may have heard the structure may have bothered him, but I am not sure that is a reliable memory i have picked up somewhere (or dreamt up?).

"He was arrogant, there's no doubt about it. But handsome, talented men usually are."

Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, the Serial Killer p158



My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

The title obviously tells you something about this book, written by a sister. In fact what it tells you might be slightly biased. It is a book about a horrendous situation causing complex dynamics and powerful pressures on the psycholgies of those involved. Leading to such acts as the title shows - though I might see it as far less pre-meditated than a reaction to those pressures. Of course it is told by someone involved in it all, who of course imagines seeing things this way.

But it is told with a light touch. At first I struggled to get involved but in the end read the last hundred pages quickly. It is a quick read. It seems wholly to have got what it is about, knows it and shows it in an accessible way that is deceptive. I do not know about Nigeria to know what might or might not happen in these contexts, maybe it would not be possible for such a situation to have even the defence that it has, and so we have how the novel plays, how they must play things. Which is interesting if it asks that question of reality. For all its lightness it does make me think. And interesting to see a contemporary view of the world from Lagos.

>66 tonikat: sounds like you enjoyed it. The straight-faced simple-appearance playful touch won me over. She’s messing with us readers.

A very belated Happy New Year, Kat. You started with some great reading (and great reviews). The Griffith book (#43) sounds interesting. Might be a good gift for a friend in need. And I enjoyed the review of the Lewis petry collection (#51) and your discussion of your own poetry (I have not written since the early otts).

>67 dchaikin: I did enjoy it, but partly that feels wrong. I have a feeling I don't need that type of messing with, but I can see a case for it. It does stay with you -- and things staying with you seem part of it -- and fragility as brittle coping stymying society.

>68 avaland: thanks and to you too Lois. Jay Griffiths' book is superb, but may not suit some political tastes, though maybe they should try it (then again I sometimes think they do read all sorts and maybe use it too). I didn't feel my Lewis review was very good, it is a very spare collection, and I also kept editing it to take that specific reading of it out of it, not least lest to sayu such was vulgar somehow. My own poetry, feels somewhat all over at the mo, I wrote a decent one last week, but trying to find my way into feeling how I usually do, or usually feel I may feel. I'm thinking I may read Nelson Mandela's book, someone who digested difficulty, somewhat. And resume Thomas a Kempis. But reading has stalled in the last week or so and tragedies, whilst they had a healthy affect on me I think have appealed less.

March && The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society && Gifted && world of light: a portrait of May Sarton

https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/03/05/elizabeth-barrett-browning-happiness

https://archive.org/details/worldoflightaportraitofmaysarton

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/12/books/review/czeslaw-milosz-19112004.html

https://antigonejournal.com/2021/03/greeks-afghanistan-buddha/

https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/interviews/patricia-highsmith-1988-film-a... interesting

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/24/philip-roth-by-blake-bailey-review...

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20210329-the-war-correspondent-walking-the-world very interesting on walking

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/mar/28/and-the-brand-played-on-bob-dylan-...

At the moment I'm reading Louise DeSalvo's Writing as a way of healing a chapter per day. It's very good, 5 days in, it's a book I'm finding feels good to read. I've had it ages but have avoided reading on this theme, partly due to my counselling training and my own writing.

But I'm writing as I was surprised by what she write of Sylvia Plath in chapter 5 -- she noted Plath did not write about how her writing made her feel nor maybe about the link between events in her life and her feelings, which DeSalvo sees as vital for that healing effect. I was a bit shocked by this, and have to think as I read her and of her how true it may be. Its left me wondering if she just expected it of herself, top of the class in a way and nowhere to go with how that is. It also struck me that maybe she stayed with the negative. Powerfully so of course. But I wondered if that was also part of being a golden person in a way, to seem authentic she had to show the difficult (is this a social thing for others, apparent privilege has to show it knows difficulty to be real? and when it does so it also apparently does not need help?) and then again its maybe taken for granted she's still the golden seeming person (including by herself) after that, and especially as a woman in mid twentieth century western circumstances. I'm liking DeSalvo's book a lot. She speaks of the need for balance in writing of ourselves and something made me want to balance her views of Plath in this way, though her comments may make some sense of what happened.

"Ordinarily I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable."

from 'How I go to the Woods' by Mary Oliver in Swan: poems and prose poems (ahh I find it reprinted here with permission and with another poem https://www.uuworld.org/articles/two-prose-poems for the whole thing.)



Picking up Mary Oliver's work again in recent months has been a wonderful thing. Inspiring, not least on living well and living well creatively.

I find this collection very beautiful. Her themes can seem always natural - but they burst to life each time, like each poem has a reason and they are multifarious despite sometimes similarities, always particular and communicating from that. The world in her writing really speaks. It is quite wrong to be dismissive of her or under estimate her - she speaks in tones that teach and allow us to learn for ourselves, with her, as so much of the time she seems to be always learning. I'm glad to have come back to her and hope in my journey away I never felt too sure I was gaining something, as I don't think I was.

Maybe I'm not saying much in not being more specific. I am a fan and I hope I can take just a small part of her way into my life, not just the being with nature, but the drive to make her life - as the wonderful title poem ends "And have you changed your life?".

The Three Marriages: Reimagining work, self and relationship by David Whyte, audiobook read by the author

I enjoy David Whyte's poetry and his prose, his imagination and tenderness. I don't read many audiobooks, but this was a present - in fact it was a present I got for someone else and needed to listen to, purchasing a second copy to give.

The title probably tells you as much as I can -- reimagining how we see our narratives in life, an alternative simply to work life balance (a term he dislikes0, recognising how much time we spend at work (hopefully/usually?) and its place in the story of our lives along with our other relationships, to another (also hopefully (??)) and also the oft neglected relationship with our self. All told via many a story . . . Joan of Arc, Robert Louis Stevenson, Pema Chodron many others and also many an anecdote from his travels and leadership of groups. All qute stimulating and dynamic and encouraging of a rich narrative to self when so much in life seems to encourage barren attitudes of givenness really that can be hard to grow through. So I highly recommend it, he is good company, I find and remain grateful for having learned of him on these groups.

"A faint breath of money somehow appears, a mist of money. I breathe it out into the air, and immediately it's sucked away by those who have entered into elaborate agreements with me that I haven't read."

The Anthologist p198.



The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

This is a book about Paul Chowder, from his point of view. Paul is a poet. He sets out to teach us everything he knows about poetry. He's having a struggle because he has compiled an anthology of rhymed poetry and in doing so it seems he's read or reread everything and the idea of writing a brief introduction is blowing his mind. So he spends a lot of time at his desk in his barn avoiding the task, seriously avoiding it. Decluttering his messy office avoiding, his girlfriend Roz giving up when he misses his deadline and moving out avoiding, losing his perspective on daily tasks and his view of himself as a person that can do things in the modern world avoiding. So in a way it is about his creative process, that of a poet, someone in tune with poetry which can be so out of kilter with the modern world. And whilst he does this he remains in tune with small daily things he sings of, and explains to us some of is lovely theories of rhymed poetry and shares anecdotes and favourites of it and the story of how unrhymed poetry (hey, it doesn't have to be rhymed as we're taught at school) gained supremacy.

It's a beautiful book - from how this may be especially an anthologist's sickness, in terms of how he's lost his narrative overview to his examples and teaching and him as a realisation.

i first read it in 2010 and its stayed with me in some ways, though I had forgotten the story I had remembered a lot of what he said of poetry. It's probably linked to my own experiments with meter that were beginning about then. He and Nicholson Baker make it accessible - and it is interesting when he points out things that the people who seem to know don't know that they know.

A lovely gentle yet heartfelt story. I've had the succeeding book, Travelling Sprinkler for years now and am going to read it. I wanted to refresh myself with this first and am very glad I have. The writing of this book flows so beautifully it is like someone is having a chat with you or their diary. Another irony that he is so stuck.

I tried some of the poets he suggests and will get back at that again i think. I didn't say much about it then - I recognised how much it was about a way of being lost in the world. But also found by it and finding it.

edit - and a very believable character, i think, in some ways, a delightful one too.

>74 tonikat: I find it hard to believe that Nicholson Baker also wrote Vox which I read last year.

>75 baswood: hard to believe? (I've not read Vox)

>75 baswood: >76 tonikat: hang on I think this may be another conversation we have had before, apologies, my memory or just not engaging bear of Little Brain's head

"How often have I been reading a writer's published journal or letters and stumbled upon an admission that, for this author, without writing, life just wouldn't be worth living, that writing has given purpose and meaning to life? Times too numerous to remember."

Writing as a way of healing p4.



Writing as a way of Healing: How telling stories transforms lives by Louise DeSalvo

I finished this a week or two ago. I'm getting bad at keeping up. I'm making myself write this tonight as I've not written much today and as I realise it is not as with me as it was.

I loved reading it. The first four or five or six chapters (I read it a chapter per day) all left me feeling good, like I had understood and recognised important things personally as well as generally. Later it was still good but had dived much more deeply into the process of writing - such that my intention on finishing was to read it again immediately and as I put more of it into practice. Specifically it has made me think much more of writing memories of childhood. But other projects still get in the way. I'm not shelving it though, I want it to stay in my current thinking and writing.

I've had the book for years. My own writing is linked in some ways to healing - a lot of it, my poetry, was prompted by my Counselling studies. I know journalling is good for me (though its tone sometimes slips into other things). But as I have explored my poetry I have avoided reading about writing for healing or as therapy. That's both led me to explore naturally myself but also to miss what I may have learned from work like this, and its good advice.

Central to this book is the research that explains what sorts of writing and questions to ask are healing. At the same time it gives some guidance on what may not help, or may in fact be bad for us. She powerfully uses the example of Sylvia Plath at one point, i think i mentioned that above and defended Plath a bit. Overall this book felt very trustworthy to me. As it proceeds it unlocks process very well and also uses some fantastic examples from famous writers' experiences, as well as her own and those of her writing pupils. That quote I began with above was followed by some of those illustrious examples, some of which opened my eyes to these people in ways I had not realised.

It is very good and experienced at understanding the process I think. One of the things that may have stopped me from reading it previously might have been not wanting to be told how to write - it doesn't really do that nor is it simplistic or teacherly really about that, all things I'd not like. It has a very nice tone to it in this.

I'm making myself want to read it again. To follow the exercises I don't already and to embark on some memory writing. Then there are several writers i want to know better due to how she has introduced them. I feel it is true how helpful writing may be, and I feel i have understood from what she has told me better some things that may help me, and may use to develop my own writing.

>78 tonikat: Noting this one - sounds interesting. My friend lost her father a few years ago and has found a lot of comfort from both reading the many letters he wrote her and from writing about her memories with him.

I was a prolific diary writer from the age of 12 to 29. It definitely kept me sane through the ups and downs of adolescence. I have them in the attic but have no clue what to do with them. I'd hate the thought of anyone reading them - I should probably just burn them.

>79 AlisonY: yikes, I'd not be for burning them. But you know -- have you ever read them? I say this partly as I realised i don't reread mine much, so started to a little.

Writing can be very helpful at such times as for your friend, I'm glad she's had that and his letters.

The Persians
Seven against Thebes
The Suppliants all by Aeschylus

Tragedy the Greeks and us by Simon Critchley

In January in reading of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and before life intervened in a big way in February, I was influenced by Steiner to read first the Iliad and secondly more of tragedy. I've put Homer down for now, though I was enjoying him and I got further than previously, it gave me a lot to think about, I found it highly ironic.

As to tragedy I read a bit of Steiner's next book, The Death Of Tragedy but focused on Simon Critchley's Tragedy the Greeks and us for another voice, one I am a little familiar with. And reading that I also made a start on the tragedies and began with Aeschylus. Critchley's advice to read plays ahs always seemed good to me, i am just bad at it, but you could certainly motor through a lot of dramatic literature that way as he says, many just take a day. I read three of Aeschylus' plays in a week - The Persians, Seven against Thebes and The Suppliants. However, life intervened - and these may be subjects not to take lightly. I did manage to continue and finish Simon Critchley's book.

I have an idea about tragedy I want to write an essay on, based on something I think I heard Peter Hall say on television once, but which I have not heard anyone else ever say since. It is something that seems obvious in some ways to me and relevant to me that I find hard to believe it has not been considered more, though there may be good reasons for that. Critchley's book whilst touching a bit on the road to where I am thinking about did not refer to this possibility at all. But at the same time, with how life can challenge me, it is one to go gently with and slowly. Plus as I learn more I learn immediately I must nuance this for examples of tragedy that are less expressive of it. You'll see I am walking around the subject as I would like to write on it, and have already a little. And basically I have a lot of tragedy to catch up on.

I'd totally forgotten that Aeschylus was of Athens' war generation and served at both the battles of Marathon and the naval Salamis ten years later. Battles against The Persians of course, Darius first and then his son Xerxes. The latter of him did burn Athens and I get a mental picture of Aeschylus in a trireme near Piraeus looking up at his burning city. These were threats to his whole way of life, defeat would probably have meant death or else slavery. it was all on the line for the Athenians at both battles, and for other greeks. The Persians is the earliest extant tragedy that we have. It hit me strongly that therefore and given its subject matter from one who was subjected to so much, that tragedy's birth may have a strong link to the experience of post traumatic stress. I speculate.

Otherwise it also seems to me that there is a strong element to The Persians of cleverly mocking the defeated King, sending him home to his mother (presented as a decent ancestor respecting woman). In a way he is accused in the play of acting in an un-sacred way -- and in some way mocked for hubris, and for not understanding the true facts of life. He is presented with his defeat as a mental knot he is now tied in with nowhere to go and there is a way we may speculate how such a person might be allowed to remain King, how a people might allow it. We know that the battles of 479/480BCE were not the end of the conflict and I think there is an element of propaganda to this, that if this were performed and spread from Ionia into asia minor may destablise him (I don't know if the plays were diffused like that, but there were plenty of Ionian theatres). In a way it is especially satisfying from a philhellene point of view - on the way to Greece in 480 Xerxes had bridges built over the Hellespont. But the first bridges were destroyed in a storm - to which Xerxes responded by having his engineers killed and the sea whipped. I always felt for those engineers and the way Aeschylus seems to mock him in a very classy way seems related to having taken such a stance of trying to seem so terrible. That post traumatic stress seems also to have a huge element of having faced a terrifying reality and come through. Leaving it natural to criticise on such lines - it is not outright mockery and yet somehow it is.

I've heard plenty about the plays for many years but it is very helpful to read them. One aspect of that reality I noticed in all three plays was how Aeschylus mentions the land and the local shrines to local Gods of the Polis. In a way Xerxes did not understand the land either at the (unmentioned I think?) Thermopylae pass but especially not (the sea/and land of Salamis. The greeks' awareness of this a huge part of their victory over much larger brute force. But beyond that it was redolent to me maybe of older beliefs, not fully spelled out, of their pagan past that he is very careful to respect -- and that need to respect such things is a big part of the morality of the plays I read so far, or a ground of them.

The other two plays were also fascinating. I'd forgotten I knew the story of Seven against Thebes. As also how I had known that so much actual action always happens off stage in these plays. I very much enjoyed how our protagonist seems to act so well in designing his defence against the seven before totally going into tragic (and inexplicable mode) by deciding he will fight that special seventh hero himself. i love that it is not explained, but seems entirely fitting to him.

Finally i enjoyed something of the female view in the Suppliants which doe smake a bit more of the relationship to the land. And I enjoyed thinking about the decision making process in deciding whether to help these maidens or not. A very redolent play of our migrationary times and people (usually men) in people's places of origins driving reasonable people out.

Also to say something of Simon Critchley's Tragedy, The Greeks and Us. I enjoyed it very much. It makes a very good introduction and a good argument that the tragedies contained a sort of wisdom different from that that became philosophy - in fact it was related to Sophistry within the plays. he gave me an idea that the Athenians may have turned more carefully to philosophy having launched their disastrous Sicilian Expedition after being roused by a particularly powerful speech by the Sophist Gorgias who wanted them to help his home city. It was good to get this broader context and to follow the development of Greek tragedy in this book. I need to read it again. A lot has happened since i did. it may be a book i wish i had read physically rather than on my kindle, for memory and ease of flicking back and forth. I'd already like to read it again.

One aspect that Critchley I don't think said much about, and which relates to my own interest, was how the plays were used as part of the Asklepian healing rituals. At sites like Epidavros purification included going to see drama (maybe comedies too, I need to find out). For myself I found this hit of several plays in one week was unexpectedly (despite knowing this effect has hit others) it was unexpectedly healthy. But in the longer run, maybe human beings cannot take too much reality and I have paused before the Oresteia (which is very much in my mind for my idea), let alone the other playwrights, but I hope to on a more gentle schedule and with Critchley to turn back to again and also Steiner's book and maybe others.

April ## Boyhood ## Red Joan ## Gone Girl ## Joan Didion: the centre cannot hold ## The Ghost ## A Star is Born ## The Trial of the Chicago Seven ## Seaspiracy ## Page Eight ## Turks & Caicos ## Salting the Battlefield ##

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/23/jury-acquits-extinction-rebe...

"I don’t want to know about evil via poetry. I don’t want to spread the knowledge of evil. I just want to know about love."

Baker, Nicholson. Travelling Sprinkler (p. 66). Profile Books. Kindle Edition.



Travelling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker kindle ed.

I read this shortly after the preceding The Anthologist. Here we continue the quiet day to day adventures of poet Paul Chowder. in this volume maybe his process meets its match as he tries to finish a collection called 'Misery Hat' for his publisher. I'd like to know if his process is more chaotic at such times, or if really this may just be situation normal for him. His girlfriend Roz has left him again, which really may be the main theme to the book as he thinks this through. He develops a need for strong cigars (after a briefly trying chewing tobacco) and then most productively he buys a keyboard and some music software to set himself up as his own mini studio for dance tracks. I mean most productively as this is key really and to his developing thinking about his poetry. He makes a friend of his neighbour's son who is into similar things and can advise on some software. Amidst it all we're treated to this poet's creative thinking about any number of things. I saw a poet who got a mention in the first book say how we miss in that book the one thing that Paul is, meaning any of his poetry. In this we do get some glimpses of songs he plays with.

Oh I forgot he also attends Quaker meetings:

"AND NOW MEETING is over and I’m back in the car. One of the elders, Chase—the man who sang “How Can I Keep from Singing?”—was shaking hands at the door when I went in. Meeting was crowded and there were a number of young children. I sat down in an empty stretch of pew far enough away from the next person, a filmmaker I knew slightly, so that I thought he wouldn’t smell me. I put my finger through my key ring and closed my fist around my car key. People were smiling and looking around, as they do while latecomers arrange themselves. The last to arrive were a mother and her three children, followed by an older man in a white shirt who sat next to me. He was a bit out of breath from hurrying, and I heard his breathing gradually slow down. I listened to the clock for a while and thought about how many people were wearing plaid. One woman had gotten her hair cut short in a way that looked very good. I closed my eyes and felt that time was moving faster, maybe a little too fast. The windows were open, and the door was open, and the sound of a passing car travelled slowly through the room. After that there was stillness. A little boy held his mother’s gold watch, turning it in his hands and smiling a secret smile. Then the silence changed and deepened, and for several seconds it was perfect and I felt a sort of ecstasy. Then someone shifted and adjusted a pillow for her back, and I could feel my pew bend when the man next to me crossed his legs. Again a car sound poured softly in through the windows and out the open door. We were permeable. We were a meeting permeated with openness."

Baker, Nicholson. Travelling Sprinkler (pp. 94-95). Profile Books. Kindle Edition.

Which i liked having attended a few myself. In fact in some ways his whole ditzyness and being into poetry is quite like me except I'd not get into cigars I think and my keyboard skills are not at that level yet. Nor maybe my poetry as he clearly has a profile, he is also not to be under estimated from his quiet tone, he knows how to get work when he needs it. There is a lot I can agree with him on, including how useless I can be at modern life, it seemed quite familiar in some ways without some of his details. There were many passages I liked a lot, Baker manages to write very fluently and it read very easily as a very believable chain of thought much of the time. Paul starts to get in touch with what is important to him, and I suppose thinks that through in terms of poetry, the quote above being really quite early on in a process for him I guess, he (Baker) has a good understanding of how we don't always quite know ourselves or even if we do may struggle with what is best for us. I would love to read a book about him in different times, and also more of him as a poet. Though he has given me plenty to think on in that department anyway. A book of him getting it all right, in his particular way of course, would be a delightful way to finish a trilogy of him . . . and a natural progression from this.

"Pasternak is a dreamer and a visionary. In his revolutionariness he doesn’t differ from all the great lyric poets, all of whom, including the royalist de Vigny and the executed Chénier, stood for liberty: the liberty of others (poets have their own); equality – of opportunity; and fraternity – with which every poet, despite his isolation, or perhaps thanks to his isolation, is filled to the very brim of his heart. His ‘left’ tendency is no different from that of everyone whose heart is where it should be – on the left."

Tsvetaeva, Marina. Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry (Kindle Locations 2663-2667). Bloodaxe Books. Kindle Edition.



Art in the Light of Conscience: eight essays on poetry by Marina Tsvetaeva translated with an introduction by Angela Livingstone

Marina Tsvetaeva is often seen as one of the four great Russian poets of the twentieth century, or at least of the Silver Age, though as I type that I wonder where that leaves Blok or Brodsky. Those four are Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova and herself. A few years ago I was reading a selection from all four and it was her poems that grabbed me most immediately at that time, I bought this and more to read then. She's sometimes described as overflowing with feeling, I wonder if that has anything to do with a simple reading of her life and interpretation of her suicide (which may have been the result of having been trapped in a NKVD plot). I find her just properly full of feeling and bursting with it. Feeling in those times having come under challenge and being a dangerous thing.

Tsvetaeva supported the Whites during the revolution, her husband fought with them. Later they got out of the Revolution as emigres, but she did not settle well. Was not taken to in some senses amongst emigres partly for giving time to work still being written in Russia. I get a strong sense of her respecting the humanity on all sides, and of the course the Russianness on all sides -- she has an interesting idea that aside from those who were political she would still be better read in Russia than she was amongst emigres, somehow with the whole land open to her. In the end they returned to Russia, disastrously, her husband was killed, she could not get work.

These essays are brilliant, full of recognitions of poets and the world that make you stop and think. Readable even when I have not read some of the people spoken of. Generous and knowing and full of life. Full of ideas I'll think about for a long time. As a result I have started Letters: summer 1926 between herself and Pasternak and Rilke. Then it was good to learn in the intro that there is little overlap with her collected prose and i will read that. She is a beautiful writer, apparent despite translation and I am sure because of the way these had been translated. It has all also prompted me to read Nadezdha Mandelstam's second book. And I must get back to Zhivago and reading of Pasternak.

Her writing is dense and not easily summed up, it is a trip somehow you have to make, taking moments out of it can make sense, but the overall thing is to read through the whole argument and think yes on it as a whole and the brilliant landmarks you've progressed through the whole piece. It is certainly validating of poets and poetry in many ways and was also a reminder to me of some things I was almost forgetting (and some of which some people might have argued against to me and pooh poohed and led me away from). Her distinctions will have me thinking for a very long time to come, for example in the title essay. I'm resisting the urge to start sharing them here, go and look, if you are so inclined.

>84 tonikat: it is a trip somehow you have to make
I like that thought—it's a good endorsement, and now I may pick this up sometime.

>85 lisapeet: I may just be being a bit lazy too. But I like her style, find it very free and engaging.

>86 tonikat: Lazy or not, it's very evocative of a certain kind of reading experience that I like.

>87 lisapeet: I hope you do -- but I am sure it'll speak for itself to one who listens and likes such things.

An unusual poem for Mary Oliver, about a person. Also about someone tarred with the brush of 'madness'. Well worth a read / listen - Anne, https://voetica.com/voetica.php?collection=1&poet=27&poem=1641



New and Selected poems V.1 by Mary Oliver

I've delayed several posts recently. I'm not sure it really helps as I am reading a lot more and it is probably best to write whilst things are with me. I've certainly also delayed writing more about Mary Oliver, as what more can I say with short broad brush strokes . . . I almost have to write more seriously now about her having read her quite a bit. Strange in a way given how she always makes things fresh. But it is not easy to reach that, and sometimes my blog just goes quickly, gets things done.

I have to confess I did not read through the sections here from collections I have read previously. It's also interesting that around the time I read it it and volume two are mentioned in Travelling Sprinkler, that poet has his mind on the right things. Criticism of Oliver misunderstands, I think.

The new poems here were as good as ever. But it was interesting to read the earlier work and see that that clear voice of later work emerged itself from itself, honed itself. That's the sense I have. Perhaps it is obvious but it seemed clear to me - it was there and could be fully itself at times, but at others it was doing the things it had to do, through carrying other things as it developed, for me. A sense I remember sometimes of having to be a poet, not just being, which she became so good at -- maybe it is inevitable on that journey. I feel I have to be more specific and I am not sure I want to be, this is my sense in overview and true only of her very earliest works (for me). It is not meant as criticism, but as appreciation for her path. I have quite a few more collections that I have not read (though I have run out of further copies of any at the mo), maybe the path will be more complex yet. Such a journey as I suggest should not be any special news for many poets. Of course it also has an element of her journey as person, spirit, of the ratification to herself of her values and their constant rediscovery.



Long Life: Essays and Other Writings by Mary Oliver

"A CERTAIN lucent correspondence has served me, all my life, in the ongoing search for my deepest thoughts and feelings. It is the relationship of my own mind to landscape, to the physical world—especially to that part of it with which, over the years, I have (and not casually) become intimate. It is no great piece of furniture in the universe—no Niagara, or rainforest, or Sahara. Yet it is beautiful, and it ripples in the weathers as lively as any outpouring from the Great Lakes."

Oliver, Mary. Long Life: Essays and Other Writings (p. 84). Hachette Books. Kindle Edition.

So opens the essay Home in this collection from 2005. Clearly a mature work. In it she expounds some more on the questions she has with her, like songs, and which she seeks to find answers for in how she lives, loves. She finds many answers, she asks many questions. This is a lovely selection of essays, often about her favourite places, sometimes amidst change. Also a section of an essay on Emerson and three introductions she wrote for volumes of Hawthorne. her understanding and appreciation shine through.

Her relationship to the landscape made me think at times of Aeschylus' mention in the three plays I read of the local gods and shrines and the respect for the land that shone in them too.

Reading her sparkles with good living and inspires to try the same, to listen out for my own best questions and turn them, turn them turn them towards some better answers.

"So again the three signs. Put them together any way you wish. WORK RELAXATION DON'T THINK, Once separated out. Now all three together in a process. For if one works one finally relaxes and stops thinking. True creation occurs then and only then.

But work, without right thinking, is almost useless. I repeat myself, but, the writer who wants to tap the larger truth in himself must reject the temptations of Joyce or Camus or Tennessee Wiliams, as exhibited in the literary reviews. He must forget the money waiting for him in mass-circulation. He must ask himself. "What do I really think of the world, what do I love, fear, hate?" and begin to pour this on paper."

Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing p147



I've had a copy of this for quite a long time. A teacher liked it a lot and in a way I have imbibed some of its lessons through that teaching.

I was led to read it after my recent reading on writing and also on poetry with Tsvetaeva. Though this is very different from her in tone. Mostly Bradbury (whom I've not read otherwise) seems more prosaic. From what he says he also appears self taught. There are dimensions to what Tsvetaeva says that are not apparent here, especially in terms of being in a tradition, a sort of intellectualism, not that he lacks intellect, a sort of depth to what she says not that he lacks depth either - there are maybe ways I could wonder if he is in revolt at some of that, there are also ways in which gender divides them too. But at the same time from what he says, his knowingness of creativity, he clearly listens to his muse. I am interested to read him, or try him.

There were two things I disliked. Firstly his defence of science fiction and fantasy seems unnecessary now, I don't doubt as needed so much for so much of his experience -- but in what he says this is where I got a flavour somewhat in revolt against so much of what was valued in literary life, of other ways -- though i do not doubt the ways those in power can themselves have categorised and marginalised some, to make them want to react. Secondly there was a comment that seemed simply misogynist about Elizabeth Taylor's weight in a film that stood out to me now.

But overall he speaks a lot of sense and I am interested to read especially Dandelion Wine and Farenheit 451 -- and to try and apply his work ethic more carefully and consistently for some projects -- but careful in myself of method and finding that relaxation and flow he speaks of, but which also wants my own depths of flavours.

I found these two tributes on his Wiki page, by people who obviously know his work - "Writer Neil Gaiman felt that "the landscape of the world we live in would have been diminished if we had not had him in our world".89 Author Stephen King released a statement on his website saying, "Ray Bradbury wrote three great novels and three hundred great stories. One of the latter was called 'A Sound of Thunder'. The sound I hear today is the thunder of a giant's footsteps fading away. But the novels and stories remain, in all their resonance and strange beauty."2

I think I am up to date with comments - I'll try to stay better up to date. I am shirking off writing a presentation for next week, so must now face applying myself. I'm also managing to get through more reading than ever whilst on LT, still need to see how it continues.

>90 tonikat: I have a bit of interest in that one just because of the combination of Ray Bradbury and Zen, but from what I've read about it—including your comments—it seems like it might be dated. This line of his alone—
He must forget the money waiting for him in mass-circulation.
—makes me laugh, which is possibly the wrong way to approach a book like this.

>91 lisapeet: yes i see what you mean, his examples in that chapter are someone trying to be literary and channel great writers in a way and someone seeking popular success, which is where that comes from. It was dated in some ways, but interesting to read his path and pout it together from these essays across quite a few years. Zen only comes in in the last essay.

In some ways it has become an introduction to him for me. I remember when the Martian Chronicles tv series came out, but we were watching on a small holiday home portable and it never caught me,

May ** Turks & Caicos ** Salting the Battlefield ** Finding the Way Back ** Folk (Radio see below) ** Erin Brockovich ** Tenet ** Stowaway ** Awakenings

https://lithub.com/hilary-mantel-on-how-writers-learn-to-trust-themselves/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/14/this-yarrow-tara-bergin-review

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-kurt-vonneguts-slaughterhouse-f... Salman Rushdie

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/aeneid-virgil-shadi-bartsch-len-krisak-review...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000vwq2 - Folk r3 drama

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/elegy-anthony-thwaite-poem-of-the-week-andrew... -- obituary with interesting quote of a John Bayley review on types of poets, been trying to say similar as a bulls eye misser myself

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-benjamin-files-fredric-jameson-review-car...

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-murder-of-professor-schlick-david-demonds...

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/migrants-in-the-profane-peter-e-gordon-review...

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/languages-of-truth-salman-rushdie-review-clai...

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/may/23/mad-man-to-bad-man-jared-harris-...

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/disraeli-lothair-monsignor-catesby-boy-capel-... fascinating

https://poets.org/poem/happiness-0

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/may/24/favourite-dylan-song-mick-jagger-m...

https://poets.org/poem/hypothesis?

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/may/25/emily-brontes-handwritten-poems-ar...

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/joseph-brodsky-translators-review-stephanie-s...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/29/non-fungible-tokens-digita...

"When you are faced with someone who has had to fight for the freedom to work creatively, and you accept that you have given them the space to discuss and express their ideas when there has typically been only absence, you must be humble to your privilege. My space came from pushing myself to make one film after the next, how I could never sit still, for to do so would mean a closing of that space and the opportunities available to me. I was born with none of these things, nor had family who understood them."

Govinden, Niven. Diary of a Film (p. 64). Little, Brown Book Group. Kindle Edition.



Diary of a Film by Niven Govinden

I saw this author in conversation with an interviewer online this last week. He (assumed pronoun I am afraid) spoke very enthusiastically about this his latest book and about writing. That and the interviewer liking it led me to seek it out right after. It's a short novel, in the form of a diary i guess, kind of stream of consciousness and having started it it was easy to finish -- not least as I was interested throughout.

It is the story of an auteur film director attending a film festival in an unnamed Italian city with his latest film, an adaptation of a book by William Maxwell, The Folded Leaf. Our author identified as a queer person of colour the other day, this director identified as queer I think, or gay, and has a husband and son at home. It seems this film was the auteur working at his highest pitch. He's now in the process of sending the film off into the world, weathering the anxiety this can give but with the benefit of a lot of experience and starting to think about what he may do next. Our author was very clear in the interview I saw that the subject they'd realised wasn't simply film, but creativity. I was of course very interested by that. Though there are some film aspects to enjoy too -- the tone he sets for the european auteur (from an unnamed eastern european country) in this Italian city with his two hollywood stars, who seem to be managing being gay and being stars, or starting to. i wondered, as it seemed so set for becoming a film, how it could be cast as I understand that is something still hard for some stars.

But there is much besides to enjoy here - there is some flaneuring (?) in an Italian city, coffee, food (of course) and a meeting with a woman how published a novel a long time ago about a local theme. The directors' ears prick up, with this person whose company he enjoys. In doing so we have a large element of plot -- another is that of being gay i think and the tolls it may take, as the director watches others negotiate this -- but maybe most central is this highly creative person negotiate the end of a project and sending it off and at the same time casting about for something new. Overall this gives us a portrait I think for this gay person of their creativity and also the toll of that, its costs, its impact on others, on himself too in loss of perspective, the turbulence of creativity and perceptions of others on that. There is some discussion that is redolent of people watching things through lenses or glass and we are left with a powerful image of the director in this process. It is quietly almost forensic in what this whole process shows us -- but full of life. I've read the LT review comments so far and have to say I think central to the whole thing is a mixture of love and creativity and how close they are, and potentially how difficult that can be for others.

I enjoyed it. There were some minor things that bothered me, but one was later explained. The other was a sense of preciousness at times in the text, like it was too perfect what was happening and how, but that was minor really -- and may also have been an aspect of our protagonist. I really enjoyed it. In the past hearing it was by a queer writer may have put me off - unless they were famous and had crossed boundaries more. It has made me think of reading more Italians, Bassani, Eco mainly (the latter never mentioned), and of travel and living a full life. Some of the tone still I notice, but a cool and enjoyable book. I would not be surprised to see a film one day. Though of course maybe it is partly in conversation with a certain famous gay themed film set in Italy in recent years, amongst other things.

edit - it is interesting I spoke of precision as in some ways that is not there in this, the city seems like a generic Italian city, no solid details at all. Time too at times seems hinted at but you wonder how it works (though that may -- am I going all Nabokov in my analysis). But there is a sort of looseness within which it is all held and works, funny too compared to the little inter-relational details throughout. I'm not sure what it means, just am aware of it. Maybe it is fitting for something dealing so much with the imagination and internal life, and someone maybe at a distance from the world in some ways.

- the guardian review - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/05/diary-of-a-film-by-niven-govinden-...

"The kind of thinker this reveals Frank to be is suggested in a story told by Edward Greenwood at his funeral. That related to when he was in hospital and proving temporarily difficult to locate. When Edward asked where in the ward he could find Professor Cioffi, a nurse replied with a kindly smile, ‘Oh you mean the patient who knows all the answers.’ ‘No’, came a voice from underneath some nearby bedclothes, ‘I know all the questions.’ Frank may not have known all the questions but his correction of the nurse indicates what he felt the role of philosophy in ordinary life ought principally to be."

Ellis, David; Bunnin, Nicholas. Frank Cioffi: The Philosopher in Shirt-Sleeves (p. 10). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.



When I was an undergraduate all students in the school of Arts at Essex in the first year had to take a core course on The Enlightenment. It was a great grounding. Lecturers across departments lectured on it. One of them was Frank Cioffi, who I think was head of the philosophy department then. I remember one of those lectures as the most inspiring of all those I attended as an undergrad. Different from my later Counselling lectures, which had an intimacy mostly in smaller groups. I'm not sure now, though I could check my notes if there was a second lecture, I have a memory of being disappointed that someone filled in on another occasion (and remember lots of people then leaving that lecture). That, a good result in my first year exam in philosophy and an enjoyable year with another philosopher had me decided to switch to philosophy and history. But Frank Cioffi's lecture was the start of that. Sadly I couldn't get it by family, to much and continued regret and for another reason hadn't the ability insist at that exact time. It was only in recent years, after hearing of his death, that I learned that such a reaction was well known after his lectures leading many other people to switch to philosophy over the years. It's not that other lectures were at all bad - there was just something dynamic and engaging in his manner and wealth of examples and thinking on his feet. This book also recognises the many times people were moved likewise.

Frank Cioffi played an important part in the criticism of Freud and also wrote on Wittgenstein. he wasn't prolific in publishing this book suggests but was almost always hard at work thinking, developing arguments. The first part of this book is made up of expansions on notes he left behind on an variety of topics by a friend of his who had spent many hours in conversation with him. At times, as a non philosopher, I struggled to follow the threads of some chapters as I am less familiar on some topics. But his thinking always so lucid. The book concludes with a review of his career and interests and contribution to philosophy. I understand from it that he may have felt he may be seen as a failure by some standards, an amazing thought given his ability and surely not true in the many eyes he influenced even more than mine. I am left with a strange question of having been introduced to his lines of thinking how much those seeds, and maybe others at Essex, contributed to my own move to views of Freud and Wittgenstein in that range during my counselling training. It also seems a huge opportunity missed.

I was glad to read this and learn more of this remarkable person. Delight, that is what I remember I think, in my very small and distant contact with his thinking.

"Since I knew he admired F. R. Leavis, I would then remind him of what that critic had said about the irrelevance of philosophy to the kind of issues raised in any reading of great novels, and some great poetry also; but he would quote in response Dilthey’s simple assertion that ‘literature’s superiority of content is offset by its incapacity for systematic representation.’ What helped to make Frank so interesting was the permanent battle that went on within him between a powerful will towards order, system, clarity of thought and delight in the sheer heterogeneity of human existence."

Ellis, David; Bunnin, Nicholas. Frank Cioffi: The Philosopher in Shirt-Sleeves (p. 90). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

>95 tonikat:

I really liked that.

Feels like high time to delurk and say how much I enjoyed your thread.

>96 LolaWalser: thanks, good to hear :)

>95 tonikat:, >96 LolaWalser: Ditto!

Me too.

Me too. Also thinking it's something my husband might like, apropos of nothing really.

Yay >98 wandering_star:, >99 SassyLassy:, >100 lisapeet: thanks. 'apropos of nothing' can be a very good thing, it seems like an old lyric I once knew but cannot place now, but ty for my 100th post. I'm ahead of myself by my usual reading and posting rate for the year, but greatly enjoying it. But shh don'y say anything kat to break the spell.

Hope to post again soon, I am rereading For Esme with love and squalor and should finish it this weekend. Previously posted current reads have slowed.

"They sang without instrumental accompaniment - or, more accurately in their case, without any interference. Their voices were melodious and unsentimental, almost to the point where a somewhat more denominational man than myself might, without straining, have experienced levitation."

from the title story, p67, For Esme ~ with love and squalor by J. D. Salinger



I thought i would reread these stories as I was thinking some of his posthumous work may be published this year. But on checking the interviews with his son I see that may be any time in the next eight years or so. I don't know why I thought this year. Hope maybe.

But I'm very glad to have read them. Each a well cut gem. They understand themselves very well, like a great mise en scene and understanding of the whole situation and context. He plays a lot with never telling us the most important things, leaving us to have to infer them. Which may be difficult for some, but is not problem in my eyes. They have a playfulness to them. They also consistently seem very interested in innocence and its relation to greater knowing. The last story. Teddy, was my favourite in memory, I am not sure I can be as clear on that on this read, though I still love it. In it was have someone seemingly very gifted and knowing yet also seemingly innocent. There's also a consistent interest in innocence and need for it in those that are not at all innocent and are playing a game that later may be seen in Holden Caulfield I think of a kind of sardonic world wisdom - though some of these characters maybe have earned that even more than HC.

But in a way I love each of these stories and their grasp of people and places and times. And have a lot of faith in what may yet come. I think some may criticise him as middlebrow - but I think that is only a misplaced observation of his clarity, his lucidity. Which to me also makes perfect sense of his retreat from the public eye, not strange at all, a product of his knowing and seeking the best.

Each story also most touching in their understanding of their subjects, especially in the face of what might be multiple seemingly valid and validated by the story other possible interpretations in those that may not look more closely. In a way that amounts to a critique of a sort of pop wisdom, or the view of the media perhaps in our day, and of the gossip. The title story may, as may a few, vie with Teddy as my favourite - I've not known sleeplessness for anything like the reasons that are a matter of ellipsis in this story (but which do fit in some way some of what we know of Salinger's wartime experience in Intelligence). But I do know what it is like to remember sleep after serious sleeplessness and this suggestion of how this could work is most beautiful, the angle of approach again not saying as much as i have just ham fistedly done. Yet at the same time somehow his subject, though indirect somehow is right in front of us, with a manner of address which in memory also his other work. I need to reread those too. That may explain his popularity a little, it is like the tone of a knowing relative who knows us well and helps us understand ourselves, accept lessons learn, and set us on our way again ready to face the world. Later Holden Caulfield of course needs just such attention. It is a familiar and intimate knowing of what he speaks of - and valuing something that without being tuned into it manages to seem quite invisible to so many. I suppose that has a great understanding and compassion and forgiveness - sometimes an explanation of what seems strange that is really most human. That may be why I am so hopeful of later work. Offering such understanding of say Holden Caulfield later, who so many people just cannot stomach and if he was theirs maybe pack off to military school, seems challenging to some who draw a line in understanding I suppose, and maybe there is argument for that -- but it is just how, in not following these explanations and views some seem lost and may believe less of themselves than is true - how many have experienced such at the hands of psychiatry say.

I wonder, if, to an easy view, to an idle gossip, each of these situations seems to defy propriety and explanation. Salinger gives us, often obliquely, the inside dope, and obliquely may also be all the subjects themselves know, especially at the time.

I also wonder now if in each situation the subjects are trapped, railing against the bars of their cage, or falling into a trap unable to avoid it. Which is interesting in light of the banana fish story. Perhaps also it is humanity that may dissolve the bars somehow, sometimes, if we can succeed in it, to it. And also humanity springing the trap, when it may look like badness that does so, but in fact vulnerability and need that is expressed in a way that has been complicated and may look quite different to others.

on Salinger - https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2011/02/salinger-201102

edit - Does one misunderstood version of humanity, often one kind of forced onto a person misunderstood (misinterpreted) within the rules, either through following them or being broken by/breaking them, is that what springs the trap or creates it or the falling into it. And a greater version of humanity is one that understands and dissolves and allows and forgives, much like the Prodigal Son's story. Is this what we know and recreate differently all the time. The best is to understand and surpass, forgive, feel with, to love. That seems to be what these stories are about -- and finding ourselves in their midst and understanding many turns in response, but remembering the vital ingredients of the thing (though some too awful for him to share, for Seymour and Sgt. X), but remembering there was a reality that made the prison and begging the question of it, freedom, and is the idea of how to find that freedom the real freedom. Which all makes Teddy's story all the more poignant at the end.

>102 tonikat: Have you read Franny and Zooey? That used to be a favorite of mine, but it has probably been 40 years since I have read it. Maybe I want to do it again, but I don't want to spoil it, if it is not up to my remembrance.

>103 sallypursell: I have, I liked it very much. I've read the four main works and now think I'll go on again through them all.

>104 tonikat: Thanks, maybe I will read it again, then.

>105 sallypursell: in reading around him tonight I came across this on his wiki page

"In recent years, some critics have defended certain post-Nine Stories works by Salinger; in 2001, Janet Malcolm wrote in The New York Review of Books that "Zooey" "is arguably Salinger's masterpiece ... Rereading it and its companion piece 'Franny' is no less rewarding than rereading The Great Gatsby."132"

which may instil greater confidence than I can.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._D._Salinger#Posthumous_publications

I'm one of the gajillion Salinger fans since a high school teacher lent me a copy of Nine stories. Then I searched my parents' library and found Franny & Zooey, one of the select Most Important Books Of My Life... and also The Catcher, but that one I never warmed to, although I'm not one of those tedious "haters" of Holden. Then I read everything else in print and reread faves many times... but not in at least a decade.

He's still I think one of the masters of prose, where I have to stop every paragraph or so and wonder how did he do that, how did he instill such life into a picture made of words, but emotionally I think I've drifted a bit away...

I may understand that emotional change -- for all the freshness of his approach in each story, his voice seems a bit like a sort of close up that in memory might be a bit stifling. I have read the four books currently available. I did struggle to read Hapworth though and never completed it, whilst not feeling critical exactly. But in my memory I wondered if this was part of the criticism of the time, which was exactly when he came to stop publishing. So I'm interested to see whether and how he may change with time, if at all. I have faith in him, certainly I have hope about these books that are projected to be published sometime.

Also, I've noticed with some authors (e.g. Hemingway) the image I take away of him is different from the freshness of actually reading him. And having read most of those stories again in the last week and feeling today a bit like maybe it was all too close I could wonder this about Salinger, if it leaves me with an image that is not who I meet when reading him. I will think about that as i read more.

edit -- maybe those are just my versions of change, what i notice and hear when you mention such a thing.

June ** Spotlight ** Barton Fink

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/01/wuhan-coronavirus-lab-leak...

https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/global-psychiatry-crisis-values

https://www.icorn.org/article/poetic-tribute-late-zurab-rteveliashvili

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/jun/03/the-beatles-in-india-with-their-lo...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/06/the-guardian-view-on-the-g...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3SWCShKd5tbCvMjKknjVtFk/diversity-in-t...

https://poets.org/poem/what-lips-my-lips-have-kissed-and-where-and-why-sonnet-xl...

https://lithub.com/horseshit-yes-marlon-brando-eclectic-bibliophile-wrote-in-his...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/10/acropolis-now-greeks-outraged-at-c...

https://americansongwriter.com/cancer-patient-jane-marczewskis-performance-of-it...

https://pipelineartists.com/do-what-feels-right-the-terrence-malick-way/

https://poets.org/poem/there-must-be-one-thing-you-cant-have-order-be-alive

https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/dark-matter-theory?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CE9vH3vtrr4 lovely documentary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEfI4-lZLcc 'how is it possible to be human . . . '

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/three-newly-discovered-manuscripts-edward-lea...

https://thehumandivine.org/2016/12/11/william-blake-and-the-divided-brain-by-iai... - Blake society annual lecture 2016

https://curiosmos.com/astronomers-map-8000-galaxies-and-make-an-incredible-disco... -- Perspective, hello Laniakea

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/milley-critical-race-theory-ma... :O

I have passed my total of reads for last year. I'm not even reading that much in recent weeks, but then three of last month's completions were poetry. I'm trying to now complete the prose I started (recently). But then there is a lot of that (overall). I feel like I have cast my net out wide and its overwhelming me a bit, somehow adrift a bit for now. Also feel, whilst numbers aren't a competition really, or surely I'd have had a year like this before, but feel I am competing with myself a bit to understand and grasp well, to know. So I'm dialling that back a bit to enjoy, I hope. I'm reading Letters, Summer 1926 between Pasternak, Tsvetaeva and Rilke and they kind of remind me of me. Pasternak's feeling for receiving a letter from Rilke understandable but massive, charming and his changeability though soem of that is warranted -- and all of them kind of gushing.

edit- maybe that is what poets do, remind us of ourselves. they are very open (Tsvetaeva causing Pasternak concern when she is less so and him right to have sensed this, though he'd seemed maybe overreading). In the section I just read Tsvetaeva I think makes a comment about poets being unedited in their openness.

Finally did an overdue deep catch up here. Love your thread and where you’re going with your reading this year. I hope you manage whatever is overwhelming currently, and I hope you post more on Letters, Summer 1926.

ETA: I meant to add - very interested in all these Salinger comments. He gets so much general criticism, i was surprised to see some affection by readers i trust. I had never thought to read his other works. (Read Catcher at some point in my teens. I did like it…I could relate to Holden. 😳)

Thanks Dan :) I'm nearing the end of Letters, Summer 1926, an amazing read.

Holden, me too, though i wasn't at all like him I thought, yet hmmm things change. He's a lovely writer, I do wonder if and how he'll change in any more works.

I'm going to have to put Letters, Summer 1926 on my list. I've been writing a lot of pen-and-ink correspondence—I did even pre-pandemic, but I've ramped it up exponentially in the past 15 months and have gotten into some wonderful deep letter exchanges with friends a few miles away whom I would ordinarily just see for lunch periodically. At some point I began thinking about what people wrote about when paper and ink was all they had, for most of the 20th century, and how they maintained regular—and engaging—correspondence in the absence of novel, exciting experiences, so I've been dipping into my correspondence collections. Which, as it turns out, I have a lot of, since as I said I've always been into writing letters and never really stopped even with email. It's fun to see what people—usually authors in the collections I have—have to say about the often mundane details of their lives, and how they make those descriptions come alive.

>113 lisapeet: some strong stuff in Letters, 1926 in a way. Excellent though. Learned a lot about all three of them, though Rilke is in it more in absence. Very humanising of such people.

Fascinating about your letter writing. I write them rarely but when i do yes pen and ink is needed, despite my handwriting having gone from bad to worse. As with my writing it slows you down, makes you think differently, I enjoy it, the consideration -- it's a bit like you are conjuring a conversation up and the person is with you more than by the net. I've not read lots of letters books. I have some. The one i should read though is Emily Dickinson, whose poems I need to get back to, the loose sheets. Mundane details and aliveness I agree, opens things up.

The title poem for this collection can be read and listened to here - https://childrens.poetryarchive.org/poem/the-armada/

they also have another of the poems, The Minister for Exams, https://childrens.poetryarchive.org/poem/the-minister-for-exams/



Armada by Brian Patten

of the four collections I've read in the last six weeks or so this is to me easily my favourite, easily the most immediately loveable and most clearly poetry (those others include an Alice Oswald and a Don Paterson collection) that does not lose itself in trying to be so, somehow encrypting its concerns away from the immediate and the poetic. No and no lack of depth for that.

It is heartfelt, responding in part to his loss of his mother and also considering the past and bringing it to present.

What more can I say, a delight.

A very interesting interview with the man himself - https://www.writeoutloud.net/public/blogentry.php?blogentryid=45039

July ** Once upon a Time in Hollywood ** Acts of Quiet Resistance (cinema) ** Bourne movies ** Stardust ** Knives Out ** Bourne Legacy ** Beatriz at Dinner

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/endlessly-various-world-of-russell-hoban-revi... -- very interesting with a great story at the end, of the literary world, interesting to hear how even such people can be divided in such ways

https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/docs/default-source/members/sigs/spirituality-spsig/sh... Interesting, NB where this is hosted

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2021/jul/04/all-of-this-unreal-time-review-cil...

https://thepointmag.com/criticism/the-wound-talks-to-you/ (re John Berryman)

https://www.diehoren.com/2016/01/what-kind-of-performer-was-rilke_8.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_JMae81jYU re John Clare

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/05/flogged-imprisoned-murdered-today-...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna1324 trans teen artist success

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/07/victims-allegedly-tortured-by-new-...

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-subversive-simone-weil-robert-zaretsky-bo...

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/three-rooms-jo-hamya-book-review-stephanie-sy... sounds interesting, but if ti is so for Oxfordians then imagine it on repeat down through the lower divisions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijg3HTpEKMI -- Ian McGilchrist Blake Soc. lecture 2016

https://www.frominsultstorespect.com/2018/07/29/involuntary-psychiatric-drugging... -- is involuntary psychiatric drugging torture?

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/07/06/seeing-and-being-are-not-the-same... - Woolf's The Voyage Out

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-lunatic-fringe-christine-brooke-rose-poem... one to ponder (and wth)

>115 tonikat: loved those two poems. Armada is really special.

>117 dchaikin: it is, do you know it (sorry missed if so), I loved his Collected Love Poems too.

I've been letting the grass grow on comments for books completed, so here goes for one. I have probably let the reading cool a little too, saying so may help me pick back up.

Letters Summer 1926, Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, Rainer Maria Rilke



What a readable book, yet at the end very sad and I think that is a reason I have not felt like posting about it. I flew through the first hundred pages and at other times. The letters are mostly from Tsvetaeva as I remember and secondly from Pasternak, with fewer from Rilke whose death looms during the exchange and after his death too at the start of the next year.

Rilke of course the famous poet -- whom both Pasternak and Tsvetaeva idolise before any contact with him and whom Pasternak had met as a child when he, Rilke, visited his artist father in Russia.

Tsvetaeva the Russian poetess living in exile at the time of the letters in France. A poet Pasternak saw at that time and the premiere Russian poet. A white Russian, though one who relates to that quote above as left leaning -- but she had written in honour of the Whites, whom her husband fought with. Though at the same time she seems not entirely accepted in the expat community, perhaps as she is left leaning in her heart. I am very struck that she seems to have in some way isolated herself in her greatness as a poet, but also was able to take that tone as an aloof person in the past of some privilege, but that this left her very vulnerable in exiled poverty.

Pasternak the poet and of course later also a novelist.

At the outset of this book Pasternak and Tsvetaeva are corresponding. Each in love with each others' work. They even begin to use the intimate 'du' form of address and speak of meeting (and in fact that if they were to do so they'd go to Rilke). There is talk of Pasternak going to her (remember they are both married) and she kind fo cools him down and they agree to wait a year. Then after she's cooled him a bit I think he considers 'what am I saying and he cools too.

But that in itself is complicated as in amongst all this his father passes on a letter from Rilke in which he says he has seen Boris' poetry and liked it. Pasternak is living in Moscow, his father is away in Germany with other family members. Pasternak seems to be in a situation where it is very hard to speak openly to anyone - as only became worse. So to get the letter from Rilke (on i think if I remember right the same day he'd been transported by a new poem of Tsvetaeva's) was an earthquake in his life - a god had noticed him and liked him. he carried the letter in his wallet for the rest of his life. It seemed to release him to spring in the midst of a deep winter of the soul. reading his reaction to this, sensing it and his sense of connection from it amidst alienation was a sheer joy.

It complicates things though. he dare not write directly to Rilke (I think could not as post from Russia to Switzerland was banned). Then there is a delay when he responds through his father, as his father shares his letter with family. But what he does do is let Tsvetaeva know - he has also mentioned her to Rilke and effects an introduction. She thereupon writes to Rilke. And this is just at the time of the sort of recalibration of things with Pasternak and she is clearly cool with him and coy about what she says with Rilke -- their interplay itself is kind of dynamite for her again with this god like figure.

And speaking of dynamite the psychodynamics of the thing are easy to see. I won't explain much more than that. There is a complication in that they may write each other two letters or more in the time they get a reply to just the first -- which I think leads to much confusion and assumptions and over reading and reading of the wrong thing into each other.

One thing I liked about it was how much they are just human here, and fallible and also just striving artists needing to be understood and especially needing to be understood by peers with the same or similar depth of awareness. Rilke too seems in his letters to need this, to write to people that get who he is as they are too in some way (though both Pasternak and Tsvetaeva at this time freely assume a place as disciple).

There is amongst it a letter or two from Pasternak which i loved that talk about poetics. i find Tsvetaeva and almost painfully lucid writer too and both gush at each other it can seem. Things also become complicated as Rilke i think knows how ill he is and does not share this and Tsvetaeva interprets this as she does. The end of the book closes with a breakdown in relationship with Pasternak and also her thoughts on Rilke's death, he had written an extra Duino elegy for her basically and she wrote an essay and poem for him. I think there must have been letters we do not see too. but that close was sad -- especially if you know what happened to Tsvetaeva who I think in addition to needing that contact I have spoken of may have been becoming increasingly desperate in her situation (though I say that not knowing the detail yet knowing what does happen overall -- and I also see this reflected in her writing less poetry).

Writing this about it now it is clearly hugely powerful. I know I paused for a week or two before completing it after that flowing start and all that hope. I hope I haven't spoiled it for anyone. But it was a lovely insight into these writers, all of whom interest me a lot.

A few years ago I read Four of us and Pasternak and her poetry stood out to me (and I already had fallen for the other two too). But I am not sure I have yet really clicked with translations of all their poetry, though I liked those in that book. I did start Dr Zhivago this last year and need to go back to it. I know I am wariest of Russian translations and it may be having read more prose about them than a lot of others, I am kind of aware of how much I am missing in a way I get over with other translations. I have been reading some other translations of her this year, but i realised I wasn't feel quite as close to her as I had with the prose I had been reading. Anyway, I will persist. her prose is gushingly lucid and adamant it will not slow down for anyone or accept anything less than her brilliance -- and that made it very powerful in consideration of what happened, I was, I think, a little scared to face it and feel her grief.

I'm typing this without my copy but will dig it out and try and type an extract in, maybe of Pasternak putting into words something about poetry I agreed with and am a little jealous he said in this way - not least as I wasn't sure anyone else would say it.

Edit -- there is also a sort of shared mysticism in their approaches, both Pasternak and Tsvetaeva are aware of coincidences in what they are writing, and see this as how close they are to each other. There is a definite sense, with Rilke too, that they feel it is related to writing from the same place, from Poetry as it were I think, from something bigger than them.

I have very cleverly not marked passages in the book with stickers as I often do. And what he said was not entirely new to me, it was just newly put and the jealousy may have been that it was so well put, hmmm no may about it. The book has commentary at times to clarify when letters were sent and arrived, filling in gaps and maybe info from other letters (I guess), one of them relates to these poetics:

"Elaborating a principle that perhaps can be traced back to the Marburg school of philosophy and its leader, Hermann Cohen, Pasternak asserted that the artist's subjective creativity can, to the extent that the artist is capable of embodying his experience in a work of art, continue its experience objectively, thus becoming part of human heritage, and of creation. In passing from the subjective to the objective, works created by man become greater and more significant than their makers. Art creates characters who live their lives independently of the author, who merely watches from the sidelines. It is in this light that Pushkin's words about his heroine Tatiana are to be understood.

Pasternak experienced this sense of the objectivity of the work of art--the feeling that the force that produced the work is above and beyond the artist who is responsible for the work--when he wrote My Sister, Life. From that time on he considered the definitive criterion for appraising a work of art to be its objectivity. He wrote to Tsvetaeva: "In order to express the feeling of which I am speaking, Pushkin ought to have spoken not of Tatiana alone but of the entire poem: 'Fancy, I read Onegin as I once read Byron. I do not know who wrote it. As a poet, he is greater than I am.' Subjectively, it is what the poet has just written. Objectively, it is what he is now reading, or correcting in the galley proofs, something written by a being greater than himself.""

ibid. p56.

Concerning this sense of affinity the two had I also cam across this from a letter when i was looking for quotes:

"I had occasion to write to Voloshin and Akhmatova. Soon two sealed envelopes lay on my desk. I felt the urge to talk to you - and immediately I was aware of the difference. It was as if the wind had ruffled my hair. I could not write to you. I wished to go outside to see what one poet's thinking of another poet had done to the air and the sky."

Pasternak to Tsvetaeva, April 20 1926 -- ibid, p80

They seem to recognise a sort of life force and respect for it in each other. I can only agree.

>119 tonikat: Wow. What a wonderful review/essay. Thanks for all of those heartfelt insights.

>120 rocketjk: and wow, thanks. I've added some quotes - a bit dissatisfied could not find exactly what I thought of, but these are nice, and what I was thinking may have emerged from much longer pieces or over the course of the letters.

>119 tonikat: That's a fabulous review. The book was already on my list—as someone who writes a lot of pen-and-paper letters, that insight into their correspondence is really interesting, and I'm very much looking forward to reading that one.

>122 lisapeet: thanks :) I hope you enjoy it.

August ** The Accountant ** Jason Bourne ** Dr No ** The Matrix ** The Men Who Stare at Goats ** Official Secrets ** Jupiter Ascending ** Fleabag s.2

https://aeon.co/essays/how-a-vanished-ancient-greek-city-helps-us-think-about-di... - Helike and Bura (Northern Peloponnese)

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/05/ive-been-poor-for-a-long-time-afte... -- excellent

https://owenjones84.medium.com/the-lies-of-anti-trans-rights-activists-need-to-b...

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/seamus-heaney-and-the-end-of-cathplic-ireland...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/08/amia-srinivasan-the-right-to-sex-i... complete with attempted smack down at the end without any actual argument

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/jul/14/gino-strada-emergency...

https://psyche.co/ideas/why-some-of-the-smartest-people-can-be-so-very-stupid climate policy in recent decades?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p09r9kr8 - why don't men read books by women? 10 minute woman's hour piece

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/land-of-aeolia-ilias-venezis-book-review-a-e-...

https://thehumandivine.org/2019/07/21/yeats-on-blake-william-blake-and-the-human...

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-ethics-of-microaggression-regina-rini-boo...

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/literature-and-transformation-thor-magnus-tan...

https://thehumandivine.org/2021/07/04/how-morality-damns-us-blake-and-the-tree-o...

>119 tonikat: Sometimes that time between reading and writing about it really clarifies your thoughts. Lots in your review, which will lead me to the book, which is actually somewhere in the house.

>125 SassyLassy: yes I agree, gave me time to process -- with fiction I fear sort of forgetting the experience. Changes to my calendar also mean I'm happier to pause more. On the other hand, getting up to speed to write about the poetry I am behind on will be a bit of a task. Hope you enjoy the book :)

edit - process may seem a cold word, but i mean it warmly and as opposed to product/produce. At bottom it may just mean to let things settle and see what it is that just keeps nagging at me to talk about.

No, not nagging, poking me, tickling me, delighting me to prompt me to speak.

September

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/07/amit-chaudhuri-all-non-western-lit...

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/sep/26/beatles-final-days-get-back-let-it...

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/george-berkeley-philosophical-life-tom-jones-...

October

https://www.rte.ie/archives/2015/0930/731411-seamus-heaney-on-his-nobel-prize-wi... lovely interview

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/oct/08/tears-for-fears-reunion-interview

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/oct/10/it-was-john-who-wanted-a-divorce-m...

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-impact-of-abdulrazak-gurnahs-nob...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/11/solved-the-mystery-of-the-slut-scr... John Steinbeck slut mystery and how academics dont dare ask each other questions over thigns they think are too simple or think very hard before doing so

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/22/have-sumatran-fishing-crews-found-...

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/oct/21/maid-netflix-how-the-devast... -- Maid

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p09zdy7y

November

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/10/21/a-holy-terror-dancing-with-light-...

https://fb.watch/9oDL93Gpkn/ a good promo to the Get Back film and book -- I often think it might have been important to the ways the world has gone that the Beatles split and wonder about that sometimes

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/nov/20/i-just-cant-believe-it-exis...

http://www.recoveringwords.com/site/an-alphabet-of-poets (David Ignatow)

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/26/get-back-past-beatles-pres...

hello thread in late October.

I have been quieter, not just due to Sassy's reflection and thinking in that sort of way. To some extent I don't relish trying to comment on some of that poetry, I'm not sure why, it's not particularly about it as about me and it and me commenting on poetry. Then the Joseph Campbell, well who needs more comments on him I could wonder. Maybe I will wind myself up to it.

I have at times had a bit of a lull (and seem to most years around the August/September time - maybe trying to get out more finally aware the year will turn, I don't know). But then again I have also been busy reading at times and made a list of ten recent books I want to finish just from this year. I am really quite superstitious of naming them it seems to divert me / break a spell. I started this here post out thinking I would post them, so there you go, reassertion of my superstitious ways.

So, why on earth am I posting at all now, oh alright:



In the Dark Places of Wisdom by Peter Kingsley Reread.

It's two and a half years since I read this, my first by him, which led me to go on and read all of his books (excepting a translation) and in September I read his latest, a sort of memoir A Book of Life. My comments from that first read are here - https://www.librarything.com/topic/301415#6832450.

Unsurprisingly I agree with my comments, and it is a lovely book. But I am not sure how well I introduced it if you were not familiar with it, at least at times - partly in resisting trying to explain it all.

I think it is also a very important book, as are his others. It is a book about Parmeneides who is known now as the father of logic and a Pre-Socratic philosopher. Kingsley really brings he and his work to life --- with an argument that takes him well out of the dusty (or maybe just too clean?) image of logic now and into an argument about his (and Pythagoreans and other Pre-Socratics) in fact being shamanic in a way as a Priest of Apollo and a healer and someone who engaged with thinking in a iatromantic way, of stillness to the point of death really which might bring insight. It is fascinating - and it is fascinating to think how Plato at first covered up this tradition of dark places in philosophy (look up iatromantis). Just hugely important in thinking about thinking and philosophers. And whilst Kingsley comes very much from the shamanic himself, as he does not hide overall in his work, it is thoroughly researched and referenced (he is a scholar of the first order in my mind) -- though wisely he leaves references to the end, to allow his story to flow in the very best ways.

And there is so much to this story - it begs to be better explained by me. The whole story and context he sets of the city of Phocaea and what happened to it and where its citizens went when the Persians came knocking is something I could talk and talk about. Kingsley opens up the culture of Ionia in the process and explains how it links to their descendants in Elea/Velia. I hope he has many more books in him -- I think what I respond to very much is sensitivity to history/histories that get bypassed in the larger narrative, for example he's very interesting on how many Greeks didn't like Athens and also how Athens has come to claim so much centrality in our thinking and what this misses. He of course goes on with these themes in his other books - and tracing a line of thinking that runs against the rationality that can dominate.

It is also lovely how he makes sense of more recent archaeology and in a way how he is prepared to ask obvious questions that past efforts have simply obviously avoided -- and often have not wanted to think about/face/delve into. He also gives a lovely (and close) reading in this and in his next book of Parmeneides' poem -- with close attention to use of words and explaining how it fits with the role of a Priest and where certain words give us clues as to the origins of this in incantation (and in geography and history). I suppose in a way Peter Kingsley is very in tune with poetry too - so of course I like him.

I am not an expert but Kingsley speaks and argues as one and one that has dwelt thoroughly on what he says to avoid traps that are often sprung - as I say he is not short of citations. I do not see him reviewed a lot - but it may be he is exposing so much of the emperors clothes that people need to be very careful. I cannot recommend him highly enough.

Oh -- why did I reread it now? i am not sure, it was not directly after reading his latest, but it came to mind and how much I enjoyed it (enough for me to decide to read all is others) -- and maybe something about an idea I found in it also, of knowing something but maybe having to learn it again, with a little help from someone else . . . I felt I wanted that and to revise this introduction to Parmeneides and also to Kingsley's works -- I'll most likely re-read the others too. But finding my way back to listening to me at the moment, to stillness.

You have me interested in Kingsley. Great post. I’m catching up, so noting I also enjoyed your post on Letters Summer 1926, Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, Rainer Maria Rilke
(>119 tonikat: ). And, if you’re still wondering, i just saw your question in >118 tonikat: and everything I know about the Armada and Patten come from your post and links.

>129 dchaikin: thanks Dan, I think i was reading what you said a certain way which was quite wrong. Glad if I have interested you in Kingsley. In a way the Pasternak/Tsvetaeva/Rilke book leaves me with heavy feelings, Rilke is at the centre but largely absent, Tsvetaeva whom I find a joyful (I know her early poems most) poet and a thrilling, mercurial writer was in difficulty in a way and this made some of what she suffered clearer, but it prompts me most to read Pasternak more and get back to Dr Zhivago which i need to add to my list of books unfinished this year.

Educating Rita

I was just thinking about this for no good reason.

An aspect occurred to me about it - Frank lives in the academic world, has done everything he needs to be part of it, read the books, analysed them, yet he is finding it a dead world -- for all the life the books offer something in that world deadens him . . . and this deadening is something he himself seems trapped in in how he lives (almost paralysed by having so many answers to hand). In a sense, given his own analysis of his poetry as somehow academically correct yet lifeless he is trapped in this deadness as a poet -- yet still has his sense of life, but it feels utterly prevented . .. by that world but also it must be by his own imaginative response to that world, to the world in fact which he is somehow unable to escape into.

Rita (whom Frank admires so much as somehow free to be herself) -- is also trapped in a world that seems dead to her, that is not interested by the questions she wants to ask and things she wants to learn more of -- and in fact sees her wish to learn and read and all as positively queer/weird/perverse/abnormal.

There is a reciprocity in their situations. Frank if anything seems almost be be taking a Star Trek type Prime Directive with her, he does not want to spoil her with what he sees ultimately as a trap. He seems not to recognise that his own sense of trap is a sign of life, as he is unable to actualise it. Yet he also does so by sabotaging his own position, destroying it. But in a sense otherwise he is not walking his own walk . . . and maybe realises this, and hates himself for it.

At heart it is a play about the secret of life, living a good life for ourselves (authentic) - being true despite the traps our good (and bad) answers to it bring us. Especially the social traps of answers and positions given by the nature of the answers -- and the possibility that whole slews of society may almost have the role of hiding engaging with life to us, yet offer us easy daily life.

I did see a performance a month or two ago, entirely coincidentally. But I preferred the film, it has my heart. The performance was ok, good and bad bits (and some changes).

But - They are both desperate to live. This feeds into my thinking that the one to one tutorials deliberately are a rule breaking by Frank, and I really like that the play does not explain this (it is not how the OU works as Mark said). Just as every audience probably since drama began has been dominated by people desperate to live, I am thinking. Or is that true? does some of this sidelining from life's priority just come with some modern ways of life, that solves so much for our ease and survival?

edit -- ohhhhhh Frank is also an alcoholic, has perhaps his need for his fix of life in literature also been a sort of addiction? And now his fixes are not giving him what he wanted? Is he looking on giving Rita culture as an unenthusiastic pusher somehow, someone who has lost belief in the product -- as it has killed not allowed to flourish that spark in him? I would love to read what becomes of Frank, and hope it may be something more, may escape this/these knots.

edit again - and Rita's own reaction to her summer school, had given her an intense fix perhaps, and also takes her into a new position in regard to culture in which she starts her journey with that and possible mistakes (and the sub plot of her flat mate). I suppose at the end maybe we do not need to follow Frank further, they have both been released somewhat from what deadened them or tied them down.

and again -- and perhaps what Frank also knows is something about the acceptance of ideas by that world, perhaps, the snobbery perhaps and the need to be the right person in some ways and so also his knowledge of an invisible barrier that Rita will face, as a woman, but also from a class point of view.

Unrelatedly, I am slowly making my way through Autobiographies by W. B. Yeats - at one time he was part of a group of poets and I think he commented to them, or was aware in himself 'there are too many of us', which may also relate to that place in the culture idea I am giving Frank, at least it does for me -- and I am not sure I have explained it well for Frank, it is touched on, maybe I read it in to him somewhat.

Conversations with McCartney by Paul Du Noyer

I really enjoyed this. I bought it after enjoying One, Two, Three, Four The Beatles in Time last year. I never wanted to read about music as a young person, it so often seemed such a pose, and I had enough difficulty getting hold of everything I wanted to listen to (cost, a lot of friends not that into it). I also wasn't able to study an instrument, which maybe made it more immediate to others, but now I do a bit. So this is a new vista opening up.

Paul Du Noyer is a fellow Scouser who has interviewed Paul McCartney across many years. It gives a very interesting portrait -- much more depth than so many television interviews I think. I especially enjoyed his comments on songwriting and the low down of his Beatles and other experiences of course. I realise that after Pipes of Peace I sort of stopped following him as much and now I have a lot that seems interesting to catch up on. I've also found a tape player that still works and am listening to old stuff from the 80s (Pipes of Peace has been chucked as it was broken), but maybe that is only relevant to myself. It's a total coincidence to learn now of McCartney's new book on his lyrics, which I'll be interested to read, hopefully a Christmas present - having enjoyed the radio 4 series of him reading aloud his comments on ten of his songs. he really does come over as an artist in a way that in some ways i wonder if they've not wanted to present him as(?). I'm also looking forward to Peter Jackson's Get Back film later this month. Peace and love. Peace and love.

We watched a Beatles documentary recently focused on their hit songs (one of those where they count down to #1), and although I shouldn't need reminding it really hit home just what amazing songwriters they were (especially Lennon and McCartney, obviously). Just so many terrific songs in so many different styles.

McCartney himself I can take or leave (somehow I always get a sense of him relishing in his superstardom every time I see him on TV), but his talent I certainly take my hat off to. This book sounds interesting, particularly around his songwriting thoughts and experiences.

>133 AlisonY: it gave me a very different view of him to that tv persona of his (and which is different from his Beatles persona I think in the cheeky interviews) . . I was wondering if it was just me that's been getting it wrong, but it helps to see you've seen something similar . . . this was more intimate and resonated with the songs, I'm listening to him again and expunging lots of comments others have made about him post Beatles. The Radio 4 series does this too, at least probably if you are in the UK its on bbc sounds. I can hardly wait for the Get Back documentary and the lyrics book.

He mentioned at one stage how at times he might have deliberately tried not to write hits -- I wonder if he's been being playful with how he's seemed. I also had not realised some of his explorations.

>134 tonikat: I don't think it's helped that the UK keeps reinforcing McCartney as almost saint-like - something way beyond 'national treasure'.

Now I think about it, perhaps that's what annoys me most when I get a bit irked with him on TV - it's everyone else's extreme fawning around him. Plus I now eye roll when I hear Hey Jude as it feels McCartney and that song have been wheeled out far too many times in recent years. Shame - it's a good song but the overplay has spoilt it for me.

Will check out the Radio 4 series.

>135 AlisonY: kind of agree about some of the fawning - on the other hand I'd much rather they do it for him than any Royal and a lot of others. Is it curiously out of step with his populism? I think he's probably had to haver such dialogue with his image I wonder if he he just rolls with it.

I avoided Hey Jude for quite a while, but love it still, their biggest hit.

edit - I already added to that first paragraph -- but then have thought does the national treasure thing stand out so much as where it all began is so far away from where we are now and where the people/programmes who seem to be fawning a bit, or whatever, are day to day, 'next icon please'? Where we are come to that. I'm thinking the book and the radio thing get around that.

edit again - am i happy to say 'fawning', I don't know. I don't know anything really. That's the way the world likes it. Would I fawn too?

Doesn't it feel good to finish a book. Gestalt complete or cycle or whatever. And then you work out what you think of it (sometimes courtesy of your thread). So satisfying. I'll get a bit like Tom Hanks in Cast Away . . . 'I, yes I, have read a book and I understand it'.

(Looking around for Wilson)

ahhh Wilson, what a fella

Just thinking how he was without books that whole time too . . . no Desert Island Discs choice of what to have with you

It was nice to be with this today, and always good to think of that film

Well, it is December which usually starts to bring thoughts of reviewing the year. Plus I've been reading some of Borges' non-fiction which maybe triggers some inner librarian type thinking. And I was thinking of how often I think of noting books I've left unfinished -- and how in recent years I've often regretted not noting them somehow because I've later wondered 'when was it that I was looking at x, y or z' -- not that a yearly review is quite the same as putting them into the stream of my thread. But then I don't mention things in progress very much at all as it always seems to dampen my progress, so maybe a yearly review is the best thing, or maybe even a half monthly review would be a good thing. I know I often start the New Year feeling committed to finish things I've started, and of course run out of that oomph a bit -- maybe this will keep me oomphed up.

I'd make a wall of covers but many I've not finished I've not added and can't be bothered search etc.

Flow -- I mean it is good to learn of this, but i find him quite a conservative writer and also i don't enjoy his prose much -- but I want to know -- but then as i think i wrote once before, maybe i am best off with my own Flow methods, secret alchemy etc. an not tryign to cheat, yet i do want to know. I seem to remember now that there was a statement he made about how the law sees a terrible crime that I disliked (I'm not saying more now as i'd need to go back and check, but no matter if that was true it turned me off -- oh i hope I remember right and it was him, i will check).

The Voyage Out Virginia Woolf(not got very far at all with it, was going to try and read her in order)

Two Way Mirror: the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Fiona Sampson saw the author talk about this but also have not got very far with it - was wanting to complete my Emily Dickinson reading first, but had started it when i got it.

Sophie's World -- was going along swimmingly though still quite near the start when it suddenly struck me as analytic and rationalist and who is this svengali sending a young girl these messages to teach her how, what(?), to think, but I'll probably go back to it, as in other ways I was liking it, just hope it isn't a textbook in disguise, though it may help some of my gaps.

The Death of Tragedy by George Steiner - am about half way through, very interesting, am hampered by my lack of knowledge of Racine and Corneille, but still very interesting. Very interesting about how Romantics loved Tragedy so much yet were usually no good at writing it. I've heard Steiner described as a conservative - which makes a lot of sense of his trying to put the boot into Tolstoy (see above, and of the way he did that), I find him very good at describing works and understanding them, and dare to differ a bit in some conclusions, I think, where i am somewhat equipped to, but it's all a work in progress. But i like him.

the little town where time stood still by bohumil hrabal -- I started this second story in this book after reading the first. I already had a strange feeling I had seen some of the first on telly in the 80s, and the start brought back a lot of memories of that time - I stopped reading and contacted an old friend whom I'd lost contact with even when at school. But something about the boy in this always made me wary of him (the character not my friend) - i think i remember being struck by his innocence among the men when they talk of tattoos and was aware of how that would have been difficult for me (it sort of upsets me in a way, something resonated even then), I certainly remember it challenging my interests as i saw them back then. My friend was also clearly gay then and that was a minefield to my growing up and social situations - one which i utterly failed to defeat by being so apparently not. There is a film of this by Jerzy Mendel with Hrabal screenwriting and I wonder now if I somehow saw that, though as I remember it it may have been serialised. May try to finish this for this year.

dr zhivago how could i put this down, yet i did. The wonderful passage in the first part when he feels so in touch with nature I remember at school assembly i think, or hearing it elsewhere. I'm really adding here the things I mean to finish. Not sure why i drifted - I love the army of characters, but that may have been part of it, keeping track, though I didn't feel a huge pressure to do so in a way it was a go with the flow sort of book. I love the idea Nabokov didn't like it.
February Poetry of Boris Pasternak

Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil

the collected songs of cold mountain translated by red pine -- I start this and restart it, and never get very far, yet I like it. I want to get further, as next up i think red Pine translated Stonehouse, whom he thought better, not to mention going on from there.

the total library: non-fiction 1922-1986 by Jorge Luis Borges (maybe one to nibble at over many years and never to finish -- not least as so much of it is about so many classics i do not yet know, what a reader (Borges.))

The Iliad translated byrichmond lattimore - left off this to read Aeschylus, which I find very powerful reading and deflected my early year purpose, still had got well in and will go back.

The complete works of Aeschylus three to go, but not to be hurried - they heal somehow, but healing also brings hurt. Its also brought a lot back from old classes.

Hope Abandoned by Nadezdha Mandelstam -- I love this lady's writing but this time I stalled, something about so many many names I don't really know much of myself, but also it did occur to me to wonder at some other points of view (not that it matters to me - but it hit me stronger than in the first book, but here she is freer to just give her own point of view), but really it was more just the density of it at the time, when we had sunshine. It also of course deals with very hard times, her accounts of times during the civil war were chastening, and yes, maybe not what i wanted in the summer (ooo get her -- how dare I -- it did remind me of my days as a history student, which is a subject that maybe it should not surprise me I do not tend to read now).

There's a lot more, so i may add to the list, my mind has gone blank now. There are some I want to keep to myself -- I do wonder sometimes about posting my reading and my thinking, not least that the AI management systems will one day gobble it all up and know just how to manage me (keep me in the matrix). There are a few I don't mind not finishing at all. Those I add i do want to finish, so this list may be helpful to keep track.

I've not been adding my viewing at all -- I do see much less these days, cinema club is defunct and so is my telly. So i watch sometimes on the laptop or else when visiting others. I've also not tried to watch as much at all in these last few months. I stopped adding from that exposure point of view, but i like having some track of my viewing. so in no particular order (and adding as i remember)

The French Dispatch d. Wes Anderson (loved it) at the cinema(!)
Foundation s1 - read it in my teens, didn't enjoy the game of thrones type plot add in, i liked the rest
Get Back -- loved it, all you need is love
The Matrix
The Matrix Reloaded
Ronin
the Darjeeling Limited
This Beautiful Fantastic

December

** The Contender **

December articles

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/04/trans-writer-torrey-peters-intervi...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/06/china-modified-the-weather-to-crea...

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-beatles-get-back-peter-jackson-review-wes...

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/why-women-read-more-fiction-helen-taylor-revi...

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n24/robert-crawford/in-a-tuft-of-thistle Borges in Scotland

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/23/joan-didion-american-journalist-an...

https://www.instagram.com/p/CX6avXYBRqO/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/29/top-10-books-about-self-improvemen... hmmmm

>140 tonikat: cool rundown. I enjoyed Sophie World way back when (2007). It is a kind of light textbook, but I found it fun. Don’t expect it to go too deep.

Where do you keep all those half read books?

>142 dchaikin: Thanks, maybe that not being too deep was part of what made me aware of rationalising and this tone of the teacher, a helpful tip, may help me pick it back up.

>143 baswood: well some stay scattered about my flat (important ones - and until i tidy up). Then some go into to be completed piles at the front of shelves of books, where they taunt me by reminding me they exist never mind the tbr pile (and why don't I just put them back there?). and some get reshelved. and some, thankfully quite a few of these, are on my kindle.

growing up I always (almost) finished books I started. now I have in my 'collections' on here 462 books labelled as part read, and another collection of 44 books started but on hold. And I don't think I've been adding to those labels for some years. Many are books I would really like to finish (and hence maybe my also tracking tomes I read from my existing library). In a way it can hurt my view of myself as a serious student, but in other ways it does allow that following my heart thing and it can be a very creative mess. Often I enjoy a book and have very strong feeling with it and maybe as part of life, but that moves and that needing to be there is part of my illusion of not feeling ready to go back to it. That may be a phase of over reading, at least sometimes. I do try now to pick books to be completed, but according to how strongly i feel i want to finish them, and I do make progress.

I'd also say, quite strangely, that I'd also not necessarily see myself usually as good at not hearing what happens in a story. So I'm tolerating this in ways that surprise me. I suppose it doesn't matter to text or characters if I don't read to the end -- it matters to me of course, but I have let that go a bit. I wonder if it is linked to being able to say bye to people in the therapy work I was doing. But back to the books, it also leaves me in dialogue with characters and stories.

That point about saying bye to people interests me as a possible parallel process. In a way what I was doing was not therapy, it was the first level of help people get, helping them help themselves -- and this fitted for me with my counselling background as I could do it in a very person centred way. I'm not doing it now and don't want to do other cbt type things. It meant meeting a large number of people, including first assessment. A lot of asking myself 'is this for me' (or what part is for me, or is this for someone else in a large dept.). It could be intense - when I met people for the support it was for a short time and then closed, or else referred on, so a lot of saying bye and not hearing more of their story after what came to be a standard short time (early on it could be longer). I'm wondering now if it has impacted this (reading) - especially possibly building up a picture and then letting go. Maybe that is far fetched. But then I also wonder if I am looking for something in my reading and move on if I'm not getting it - though undoubtedly I want to complete some I have moved from (either in letting it go but also in not working on that link I was feeling if that moved in me away from the book). It brings me to my yearly questions about what I choose to read and gives me lots to think on - and how I move on more. I do think, as a writer, I've been learning a lot of others' tone and style (assessing?). Now I wonder if it has impacted writing. But I am also feeling a bit enthused that now maybe if the other process was an impact, in a way I can enter the fuller relationships again, maybe more often.

As I also saw myself as making up for lost time in some ways with my reading maybe I've also been sampling to an extent -- time to change that gear.

I came across this just now:

“I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.”
- E.M. Forster

I like that -- there is something for me about this feeling they inhabit in life. But I can see sometimes I should work harder to stay with it or move from it, but with them.

I also had these thoughts, from nowhere really whilst i had a very late breakfast -

- that was a nice way to not be able to get to sleep last night (realising some things about my reading pattern and maybe some reasons why i leave off so many books in recent years (15 years or more)). (and after some earlier very helpful realisations in bigger spheres that maybe are partly prompted by reading Borges at this time).

Having a very late breakfast and I had the (I assure you unrelated thought) that a book I would like to read would be one in which Hannibal Lecter makes contact with doubt, despite himself, maybe very slowly at first, maybe it would be Clarice's influence as they were left in my last reading of him in the horrible Hannibal. Strange, I think they were in Borges' country then. Of course it might have to get a bit Shutter Island, maybe he'd be quick to that conclusion, he of the razor sharpness (in a way we must wonder about eating himself - and maybe that is what he has always been doing?). We aren't really shown any doubts assailing him, as I remember it. He's very neoliberal in a way, I often think. I'd like to see him have to contend with realisations and frames of reference that challenge his neat genre perfect imperfection (after all he judges people he sees as bad in a way -- it is a vulnerability perhaps he ay get a perspective on himself). Maybe he'd rage at first, so not good, and hoping there would be a shortage of his meat and drink. Maybe, maybe it would all revolve around what to do with Clarice? Maybe Clarice would of course, slowly, as she is Clarice, win.

I thought Lecter had no doubts because he's a psychopath. Unless I'm misunderstanding what kind of doubts you mean... it is about what he is doing, yes?

>146 LolaWalser: maybe that is true . . . maybe that is how it works and I'm naive about them . . . but still it'd be interesting to see. Maybe, I really do not like him, but I confess i do think about him sometimes.
Did he doubt before he was a psychopath? what stopped him doubting (i think there is an origin story but I have not read that). What makes it impossible for a psychopath to doubt? Part of what i was picturing was getting older -- maybe it is abit like i see in Hitchcock films, some people just dig themselves further into the hole (e.g. Scottie, Norman Bates) some people exhibit grace and are able to reboot (e.g. RoT or Hannay). But I pictured the person stopping him from doubting is himself, and maybe that would come apart a bit with age. Maybe not maybe he is stuck. But I do find it hard with things that are oh they can never do something that humans can do. I also thought of the impact of Clarice, maybe someone whose like he has never known.

edit and a quick read shows that no, maybe such people never doubt. I didn't know that -- and if so why cant we spot them earlier? I suppose also I confess i am coming at it from my humanistic counselling perspective, having not had to work with such a group in any other setting. I'll have to seek out some humanistic work on the idea really.

It also strikes me it requires me to have no doubt they are incapable of doubt, hmmmm.

yet more editing - in fact this then gives me questions as to all out acts of not doubting in our modern technological world and our culture -- I go to switch a light on, I do not doubt it will work, I take a pill not doubting it is good for me, I vote . . . hmmm.

I also suppose with Lecter it was about getting some aspect of self reflection -- usually he is sure in is diagnosis of his victims, perhaps he gets a flash of it as pertains to himself, or Clarice does something in a way that gets through to him, some minor act of politesse despite her situation and it plays on his mind, perhaps he witnesses some small act of love that goes beyond the cynical he likes to frame things in. I don't know i should read his origin story, yet after reading Hannibal I swore off him.

And surely we want to encourage doubt in some watching, not throw it out?

sorry mor editing yet -- and I know i would want to be incredibly careful about this and have safeguards (guards) about -- but if you tried to help such a person therapeutically would you not be trapped in a loop of no doubt? Putting ourselves where? (not where i want to be -- and contrary to our wisdom traditions, no?)

I'm sorry Lola, not all aimed at you, but is what thinking about this opens up for me.

Interesting that not doubting is a psychopathic symptom. How many Shakespearean characters would classify as psychopaths? (Richard III, Iago, Aaron, Lady McBeth?, Angelo?)

totally Dan -- their defence, 'it's a dramatic necessity dahlinks'

Macbeth himself of curse (oh of course) does doubt and rues doubting his doubt?

>149 tonikat: I thought Macbeth hesitated a bit, needed some prodding by the lady. Of course she does break down eventually. So not sure she qualifies either.

I did forget Goneril, Regan and especially Edmund (the illegitimate son) in King Lear.

(And thinking about Hamlet, if only he had been a psychopath…)

>150 dchaikin: you make me wonder 'if only' as you say of Hamlet is why there are so many in positions of power (in history of course (cough cough))

and yet Macbeth doesn't hesitate of course in a way (to contradict myself). I think I remember him anyway (last read it aged 15) as regretting afterwards (did see a performance a few years ago which made me think this). I wonder a bit about Birnham wood coming to him as some sort of reflection of him having fate come to him despite that regret and maybe that the whole thing was not true to himself even maybe in a way (maybe that's obvious to those that know it better than me). (I'm always cautious (I hope) of saying anything about Shakespeare it is such hot ground and he of course has thought through everything far more than I ever could never mind all the scholars).

would it be true that in a way they make their decision as though they are in a genre, in a game. . . game of kings . . . the witches partly also warp his view, and he has a part in it too, ghosts etc. . . . but lose track of the bigger picture, reality? They make themselves a bit thick?

(sorry am a bit slow aren't I - he thinks he's safe due to that comment/prediction, in fact the whole thing is related to thinking they are.n and safe not just to think but to act, that is hard to explain, to me anyway.)

>151 tonikat: I like your “in a game” idea with Shakespeare. It works well. In all his tragedies, and some of his other plays, it’s failing to play that game right, failing to win that game, that ultimately undoes them.

As for Hannibal, I’ve only seen the movie, and only the first one. He certainly plays, and to win, there.

>147 tonikat:

Not to worry, I had a great time with Hannibal Lecter once upon a time and there's some residual interest to that saga.

>148 dchaikin:

I think that's a bit upside down. Psychopaths (it seems) don't doubt, but not everyone who doesn't doubt would necessarily be a psychopath.

I'm not a psychologist and probably am oversimplifying terribly, but the way I understand it, psychopaths ARE insane people, what we classically would have called "mad", because they act on extraordinary pathological compulsions.

Of course, what with Lecter being fictional, there's no end to the stories one can tell about him.

>153 LolaWalser: yeah, it's not the right word. Hannibal is cruel for some other reason than an end goal. Just - it's something about Shakespeare I'm trying to explain to myself - his characters that are entirely practical, and have no ethical qualms (they are ruthless). And that a message from his plays seems to be that this isn't their weakness, but their strength. The weak characters fail to be ruthless enough, or hesitate to be. The aspect of having no doubts is interesting to me in that light, because it fits all these Shakespeare characters I have in mind.

the aspect of how (maybe) not doubting is a step nearer the psychopath interests me, where is the boundary -- and does lots of not doubting create vulnerability?

>153 LolaWalser: sounds scarily intriguing

It all also makes me think of differing realms, the personal and the political, and maybe sub realms, is the political self always in the end a mask that sticks?

>154 dchaikin:

Life being relatively more nasty, brutish and short in his time/ancient times may have something to do with it? Although now I wonder whether anyone in Titus Andronicus might qualify as a bona fide psychopath.

>155 tonikat:

Ha, it was a strange period. I was working on a project that required physical presence in the lab at the worst intervals and worked out that the late-night break could be filled with taking in the last movie at a nearby cinema. The movie was then just-released "Hannibal". I had seen "The silence of the lambs" when it came out but hadn't read the books. I ended up seeing "Hannibal" on five or six consecutive evenings so maybe it's not surprising that I felt compelled to read the books. I don't remember how I ended up in a Yahoo group chatting about Hannibal, I had a question about something? but I stayed for someone fascinating I met there. The two-year affair didn't end well (she was married) but Hannibal has been special ever since. :)

the aspect of how (maybe) not doubting is a step nearer the psychopath interests me, where is the boundary -- and does lots of not doubting create vulnerability?

I haven't read the "origin" book either, which as I heard "explained" H in terms of PTSD, but my own take on him had been that he was always cracked and always "himself".

>156 LolaWalser: - have you read Hannibal the book? Not surprisingly unfilmable as it is. After that I never wanted to see the film. You mention the lab and then seeing it, almost sounds like a horror film set up, nice it was much sweeter.

trauma may make sense, though he is necessarily, i hope, a fictional monster -- i don't like to believe in monsters though, and he's such a myth, maybe the origin story would satisfy me for learning of how he became what he does. (Or have i imagined that there is an origin story? i thought there was but i had no wish really to see/read it then if there was)

>157 tonikat:

After seeing Hannibal and ending up in that chat room I read The silence of the lambs, Hannibal, and Red Dragon--I think in that order. It's been a looong time but I don't recall hating "Hannibal" the book (although the ending didn't convince me), and as for the movie, I loved the way it looked and sounded. And yes it was a bit spooky and special watching it in those circumstances, with just a few nightbirds evening after evening. (Wish I could do that with every movie...)

I had to check--yes, there is a fourth book, the "prequel" Hannibal Rising. As a boy he witnesses atrocities on the Eastern Front. I guess it came out too late to intrigue me at the time; I'm not sure I need Hannibal "explained". But now that I think about it, it might be interesting to see what Harris' idea on this was.

>156 LolaWalser: for Titus Andronicus I have Aaron as the model. Others are as ruthless and as gory (Tamara) but he’s the smartest and most strategic.

"Whether we listen with aloof amusement to the dreamlike mumbo jumbo of some red-eyed witch doctor of the Congo, or read with cultivated rapture thin translations from the sonnets of the mystic Lao-tse; now and again crack the hard nutshell of an argument of Aquinas, or catch suddenly the shining meaning of a bizarre Eskimo fairy tale: it will always be the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find, together with a challengingly persistent suggestion of more remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told."

The Hero with a Thousand Faces p1



by Joseph Campbell

This is a famous book. What can be said? I only want to speak of my response to it. Earlier in life others recommended it to me as a must read for would-be writers. So of course I ignored it. Only in relatively recent years did I come to his other work (I so wish i had seen his famous tv series at the time, it would have helped me). It does of course seem to me now to be essential reading for writers.

There is something about myth, and also about reading all these myths. I am very bad at remembering them precisely - even worse than I am at poetry. I am left with a sort of overview, and often great frustration about explaining the details that gave me joy in reading them. I more than half think that such difficulty may be part of how they morph so much in the accounts of them, I don't think I am the only one.

So I have very much respect for Campbell's ability in considering what seems the whole world of myth, to come to the core of the myths, the most authentic versions somehow (or those that seem central and definitely of course which fit his analysis of the monomyth, the great central journey of humans), which he seems to sift to a lot . (For me the alternate versions so often just confuse me - his clarity to sift them as he does is awesome.) And of course this may be related to how some criticise him for missing other aspects.

It is interesting how I may also read in that paragraph above how maybe of course he finds that monomyth as it is the one he needed to seek out. Maybe that is even some of the suggestion of the more being there (that his focus may lead him to miss something?) -- though I do not doubt his observation, it is so often what I am left with too, it seems part of myth to have opened up the world, that there is then always more to explore, it is new again.

Anyway - you probably know, this monomyth is one of making sense of the world, of transitioning to adulthood in society, of discovering a place in the world, in the universe, in the relation to God/gods. he traces this as a journey of heroes, having to have all challenged and then how they may return to society. I find it very true and also myself rue having missed some of that in my society (though maybe not some of the practices detailed).

I read it this summer - probably prompted by also attending this year a series of monthly workshops on the heroine's journey (which I am yet to read). So that helped me balance. Campbell I find a generous and kind raconteur (though I also note some of the way that paragraph above is phrased as at least being of its time, maybe colonial in outlook, I'm not sure I'd say racist as maybe metropolitan looking at the provincial (or speaking to an audience that would accept/expect that) - though it is balanced for me by the obvious respect Campbell has for people worldwide and their myths and society and practices). He has though, as is well known, been criticised for the male bias of this book.

I liked it very much. I do wish I knew myths better, they do come back to me with a prompt -- I'm not totally blank about them but do forget their key turnings far too much for my liking. I must just engage with them more. In some ways I think it may be a strength that my memory is not rigid about them -- Campbell in a way gives me a skeleton now to fit them to -- though I am interested in the more recent view of myth that is more diverse and open about what fits as such, that blurs the boundary with any story.

I finished it some time ago and writing this makes me think I've been ignoring following up with more reading. Though I also realise that my recent Borges non-fiction reading has prompted me to read some more of his fictions, so mythic in dimension.

>160 tonikat: Very interesting. This one has passed me by, might have to look into it.

Charmian turned to Mrs Pettigrew. ‘You have been out all afternoon, haven’t you Mrs Pettigrew?’
“Mabel” said Mrs Pettigrew.
‘Haven’t you, Mabel? I made my tea myself and brought it in. Godfrey won’t believe me, he’s absurd.’
‘I brought in your tea,’ said Mrs Pettigrew, ‘before I went out for an airing. I must say I feel the need for it these days since Mrs Anthony started leaving early.’
‘You see what I mean?’ said Godfrey to Charmian.
Charmian was silent.

Memento Mori by Muriel Spark p133



apologies there are spoilers amongst this

This book follows a loose grouping of friends in their seventies and eighties, I guess contemporary to the publication date (1959). One and then slowly a number of them get anonymous phone calls to say "Remember you must die". They take this in varying ways - the police are involved but don't seem able to do much.

Together with these friends we have several of the people involved in looking after them over the years, housekeepers, cooks. Some of whom become quite close to them as companions.

The focus is on Charmian, formerly a successful novelist, now seen to be declining with age (her memory seemed to be going) and wife to Godfrey who is brother to the first victim Dame Lettie Colston (both of a major brewing family).

As we go we learn things about the tensions between these friends and also the people helping them. Charmian's previous housekeeper Jean Taylor is a major figure, now in a hospital ward - and resistant to being moved to a posher nursing home where she may accompany Charmian. Another is the manipulative Mrs Pettigrew, somewhat shady inheritor of another friend's fortune who goes on to be moved in as help for Charmian and Godfrey.

Another figure is Alec Warner whom the wiki page is telling me is a retired sociologist -- though I'd remembered him as medical in some way. Due no doubt to his attempts at diagnosis or classification of people -- in retirement he continues an elaborate system of note taking on everyone, encoded of course.

I mention wiki as I read a library copy that I have now returned, having copied out the quote above, but forgetting to note everyone's name etc.

I don't want to get into the twists and turns of the plot, it is quite complex. We learn a lot more of all these people, ways in which they are facing age (or ignoring it). We also have an aging retired detective involved who has an interesting angle on who is calling them -- an angle which fits in a way with her previous novels in which there are unexplained voices or things (at least for a long time in Robinson).

Unlike the first two books of hers I've read she does not open chapters with a sort of summary that she then explains more fully how we get there in the rest of the chapter. I'm glad -- though of course in a way I sort of missed it too.

There is something I am seeing her writing which is a sort of detective or mystery focus to the writing that she also takes out of the equation a bit so her work is never exactly that. There was a flavour for me to this book, and also to the others I guess, of someone with some familiarity to knowing secrets, and maybe also of following interactions with groups of people. I see she worked in Intelligence during the war and this makes sense to me -- the treatment of these old people is almost like we are reading of a gang slowly brought in, in this case to the Final Judgement. I may over read that, such a tone is of course common in literature, film, popular culture - I find her very refined with it, very knowing.

Another aspect I noticed was this age group -- all of whom were living their wild days in the days even before the first war, the belle epoque. It struck me this may be a social comment on those times and of possible waywardness in upper classes without their eyes on the ball that ended up so disastrously. Spark was born in 1918 and as I say worked as she did during WWII. I wonder about this, I don't know, it just seems a bit judgemental of these people (mostly). They are also people in whom no mention is made at all of war service in either war (as I remember now I am without a copy, if there is it is minor, and that seems important given the agenda the war set at this time and the recovery after).

One other aspect is of course class. There are moments at which the friends, or some sub group of them discuss the issues at hand quite freely but still somehow conscious they are being listened to by a home helper (especially Mrs Pettigrew). There are ways in which they have no expectation of the sort of refinement they'd wish of those people. Jean Taylor crosses these lines most - a reliable and well liked helper to Charmian who when young was also proposed to by one of the friends, despite class status (though she was well aware of this impossibility). In hospital i felt her awareness of in some ways being as aware as the friends but always an outsider may colour her wishes about where to stay. In some ways I see given the way the helpers are related to it almost creates the dynamics of problematics between the classes.

Another aspect is also, of course age. Charmian under challenge in fact rises to it and her health improves. An interesting aspect - I know I have read research on what helps us to stay young as we age, to be busy. I was struck recently to learning that research on a convent showed some Nuns at death had Alzheimer's but no one had noticed as their lifestyle kept them so busy/active the brain was compensating. But long before such research we have the kind of knowing I might expect from an Intelligence officer, or maybe anyone with an active interest in others. In a way aging is not closely examined - but I think Spark was interested in looking at how people face death, and to some extent how they are allowed to do so socially (contrasting the hospital ward with people of the same age who were of a better off background). I think she's also interested in their interest (and often lack of it) in how they may be judged at death, and their view of this possibility.

I also think it is just funny how she pictures hapless Alec and his notes - again from that possibility of her having some similar interests as an author and given that work in the war. To me she is commenting in a way that is cutting through the academic to be real and have an effective knowing, without their labyrinths, to live perhaps. There is also a clear theme of how people are seen from surface appearances (their age, their health) that has nothing to do with really knowing them --- for a book with an anonymous voice it has a theme about the need to listen very carefully.

I read it quite quickly and enjoyed another Spark in my attempt at reading her through - I may quicken the pace with that to more than one per year.

Previous Spark reading -

Robinson 2020 - https://www.librarything.com/topic/314871#7334689
The Comforters 2019 - https://www.librarything.com/topic/301415#6968903

edit - I must correct myself - it is a constant theme how the changes of age make things different, often more difficult - that excerpt I chose is all the more funny when we have read how Charmian had in fact, with great effort, managed for herself.

It may also be a theme that whilst some of them may be busy, keeping themselves going, the manner in which they do may be linked to not having grasped what their message is getting at (I wonder). Getting on perhaps in ways established in their youth, and sometimes uncompleted somehow, still bothering them.

>161 baswood: sorry Barry, meant to reply to you before that last bit. Campbell is well worth checking out.

Reese had already diagnosed her own problem. She didn’t know how to be alone. She fled from her own company, from her own solitude. Along with telling her how awful her cheating men were, her friends also told her that after two major breakups, she needed time to learn to be herself, by herself. But she couldn’t be alone in any kind of moderate way. Give her a week to herself and she began to isolate, cultivating an ash pile of loneliness that built on itself exponentially, until she was daydreaming about selling everything and drifting away on a boat toward nowhere. To jolt herself back to life, she went on Grindr, or Tinder, or whatever—and administered ten thousand volts to the heart by chasing the most dramatic tachycardia of an affair she could find. Married men were the best for fleeing loneliness, because married men also didn’t know how to be alone.

Peters, Torrey. Detransition, Baby (p. 5). Profile. Kindle Edition.



This title didn't thrill me, thinking it was about Detransition. Then I read an interesting piece on it and thought I'd give it a go. I'm glad i did - it's a well constructed novel, literally as it moves about its time line, though in a way I could keep up with. This timeline being centred on a pregnancy caused by a detransitioned transwoman now living as a bloke with a new partner. Thing is the pregnancy causes all sorts of crisis and not least for that detransitioned person who confides in their former transwoman partner. Meanwhile the natal female who is pregnant is also meeting crisis, not least in learning now that her partner used to live as a woman.

We get a working out of all this -- and interestingly the options that come into view from the point of view of family and seeing this possible baby into life. It has adult themes and I chose the section I did above as it was without expletives (though it seems to me to use these realistically).

Its very knowingly written - if anything it does something I notice in some trans people (including myself) in that it over explains at times (which I partly see as a parallel process relating to our situation and having to find our own explanations). On the other hand I found this interview with the author to show her stature in several comments, and as it points out this has been called the first great trans novel (though may there be some we don't know as such due to our social past?) https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/04/trans-writer-torrey-peters-intervi....


The action works itself out very well in relation to the central question of the pregnancy and fills in the back stories of the three people involved. In the end i think we get very effectivley to a point i think a progressive feminist may see in which though we're left hanging a bit, that however they see their situation is just ok (I'm thinking, though we each may have their own biases there, I do). But that possibility that it may have worked us through to that point, to have followed characters that can have got to that point, is rather remarkable.

I did enjoy it -- and I recognised a lot about experiences of being trans, which is also rather remarkable, given how absent such published understanding has been, especially in this form.

edit -- my point about the situation is that it all seems radically pro choice in several ways or in several areas of these people's lives and together, very progressive, that all choices are valid having lived through this novel. wow.

>162 tonikat: I was just thinking more about voices in Memento Mori -- take the example of how the upper classes limit what they say in front of their helpers, which somehow freezes them to the helpers and also the relationship. But then I thought how much all the people the book (all?) are frozen in the way they talk with others -- sometimes even seeking a freedom in another manner of speaking with someone else (Charmian's husband's visits to the young woman who offers a listening ear). There is maybe a sense of people being stuck in their own voice. Charmian of interest perhaps in that she has invented the voices of her novels and maybe has some other sort of view to most of the others, It also occurs to make an Educating Rita type point at the end of this year, that this may be an interesting book to make into a Radio play/series, for this reason. The relationship to the anonymous calls is also therefore interesting. I also wonder if she's picturing a certain sort aging (or just aging) as getting stuck in your own voice. I don't know, it occurs to me. And I also start to wonder at the relationship of voices - many of the voices maybe stuck in how they have pictured other voices, the world, and for Spark maybe also God is involved. It feels painful, sort of brittle sticks clashing -- though there are some freedoms to be found in real clashes that get passed the superficiality of the voices. For all they may not be seeming to dwell on age, do the voices become as they do with a sort of neglect of the issue, showing itself in an anxiety. And the good listeners are freest of all, at least inside.

That also seems to be a social point, in our class ridden society. And maybe again a religious aspect, none of these people is shown with any relationship at all to God really (? maybe the old woman in hospital?) -- a sort of openness if not to God then to the wider world beyond what they have made of it and themselves in it. Language possibly as chains, unless you challenge yourself, and chains that may shrink too. Social positioning too the same.

There was one church service presented, or people attending one - and I think something interesting happens when it is considered.

edit - i wonder if it may also be a comment on how we are given fictional personalities/representations, what is often left out (?)

Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges

I bought this in 2004 and read some of it then. I read several of the fictions and some of the other essays. One essay 'Everything and Nothing' about Shakespeare is one of my favourite ever pieces of writing. However I found the few fictions I read mind twisting, especially one, The Garden of the Forking Paths, which I found horrific. I think I identified too much with it somehow, and in fact I was ill about a year later, maybe I was unwell. I read it again quite a few years later and it did not have that affect.

But that and maybe the figure of Jorge of Burgos in Eco's The Name of the Rose made me cautious of Borges. Of course I know his reputation. At one point I have a note that I made that error others have been known to make to think of his characters as ciphers for ideas -- I said it although still I was not sure. But I didn't give up, i read a few more of the stories - I bought the collected stories and the total library of his non fiction. i read and loved Funes the Memorious. One of the reasons I bought the collected stories was so I could read the story The South, which I understood was very personal. These were far from being just about ciphers. But still I couldn't always see him.

A couple of weeks ago at a difficult time for some reason I pulled these from my shelves and had a very early night. I began with The total library, the non fiction, and read several of them. I noted how little he says sometimes of things he likes (Hitchcock's film The Thirty Nine Steps). And read several essays, especially 'The Personality of the Buddha' and 'Pascal's Sphere' - two people that interest me very much. Something clicked, maybe as he asked questions so like those I might ask (and maybe in my developing them, him being on my mind somehow all this time is part of that). He's inspiring further reading. I loved the stories overall, though they can have a horrific edge to them. But I can follow him better, and that his characters are not ciphers is why their can be horror.

If you've followed my thread this year you'll have seen me read and write about Tragedy. Reading Borges on Buddha I realised (again) that to a Buddhist Tragedy (and Comedy) may be part of the illusion of what is not real. It's a powerful realisation given how Tragedy insists it is such a horrific trap. This may be part of what made reading him so easily possible. I'm also thinking I have often identified too much with my reading (overall). Of course Borges also has a story on Averroes the Islamic philosopher. A man who did not know what theatre was and therefore when translating Aristotle translated Tragedy as praise. Borges gives a depiction of him - and realises what does he himself know of Averroes. And what do I know. But whatever Averroes' ignorance of Tragic theatre I still find his idea interesting.

So that feeling of finishing a book I was on about a while ago -- well it was multiplied quite a bit for this over these nearly 20 years (and at times I felt no hope to be able to face this whole book). He's enthused me to read and of course to read him further.

>166 tonikat: Wonderful review and comments. Thanks for that.

>167 rocketjk: ty :) made me smile on Christmas day, best wishes of the season to you.

I've always meant to read Borges and just never have. Your review nudges me a little further in that direction, definitely.

>169 lisapeet: cool :) and always nice to have you drop in. The great thing about him is everything is short, though also powerful often. I'm looking forward to trying his poems.

The Little Town Where Time Stood Still by Bohumil Hrabal

I greatly enjoyed reading Closely Observed Trains a couple of years ago - having also enjoyed the superb (Oscar winning) film some time before that. So wanted to read more Hrabal.

This was packaged with a first novella Cutting it Short in which we follow a young blonde wife with luxuriant long hair and her young husband a brewery manager (Francin). They live in Czechoslovakia - I am not sure but imagine it may be Bohemia, near the Elbe anyway I think. The prose is playful and sensuous as she is, hmm I have forgotten her name, is that as it is all in first person (maybe I have not checked). Francin is quite buttoned up and undone by her playfulness at times - she's more than that maybe, acting out her sensual apprehension of the world. They are joined by Francin's brother Pepin, a survivor of the Great war, "sodya of Austria" who can create mayhem on his own thanks to a head wound it is likely and this too can play into her playfulness (beautifully too at times). But in her own family her father if placed under slightly too much stress will do his nut at the women of the family and only calms down when a wardrobe (old ones kept for the purpose) is wheeled and out he can demolish it with an axe.

It may sound a comic novel - but it is much more than that, freewheeling through many emotions as it goes ina breathless prose I found the only way to read was to start and not stop (chapters seeming single paragraphs (I've not checked if they are, sometimes maybe). It is lyrical and conveying of emotions, limited only by life itself and life is what bursts through again and again above and beyond conventions and the structures of living - and all the more forcibly for any repression.

I enjoyed it very much and remembered i had half seen i think a film version in the early 80s and remembered a friend telling me how it had ended.

the next novella The Little Town Where Time Stood Still opened with something I had remembered from the film i guess - a boy spending time with sailors learning about tattoos -- the son of Francin and his wife, seven years later. he then goes to a pub to speak to other locals of this -- and maybe it is predictable what happens. His innocence in this situation always filled me with a sort of dread and is part of why i did not watch this film (there is a film of it as I say of the early 80s and written by Hrabal again and directed by Mendel again as with Closely Observed Trains, i think I must be remembering this). The story rushes on, the events of life, Uncle Pepin still there and some deepening maybe.Though you need to know this second story was written before the first -- the narrator becomes less clearly the boy, at least he is not always present (and this I understand is Hrabal himself and this his family it is based on) - the story moves into the second world war and then later under the shift to communism (which gave this second story some problems with the then censors). There are interesting character shifts as the world shifts - and a lot of hard truths they manage to live through through their focus on things they love.

I felt he luxuriated in showing his mum's sensuousness in the first story. Other characters are more filled out in the second. It's wonderfully evocative and gains a wholeness and perspective on their lives which is wonderful. I would read him some more -- though the two spurts i have read it in needed some build of of energy (especially the second, though I always found the opening of the second disturbing and it disturbed me again being reminded of it - when i saw that film i was moving to the cusp of leaving childhood, the innocence of the kid in the hands of others always bothered me).

There is, perhaps, a glory to the irrational in life in these, and a priority of things sensuous but also felt by the spirit to the stories and as what really matters.

>171 tonikat: I very much enjoyed Hrabel's I Served the King of England several years ago. I enjoyed his semi-hallucinatory, slightly absurd style of storytelling.

>172 rocketjk: that is a good way of putting it. I hope to read him more.

To Review - 38 books (or so) read.

Most completions since I started on LT, but fewer than I was on for bit for a thing or two, though that has shown me how things can be again.

Fifteen written by women - 39% (more disappointing than I'd realised). I have just realised that that percentage started to fall half way through the year with my interruptions to my original progress, maybe fell a bit more into older patterns. I do have far more books by blokes.

poetry - 8, 21%
non fiction - 16.5, 43% (Included Labyrinths as a half in this and a whole in fiction)
fiction - 9, 24%
drama - 5, 13%

Now very struck by that non fiction figure, it was not a conscious choice.

Kindle books - 16, 42%

I find kindle all too easy to use for ease of access to many books and also the reduced price involved, though I feel guilty about it too. Amazon's break with Visa in the UK may help me challenge this habit. I do like it for big books, or multi footnoted books, it can be very helpful. Though I often find its dictionary limited.

my 2022 thread is here - https://www.librarything.com/topic/338049