Haydninvienna on the desert island: Richard tries to read the classics in 2023

So here we are with a new thread, eight (or so) hours early. As I said in my last thread, my big Everyman Complete Works of Michel de Montaigne has just arrived, and I see that one of the reviews on LT calls it a desert island book. I began 2022 with Sarah Bakewell’s excellent Life of Montaigne: in one question and twenty attempts at an answer, still one of my best reads ever. So, as I said, this year I hope to read some of the books that I’d take to a desert island. I don’t actually intend to start with Montaigne; at 1331 pages of smallish type, it’s probably the longest book I own. But I can dip into it.

Now I’m going to find some classics to start the year.

Happy New Year, and happy new thread!
May all of your 2023 reads be gems.

>2 clamairy: Thanks Clam! I hope so too.

Looking forward to your views on the classics you read!

Happy New Year and new thread!

Happy new year!

I look forward to seeing which classics pique your interest in 2023.

Happy New Thread!

>4 MrsLee: >5 majkia: >6 libraryperilous: >7 Karlstar: Thanks!

Happy New Year and happy reading!

Happy New Year!!

>9 Narilka: >10 catzteach: Thanks!

Happy new year again to all, GDers and their families.

I wanted to start the new year with a short book, and the one I first thought of was Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, which I actually read many years ago. But it’s not a cheerful book, and in this winter of discontent I need something light. So let’s go back a bit in time and have some light Shakespeare: As You Like It. This was the first Shakespeare play I ever read, almost exactly 60 years ago. In 1963 the education authorities of Queensland decreed that this play would be studied by the pupils who would face the Junior Public Examination in 1964, and so we did. I don't believe I’ve read it since then, but I remember a surprising amount. Fluff it is, with a plot even less plausible than that of most operas, but it’s fun, and actually made me laugh. More songs than I remembered, including some of Shakespeare’s best-known ones such as “It was a lover and his lass”. A surprising amount of clever banter too. All in all, the play satisfies one of Italo Calvino’s criteria for a classic: that having read it in youth and then again later in life, it’s almost like you are reading it for the first time.

If you’ve never read any Shakespeare, and want to dip your toe into that ocean, and aren’t bothered by a totally improbable plot, this play wouldn’t be a bad start.

Happy New Thread

>11 haydninvienna: It's always good to combine Shakespeare with a New Year's Day. You're stepping out in 2023 in the best of ways. As all your visitors have already said, happy new thread!

>12 hfglen: >13 jillmwo: Thank you both.

After all, I did read Rasselas.

Samuel Johnson is fascinating, one of English literature’s one-offs. Raised in genteel poverty, left Oxford without a degree because he could not afford it, unsuccessful as a schoolmaster, disfigured by scrofula and probably afflicted by Tourette’s syndrome, unclean, uncouth, drudging for years for the printers, reporting Parliamentary debates, edited Shakespeare, and then created, almost singlehanded, an English dictionary that wasn’t superseded for almost 200 years—was there ever anyone else like him? There are apparently those who regard him as the greatest of all critics of English literature. He wrote Rasselas in the evenings of a week in January 1759 to pay his late mother’s small debts and the expenses of her funeral.

It isn’t easy to say what Rasselas is—the best description I’ve seen or come up with is “philosophical fable”. It’s not exactly cheerful. Briefly Rasselas, a Prince of Abyssinia, tires of his life in comfort and takes off with his sister Nekayah, the poet Imlac, and some servants to see the world and make a choice of a way of life, despite Imlac’s assurance that “Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed.” After many adventures and much talk, they retire back to the kingdom of Abyssinia to resume their former life. In fact, it’s Johnson’s statement of resignation in the face of adversity, which must have seemed his unalterable lot in life.*

I’m not sorry, after all, to have read it, but I don’t intend to encourage anyone else to do so. You would have to be prepared to read 140 or so pages of Johnson’s stately eighteenth-century prose. It’s never unclear, but you might occasionally wish he would get to the point a bit quicker.

Rasselas, it occurs to me, is kind of a mirror image of Voltaire’s Candide, which appeared in the same year. In both the principal characters begin in an ideal state (Abyssinia or Westphalia). Rasselas et al leave voluntarily, but Candide, Cunegonde and Dr Pangloss are ejected violently. Rasselas et al carry much wealth with them, and suffer no violence or ill-usage except for the lady Pekuah briefly being held in captivity for ransom; Candide et al suffer war, disease and every calamity possible, even being killed and brought back to life. Candide and party discover El Dorado, the land of perfect peace, and yet decide to leave. But their conclusion is “Let us cultivate our garden”.

*And yet he wrote this:

Hermit hoar, in solemn cell,
Wearing out life's evening gray,
Smite thy bosom, Sage, and tell,
What is bliss? And which the way?

Thus I spoke; and speaking sigh'd;
Scarce repress'd the starting tear;
When the hoary sage reply'd:
"Come, my lad, and drink some beer."

Happy New Year!

>15 Bookmarque: >16 Karlstar: Thanks! And to you too.

Happy New Year, looking forward to see what classics you read this year.

Not sure if this counts as a classic, but how about a detective story written by the creator of Winnie the Pooh? This article (https://crimereads.com/on-the-only-mystery-novel-written-by-a-a-milne-creator-of-winnie-the-pooh/) turned up in my Pocket feed, and the book is available on Project Gutenberg.

>19 haydninvienna:
That is an interesting article.

It appears I have a copy of The Red House Mystery. The title rang a bell with me. I obviously bought it because of who had written it, but I have not read it yet.

Thank you for bringing this back to my attention.

>19 haydninvienna: I read that and gave it four stars! That's pretty high for me to give a murder mystery, so I guess I liked it. Sounds like the mystery itself wasn't difficult, but the characters were very enjoyable. I have no memory of it, so I guess I can read it again with pleasure sometime.

>21 MrsLee: Seconded. It wasn’t hard to work out that the murder victim wasn’t the supposed wastrel brother Robert but Mark Adlard himself, and given that, it was fairly obvious that Cayley dun it.

In short, not one of the great detective stories, but yes, some good characters. Did you notice how in some places the dialogue sounds like a conversation between Lord Peter Wimsey and Inspector Parker, with a dash of P G Wodehouse?

>22 haydninvienna: The dialog is probably why it rated high with me. I'm a sucker for good Piffle.

Happy new year and new thread, Richard! I'm hoping to read a few classics too this year, so I'll be dropping my shield as I enter and hoping for a bullet or two. I've never read As You Like It, so that's certainly a candidate.

>23 MrsLee: Actually, I thought some of the piffle was pretty good, well up to Wimsey standard. For example (Anthony Gillingham, the “detective”, is talking to his friend Bill Beverley):

“Are you prepared to be the complete Watson?” he asked.

“Watson?”

“Do-you-follow-me-Watson; that one. Are you prepared to have quite obvious things explained to you, to ask futile questions, to give me chances of scoring off you, to make brilliant discoveries of your own two or three days after I have made them myself—all that kind of thing? Because it all helps.”

“My dear Tony,” said Bill delightedly, “need you ask?”

Antony said nothing, and Bill went on happily to himself, “I perceive from the strawberry-mark on your shirt-front that you had strawberries for dessert. Holmes, you astonish me. Tut, tut, you know my methods. Where is the tobacco? The tobacco is in the Persian slipper. Can I leave my practice for a week? I can.”

Next up was The 99% Invisible City, a book based on a podcast which I’ve never encountered. It’s about the bits of urban architecture and design that most of us never notice, such as plaques, sewer vents, and the famous false house fronts in Bayswater in London (https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/leinster-gardens-false-facades). It was interesting up to a point, but it suffers from its origin, because I seldom felt that any topic was gone into very deeply. There is a list of further reading that might help. Also, it’s illustrated with line drawings only—some photographs would have been very helpful.

I had a small rant about an editing error in Atlas of Forgotten Places late last year. In reading the book rather than flipping, I found several more. I would have simply passed on and thought that it’s how things are these days, except that the author’s acknowledgements include one to the editor for her “eagle-eyed” editing. Oh well. (One issue with this kind of minor sloppiness is that it makes you wonder what their fact-checking was like.) Pity, because the idea of the book is good—short essays, well illustrated with maps and colour photos, of buildings and other structures that have been abandoned and allowed to fall apart. There are some surprisingly recent ones, such as the main stadium built for the Athens Olympics in 2004. All in all, not a bad job, but could have been better.

Next classic is likely to be Steppenwolf.

Happy new year! I can see that you are well on the way to a year of good reading!

>25 haydninvienna: I was temped to order The 99% invisible city for work but it sounds like it may be a bit shallow for the library. I will investigate further.

I borrowed the 99% Invisible City from my public library, and enjoyed it, but I agree that photographs would have improved it. I'm a big fan of the podcast. Host Roman Mars has one of those perfect radio voices and the topics are almost always interesting.

I bailed on Steppenwolf about half way through; things are starting to get a bit dark for this gloomy winter. I expect or hope to get back to it when things lighten up a bit.

But my copy of Classics for Pleasure arrived this morning. It turns out to be a delightful book: about 100 short essays on books and writers that Dirda thinks ought to be better appreciated—including Rasselas and Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Also, for further example, Ovid, H Rider Haggard, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and S J Perelman.

My records seem to say that I have Classics for Pleasure on my shelves somewhere. I am concerned that I can't immediately find it. Michael Dirda is a wonderful reviewer of books.

Started Mark Vanhoenacker’s Imagine a City. Yes, the title is a reference to Invisible Cities—one of his favourite books, he says.

Reading In the Teeth of the Evidence, another collection of short stories by Dorothy L Sayers. One in particular piqued my interest, “Bitter Almonds”. Wealthy, unpleasant elderly man, widowed, has a scapegrace bachelor son and a worthy married nephew. No other relatives. Son proposes to marry a woman of whom father disapproves. Father, son, nephew and nephew’s wife in father’s house. Father and son talk privately, quarrel, and son leaves abruptly. Nephew finds father dead in his study, with the smell of bitter almonds on his breath*. Son is a photographer and has access to potassium cyanide. Father was known to intend to make a new will disinheriting son. But of course Montague Egg, whose employers had been supplying wines, spirits and liqueurs to Father for many years, gets involved. At the inquest the police produce the remains of a lead-foil capsule that had once covered the cork of a bottle. The son gave evidence at the inquest that he had drunk a glass of crème de menthe, which his father also disapproved of. When the body was found there were two liqueur glasses in the table, both with traces of crème de menthe. Mr Egg knew his customer would not have drunk crème de menthe, but was able to identify the lead foil as having covered the cork of a bottle of noyau, a liqueur that is flavoured with apricot pits and often contains a significant quantity of cyanogenic glycosides. Apparently in an old bottle the oil tends to float to the top and concentrate the cyanides. Supposedly there have been cases of lethal consequences from taking the first glass from an old bottle. What had happened was that Father had drunk nothing while the son was with him, but afterwards had decided to have a real drink; found the old bottle; uncorked it and taken the first lethal glass. Nephew, on finding the body and realised what had happened, had tipped the remains of the crème de menthe into the glass with the noyau and removed the noyau bottle and its cork. Question: what crime, if any, had the nephew committed? He had interfered with evidence, but the scene wasn’t actually a crime scene because no crime had been committed. Good one for a criminal law tutorial topic, perhaps?
*Apparently this doesn’t actually happen, but it’s much beloved of detective story writers.

Another E C R Lorac who-dun-it: Murder in Vienna. Superintendent MacDonald of Scotland Yard goes to Vienna for a holiday*. It’s 1955 or thereabouts and Austria is newly a free country, after the end of WW2 and the post-war Occupation. Dodgy dealings with several parties trying to acquire the rights to publish a very famous opera singer’s memoirs, thought to be scandalous. The several conspirators fall out, there is murder and attempted murder, and because most of the conspirators are British and a former British diplomat is accidentally involved, MacDonald gets on the job in cooperation with the Vienna police. Much loving description of bits of the city of Vienna, some of which I could follow from my own visits.

*Yes, really. (You kind of think that policemen ought to be forbidden to go to places on holidays, because something terrible always happens.) On an aeroplane, a big deal in 1955. And on a Vickers Viscount. I think that it was on a Viscount that I took my first ever flight.

>31 haydninvienna: It seems that it should be a crime to try to incriminate some one else when there was no murder. Especially if the death penalty was active, because would that not be attempted murder?

>33 MrsLee: >31 haydninvienna: I should of course know the answer to my own question, and I don’t. I don’t have any access to a proper professional library, and I can’t even think at present how to formulate the right questions. Best I’ve come up with so far is the common law offence of perverting the course of justice, of which fabricating evidence is an aspect, but evidence of what? The problem is that there had been no actual crime. The usual context of the offence is that a known crime has been committed. I think I’m going to pass the question onto tokengingerkid (who works for a firm of solicitors) and my elder son David, who is doing law, in the form of “does this assumed set of facts amount to the common law offence of perverting the course of justice or any other offence?”

>34 haydninvienna: I would like to know what they say. At the very least it would put a great strain on future family dinners. ;)

>35 MrsLee: David begged off because it’s some time since he did his criminal law unit. However, I also put the question to two of my colleagues, neither of whom is a specialist criminal lawyer. One (Terry, who did his law in Edinburgh, hence he knows Scots law rather than English law) answered as follows (I have quoted most of his answer, omitting his examples, and with one other minor omission):

This was an entertaining jaunt back to my university years!

From a Scots law perspective the nephew’s act (tipping the crème de menthe into the glass that had contained noyau and removing the noyau and the cork) could amount to an offence within the group of offences under Scots law that come under the general banner of “offences against the course of justice”. As these are common law offences they, even to this day, can be worded in a variety ways in an indictment. Most commonly the charge is “perverting the course of justice” but you also see “defeating the ends of justice” or “obstructing the course/ends of justice”; and there are more specific offences which also fall within this category such as “procuring false evidence” and “wasting police time”.

Depending on whether the nephew’s actions actually led to the police seriously investigating the son and whether any charges were brought against the son as a result, the charge against the nephew may be phrased as attempting to pervert the course of justice (because if no investigation was commenced then the attempt was unsuccessful). Nevertheless an offence of attempting to pervert the course of justice (or attempting any other offence in this category) carries the same potential sentence as an offence of actually succeeding in perverting the course of justice. I’m not sure what the sentencing limits are but given these are common law offences I suspect the courts have a very broad discretion.

…

The main issue with this category of offence is that the mens rea* is absolutely key. It is established in Scots law that any actus reus** can amount to an offence against the course of justice (there have been unsuccessful attempts by defence counsel to persuade the courts that only a certain closed list of acts can constitute such an offence). But proving beyond reasonable doubt that the intention of the person committing the act is to pervert/defeat/obstruct the course/ends of justice can be problematic.

If I were representing the nephew I would suggest he was merely tidying up and had no intention to cause suspicion to be cast upon the son. For the nephew to have had such malicious intent would require him to know a lot about noyau and the dangers inherent in old bottles of it and that crème de menthe could not have the same effect. At the time he carried out the act, which was presumably before Mr Egg was drawn into the inquest, could it be proven that he had such specialist knowledge?

Anyway, very entertaining, unfortunately I now have to go back to boring old … capital markets rules!

TL/DR, “attempting to pervert the course of justice”, as I suggested.

*The guilty state of mind; the intention.
** The act giving effect to the state of mind.

However, given Terry’s hint, I did a bit more googling and found something useful in the published charging guidelines from the English Crown Prosecution Service:

The offence of Perverting the Course of Justice is committed when an accused:
• does an act or series of acts;
• which has or have a tendency to pervert; and
• which is or are intended to pervert;
the course of public justice.

The offence is contrary to common law and triable only on indictment. It carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment and/or a fine. The course of justice must be in existence at the time of the act(s). The course of justice starts when:
• an event has occurred, from which it can reasonably be expected that an investigation will follow; or
• investigations which could/might bring proceedings have actually started; or
• proceedings have started or are about to start.
In R v Cotter and Others 2002 EWCA Crim 1033 it was held that where the prosecution case is that a false allegation has been made, all that is required is that the person making the false allegation intended that it should be taken seriously by the police. It is not necessary to prove that she/he intended that anyone should actually be arrested. The offence of perverting the course of justice is sometimes referred to as "attempting to pervert the course of justice". It does not matter whether or not the acts result in a perversion of the course of justice: the offence is committed when acts tending and intended to pervert a course of justice are done.

Note the passage that I emphasised. It seems that even though no crime has actually been committed, the appearance of a crime is enough if it can be reasonably expected that an investigation will follow. Therefore, all that remains is the hard part: proving intention.

ETA if the nephew were charged, tried and convicted, the possibility of the son being hanged for murder would probably be taken into account in sentencing—note that life imprisonment is a possibility.

>36 haydninvienna: Thank you for that follow up! Very interesting. So one would need to have evidence of the nephew's specialized knowledge of the effect.

>31 haydninvienna: and >36 haydninvienna: This is really quite interesting stuff. That aspect of whether there'd been a crime or not had never occurred to me. But it's particularly cool that you would be able to extract from your colleagues such educational specifics. I will echo >37 MrsLee: in her thanks for such a worthwhile explanation!!

>37 MrsLee: >38 jillmwo: Always glad to oblige! But a small warning: the offence we’ve been discussing is a common-law offence in England and Scotland (which are separate legal jurisdictions) and might not be the same in the US, Canada or Australia. People tend to assume that “the law” is the same everywhere, and it isn’t. Just as an example, I see that in my birth state of Queensland (which codified its criminal law in 1899) the nephew’s conduct might well have amounted to the statutory offence of fabricating evidence, which carries a maximum prison sentence of 7 years.

>39 haydninvienna: Just to assuage any lingering concerns that you might have, I was not planning to replicate the crime here in the U.S. As tempting as it might upon occasion to "off" one's relatives (wealthy or otherwise), the local Mid-Atlantic jurisdiction in which I reside would frown on that -- as local television news anchors regularly point out in their nightly coverage of death and mayhem. But I agree that -- if one were to be writing a crime novel -- the author would need to research the point, as such a death (with or without intent to commit a crime) could well be treated differently here in the U.S. Not to mention that, given automation in the 21st century, the bottling processes of fine spirits might be different from those with which Sayers was familiar.

Have you read enough of the Montague Egg stories to venture a general assessment? Some readers find his voice as the narrator to be annoying.

>40 jillmwo: There are only about a dozen Montague Egg stories, and I think I’ve read all of them. I quite like him, but I’d probably tire of them if there were too many more.

Most detective novels are based on somebody dying in suspicious circumstances, and the substance of the novel is the finding out of either or both of:
• were they actually unlawfully killed; and
• if yes, who done it.
Once it’s established who done it, the book is over, and the perp’s trial, conviction and sentence are not our concern. I can think of only one detective story I’ve read in which the trial (and a subsequent appeal) are central: The Second Man, by Edward Grierson. Not many detective novels seem to get into the details of the criminal law. There are lots set in lawyers’ offices or barristers’ chambers, or otherwise with significant legal plot points, but the legal background is often the law of inheritance rather than criminal law. I remember that a plot point in Unnatural Death turns on a change in the English law of inheritance as of 1 January 1926. There’s a significant legal point near the end of Tragedy at Law* by “Cyril Hare” (a county court judge IRL), but the point is about the period within which a certain kind of lawsuit must be commenced.

* as I’m sure pgmcc would wish me to mention.

>41 haydninvienna:
Tragedy at Law* by “Cyril Hare”

* as I’m sure pgmcc would wish me to mention."

Yes indeed; one of jillmwo's many book bullets that found their way into my person.

By the way, I have only read a couple of the Perry Mason novels, but the TV episodes, which were not written by Erle Stanley Gardner**, generally involved a lot of courtroom scenes. I think they were more focused on revealing the evidence uncovered by the great investigating attorney, Perry Mason, rather than arguing the niceties of the law. When I was a little boy, Perry Mason was regular viewing in our house.

**Gardner had put a lot of effort into mastering the art of writing pulp novels, and then put a lot more effort into writing more literary crime novels. When he broke into the TV scene he did not feel like putting more effort into learning how to write TV scripts, so he hired other people to write for the TV shows.

>42 pgmcc: Like you, I remember the TV shows pretty well. The courtroom scenes generally are all about Mason’s cross-examination and the new evidence that he and his team have uncovered to confront the guilty party with. Needless to say, an English or Australian defence counsel wouldn’t be doing legwork: he or she might interview witnesses (with the accused’s solicitor present, of course) but otherwise it’s all up to the police (the prosecutor must share the prosecution case with the defence) and maybe a private investigator instructed by the solicitor. Also worth pointing out that to secure an acquittal the defence need only raise a reasonable doubt. It isn’t necessary to even prove that the accused didn’t do it, still less to identify the actual wrongdoer.

>43 haydninvienna: The interesting thing about Erle Stanley Gardner is that he was a reasonably successful attorney but found the office work did not give him enough adventure. That is why he started writing pulp fiction and made his attorney character someone who went out and got some of the action. He made a deal with himself that he would give himself five years to build his writing income to the same level as the income he was getting from his legal work, and if he had succeeded in doing that he would give up the legal work and become a full-time writer.

It did not turn out exactly that way. He build up his writing income and continued with his legal work.

>43 haydninvienna: and >44 pgmcc: My husband has been reading through the entire series of Perry Mason novels over the course of the past year or two; one of the things he noted to me early on was that the courtroom process doesn't absorb nearly as much of the written text as it did in the TV series. In light of the social conventions of the time, the television episodes minimized some of the action where you see Paul and Perry working together in the investigation; certainly the relationship with Della Street got cleaned up for the television audience.

I remember being somewhat shocked by that in my younger days when I was reading Gardiner's novels for the first time. I've never been a big fan of the novels, but I did find reading about Gardiner's process to be fascinating, if a bit mechanized. If the objective is to turn this stuff out to generate an income (and writers do need to eat), then he was very, very skilled in building that income.

>43 haydninvienna: Jill should know all about Perry Mason and Erle Stanley Gardner; it was jillmwo that hit me with the book bullet for Secrets of the World's Best-Selling Writer.

Finally finished Imagine a City by Mark Vanhoenacker. His first book, Skyfaring, was so good that I was eager to read his second, which is part memoir and part reflections on some of the cities he has visited, as a British Airways pilot and otherwise. It’s equally beautifully written, but I found it less interesting than Skyfaring. However, if you are more interested in the memoir parts and less on the reflections on flying as a profession, it might be for you.

During one of Mrs H’s medical appointments I dipped into On Consolation by Michael Ignatieff. The book is a series of short essays about writers who might be sources of consolation, beginning with the Book of Job. I read the essay on David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, and downloaded the text from Project Gutenberg. I quickly realised two things: first, that the Distributed Proofreaders had missed a few errors; second, that although Hume was a near-contemporary of Samuel Johnson (see #14), Johnson is much easier reading. With Johnson, as I mentioned, the stately eighteenth-century prose just flows along; Hume’s prose is much more turbulent. Plus, it’s philosophy.

Idly browsing the Faded Page website today, I noticed that they had quite a few of the boys’ books by Captain W E Johns. Johns was the creator of “Biggles”, and Faded Page has a couple of dozen or so of the Biggles titles and a good few of Johns’ other books*. When I was in high school the school library had most of the then-recent Biggles titles and I read them all, plus a good few from the public library and a couple that I was given as presents. So I thought, why not dip again into one of the ones that I actually owned, Biggles and the Cruise of the Condor? Nope. Bad idea. My willing suspension of disbelief won’t stretch that far, and the prose is, um, clunky.

*Including the “Worrals” series, where all the main characters are female. Johns may be unique in having written action adventure stories for both boys and girls—I don’t know of any other author who did so.

Another “classic” of a different kind that I failed to finish was Mystery of a Hansom Cab by Fergus Hume. This is a very early detective story written in Australia, first published in 1886, set in Melbourne in the late 19th century. It is said to have been admired by Arthur Conan Doyle. I stopped at the point at which the impossibly beautiful, virtuous love-interest appeared. Not that I have any particular objection to beautiful, virtuous heroines, but I do have a problem with authorial gushing.

And, at last, one I did finish (also with a beautiful, virtuous heroine): Trent’s Last Case by E C Bentley. Bentley was the inventor of the clerihew (which in fact is what his initial C stood for). A clerihew is a four-line verse with a biographical tone:

Said Sir Christopher Wren
“I am going to dine with some men.
If anybody calls
Tell them I am designing St Paul’s”.

Bentley wrote Trent’s Last Case as a kind of parody of a detective novel, with a maniacally complicated plot, and the fact that Trent actually gets the solution wrong (but finds out enough to clear the obvious suspect). Trent swears off investigation after that, and marries the victim’s beautiful, virtuous widow, after discovering that, under the terms of her late husband’s will, her right to his assets ceases if she remarries. Then he finds out what actually happened.

I believe that Bentley wrote one more Trent novel and some short stories, but I haven’t dipped into those yet. (ETA there are two titles on Bentley’s Gutenberg page—Trent’s Last Case and The Woman in Black—but they are the same book, respectively the British and US titles. According to Wikipedia, the second Trent novel is called Trent’s Own Case, but neither Gutenberg nor Faded Page has it.)

>47 haydninvienna: I have and have read Trent's Last Case, and apparently liked it a lot, but I don't remember the story at all. Mine has an introduction by Dorothy L. Sayers.

>48 MrsLee: I liked Trent’s Last Case too. I would like to find the second Trent novel if possible.

Again on Faded Page, I noticed that they have most of the “Judge Dee” stories by Robert van Gulik. I’d seen these mentioned quite a few times, but never found one I could read, till now. “Judge Dee” must be the progenitor of all the detective series in old-time settings—apparently there really was a “Judge Dee”, who was a district magistrate in T’ang Dynasty China (7th century for us). The district magistrate was an official of the Empire’s civil service, who was the judge but also the investigator of crime, plus a host of administrative functions, for his district. Van Gulik, who had a PhD in Chinese studies, found a book about him in a used-book store in Tokyo, and adapted some of the cases to produce the early novels, and then went on to produce several new ones using incidents from the history of the Dynasty. Dee and his helpers solve crimes using straightforward police work and reasoning, plus the occasional judicial torture of a suspect. Dee even manages to break an alibi which was based on the perp having tinkered with an incense-clock* to give a misleading time for a murder. I’m not sure whether I can count Judge Dee as a classic—compared to E C Bentley they are not actually terribly good, but they still manage to be interesting. I’m led to believe they give a fairly realistic picture of the society of the time. One of them, Murder in Canton, presents a tense situation between the Empire and Arab traders in the city, which even then was a major centre of trade and also gambling. Van Gulik notes in his postscript that

In the seventh century a.d. the two leading world powers were the vast Chinese T’ang Empire in the east, and in the west the Islamic realm of the Arab Khalifs, who had conquered the entire Middle East, North Africa and Southern Europe. Curiously enough, though, these two cultural and military giants barely knew of each other’s existence; the points of contact of their spheres of influence were limited to a few scattered trade-centres. In the latter hardy Chinese and Arab sea captains met, but in their respective home-countries their accounts of the marvels they had seen were dismissed as so many sailors’ yarns. Since for this Judge Dee novel I wanted to place the judge in an entirely new milieu, I laid the scene of my story in Canton, the port city which was one of the focal points of contact between the Chinese and Arab worlds.

Having now read 14 of them end to end, I’ll give them a rest and read something else.

*this was a clock based on a group of spirals of incense on a ceramic dish. The spirals were connected. You lit the first spiral and it would take one hour to burn away and would then light the next spiral, and so on through the night.

>49 haydninvienna: I read one of van Gulik's Judge Dee novels when I was a teenager. I liked it, but I've never gone back to the series. Murder in Canton sounds interesting.

>50 libraryperilous: I thought Murder in Canton was decent, but you have to be prepared to deal with a lot of Chinese attitudes—the Arabs are regarded as barbarians and assumed to be untrustworthy rogues, and rude things are said about Islam. There are the Tanka people, who live on boats in Canton harbour and are “untouchables”. Judge Dee, as an official, is entitled to keep four wives. At first appearance (in The Chinese Gold Murders—chronologically, this is the first and Murder in Canton the last) he has two, but later he acquires a young woman as his First Lady’s companion, and the young woman fits into Dee’s family so well that Dee, at his First Lady’s express request and with his Second Lady’s encouragement, makes the young woman his Third Lady. And then Dee and his ladies can play a proper four-handed game of dominoes! Which we actually see them doing.

Amalgamemnon by Christine Brooke-Rose. Perl-ruled on the third page. I don’t have the patience for it.

>52 haydninvienna: Wow. Obviously I'll give that one a pass.

>53 majkia: TBF there are people on LT who think she is wonderful. I just don’t see the point. Quotation (copied from Goodreads cos I just couldn’t):

For although like you I could be a spokesman denying rumours from below that predefer to be stifled till the return of the repressed prodigal, I could also be a streetsweeper cleaning up the unmanuring dung dropped from above, which will have to be collected up and sorted out and recycled maybe into serviceable goods, as in psychoanalysis, a genie from a plastic bottle. When the magic cycle of genuine shit will have been replaced by the chemicycle of pure electronic thought ever expanding, more and more unbiodegradable, the heart of the earth will stop, shrivel to a curled up foetus to be ejected lifeless and wither to a moon without even the attracting planet to encircle except the distant sungod dead because unseen unfelt by anyone.

My opinion is succinctly expressed by Goodreads user Chadwick, who commented ‘This is the rare experimental novel that makes me ask, "Why the f**k did you bother?"’

I suppose I’m just not clever enough.

>54 haydninvienna: I have to admit that I'd give that one a pass as well.

>54 haydninvienna: That sounds like some of the spam email I get.

>54 haydninvienna: Has this, perchance, been written by an AI?

>54 haydninvienna: That is some seriously disturbing word salad!

>57 pgmcc: I suspect an AU to be more likely, (Artificial Unintelligence).

>54 haydninvienna: Thanks for confirming that this is one novel to avoid.

A couple of quick reads, both read on line.

The Eames-Erskine Case by "A Fielding" (aka Archibald Fielding). I found this on Project Gutenberg Australia. A wild, maniacally complex plot involving a wealthy Scottish landed family, silk spinning in Toronto, New York and Lyons, ranching in Alberta, double identities and a mysterious apparent suicide in a hotel in London. Interesting, in a book published in 1924, that there are several references to characters travelling between London and Paris by air. I have never heard of Fielding before and Wikipedia has nothing about him. (Or her. I found a blogger's joking suggestion that "A Fielding" was really a pen-name for Agatha Christie, but such consensus as exists is that "A Fielding" or "Archibald Fielding" was really Dorothy Feilding (sic), who coincidentally lived in the same London street, Sheffield Terrace, as Christie. G K Chesterton was born in the same street. It's a very desirable area of London: Kensington Palace and the Royal Albert Hall are an easy walk away. There appears to be no record now of Dorothy Feilding of Sheffield Terrace, but she seems not to have been connected with Lady Dorothy Feilding, who worked as a nurse on the Western Front in WW1.

Back to Victoria by Jefferson Farjeon (from Faded Page Canada): Farjeon was one of the Golden Age detective novelists (brother of the children's writer Eleanor Farjeon), and Wikipedia quotes Dorothy Sayers's admiration of him as "unsurpassed for creepy skill in mysterious adventures". I wasn't up to creepy mystery, but this one was kind of cosy. A swindler sets up a fake business, employs a number of unsuspecting people, and persuades them and one other person to invest their savings in it. He then absconds. The victims see a newspaper advertisement for staff for a remote country house and, in the spirit of "what have we got to lose", apply en masse, and are employed by the aged but very wealthy couple who live in the house. Coincidentally (or is it coincidence?) the swindler turns up as well. This has to be one of the more unusual mysteries in that there's no murder, although there is an attempt. Of course there is a happy ending. Overall, not bad.

Continuing my cheating on my resolution to read the classics (but this one’s not a cheat because it really is a classic): The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. I first read this many years ago. I’ve actually just started it, but I loved this (describing a modern (for 1951) novel):

The Sweat and the Furrow was Silas Weekley being earthy and spade-conscious all over seven hundred pages. The situation, to judge from the first paragraph, had not materially changed since Silas’s last book: mother lying-in with her eleventh upstairs, father laid-out after his ninth downstairs, eldest son lying to the Government in the cow-shed, eldest daughter lying with her lover in the hay-loft, everyone else lying low in the barn. The rain dripped from the thatch, and the manure steamed in the midden. Silas never omitted the manure. It was not Silas’s fault that its steam provided the only up-rising element in the picture. If Silas could have discovered a brand of steam that steamed downwards, Silas would have introduced it.

I consider The Daughter of Time to be a classic as well. It stands up to multiple readings. And the humor -- as shown in the paragraph above -- has just that elegant touch of astringency.

>61 haydninvienna: Sort of adds a new element to karlstar's STTM ratings. Love that.

>61 haydninvienna: The Daughter of Time is a real classic!

>61 haydninvienna: I only became aware of The Daughter of Time in January, 2020. The friend I went to London to meet bought me a copy. I enjoyed reading it and was fascinated by the detective taking a police investigation approach to history.

>62 jillmwo: Re the humour: yes, exactly. While reading I thought more than once of MrsLee’s comment that The Red House Mystery had some good piffle (see #23 and #25 above). Only minor piffle but good piffle, and a good deal of, as you say, elegant astringency. I have to say that I find her case against Henry VII pretty convincing.

>65 pgmcc: As far as I know, the book is unique in that respect. I imagine there are many books that revisit the received knowledge about bits of what the book calls “Tonypandy”, but I’ve never found another that frames it as an investigation by a police officer who is temporarily laid up. And if you don’t already know what Tonypandy is, you will just have to read the book.

Incidentally, “Tey” refers to the memorial to the Wigtown Martyrs, supposedly tied to stakes at low tide and left to drown as the tide came in. It’s still at Wigtown.

ETA I think the book by Horace Walpole that Carradine refers to is probably Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third, which is available from Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17411.

>63 MrsLee: I think the steaming-downwards rating may be way too subtle for me.

>66 haydninvienna: The book by Horace Walpole … : it was indeed Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third. It was republished in the mid-1960s by the Folio Society together with More’s character assassination, and the combined Folio is available cheaply on line.

Now finished the Walpole book on line (it’s a short read). Not surprisingly, Walpole covers much the same territory as Josephine Tey. In fact, I assume that Tey had read Walpole. The result of all of this is to make me wonder how many of history’s causes célèbres are made up out of whole cloth. I’m not going to put down any examples though, for obvious reasons.

Tey also led me to some reflection on the relations between England and latterly Great Britain with Europe. Noticeable how much hopping about there was between England, France and the Low Countries. I got reading about William III and the Glorious Revolution of 1689. We had some discussion a while ago about who financed William (in relation to Imprimatur, by Monaldi & Sorti). The argument was made that William’s invasion of England was actually financed by the Pope (so that the Pope would have been financing a Protestant to overthrow a Catholic king, James II) to ensure that William gained access to the resources of the English crown so that he would be able to pay his existing debts to the Pope. That has to be seen in its European context—William’s first priority was to ensure that James did not enter into an alliance with Louis XVI in Louis’s war against the Dutch. Certain recent events seem to reflect an idea that England/Britain ought to have nothing to do with Europe. Ha ha.

>61 haydninvienna: I really need to reread this one. Thanks for the nudging.

>69 haydninvienna: I'll be honest, I'm having a hard time making myself read Shakespeare's take on poor Richard because of reading Tey.

>71 MrsLee: I recall that you had some issues with another of Shakespeare's plays a couple of weeks ago. Here's Walpole (from the Gutenberg text, emphasis added):

It is evident from the conduct of Shakespeare, that the house of Tudor retained all their Lancastrian prejudices, even in the reign of queen Elizabeth. In his play of Richard the Third, he seems to deduce the woes of the house of York from the curses which queen Margaret had vented against them; and he could not give that weight to her curses, without supposing a right in her to utter them. This, indeed is the authority which I do not pretend to combat. Shakespeare's immortal scenes will exist, when such poor arguments as mine are forgotten. Richard at least will be tried and executed on the stage, when his defence remains on some obscure shelf of a library. But while these pages may excite the curiosity of a day, it may not be unentertaining to observe, that there is another of Shakespeare's plays, that may be ranked among the historic, though not one of his numerous critics and commentators have discovered the drift of it; I mean The Winter Evening's (sic) Tale, which was certainly intended (in compliment to queen Elizabeth) as an indirect apology for her mother Anne Boleyn. The address of the poet appears no where to more advantage. The subject was too delicate to be exhibited on the stage without a veil; and it was too recent, and touched the queen too nearly, for the bard to have ventured so home an allusion on any other ground than compliment. The unreasonable jealousy of Leontes, and his violent conduct in consequence, form a true portrait of Henry the Eighth, who generally made the law the engine of his boisterous passions. Not only the general plan of the story is most applicable but several passages are so marked, that they touch the real history nearer than the fable. Hermione on her trial says,

. . . . . For honour,
'Tis a derivative from me to mine,
And only that I stand for.

This seems to be taken from the very letter of Anne Boyleyn to the king before her execution, where she pleads for the infant princess his daughter. Mamillius, the young prince, an unnecessary character, dies in his infancy; but it confirms the allusion, as queen Anne, before Elizabeth, bore a still-born son. But the most striking passage,' and which had nothing to do in the Tragedy, but as it pictured Elizabeth, is, where Paulina, describing the new-born princess, and her likeness to her father, says, she has the very trick of his frown. There is one sentence indeed so applicable, both to Elizabeth and her father, that I should suspect the poet inserted it after her death. Paulina, speaking of the child, tells the king,

. . . . . . 'Tis yours;
And might we lay the old proverb to your charge,
So like you, 'tis the worse.

The Winter Evening's Tale was therefore in reality a second part of Henry the Eighth.

>72 haydninvienna: Wow wow! I never caught that allusion, but it does seem obvious when he points it out.

>73 MrsLee: Indeed. I wonder whether any of the voluminous writing on The Winter’s Tale has picked up Walpole’s point. I looked at Samuel Johnson’s notes on Shakespeare available on line, but although Johnson was a contemporary of Walpole he doesn’t seem to mention it.

>72 haydninvienna: That's a really interesting slant on what I'd always assumed was one of Shakespeare's less popular plays. I don't think I've ever read a positive spin on it, but also had not encountered that line of thought from Walpole before. (Of course, I don't think I've ever actually watched a performance of The Winter's Tale. That too might make a difference.)

>75 jillmwo: My knowledge of Walpole is limited to The Castle of Otranto and his invention of the word “serendipity”, but I see from Wikipedia that his collected letters fill 48 volumes.

I think that The Winter’s Tale (which I have not read) is unpopular for pretty well the reasons that MrsLee found it hard to take. I do remember that it’s counted as one of the Dark Comedies.

I also see from Wikipedia that

Eric Ives, the biographer of Anne Boleyn (1986), believes that the play is really a parallel of the fall of the queen, who was beheaded on false charges of adultery on the orders of her husband Henry VIII in 1536. There are numerous parallels between the two stories – including the fact that one of Henry's closest friends, Sir Henry Norreys, was beheaded as one of Anne's supposed lovers and he refused to confess in order to save his life, claiming that everyone knew the Queen was innocent. If this theory is followed then Perdita becomes a dramatic presentation of Anne's only daughter, Queen Elizabeth I.

which is basically what Walpole suggested.

>72 haydninvienna:, >74 haydninvienna: That's fascinating, not an interpretation that came up in my A level study of The winter's tale.

>77 Sakerfalcon: I can’t claim any credit for it! After all that though, I might actually have to read the play myself.

Another classic detective story with a twist (or three): Lament for a Maker by Michael Innes. Lots of literary references, here chiefly to the poem from which the book takes its title (“Lament for the Makaris”, by William Dunbar, a Scottish poet of 100 years or so after the time of Chaucer). Another wildly complex plot, lots of misdirection, two suspicious deaths, a miserly and possibly insane Scot stalking the halls of his ruinous castle in the depths of a Highland winter night quoting poetry … the detective novel as Gothic romance.

There ought to be recordings somewhere of Dunbar’s poetry read by a Scot. It would be worth seeking them out. I remember, from a radio broadcast 50 or more years ago, hearing somebody reading Dunbar’s Easter poem “Done is a Battell on the Dragon Blak” (available here if you’re curious—note that the spelling has been slightly modernised). As C S Lewis said, it has the ring of a steel gauntlet flung down, enough that I remember that reading all these years later.

Having said which, the “Lament” is available on iTunes together with a couple of other pieces by Dunbar, but not “Done is a Battell …”.

Ever noticed how books talk to each other? Given what I’ve been reading recently, I found, while lying awake at about 4am, that Walpole and Josephine Tey were chatting with Michael Innes and that Thomas Hobbes and Robert Bolt had joined in. Bolt wrote a play about Thomas More called A Man for All Seasons,* which was made into a terrific film starring Paul Scofield. What they were talking about was how violent and dangerous things were in England (and Scotland) until surprisingly recently. In Bolt’s play, one of the other characters tries to persuade More to assent to Henry VIII’s proposal of divorcing Catherine of Aragon by suggesting that if the king dies without leaving a male heir “this peace you think so much of will go out like that!”, snapping his fingers. Think about it. Extremely wealthy nobles, with numerous well-armed retainers who had to be fed and rewarded lavishly, stuck in isolated virtually impregnable castles, with basically nothing to do but eat, drink, fight and fornicate—is it surprising that there was a lot of rebellion? I wonder if one of the main driving factors for much of history was boredom? I’m not denying the huge role played by male machismo, but without the elements of boredom and isolation it might have found different expression.

*I studied the play in high school and thought it was great. Still do, although now I think it’s over-generous to More and also attributes to him a way of conceiving the issue that he would not have accepted.

ETA Some great lines in the play: see the quotations here.

Couple of acquisitions from the Blue Cross shop in Bicester for a grand total of £1:
The Solitaire Mystery by Jostein Gaarder—I now have 4 books by him, although Sophie’s World is the only one I’ve actually read—this one looks interesting
The Funniest Thing You Never Said 2: a collection of humorous or witty quotations. Each quotation is attributed, but I’ll bet you pearls to peanuts that most of the attributions are doubtful or outright wrong. Still fun reading though, and probably worth every new penny.

ETA that T S Eliot is quoted as having described Wensleydale cheese as “the Mozart of cheeses”. Apparently this is genuine—the source appears to be a letter to the Times some time in the 1930s, in the course of an exchange about whether there should be a memorial to the inventor of Stilton.

>80 haydninvienna: I agree with your reassessment of the play. I'd add that I find most works that focus on royal politics to be overly-generous to whichever main character they are rehabilitating.

>81 haydninvienna: The inventor of Stilton may indeed deserve a monument of some sort but I am always amused by what will cause people (famous or otherwise) to write to the Times.

>82 libraryperilous: “… overly-generous to whichever main character they are rehabilitating” is probably true of all works of rehabilitation.

Made another raid on the Blue Cross shop, mainly in search of Lee Childs and other adventure books for Mrs H. No idea which of the works of Child, Cussler, Patterson et al she has read but at 50p for a paperback it hardly matters. But I picked up A Case of Spirits by Peter Lovesey. It’s a short book and a fast read. Murder by electric shock at a séance in the London of 1885. Not bad, although I’m slightly inclined to question Lovesey’s description of the electrical apparatus.

More on “the Mozart of cheeses”: I accidentally discovered that the Oxfordshire library system has access to the archives of the Times, digitised and searchable. There certainly was an exchange of letters in November and December 1935 about the idea of a Stilton memorial, and both Eliot and Squire (and David Garnett) contributed to it. So far, though, I haven’t found the reference to Mozart.

Worse confusion! Some googling finds a letter from Marianne Moore (poet) to Hildegarde Watson dated 14 August 1964, about a dinner in London with T S and Valerie Eliot and Peter* and Mollie du Sautoy: “when I spoke of the cheese, Peter said that Tom had called Wenslydale (sic), in a review, "the Mozart of cheeses but did not say Mozart was the Wenslydale of musicians” (emphasis mine).

But! In a unexpected place, namely the record on line of the application for the registration of “Wensleydale” as a protected food name, the reference is said to be in the Observer, not the Times. No date is given beyond “mid-20th century”, which fits with what Peter du Sautoy was quoted as having said. There is a searchable archive of the Observer but it’s not free.

That seems to be that. There are a couple of papers available on JSTOR which I don’t have access to which might be more useful, but no go for the moment at least.

Peter: let this be a warning to you as a retiree. You might find yourself diving down endless rabbit holes after a quotation. On the other hand, you might be rather less anal about quotations than I tend to be.

*I find that Peter du Sautoy was chairman of Faber & Faber, where Eliot was a director. He was the grandfather of the mathematician Marcus du Sautoy.

And in other news, I haven’t forgotten that this is supposed to be my Year of Classics. The Oxfordshire library has Paradise Lost with an introduction by Philip Pullman, and A Preface to Paradise Lost by C S Lewis. I’ve ordered both. This rash act was somewhat prompted by mention of Paradise Lost in a thread in the Science Fiction Fans group. It will at least be interesting to see what avowed atheist Pullman has to say and compare it to Lewis (which I already know pretty well—I have the Lewis book but it’s in storage).

I still haven’t got back to Steppenwolf, and I have The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim sitting on the couch beside me.

I started reading The Enchanted April. Talk about elegant astringency …

>86 haydninvienna: Oh, my goodness! What serendipity! I have been staring for the past week at a copy of Paradise Lost that's been sitting on a shelf unread. It was one of those books I discovered back in college (sitting at the library circulation desk) but never got to finish. I could revisit it alongside you (but not necessarily reading Lewis' commentary at the same time). Just verified that my copy is the same one -- with the intro by Philip Pullman

And yes, Enchanted April is another favorite.

Since I don’t need much excuse to quote poetry:

Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav'ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos: or if Sion Hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa's brook that flow'd
Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th' Aonian Mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.
And chiefly Thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumin, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justifie the wayes of God to men.

I remember Lewis’s suggestion that you imagine the voice chanting.

But what enormous, sublime self-confidence! “Justify the ways of God to men”!

I’m properly paid for my dislike of beautiful writing. I found the description of Mrs Wilkins’s first view of Portofino from her bedroom window quite hard to read, because it was so ecstatic. I’ve never seen Portofino, but I’ve seen the view from the top of the Isle of Capri, and I know what she was talking about.

ETA I was looking for an audiobook of Paradise Lost. Oxfordshire library does both Libby and Borrowbox but neither seems to have it. I’m still wondering about whether I feel like buying it from iTunes.

>89 haydninvienna: Yes, but Pullman recommends you read it aloud yourself, even if at a whisper so as not to irritate the neighbors.

Actually, as I was weeding shelves this morning, discarding writers who may have deservedly fallen out of favor, I opened up randomly to a page of conversation between two characters. The language was lovely, evocative, etc., but it is hard to imagine two human beings actually speaking that way. Most people I know aren't that articulate when speaking off-the-cuff to a friend. I mean, I enjoyed the writer, but... (into the discard box she went.)

>90 jillmwo: I vaguely remember that Lewis thought that all poetry should ideally be read aloud (even if in an undertone). With Milton’s blank verse it actually does help, after you work out that the syntax is not that of prose. I have a recording of T S Eliot’s Four Quartets read by the old-skool English actor Robert Speaight. Speaight’s delivery really brings out the incantatory quality of Eliot’s free verse—so much so that I’m almost afraid now to play the last one, “Little Gidding”, which is my favourite.

>86 haydninvienna: I have a copy of Paradise Lost sitting by my chair, one of the five big books I want to read this year. I wish I had the one with the Lewis intro, but mine is published by Black's Books, for the classics club. The intro is by Maurice Kelley. I'm not sure I have it in me to start before the wedding I'm hosting in April. My brain/body is pretty fried when I come in from gardening each day.

Re Paradise Lost: Amazon at the moment offers 2 audiobooks for free with an introductory subscription. Sign up and then cancel within 30 days. They have Paradise Lost from a BBC dramatisation from 1992, with Dennis Quilley reading the narration and Ian McDiarmid as Satan. So I picked that, and President Obama’s reading of his own book A Promised Land.

Dennis Quilley had a pretty decent curriculum vitae as actor and singer, including quite a bit of Shakespeare. He did some TV in Australia in the late 1960s, and I remember him from then. He had one of those warm brown British voices that should suit Milton perfectly.

I said above that I had ordered both Paradise Lost and C S Lewis’s Preface to Paradise Lost from the library. The latter has arrived and I’ve just finished reading it*. Interesting (but not unexpected) to see how it connects with other writings by Lewis, in particular The Discarded Image and “De Descriptione Temporum”, his inaugural address as the Professor of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University. (Both of those are available at Faded Page Canada—the address is in They Asked for a Paper). Nowhere in the Preface does Lewis say explicitly, as he does in “ De Descriptione Temporum”, that

I read as a native texts that you must read as foreigners. … It is my settled conviction that in order to read Old Western literature aright you must suspend most of the responses and unlearn most of the habits you have acquired in reading modern literature.

but it’s fairly apparent that he thinks most modern critics (the preface was published in 1944) approach Milton from a mindset totally unlike Milton’s, and misunderstand what Milton was trying to do.

The Introduction by Charles Williams to which Lewis refers is available from the Charles Williams Society: https://www.charleswilliamssociety.org.uk/williams-introduction-to-milton/.

ETA *Not for the first time, no.

Turning for a moment to one of life's minor embuggerances: pgmcc recently mentioned his office in-joke about porridge oats. I like porridge too, and I'm fussy about it. The other day I bought a box of A Certain Brand of what was labelled "rolled oats". Not all oat-based porridge products are the same— there's a mildly bewildering variety of "rolled oats", "steel-cut oats", "porage oats", "quick-cooking oats", and probably others. What the box contained was, beyond question, quick-cooking oats. Now I dislike this stuff: it cooks up to what is basically glue. Normally "quick-cooking oats" is labelled as such, but I could see nothing on the label about "quick-cooking". I bought another box of the same Certain Brand which is labelled "Jumbo Oats", which hopefully will contain the good stuff. I'll eat the glue because I hate wasting food, but I will not buy A Certain Brand again if I can help it.

>95 haydninvienna:
Porridge appears to have benefitted from a revival. It appears to be cool amongst some younger* people to eat porridge. This new popularity has, however suffered from the demands on a younger generation for multiple varieties of their cereal of choice. This has made it difficult for those of us who want simple, plain, previously only version available oats. We are the ones who walk into Starbucks and as for a coffee, only to be faced with blank looks or a myriad of questions.

*Having just become an OAP you can fit any age group under 60 where I have said, “younger”.

>96 pgmcc: "We are the ones who walk into Starbucks and ask for a coffee, only to be faced with blank looks or a myriad of questions.

Reminds me of this Paul Rudd/Elizabeth Banks bit... A Large Black Coffee

>95 haydninvienna: Use the quick oats to make bread, cake and cookies. I had husband get some because while I like my oatmeal chewy (I add nuts, seeds and dates, topped with butter and fresh ground black pepper), I like the texture of quick oats in baked goods.

>97 ScoLgo:
:-)

>99 MrsLee: sound idea, but unfortunately we don’t do baked goods. Thinks: I saw a recipe for Jammy Fruit Bars the other day (https://www.seriouseats.com/jammy-fruit-bars) that uses oats …

I usually put some dried apricots into the oats before cooking, and add some nuts after. And I’ve been known to include peanut butter.

>96 pgmcc: This new popularity has, however suffered from the demands on a younger generation for multiple varieties of their cereal of choice.

It's called a desire for novelty and has little to do with whether one is young or old. Those of us raised on the Certain Brand of oatmeal that will not be named by haydninvienna got very excited in middle-age when we discovered in our grocery store the availability of Irish steel-cut oats and the difference in flavor.

I think MrsLee has the right idea of using up the quick-cooking version in alternate ways; FWIW they generally work in meatloaf.

>101 haydninvienna: Oooo! Peanut butter! That will definitely get tried in the next pot. As you can tell, I don't go in for the sweet and creamy versions. Mine are more like grits. I like the idea of dried apricots, too.

>102 jillmwo: Yes! >101 haydninvienna: Definitely use them up in meatloaf, or in mearballs with lots of garlic! I also use them when baking bread.

I miss Uncle Toby's Oats from Australia. Seemingly still going, and still in pretty much the same box. There used to be something called Breakfast D-Light (sp?) which was basically semolina, but that seems to have gone now.

>103 MrsLee: Try googling for "savoury porridge" and see what you get. If you think of porridge as being a grain cooked in a liquid, think of the possibilities! Paella, risotto, pilau, grits, polenta, frumenty (bet you'll have to look that one up) ...

>105 haydninvienna: Yes I did! One year I did fasting during Ramadan. I used a rice recipe I found that was made with green onions, chopped almonds, dates and apricots, with spices, to eat before sunrise. It kept me just fine until sunset.

>95 haydninvienna: >99 MrsLee: etc Agreed, the quick oats are just for baking. Makes a great topping for apple crisp. I prefer the 'old fashioned' (about 5 min. cook time) kind for breakfast purposes I'm still not sure I understand the difference between rolled and steel cut. One of them takes a really long time to cook?

>106 MrsLee: Suhoor! (Variously spelt.) That wasn’t an obscure insult, it’s the name for the predawn meal during Ramadan. The post-sunset meal is called Iftar. I gather that a really good iftar can go on basically all night. Traditionally started by eating a single date. Where did your recipe come from? Almonds, dates and apricots sounds Arabic, but not the green onions.

>107 Karlstar: Steel-cut oats are single dehulled oat grains that have been chopped into pieces, so they take a long time to cook. Or so I believe. I have a recipe somewhere for a “risotto” made with steel-cut oats, but I’ve never tried it. Rolled oats are dehulled oat grains that have been parboiled and then rolled flat. They cook quicker than steel-cut oats. The quick cooking variety is rolled oats ground smaller.

>95 haydninvienna: Couldn't help thinking of you and your oats while Better Half and I watched this Youtube video this evening. Buried deep in this episode (near the middle) is a sequence where Mary Berry makes some rather appetising-looking "energy bars" based on oats and something that looks like Rice Krispies. No heat involved; would they help deal with the Wrong Oats?

>108 haydninvienna: It was from a magazine years ago. The recipe called it a pilaf. Much easier process than any other pilaf recipe I have seen. Probably dummied down to be practical because the notes on the recipe says, "Kids will be sure to like it!" Which mine didn't. I didn't save the name when I cut out the recipe. I didn't know that about breaking the fast with a single date. A good way to do it.

>109 hfglen: Does “flapjack” mean in South Africa what it does in England? Not a pancake. To quote the all-knowing, “A flapjack (also known as a cereal bar, oat bar or oat slice) is a baked bar, cooked in a flat oven tin and cut into squares or rectangles, made from rolled oats, fat (typically butter), brown sugar and usually golden syrup.” Usually there seems to be some dried fruit in there too. I don’t think the quick cooking stuff would give the right texture. I might try it some time though—I can remember the kids making them, so it can’t be too hard.

If you search Tesco’s website here for “flapjacks” you get 39 products. The same search on the Woolworths website in Australia gives nothing, but “oat bars” gets you a couple of dozen.

We’ve been watching Mary Berry on the reruns of the older episodes of the Great British Bake-Off. I am absolutely in awe of the contestants. In the one we watched this evening, they were making filo pastry from scratch and then turning it into something edible and delicious. In four hours, with Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood hovering. No pressure then!

>111 haydninvienna:
My wife makes flapjacks with porridge oats. It was a staple in her family and it is a staple with us. They are very popular. I have tried to get my wife to add raisins or sultanas but she has only done this once or twice. Her flapjacks are great.

>110 MrsLee: Just in case I wasn’t clear: iftar and Suhoor are meals, in the same sense as lunch is a meal. Pilaf is a dish. The idea about beginning the iftar with a single date has, I believe, the authority of the Prophet (PBUH) himself.

Edited to close a tag properly.

A swerve off topic: there was some mention on Peter's thread of Jimmy Webb and "Macarthur Park". That sent me down the usual YouTube rabbit hole looking for videos of Webb the man himself. Good lord, so many marvellous songs. My favourite of all, probably: "The Moon's a Harsh Mistress" (he asked Heinlein for permission to use the title). Look for the wonderful instrumental version by Charlie Haden and Pat Metheny, or the utterly perfect version by Judy Collins. Or the first recording of it, by ... Joe Cocker.

One of my side musical interests is the "Great American Songbook". It started early in the 20th century with people like Jerome Kern, then through the 1930s and onwards with the likes of the Gershwin brothers, Hoagy Carmichael and Vincent Youmans and dozens of others. For me, both Burt Bacharach (and his longtime writing partner Hal David) and Jimmy Webb are in that tradition.

>108 haydninvienna: Thanks for that explanation, I think I watched Alton Brown explain that on one of his cooking shows way back when, but the details had gotten fuzzy. In a strangely related coincidence, we watched another cooking show this week where they make a pumpkin and oatmeal custard dessert with a crumble topping that looked great. I've wondered in the past why there weren't desserts made with oats and now I've seen one!

>115 Karlstar: Atholl Brose. Peter will no doubt take issue withe the absence of an E in the whisky, but this is a Scottish traditional recipe!

>113 haydninvienna: Yes, I understood that. :)

>116 hfglen:
If it is not Irish whiskey, then it does not use an e. I understand the “e” stands for excellent.

:-)

>116 hfglen: Interesting, though I wonder if that is just a vehicle for whisky consumption.

>114 haydninvienna: I agree that they are worthy of inclusion.

My, I have been quiet, haven’t I? Reading has been pushed into the background lately—I mentioned a while back that we had put our house up for sale. We finally had an offer last weekend and have accepted it. The usual time to completion here and now is about 2 months, so we are looking to be out by the end of April. Next couple of months are going to be a bit busy. On top of everything else, Mrs H has a couple of medical appointments and I’m doing a 200-page document for the Regulatory Authority’s next board meeting.

I picked up the copy of Paradise Lost from the library last week and have barely even opened it. Must try to fix that.

>121 haydninvienna:
Good luck with the house move and wishing Mrs. H all the best with the medical appointments.

Will you be able to keep yourself to two hundred pages?

>121 haydninvienna: Where are you planning to go?

>121 haydninvienna: Wishing you all the best for the house sale/move, and to Mrs H with her health.

>121 haydninvienna: Good luck with the sale and move and appointments.

>121 haydninvienna: May calm prevail in the turmoil of the next few months. It can happen!

You mention oatmeal, whiskey, and Milton, but minimize the uncertainties associated with family health and selling the house. It sounds as if you'll have plenty to keep you busy over the next eight weeks or so. Good luck!

Hope all goes well with health and home!

Strength to you both with the health problems and the move (not sure which is more stressful). Where's the new abode?

>122 pgmcc: >123 clamairy: >124 Sakerfalcon: >125 Karlstar: >126 MrsLee: >127 jillmwo: >128 Jim53: >129 hfglen: Thanks all. I expect to be busy indeed.

The proposed new abode is in Brisbane, where I was born and grew up. (Similar latitude to Durban, Hugh.) There seems to be a good selection of desirable residences there that would suit our needs and preferences at a vaguely affordable price. The climate gets a bit rough in late summer but we look to the wonders of air conditioning. And under the flat grey pall that is the English sky today, I can’t wait.

Best of luck with that. I hope it all goes as smoothly as possible.

>130 haydninvienna: Similar, but closer to St. Lucia and Sodwana Bay. One hazard St. Lucia has that Brisbane is spared -- hippos without lights wandering up the main road! Enjoy being warm in your new home.

>132 hfglen: There’s actually a Brisbane suburb called St Lucia. It’s where the main campus of the University of Queensland is. And it’s right on the river, so please don’t send any hippos. Fortunately, as an inner suburb in Brisbane’s dress circle, it will be well beyond our budget.

I commented a while back (#80) how violent the good old days were. How about this:

As a general rule, in fact, being a national leader has historically been a profession with a terrifyingly high mortality rate. A study of European monarchs between the years 600 and 1800 showed that more than one in five met with a violent death. And intentional, non-battlefield, extrajudicial homicide – assassination, in other words – was by far the most common form of violent death, with certain or suspected hit jobs accounting for fifteen per cent of all monarch deaths across those 1,200 years of European history. The study concludes that ‘European kingship before the Industrial Revolution was … amongst the most dangerous occupations found anywhere in the world’, with a murder rate that far outstrips even the most violent and crime-ridden contemporary cities, comparable only to the death rates of soldiers in the bloodiest of wars.
What we’re saying here is that Game of Thrones was a documentary.

… citing an article in the British Journal of Criminology. The quotation is from Conspiracy: A History of Boll*cks Theories, and How Not to Fall for Them, which turned up as a Kindle cheapie.

>134 haydninvienna: The statistics consistently say that we currently live in the safest time period of all time.

>134 haydninvienna: Not to mention that they didn't have toilet paper. No, for all our troubles, I will stick with today. I don't even long for the days of my childhood because in attitudes of acceptance of each other, we've come a long way, baby. Still much room for improvement, of course.

Agreed. We are much safer, unfortunately we constantly hear about terrible things happening and so parts of our brains assume it's gotten worse.

The only thing I miss is more green spaces. There are so many new Summer houses in this area. I hate seeing trees knocked down so someone can visit for a few weekends a year. :o(

Mrs H and I are sitting in our conservatory. Mrs H is scrolling on YouTube. An ad just popped up for a miracle cure for foot pain (presumably a useful one, as distinct from the “useless miracle cures” that it warns us not to waste money on). My jaw dropped because I thought I heard the voiceover utter the word “physiotherapist” as “fizzio-the-rapist”. Then it did it again, for certain. I mean, the BS level was close to 100% anyway, but was this a semi-literate voice-over artist or possibly an inadequately trained AI?

>138 haydninvienna: I could be wrong but that kind of narration sounds like text-to-machine-audio was being provided as the voice-over in the advertisement. Generally cheaper for the company than employing a human actor.

>138 haydninvienna: Reminds me of this cartoon.

>140 AHS-Wolfy: That's exactly what I was thinking of!

Gone! Four minutes! Well done gang!

The things you do. On a windy, cloudy Monday morning I’ve just picked up Paradise Lost and read Philip Pullman’s introduction. jillmwo has recently been discouraging us from reading introductions to classics—let me say that this was one introduction that was very much worth reading, even if you disagree with Pullman on who the “good guys” are. Pullman is absolutely right about how poetry works as an incantation, that poetry is not just elaborated prose (oddly, I remember reading something by Robert Graves once disparaging any poetry that didn’t make good prose sense—fortunately he knew better when writing his own poetry) and that poetry absolutely must be read aloud, even if in a whisper.

It also occurred to me that Tolkien must have had Milton’s descriptions of Hell in mind when describing Mordor. I don’t recall ever having seen it stated in print, maybe it’s just too obvious, but Mordor is clearly Hell. Certain other things follow from that which I’m not going to go into.

Now I’ve got Book 1 open and the Audible app, with the Dennis Quilley reading, loaded. Check back in an hour or so.

Now heard the first 2 episodes. It’s an “adaptation”, and the bits that are skipped seem to be getting longer. For example, they omit most of the description of Satan’s cronies, which takes up quite a bit of Book 1. I’m really going to have to find an unabridged version.

But what a reading! Quilley as the poet enunciates as beautifully as you would expect, but Ian McDiarmid as Satan is an absolute triumph—speaking in a kind of reptilian growl, and still beautifully enunciated. Abridged or not, this is superb listening.

More on Paradise Lost and Things I Really Didn’t Need to Know: having decided that I needed to buy the version I’m reading (published by Oxford University Press), I looked for the title on Amazon, and discovered that there are versions of it in plain English. I looked at the “look inside” on the kindle version of one of them. There could be no better demonstration of the truth of Philip Pullman’s opinion that the language of poetry is an indispensable part of it.

Pullman’s introduction to Book II:

The leaders of the rebel angels debate their next course of action, and decide to take their revenge by seducing the 'new race called Man' to their party. Satan sets off alone to undertake this great task, and the rest of the book concerns his journey to the gates of hell and out into the chaos beyond, and ends with a glimpse of the distant new world hanging in a golden chain, no bigger than a star beside the moon, beautiful and ignorant of the malice moving towards it. Apart from that magical cliffhanger of an ending, what never fails to thrill me in Book II is the sensuous power of the language, from the opening 'where the gorgeous East with richest hand Showers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold', through the savage wilderness that Satan traverses with such labour and determination: 'O'er bog or steep, through straight, rough, dense, or rare, With head, hands, wings or feet pursues his way, And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.' No one, not even Shakespeare, surpasses Milton in his command of the sound, the music, the weight and taste and texture of English words.

Relax: I don’t intend to quote all of his introductions.

>147 haydninvienna: You are making me look forward to reading this at some point this year. It was in my loose plan, but I keep picking up something else before it. I only hope I have one that hasn't been ruined by someone "fixing" it.

>148 MrsLee: I keep picking up something else before it: bit like me, really. Between Pullman on the one hand and Quilley, McDiarmid et al on the other, I think I’m coming to believe that I should read poetry only if I can also get a reading.

Off the chain in Oxford this afternoon, having decided that I needed to buy a copy of Paradise Lost (with Philip Pullman’s introductions, of course). I ordered a copy from Waterstones in Oxford and when I went there to collect it I also bought The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, and Babel-17 by Samuel R Delany. I think the latter 2 count as classics.

I have another copy of The Myth of Sisyphus in storage, but wanted to read it because of an article I came across recently in Mozilla Pocket (the article is available at https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2023/03/finding-joy-happiness-in-absu... if you have a subscription to The Atlantic):

Nowadays, any task combining boredom, struggle, stress, and futility might be labeled “Sisyphean.” Think of so-called duct-tapers in customer service, who are tasked to deal with angry people all day, while the conditions that create those aggressive customers never change. I’ve used the word to describe my former job as a French-horn player in a professional symphony orchestra (which was approximately 99 percent boredom, 1 percent terror). One could even argue that all of life is Sisyphean: We eat to just get hungry again, and shower just to get dirty again, day after day, until the end.

Absurd, isn’t it? Albert Camus, the philosopher and father of a whole school of thought called absurdism, thought so. In his 1942 book The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus singles out Sisyphus as an icon of the absurd, noting that “his scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing.” If that doesn’t make you want to reach for a filterless cigarette, I don’t know what will.

It would be easy to conclude that an absurdist view of life rules out happiness and leads anyone with any sense to despair at her very existence. And yet in his book, Camus concludes, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

>144 haydninvienna: I had an odd moment at some point within the past two or three days. I was reading an academic essay about Barchester Towers (because I suspect that pgmcc and I are working up to a discussion) and the author of the essay thought that Trollope was doing a send-up of Paradise Lost in one of his BT chapters. While I think personally this was likely not the scholarly gentleman's finest moment in literary analysis, I still had the Oxford University Press Paradise Lost sitting on the couch beside me and therefore I opened and re-visited Book One to see if I could see ANYTHING of his argument. Let me say again that Milton's language pulled me in and I'm going to re-arrange priorities to spend more time with this particular work. More on this topic on my own reading thread anon.

>150 haydninvienna: That is very close to being a book bullet. It echoes my train of thought lately, even to the idea that there is joy to be had anyway.

>151 jillmwo: Is that the PL with Pullman’s introductions?

>152 MrsLee: Camus was an atheist. You might want to take that into account. The book is basically a discussion of whether suicide is ever justified. Spoiler: no.

>153 haydninvienna: Yes, it is. It's a lovely edition.

I was idly wandering the net and discovered the Naxos Spoken Word Library. It appears to be, er, a streaming service for spoken-word recordings. £100 per year in the UK, and for that you get unlimited access to the Library. They have Milton and a lot of other English poetry, but I notice that they also have Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman. In case I’ve tempted anyone, the website is here: https://naxosaudiobooks.com/.

>153 haydninvienna: Yes, I know. I read The Fall. My review was conflicted, but I wouldn't mind giving him another shot. Sadly, the bookstore I was in today didn't have the book you mentioned, and I didn't want the one they had.

Still on the campaign of buying books instead of reading them: while doing errands yesterday I trawled through the charity shops and came away with The Chronicles of Amber and Tales of the Dying Earth, both in the Fantasy Masterworks editions, for £1.50 for both. The shop was having a 2-for-1 sale.

>157 haydninvienna: Good finds! I just picked up the Chronicles of Amber too.

Apropos of nothing in particular, I just spotted this in a thread about the Guardian's book recommendations, by Greg Baxter about Montaigne:

If aliens ever attack earth, and we have one opportunity to prove that the human species deserves a second chance, we must give them Montaigne, the humblest and most noble thinker and writer who ever lived. His incomparable exploration of the human condition begins with one fearless question: What do I know?

The thread is here, (more specifically here for Baxter's recommendations) and there seems to be quite a bit of interesting stuff in it.

ETA And I'm now reading a book that I would bet that no-one else in the Pub has read: Pleasures and Speculations by Walter de la Mare. Yes, I'd never heard of it either until I found it in the charity shop the other day. I have Come Hither and his Collected Poems, but I don't think i've ever read any of his prose.

>157 haydninvienna: Great finds!

The pickings at the Tesco book swap are getting more interesting. Today I dropped off a load of Mrs H’s discarded thrillers and came away with The Top 500 Poems and The Oxford Companion to the Mind. I’ve been flipping through the first one all afternoon. How about this, by Shelley:

England in 1819
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring;
Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.
A people starved and stabbed in th' untilled field;
An army, whom liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;
A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed—
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

I don’t know who it was who started the canard about Shelley being an ineffectual angel, but that doesn’t look particularly angelic.

The Top 500 Poems is compiled on the principle of the 500 most anthologised poems written in English. I haven’t seen any yet that aren’t from the United Kingdom or the United States—nothing from anywhere else in the Anglosphere and not much from Scotland or Ireland. Not many there that I haven’t seen before, not surprisingly.

What an interesting find! I agree that doesn't seem to be particularly angelic in tone. However, it does explain to me where a title of a particular book of history (sitting upstairs) came from. Carolly Erickson wrote Our Tempestuous Day which happens to be a history of Regency England. She must have been familiar with Shelley...(Always interesting to find original source of a quotation like that.)

Given that all of the poetry selected from the various popular anthologies was originally written in the English language, one can hardly be surprised about the selection centering on UK and US.

>162 jillmwo: While reading, I was playing Spot the Title. I must have seen a couple of dozen, and there were probably a lot that I missed such as your example.

There were a few poems that I would have liked to have seen there that I missed: Edward Thomas’s “Adlestrop”, for example:

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

There, two poems in one day.

I love the Thomas poem although nothing happens, and there’s no profound insight in it. As C S Lewis said in a somewhat different context, we have simply been shown something.

This may be a bit of a stretch, but does your book include John Greenleaf Whittier's poem about Barbara Fritchie?

Shoot if you must this old grey head,
but spare your country's flag, she said

A shade of sadness, a blush of shame,
Over the face of the leader came;

The nobler nature within him stirred
To life at that woman’s deed and word:

“Who touches a hair of yon gray head
Dies like a dog! March on!” he said.

All day long through Frederick street
Sounded the tread of marching feet:

All day long that free flag tost
Over the heads of the rebel host.

One of the things my mother would frequently quote...Historical specifics may be found in wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Fritchie

>164 jillmwo: I recently was made aware of that one while reading a Winston S. Churchill book about WWII. I think Churchill was quoting to Roosevelt because they drove past the place it happened.

>161 haydninvienna: What an appropriate find, as yesterday was National (possibly World?) Poetry Day!

>164 jillmwo: Yup, it’s there. Not such a stretch either—I remember it from one of my primary school books. In Australia.

>164 jillmwo: One of my favorite poems when I was a child. Thank you for the reminder.

>165 MrsLee:, >167 haydninvienna: and >168 clamairy: That story may be the chief reason we remember Whitttier as an American poet.

>169 jillmwo: I'll have to go dig out my old book of poems and see if there was anything else he wrote in there. (I memorized The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere as a child because of that book. A tale that was also embellished for the poem.)

Going fairly slowly with the de La Mare book mentioned in #159. Most of it is pretty mundane. In particular there’s a long essay on Poetry in Prose, which is mostly saying the same as F L Lucas does in Style, but at greater length. However, there is the occasional little surprise, such as him quoting a passionate love letter, and then telling us that it was written by Madeleine Smith (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeleine_Smith) to the lover whom she was soon afterwards accused of poisoning. Reminds you that de La Mare wrote some well-regarded ghost stories.

Following along with the discussion on the new AI-based search, I got to wondering, if ChatbotGPT is being used to write “reviews”, how long will it be before someone sues a trader who has posted such a “review” alleging misleading advertising?

In non-literary matters, I'm in the course of a new real-life experience: giving stuff away. As you may know, we are selling up and moving back to Oz, and we have the usual amount of household clutter, made worse by Mrs H's habit of buying too many small pieces of furniture. Rather than see all this stuff go to landfill, I created an account on Freegle (the UK equivalent of Freecycle--there was some sort of falling-out) and listed a few things. One matter that had to be dealt with was a fish tank and its finny inhabitants--we had jokingly suggested we would sell them with the house. If we were to try to take those into Australia, the Customs Service would have a fit. To my surprise, within the next 3 or 4 hours after I posted them we had at least five people express interest in taking them. Someone is collecting them tomorrow morning (inshallah).

>173 haydninvienna: That is awesome news. Good luck with giving away the rest of your stuff.

>173 haydninvienna: I hope your fishies will approve of their new owners! How much time do you have left before the move? How do you get your belongings moved? Do you rent a moving truck or do you have to hire a moving company? Have you chosen a new home already?

>175 Darth-Heather: I hope the fish will enjoy their new life too, but mainly I'm just hoping to find an alternative to putting them down the toilet (which seems to be the only other available solution). As to your other questions: we don't yet know exactly when settlement ("closing"for US-ians) will be; we will hire a removal company to pack and ship. Having done quite a few house moves (including a couple of international ones), I well know it's not fun, and I'd rather that the international formalities are done by someone who vaguely knows what they're doing. As to new quarters. once the house here is settled and we have the funds in hand, we will be looking for another place, but at the moment we know only that it will be in Brisbane and that there are some suburbs we would rather not go to. I'm getting alerts from a couple of real estate websites in Oz, which makes for some interesting reading, such as the idea of paying upwards of A$2.5 million for an apartment in the Brisbane CBD which looks pretty special, but which will become an island next time the Brisbane River has a major flood.

ETA and just in case anyone was wondering, the books are coming with us.

>176 haydninvienna: Wishing you well with this process. May it go as smooth as possible.

For other reasons I am looking around at my possessions with the idea of lightening the load. Specifically the family heirlooms. I don't think my kids are much interested in them, so will be sounding out the nieces and nephews.

I had a number of pieces of furniture that my dad built (he was a shopfitter by trade, back in the day when shop display cabinets were built by real people with real tools out of real wood and glass). when we left Oz I had to abandon most of it. All I have left is a handsome dining table and chairs, which we are still using. But who knows what will happen to it after I'm done with it?

I was in a shop in Cairns (north Queensland) once in the late 1980s (Dad died in 1986) and saw that the glass-fronted counter I was standing at had a makers' plate on it: "F H Leutchford & Co, Brisbane". Dad worked for them between about 1950 and 1973 when he retired, and had worked for them on contracts in Cairns. He may have built that counter.

>178 haydninvienna: My grandmother worked in the library in this town back in the 50s and 60s. Every now and then I will come across a book which she cataloged. I know this because her writing is very distinctive. Usually I find them in the cast-off shelves because they are older. It gives me a warm feeling to happen on her writing.

>173 haydninvienna: That's a big move! Good luck with everything.

>180 Narilka: Thank you!

ETA >177 MrsLee: Thank you also (I just noticed that I hadn't).

Update to #175: Fish and tank now all collected by a fellow who seems to know what he's doing. I hope the finny people enjoy their adventure.

>181 haydninvienna:
Richard, all the very best with this move. It is quite a change. I hope all goes well and there are no hiccups or additional stress factors.

Wishing you all the best for your new home back home.

>182 pgmcc: Thanks Peter.

Interesting little essay that showed up on my Pocket feed today: https://www.raptitude.com/2023/03/be-dignified-as-a-rule/. The most interesting bit was this:

We’re more engaged while reading from a beautiful hardcover than from a computer printout, or in a lamplit armchair rather than a plastic patio chair. Wine tastes better out of a spotless wineglass than from a paper cup.

Interesting in at least two ways: the reference to reading on good printed paper rather than a screen; and the wineglass. I vaguely remember from decades ago a reference to the unpleasantness of seeing butter spread with an old (but very clean!) razor. I think it was in one of Arthur Koestler’s books, possibly The Act of Creation.

>178 haydninvienna: Good luck with your move. I hope when the time comes, that table goes to someone who appreciates the craftmanship, even if they can't relate to the history.

>185 Karlstar: Thanks mate. I agree about the table.

We might need to have a discussion about why the Billy bookcase in its infinite varieties has been such a success. As part of the clearing-out exercise, I'm giving away some timber bookcases:


I had 3 of these (yes, they were once filled) but I don't regret their passing. Biggest problem is that they have a flat strip of timber down each of the sides which overlaps the shelves. Any books at either end of a shelf are not visible from the front and are harder to get out. I have 6 Billys in two different sizes and I will regret them much more. One of the beauties of the Billy is that it's simple: nothing to get in the way of the books. More, they don't present any visual clutter to detract from the appearance of the books. Which is a good thing if you have decent-looking books.

>186 haydninvienna: I agree. I have 3 of that type, one I picked up cheap from someone selling it, the other two were on sale from a local hardware store. The trim strip that obscures the books on the ends is very annoying.

My Easter—Mrs H and I had dinner with my daughter Katherine and her partner Eddie on Friday evening. Their big news: Eddie has been awarded his PhD in data science. At the moment he is doing data analysis for the National Health Service. Katherine is working for a law firm in Cardiff doing IT support. Not the career path I would have predicted for her, but hey.

Saturday afternoon was lunch at the local pub with my former colleague Manuel and his wife Edna. Edna wanted a pair of Hunter boots “like the Queen wears” and came to the Bicester Village outlet centre to find them, successfully. Manuel texted me from Foyles bookshop in London today thanking me for my suggestion to go there.

Yesterday and today for Mrs H and me was recovery from all that dissipation. I also put a couple more small items up on the swap website.

ETA meant to add: I hope everyone who celebrates Easter had a happy one.

>188 haydninvienna:
It sounds like you had a nice Easter.

>188 haydninvienna: What Peter said, it sounds like a lovely weekend.

>188 haydninvienna: Sounds like a great weekend. Thank you and the same to you.

>188 haydninvienna: I'm glad you had a good weekend, and got a bit of a break from moving-related chores. Hope everything goes smoothly.

Um, this is weird. I noted that Al Jaffee, one of the Mad Magazine artists, died the other day. (As Clam said, Mad defined my teenage years. And I used to be a subscriber!) But after reading Jaffee's Wikipedia article, I looked at the one on Don Martin (as you do) and down at the bottom saw a link to "Works by Don Martin at Project Gutenberg". I was never not going to click that link! It appears that Don Martin illustrated some issues of Galaxy in 1960 or thereabouts. There's a story by Laurence M Janifer
(credited as by Larry M Harris, which was one of Janifer's pen-names) called "Extracts from the Galactic Almanack--Music Around the Universe", which is a bit laboured but has a few weird ideas (like a musician who really can "play in the cracks"). Wouldn't be worth bothering with except for Don Martin's unmistakeable illustrations.

Completely out of left field: Somebody (I think it might have been hfglen) a while ago mentioned an LP recording, now unavailable, of songs from J R R Tolkien's books, set to music by Donald Swann and performed by Swann, a tenor named William Elwin, and with Tolkien himself reading from The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and the poem "A Elbereth Gilthoniel". I knew then that I had once owned a copy, and that I might still have it among the stored accumulation. Wonderful what you find when you're cleaning out for a move:


It seems to be still flat, although it's probably dirty. I'm going to see if I can get it digitised.

>194 haydninvienna:
That is a wonderful find. Good luck with getting it back into playing condition.

>194 haydninvienna: Is that Donald Swann as in Flanders and Swann? It sounds like a great collection of recordings.

>194 haydninvienna: Very cool!

>196 Sakerfalcon: The very self same.

>194 haydninvienna: Amazing find!

>194 haydninvienna: Wow, that is wonderful!

A bit more weirdness about the house move: we have 2 wicker baskets of horse ashes and 2 small wooden boxes of dog ashes which we would have liked to take to Oz. We had the guy from the removal firm here yesterday and I mentioned the horse ashes. His response was, no way. I had looked at the border Force website and seen a specific statement that there are no special requirements for the importation of ashes (human or animal). However, the containers must be free of soil, seeds, insects and other contaminants. What this means is that the ashes and their containers are subject to inspection. The dog ashes are in small wooden boxes (wood in itself could be a problem, but isn't usually). The horse ashes are in square wicker containers and are far too heavy to be taken in baggage. I can just imagine the response if the shipping company declared that there were 2 baskets of horse ashes somewhere in a 40-foot shipping container and Customs wanted the container unloaded ...

Suffice to say that the horse ashes are going to be scattered at the farm where the horses were stabled. The dog ashes can come with us and be declared. If they end up in the incinerator (again!), so be it.

>201 haydninvienna: Well, that's a bit different as moving stories go. Honestly, the things one wouldn't think to ask about before shifting household goods from one country to another.

>201 haydninvienna: That is not a situation I've heard of before. How's the packing going? Congrats on the find in >194 haydninvienna:.

>201 haydninvienna: Maybe it is the porous wicker that is the problem? Or did he even look at the containers? I only moved from state to state, but I had cremains from three cats and two dogs, which they packed without comment. I had put my husband's ashes in the safe in my closet, and the moving company forgot that! So I had to have my son and his friend put that in my SUV.

>204 clamairy: The problem is indeed the containers and what might or might not be attached to them. You may or may not be aware how strict Australian Customs is about biohazard material such as plants, seeds and live insects (those TV programs, if you've seen them, do not lie). But they are terrifyingly strict and the penalties are draconian. The Pickfords guy looked at the containers but not in them--I haven't ever looked in them either, but when I told him the containers held horse's ashes, as I said, his response was "no way". Just in passing, here is the Australian Border Force webpage on pet ashes: https://bicon.agriculture.gov.au/BiconWeb4.0/ImportConditions/Conditions?Evaluat.... (that's actually a query for a search.)

Update: we've now had the quote from them, and it was more than I hoped but less that I feared, so in all acceptable. This is a big international firm that also moved me back here from Doha, and I was impressed with the service then. Same now, so I'll use them even though I know that they probably aren't the cheapest.

>205 haydninvienna: Re the quote, when it comes to things like this, going with a mover who you've dealt with in the past can be a real help in coping the general insanity of the process.

(My husband always looks at me like a deer in the headlights when I suggest that moving might be a reasonable next step for us to take.)

>205 haydninvienna: When I did work & travel and worked on a cattle station in Australia (in 2006), my grandma sent me a letter for Christmas and alas, she put a straw star into it. Of course it never reached me, but she received a letter from the Australian immigration.

How exciting to move to Brisbane! It is such a lovely city. Of course I have only visited as a tourist, but my impressions have been wonderful.

>205 haydninvienna: When I visited Melbourne in 2011, I had the misfortune to be on the same flight as the Springbok rugby team (arrogant, egotistical bunch of bleeeeps, especially the coach). They nearly got thrown out of Immigration because they hadn't cleaned their boots properly. I was moved to cheer the immigration guy, but restrained myself.

It makes perfect sense. In this part of North America we are losing many of our bats because of a fungus a caver (or several cavers) apparently tracked into caves on uncleaned hiking boots. Our bats had no previous exposure, and the populations are plummeting.

>207 MissBrangwen: I grew up in Brisbane, but that was 50+ years ago and a lot has changed since then (mostly for the better).

ETA >208 hfglen: only time I ever flew with a football team was once with the Canberra Raiders rugby league team on the way to a game in Sydney the following day. They were all very quiet, very focused. I don't remember whether they won the game.

>209 clamairy: You don't need to tell me about introduced pests. Cane toads, rabbits, foxes, mynah birds, pigs, goats, rats, camels, various weeds, agricultural and animal diseases ... Australia has lots of experience with that stuff and doesn't want any more.

>210 haydninvienna: Not to mention the humans. The most destructive invasive pests of all. :(

>211 clamairy: As to how to fix all those problems: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/australian-invasive-species.

Since people cause so much destruction worldwide, a recipe for human, cooked with garlic cloves and bay leaves, is also included.

Bwahaha!

>213 clamairy: The book (Eat the Problem) is quite stunning visually, but it's A$277.77 (something like US$240). Not right now, thanks. Two copies on LT though, I'm pleased to say.

I need a laugh. The business of selling the house is getting to be a serious pain. But of course we are also looking at lots of real estate advertisements for properties in Australia. Which reminds me of the genius of Fred Dagg (that is, John Clarke, the New Zealand-born comedian who became a much-loved part of the media landscape in Australia). Here's his take on a typical real estate advertisement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbFlstJ4u8E. The text is here: https://stilgherrian.com/marketing/fred_dagg_on_real_estate/.

Something that got a bit of an airing in the Pub a while back: Cré na Cille (or Graveyard Clay or The Dirty Dust, depending on which of the two translations you prefer). This article from The New Yorker has just turned up in my Pocket feed: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-irish-novel-thats-so-good-people.... I'm pleased to see that they think that Graveyard Clay is more faithful to the original, given that that's the one I have (as recommended by pgmcc in Hodges Figgis in Dublin, where I bought it). While there's nothing in the article that I actually disagree with, I think it could have been made plainer that the book is, in fact, funny, if you like your humour absolutely ace-of-spades, coal-cellar-at-midnight black.

Odd (or maybe not) that all but 3 of the 17 "mentions" on the work page are from the GD.

>216 haydninvienna:
That is a very interesting article. Like you, I think they missed a trick by not mentioning that it is funny. I also think they overplayed the idea of the book being vulgar. I am also pleased I have ready the more faithful translation. I also bought “The Dirty Dust” with a view to reading it to compare it with “The Graveyard Clay”, but thanks to this article’s description of the translator’s attitude to translation, and his lack of enthusiasm to seek more accurate phrasing, I find my self unlikely to bother with .”The Dirty Dust”. “The Graveyard Clay” is the one for me. Strongly recommended.

>215 haydninvienna: Sorry to hear that selling the house is presenting difficulties. I'm aware of how that goes and it isn't fun at all, it took us a year to sell.

>217 pgmcc: Re "recommended": you did. You were with me in Hodges Figgis when I bought it.

>218 Karlstar: We had the buyer's mortgage lender's surveyor (what I think of as a valuer) here last Thursday, so some progress is being made.

>216 haydninvienna: &>217 pgmcc: The touchstone takes me to "The Dirty Dust" so how do I find "The Graveyard Clay"? Can you give the name of the translator? Subjects of Graveyard and black humor are a special interest of mine.

>220 MrsLee: LT does appear confused on this. I will get back to you when not on my phone.

>220 MrsLee:
Yale University Press 2016
Translator: Tim Robinson
I have sent LT book link to you in Messenger.

>219 haydninvienna: Good, I hope they don't come up with any issues.

>222 pgmcc: Thank you, I wondered what the messenger message was. I don't have access to messenger on my phone, so will wait to open it until I have access to my laptop.

>220 MrsLee: I just recalled where you worked, and am imagining you imagining conversations taking place under ground …

>225 haydninvienna: Honestly, from the remark above, I didn't know what the book was about, and I hadn't read the article, until today. I still want it, reminds me of Our Town the play by Thornton Wilder, only the dirty version. It might make me blush, but sounds like it could be interesting, too.

You are right about the conversations. Some folks in our cemetery are buried next to people they never would have associated with in life. I wonder how they are getting along.

Back to the British Heart Foundation shop this afternoon, which netted me The Quark and the Jaguar, by Murray Gell-Mann, and Tuf Voyaging by George R R Martin. I seem to attract books by Nobel laureates in physics: I have books by at least Steven Weinberg, Richard Feynman, Frank Wilczek, Kip Thorne and now Gell-Mann.

Tuf Voyaging is a fix-up of a number of stories about Haviland Tuf, who has by some unusual circumstances become the owner of a huge starship with enormous biowarfare capabilities, and uses it to become a trader, in among other things, exotic animals. I vaguely remember reading "A Beast for Norn", the first story to be published, decades ago. In the Wikipedia article about the book, though, I found this (speaking of the last story, "Manna from Heaven", published in Analog of December 1985) :

Tuf returns to S'uthlam for the second time to pay off the last of his debt. This time, S'uthlam is on the brink of war with the allied forces of the neighboring worlds. Mune, now First Councillor or planetary leader, comes aboard the Ark to discuss with Tuf the possibility of acquiring the seedship for S'uthlam's own purposes.

S'uthlam's population problem remains, worse than ever, as Tuf's innovations from his previous visit were not maximally used. Its society is beginning to break down and either a terrible war or utter social collapse seems likely. Tuf labors to find a solution, and calls a meeting of all the worlds about to clash. He presents to them his solution: an edible, mildly addictive plant called "manna", which will freely grow everywhere on S'uthlam and eliminate its hunger problems. After some arm-twisting, in which Tuf threatens to use the military might of his seedship against anyone who refuses, the hostile worlds agree to an armistice. Tuf later tells a horrified Mune that the manna will indeed feed her people, but will also inhibit the libidos of the S'uthlamese and cause widespread, but not universal, infertility. He leaves Mune to make a momentous decision for S'uthlam; it is implied that she accepts the provision of manna to forestall war and famine.

This is interesting because I remember a story published in Analog some time in the 1960s, probably by Christopher Anvil, about an alien embassy to the Earth being met by a very junior Space Force officer who is appointed by Earth on the spot as ambassador despite knowing nothing about diplomacy, the aliens, or anything else relevant. The point is that the aliens are mind-readers, hence the need for an ambassador who knows nothing, and that the effect and purpose of benefits that the aliens have previously bestowed on Earth (a plant that can be grown in any climate and on any soil, all parts of which were tasty and nutritious; a super-effective contraceptive; a crystal material that was the basis for advanced computing and communications) are to make Earth totally dependent on those benefits, but the aliens could withdraw them at will and render the Earth helpless. But of course being Analog, and (probably) a Christopher Anvil story, clever old Earth has a trick up its collective sleeve. Point is, I wonder if Martin remembered that story as well?

ETA: ISFDB shows a story by Anvil called "In the Light of Further Data" in the July 1965 issue of Analog. The date is about right, and the title seems appropriate. The issue is available from various sellers, but I'm not about to buy a copy just to salve my curiosity.

>227 haydninvienna: Great history of those stories, thanks! I had not read or heard of the Christopher Anvil story previously.

>228 Karlstar: If it really was a Christopher Anvil story, it would have been a pretty typical one. "Anvil" (whose real name was Harry Christopher Crosby) was one of John W Campbell's favourite writers, and wrote a good many stories about resourceful, independent Earthmen (always men) defeating more powerful but duller or more rule-bound aliens.

I'm a bit shamed by pgmcc having just started his fourth thread for 2023 and I'm still on my first! You may or may not have noticed that I haven't reported reading anything (except for a couple of articles from Pocket) for a couple of months. However, this morning Blurb Your Enthusiasm: An A-Z of Literary Persuasion showed up as a kindle cheapie from Amazon. I bought it on the spot and am actually reading it. So far, not bad. Despite the title, it's not all about the blurbs--there is stuff on matters like titles (including subtitles), cover designs and everything else that goes into or onto a book as persuasion to buy it.

>230 haydninvienna: Hey, don't feel badly. In your defense Peter starts new threads pretty soon after hitting the 150 post mark because they are loaded with images. And you have a lot going on there!

>230 haydninvienna: Harrumph. You, the lucky devil, get a special price on Blurb Your Enthusiasm which -- by the way-- sounds terrific, but for me here in the States, it's still full price.

>230 haydninvienna:
I think it is a matter of “Never Mind the Quality; Feel the Width”.

Your posts are much more content rich than mine.

>233 pgmcc: Your posts are much more content-rich ...: flattering (and thank you) but untrue.

You may have noticed that I frequently scan the book swap at our local Tesco supermarket. Mostly I'm looking for James Pattersons and whatnot for my wife, but there's the occasional oddity. This morning produced a real surprise: Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam, as translated by Edward FitzGerald, in an edition by Tony Briggs, Emeritus Professor of Russian at the University of Birmingham. Briggs's introduction argues a strong case for FitzGerald to be regarded as a major English poet of the second rank, along with Housman and Thomas Gray. The book also includes another translation from the Persian that FitzGerald did not publish during his lifetime, "Bird Parliament" by the poet Farrid Ud-Din Attar.

FitzGerald seems to have been a fascinating character: wealthy, but without any particular ambition, he lived a quiet life learning languages and translating (not only from Persian but also Greek), maintaining a large correspondence and for a time being a partner (probably in both senses) with a herring fisherman. The (very free) translation of some quatrains attributed to the Persian astronomer known as Omar Khayyam was hardly noticed at first: the first edition, published by the bookseller Bernard Quaritch in a small pamphlet containing only 75 quatrains, took years to sell out, until it was noticed by D G Rossetti and Swinburne. (Briggs notes that one of those small pamphlets would now cost thousands of pounds at auction. The other statistic that startled me was that the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations contains more than half of the text of the first edition, because it's so familiar as quotations.) There were four further editions during FitzGerald's lifetime; Briggs argues that FitzGerald's first thoughts were usually his best thoughts, so that this edition is mostly that of the first edition with some additional quatrains from later editions.

ETA Having read the poem--yes, it's all quotations. The first of these two quatrains might be a bit less familiar, although the second two lines of the second one might ring a bell:

Indeed, indeed Repentance oft before
I swore--but was I sober when I swore?
And then and then came Spring, and Rose-in-Hand
My threadbare Penitence apieces tore.

And much as Wine has play'd the Infidel,
And robb'd me of my Robe of Honour--well,
I often wonder what the Vintners buy
One half so precious as the goods they sell.

>234 haydninvienna: Nice find!

You win some, you lose some. Today has been an interesting day.

The sort-of-good news first. We are grandparents for the first time. My stepdaughter Alexandra is (was) pregnant with a daughter, due in August. But we got a text from her this morning to say that our new little grand-daughter had other ideas--born by emergency caesarean section this morning. Three months preemie is a bit of a drama but I've known other parents who coped with it.

The not-so-good news: our purchasers are having trouble with their financier. The mortgage loan on our house is fine, but they hoped to arrange a mortgage on their present house and rent it. Interest rates have risen enough that the rental plan may not be viable. We are told that the buyers are still committed to buying our place, but who knows?

>236 haydninvienna:
Congratulations on your grandchild.

Sorry to hear about the buyer’s finance hiccup. Hoping it will be sorted soon.

>236 haydninvienna: The economy is -- to use a technical term -- bonkers. Rumors cause more problems in banking and real estate than do the actual facts. As Peter notes, I hope it gets sorted soon.

And best wishes for the mother and child. It's a little harrowing having a preemie but the available neo-natal care options are so much better now than they've been in the past.

>236 haydninvienna: May your granddaughter grow with health and love, and your daughter mend quickly. Hoping the house transactions keep moving forward as well.

Your book find seems right up your alley! Love the bit you quoted.

>237 pgmcc: >238 jillmwo: >239 MrsLee: Thanks, all. And the English conveyancing system is—to use another technical term—broken. But here’s hoping.

Alexandra (stepdaughter) seemed to be in reasonable condition yesterday morning, considering. She’s an organised sort of person so (given decent medical care, which can be safely assumed) she should cope OK.

ETA One thing I didn't mention was that our new grandchild Alena Perri has two half-brothers, the elder of whom is in his mid teens--don't recall exactly. The relationship of Alexandra and her partner Anthony has been somewhat turbulent but they seem to be pretty settled now, and Ant with all his faults has been a pretty good father to his boys.

Alexandra told us yesterday that she got an emergency air ambulance journey from Port Macquarie to Newcastle, where there is a major hospital. Bet that's one piece of travel she won't be eager to repeat.

Just to revert to literary matters: I'm reading English Food by Diane Purkiss. I was prompted to get this from the library by a review from (I think) the Guardian, which mentioned a demolition of the idea of "authenticity". So far the only demolition I've come across is of Elizabeth David, but I'm wondering if the attack on "authenticity" mightn't be implicit in one of Purkiss's main themes, which is that there really isn't much on a British or English menu that could be called traditional in the longer term. Almost everything comes from elsewhere, starting with the Romans (who brought a taste for, among other things, fine white bread). In particular, the traditional full English breakfast is more nearly the full Scottish breakfast, and neither the English nor the Scottish version would have had baked beans on it (and I'm aware that there is also an equally traditional full Irish breakfast). The idea of food coming from elsewhere isn't entirely new: I have a vague memory of a poem of somewhen about the time of Pope speaking of sweetening the infusion of a leaf from China with the juice of an Indian cane. And we have just been watching Jamie Oliver touring Britain talking about British food and how most of the ideas (even if not necessarily the ingredients) came from elsewhere, and are still coming; and how much of the food culture comes from immigrants (which can't have put too much joy into the souls of the government--this was filmed just before Theresa May's "hostile environment" for immigrants).

Traditional fish and chips: Jewish immigrants, and possibly some inspiration from troops returning from the First World War who had eaten pommes-frites in France and Belgium
Traditional full English: invented during the 1920s (as simply "the brave British breakfast of bacon and eggs"*, and the baked beans and other bits and pieces came later)
Traditional Christmas dinner: Dickens (and the centrepiece would have been a goose rather than a turkey (ETA although both occur in A Christmas Carol)
Traditional ploughman's lunch: dairy advertising during the 1960s

*there is a prize of very small value for anyone who can guess the source of this quotation.

It's telling that the most British of British dishes now is said to be chicken tikka masala, which could be regarded either as a cultural appropriation of a traditional Indian style of cooking or a happy invention uniting two (at least) sets of culinary practices (three if you put chips with it). But thinking about the difference between chicken tikka masala and, say, sweet and sour chicken: both are a protein fried in a fat plus some vegetables plus some liquid to make a sauce, plus spices or other flavourings. I would bet that the pattern occurs in all food cultures that have invented frying. Likewise, I'd bet that the pattern of a stew occurs in all food cultures that have the physical equipment for it. So where does authenticity come in (ducks for cover)? (And I realise that sweet and sour chicken is also a Western adaptation or appropriation--but for it to be an adaption or appropriation, there has to be an original of which it is an adaptation or appropriation, surely. It's irrelevant that that original is only a very tiny part pf the food culture of India or China.)

Purkiss suggests that cookbooks are a very insecure source for what people actually ate--the modern aspirational cook book (bought and kept, but never actually cooked from) is not a new phenomenon. Somebody (it might have been Jane Grigson, but I'm not sure) started looking into eighteenth-century cookery writers such as Mrs Raffald, on the premise that people who sat on Chippendale furniture to eat from elegant Wedgwood dinnerware were unlikely to be eating swill. Purkiss is suggesting that Mrs Raffald may have been portraying what she thought ought to be rather than what was: that in reality, maybe those people were the eighteenth-century equivalent of someone eating beans on toast while reading Nigella Lawson or the Barefoot Contessa.

>241 haydninvienna: I think I found the take-down of authenticity, at least as far as food is concerned: "Why would we want authenticity anyway? Authenticity is two schoolboys coming home from school and eating bramble tops because they can't be sure of anything to eat when they arrive.". Point is, most of the real history of food is the history of poverty food, and often of very dire poverty.

>241 haydninvienna: Ms Purkiss is ranging further than I expected: "[Pigs] could also have helped the community's health by eating human faeces; some parts of India still have pig toilets, in which styed pigs are deliberately stationed under a human latrine.". Wow. Was this the original reason why pigs were regarded as unclean in Islam and Judaism?

>241 haydninvienna: - >243 haydninvienna: Interesting thoughts. Here in the USA, and especially California, we have borrowed so many cultures cooking I hardly know if we have anything "authentic" of our own. I have read a book on the terroir of foods here. Still, the methods of cooking are all going to be borrowed, yes?

>241 haydninvienna: "the pattern of a stew occurs in all food cultures that have the physical equipment for it."

Yerrrssss, but. I'd suggest that the variations are infinite and not necessarily confusable (if there is such a word). I'm thinking of Cape Town in particular, where you might find a Malay bredie (the link is to an unfortunately commercial recipe) only a couple of kilometres in space but far in concept from an Afrikaans potjie. For one thing, the Malay version comes from a Muslim tradition, but the ancestral makers of potjiekos were wine farmers.

>241 haydninvienna: I saw something this morning in a news feed discussing the current turmoil on TikTok over differences in the American and British handling of Chinese take-out (take-away). In such instances, whether or not it's actually authentically-prepared Chinese food (as originally developed in China) becomes a side issue. Apparently these were people who were primarily upset that our versions vs. their versions of take-out looked so totally different as to be somewhat offensive. (Although apparently the containers in which the food was delivered were also a source of concern.)

Just found the source. Sharing here as a gifted article (no paywall) so you can read if if you choose.
https://wapo.st/3O6xFrk

>234 haydninvienna: Congratulations on the new grandchild and I hope all is going well with the new young one. That's very early.

Sorry to hear about the problems with the sale, are you still listing it to find a buyer with better finances?

>244 MrsLee: Agreed, we borrow/adapt everything.

>246 jillmwo: With the greatest possible respect to the worthy Tik-Tokers, that is beyond ridiculous. Of course take-away/takeout practices differ from country to country, even for what is nominally the same food. I have eaten Chinese take-away here, in Doha and in Australia, and it's different in each place. Noticeably, it's blander in England, and you can indeed get chips with it. Sit-down Chinese is different was well. (I even ate sit-down Chinese in a small village in western Austria once, and it was pretty reasonable.) Even more, there's a Turkish restaurant in Bicester that was once recommended in the Guardian as a good place to go when visiting Bicester. We had a couple of goodish Turkish restaurants in Canberra, and I can say with some authority that Bicester Turkish is more adapted to the English taste than Canberra Turkish would be. Authenticity is not part of the game.

>244 MrsLee: Well, there are only so many ways of cooking anything! Almost by definition, cooking involves the application of heat. There's only a limited number of ways of doing that.

>245 hfglen: I agree about "the pattern of a stew", and how the variations are not necessarily confusable, but all I meant was that "the pattern of a stew" is slow cooking in a liquid, probably with vegetables and possibly with a grain such as barley. Once you get past the basic pattern, it could be bredie or daube or casserole or cassoulet or whatever.

ETA and I'm not even going to embark on a discussion of "fusion food" in which combining ideas from different cultures is the whole point. Anti-authenticity?

>244 MrsLee: I volunteer with a drop-in program which gives people the opportunity to improve their English by engaging in informal small group discussions. The subject of food often comes up, especially towards the end of the evening when we’re probably all getting hungry, and as an older person and life-long local resident I am often asked what constitutes “local” food. Now, that’s a hard question. As a child I had “Chinese food” on special occasions, although I imagine it was pretty inauthentic. At its best it reflected only Cantonese cuisine, since that was the dominant source of Chinese immigration to my city. But other “foreign food” was generally sought out only by those who shared its origin. I remember the first time I ate pizza; now any one-year old has been handed a crust to teethe on. I suppose the stuff I grew up on—-pork chop, mashed potatoes, canned peas—-was basically “English food.” Nothing really “indigenous.”

Authenticity. There's a very simple Australian delicacy called a lamington. Basically a lamington is a cube of butter cake (about 2 inches on a side), iced with chocolate icing (US: "frosting") and smothered in desiccated coconut. There are also versions with different icings--the most common variant icing is strawberry. There are debates about authenticity even over something as simple as this. Or the Anzac biscuit--a biscuit (US: "cookie") made of flour, rolled oats, coconut and golden syrup. This is an unusual case, since the word "Anzac" is legally protected in Australia and New Zealand, and "Anzac biscuits" can be called that only if made to a fairly closely controlled recipe (such as this one: https://www.womensweeklyfood.com.au/recipes/best-anzac-biscuits-recipe-28575). this is the rare case in which "authenticity" can be determined with some certainty.

>236 haydninvienna: Congratulations on the new addition to the family!

>236 haydninvienna: Oh my! That's a lot to take in. Congratulations on the granddaughter, and I join the others in wishing her good health. I hope all gets straightened out with the house sale..

>248 haydninvienna: According to the Culinary Institute here, 'fusion' is one of the most popular current food trends, so at least some people are moving away from any concept of authentic food.

>251 Narilka: >252 clamairy: Thank you both.

>236 haydninvienna: Congratulations on being grandparents. The good Afrikaans word vasbyt (roughly, bite the bullet hard) was invented for the house sale situation.

>236 haydninvienna: Congratulations on your new granddaughter! I hope she will grow strong soon and bring much happiness to you all.

Good luck with the house sale. Property transactions in the UK are a nightmare.

>255 hfglen: >256 Sakerfalcon: Thanks both of you. As I said above, the conveyancing system here is broken. Very odd, when you think how property-focused the economy here has become.

Kind of sorry (not sorry!) to be still banging on about “authenticity” but it occurs to me that the concept is a shibboleth:

The starting premise for this ACLA seminar, however, is that "shibboleth*" is a critical and theoretical concept whose explanatory and interpretative power ranges across the entire terrain, so to speak, of comparative literature; and, furthermore, than those moments where this concept would be useful are not necessarily marked by the actual presence of the word “shibboleth.” Even though "shibboleth" has everything to do with boundaries and distinctions, as a concept it's also portable, enabling analogy and interface between disciplines, discourses, and archives. Any inquiry touching on the political dimensions of—to give just a few examples—borders, translation, accent, assimilation, passing, constructions of group identity (tribe, race, ethnicity, nation, culture, etc.), code-switching, disability, orality vs. literacy, nature vs. culture, hybridity, embodiment, the "hidden curriculum," or the security/surveillance state will likely run across events, objects, and dynamics that can fairly and generatively be described as “shibbolethic.”

(From https://www.acla.org/shibboleth-critical-concept-comparative-literature). They might have mentioned most of what is called “etiquette” and even a good deal of what is called “morals”, at least the bits that don’t deal with cruelty. Shibboleths divide people into Us and Them. People who know an authentic adobo or cassoulet or paella are Us; everyone else is Them.

* I assume that no-one needs me to post the origin of this curious word, but you never know. If asked I will. The source of the quotation above considered it necessary to explain it.

Of course all of this really is simply an attempt to justify the description in >233 pgmcc: of my posts as “content-rich”.

We are watching real-estate porn ("Escape to the Country") on TV. I've noticed in 2 shows in a row now that someone has referred to a house as a "Tardis", meaning that it was bigger inside than it looked from the outside. So the creators of "Doctor Who" have added a word to the language.

One day at a professional conference, I used the phrase "wibbley-wobbley, timey-wimey stuff" to a long-time friend and she knew exactly what I meant in that context. Doctor Who brings a lot to the table.

>259 haydninvienna: & >260 jillmwo:

Dr Who has been around in this universe since 23rd November, 1963. I am not surprised it has had some effect.

“Bowties are cool.”

>248 haydninvienna: Re fusion food: https://xkcd.com/2778.

>236 haydninvienna: I'm only seeing this now because I was away from LT for a while. Best wishes for your step-daughter and the baby, and I hope that the issues around the house dissolve quickly.

>259 haydninvienna: That's cool!

>245 hfglen: Read this at the time and appreciated main point, but now thinking about “wine farmers” and how English speakers must have decided that “vintners” sounded much classier. I am familiar with the Alsatian Route des Vins and know that these people are very much “farmers” in the first instance.

>263 MissBrangwen: Thank you!

>264 booksaplenty1949:
You have put me onto another US /UK English difference. On this side of the Atlantic a Vintner is a wine merchant. It was only when you referred to wine farmers being called vintners that I did a bit of digging as all my life vintners has been reserved for wine merchants, my father being one. It appears it is a North American usage to call wine producers vintners.

>264 booksaplenty1949: >266 pgmcc: Seconded.See the quotation from Omar Khayyam in >235 Karlstar:. The fellow whom makes the wine is a vigneron, if you want a fancy word for them.

>267 haydninvienna: ... or maybe a cellarmaster?

>268 hfglen: Wouldn’t the cellarmaster be in charge of the cellar? Of course any one or more of the various jobs might be combined in one person.

>267 haydninvienna: Yes, vigneron is the French term. But these people are out driving tractors, if slopes permit, and doing other “farmer” type things, like pest control. Before they get to bottling and all that. Have watched cremant being bottled with the help of a great big special machine that puts the cork in under pressure. Looked like some sort of thresher. It was rented for the day and shared by all the local vintners. Set up in a central barnyard.

Here's a bit of cuteness (or something) that turned up on Pocket this morning: Why Do Dogs Tilt Their Heads to One Side? The reason that this interests me is that one — just one — of Mrs H's horses does it too. The horse in question is Manton (always called "Mo"), a bay gelding with a somewhat distinguished competition history that Mrs H bought very cheaply when his former owners were retiring him. He is a big boy (18.2 hands), fortunately with a very gentle temperament. But he thinks he is Mr Ed. If I went into the stable with carrots or apples, there would be Mo sticking his head (turned on one side) out of the stall looking at me inquiringly. Other horses in the stable might look, but not with their heads turned. So on the basis of this sample of one individual of a different species, I find plausible the idea that it's unusually "gifted" dogs that do it.

Beautiful spring morning in Bicester. Couple of updates.

Granddaughter Alena and her mother are doing OK. Alena won't be out of the preemie unit for a few weeks yet but we hope to see her and her new parents in August.

Re the giving-stuff-away situation: I got a taker for another unlikely offer: a large pile of plastic clothes hangers:

I didn't count them but there must be several dozen at least.

Somebody messaged me yesterday, agreed to take them and said her partner would collect them. Partner appeared, collected, and when I asked out of curiosity why they wanted so many, said "she has a ridiculous amount of clothes". I had expected to be told that she took in ironing, or something like that. Anyway, the hangers are no longer my problem.

Our buyers apparently have a cash buyer for their own house. So it's Game On for the house sale.

And on a whim I have just ordered a copy of Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman.

>272 haydninvienna:
That is a super good-news post. I am delighted with Alena’s progress.

In relation to clothes-hangers, you reminded me of a radio essay I heard on the nature of clothes-hangers. It was written by a flat-dweller. (Obviously from the 1970s; the era before glats became apartments.) He believed that clothes-hangers reproduced in wardrobes and that when a person moved flat the clothes-hangers in their wardrobe would transport themselves to the wardrobe in their new flat. He claimed that he always found more clothes-hangers in his wardrobe than he had before and that he always found the same hanger in new flats that he had left behind him in his old flat. His conclusion was that clothes-hangers and odd socks share a common ancestor.

>272 haydninvienna: Together with paperclips.

>272 haydninvienna: What a great set of announcements! Your granddaughter is making progress, the house sale looks good to go, and somebody took away the excessive number of coat hangers (how do the things proliferate so?)

Hopefully, much of the stress that gathers and tightens across the shoulders during any general disturbance is slowly dissipating.

>275 jillmwo: Thanks Jill. I think Peter has the answer about how they proliferate. I very vaguely remember an old science fiction story about an invasion of earth by aliens that took on the form of paperclips, wire coat hangers and other common objects with the same weird property that there are always more of them than you ever bought.

Incidentally, there were quite a stack of wire ones as well, but they went straight into the metal recycling.

>272 haydninvienna: Great news on all fronts! Good work getting someone else to take your proliferating hangers.

>277 Karlstar: Thanks Jim.

>236 haydninvienna: >272 haydninvienna: Just catching up after an absence. Congratulations to you and your stepdaughter! I am holding all of you in the light, hoping for good health of every sort.

>279 Jim53: Thanks, other Jim! (My lateness in thanking you is due to the ultimate finger-slip of having accidentally ignored my own topic.) Aaand just because these things never happen singly, my elder son David has just told me that he and his wife Caitlin are expecting in December.

>276 haydninvienna: I give wire coat hangers to my local dry cleaner, who reuses them. Thrift shops also welcome hangers of any sort.

>281 booksaplenty1949: I thought the local charity shops would want them, but they didn't.

>282 haydninvienna: ☹️

>280 haydninvienna:
That is fantastic news. Once you start on the granddad path you really get going. All the very best wishes to the expecting couple.

>283 booksaplenty1949: >284 pgmcc: Thanks!

I don't expect to go much further on the grandad path for a while, if ever. Alexandra probably won't be having any more for medical reasons, and while David and Caitlin will possibly go again none of the others of my gang have evinced any interest in parenthood. And that's OK. I'm not one of the family dragons who demands grandkids--it's entirely up to the prospective parents.

>280 haydninvienna: Congratulations on the pending arrival!

>285 haydninvienna: Congrats! I will be a proud grandma again in September. I love your phrase, "family dragon." I may like dragons, but try not to be one. If my kids want to supply me with grands, I am more than happy to receive, but if not, that's fine.

>286 jillmwo: >287 MrsLee: Thanks both of you!

>280 haydninvienna: Congrats! We have two grandchildren and that's all we'll likely ever have, but we also have grand-nephews now to enjoy.

Another thing that turned up on Pocket (when I had just about decided to give it up because the ratio of good stuff to rubbish was dropping alarmingly): a bit of classic Jay Rayner on how to choose a restaurant. TL/DR:

If the menu feels the need to tell you that the squid is tender, find somewhere else. No restaurant intentionally serves rubbery squid. So why the hell are you telling me that yours is tender? Look out for other terrifying words. Are ingredients “nestled”? Is the dish “sumptuous”? Are there “medleys” or “symphonies”? If anything is described as “mouth-watering”, close down the browser. Back away from the window. Whoever wrote that menu is desperately overcompensating for deficiencies in the kitchen. A good menu should also be simply written.

Plain English wins again.
Edited to close a parenthesis!

>290 haydninvienna:
Calamari is how I judge a fish restaurant*, or any other restaurant come to that. Serve me rubbery calamari and I will not darken their doors again.

>290 haydninvienna: Love the picture caption: "A menu should be physically readable and not too long". Some years ago I went to a conference in Beijing, which was an interesting experience. The first night I ate in the hotel restaurant, and wonder what Mr Rayner (whose work on BBC4's The Kitchen Cabinet I greatly enjoy) would have made of the menu. The first 20 pages were devoted to sea cucumbers. Fortunately those who don't read Chinese could look at the pictures (but a Dutch fellow delegate the next evening was still surprised when he ordered duck and it arrived complete with beak!).

>292 hfglen: When I took a Chinese cooking course many years ago the teacher explained that since Chinese food is served cut into bite sized portions it is customary to display the entire duck, fish, etc first to assure you that you are getting the whole freshly-prepared item. Then it is cut up for you with the less-edible bits set on the side of the platter. I say “less” rather than “inedible,” having seen “ducks feet with fish lips” as a menu item. Chacun à son gout!

>291 pgmcc: That is my test as well.

>294 MrsLee:
We share many views and other things.

>290 haydninvienna: ROFL (But also agreeing with what everyone else has noted in the meantime.)

I tend to agree with Jay Rayner on what he says in the article, but being what I am professionally, I have a simpler test: how good is the menu’s spelling and grammar? Necessary to be a bit cautious here—a place that regards itself as “ fine dining” should be able to spell, but you might not hold your neighbourhood burger joint to the same standard. Of course there was that time when the Office of Legislative Drafting was at an “away” training course in a pretty good motel in Bowral (New South Wales) (where we went on the cricket ground where Don Bradman first made his mark) and where one of the Principal Legal Officers and I settled* the restaurant’s menu for it.

*that is, proofread it, marked it up critiquing the grammar and style, and generally made right royal pains of ourselves.

Pocket must have heard me and decided to become interesting again: here's a little essay from Bon Appétit on whether there is such a thing as junk food. TL/DR:

But all of those beautiful peculiarities of bodily need and preference get erased by food hierarchies dividing junk from everything else—which are, in truth, sorting mechanisms. They’re a way of categorizing people by class, education, race, and size without saying you’re categorizing them by class, education, race, and size. And they are almost entirely maintained by those with the privileges and preferences that place them at the top of the hierarchy itself. In practice, that means the privileged foods cost the most, take the most time to produce, and have the least calories—regardless of those foods’ taste, actual nutritional value, or cultural significance.

It edges into politics from there.

Promise I'll get back to books eventually.

>298 haydninvienna:
That is fascinating. I can see a spoof survey questionnaire using a question like, “What snack food did you last consume?”, or, “Do you like mushy peas*?”, as a proxy for determining socio-economic class. The multiple choice answers provided for that question would be interesting.

FTR, I love mushy peas.

>299 pgmcc: Call it dhal (meaning you add some spices) rather than mushy peas and it stops being junk food and becomes Virtuously Vegan.

>300 hfglen:
How dare you imply mushy peas are junk food. Choose your seconds. We meet at dawn!

:-)

Mushy peas are a North of England delicacy, and people in Northern Ireland are pretty fond of them too. They are one of your five a day.

I can see a debate like this going on for ever. The definition of “junk food” would vary from place to place, and I can see much robust discussion. It would almost be like the debate about how to define a “classic” book, a debate I touched on last night when I met up with the friends with whom I edited the fiction magazine, Albedo One.

>300 hfglen: >301 pgmcc: I like mushy peas too, but the chippie here never puts enough salt in them. Just to subvert the whole idea, Nigella Lawson (hardly a poster child for virtuous food) has a recipe somewhere for Upmarket Mushy Peas. It's based on frozen petits pois, with added garlic and crème fraiche.

>301 pgmcc: Was "Albedo One" the subject of any brilliant reflections?

>302 haydninvienna:
Was "Albedo One" the subject of any brilliant reflections?

Very illuminating of you.

Nigella Lawson (hardly a poster child for virtuous food)

I have watched several episodes of Nigella Lawson's cookery programmes and her recipes made me think of the emperor's new clothes. There was one day when she went to a lot of trouble making what was supposed to be an exquisite, exceptionally nice, elegant dessert. It was a brownie with some added elements and a large dose of pretension. Shortly after that I came across a post on-line by someone who obviously shared my views of her recipes. They were sharing Nigella Lawson's special recipe for making a glass of water.

:-)

>297 haydninvienna: One of our favorite restaurants of the past had this slogan by their name (which I have forgotten, because we always called it by its slogan), "Family Dinning." It was a family-style service, patrons all sitting at long tables, like a family, served the dinner of the night off of large platters. "Dinning" for sure, with all the families with young children who went there.

>301 pgmcc: Is Albedo One still active as a publication? I ask because their Twitter account became inactive as of 2018, but the Wikipedia article makes no mention of it going away....

Purely curiosity on my part.

And >304 MrsLee: There was a dining place near my old office (so back in 2014) that had small tables for parties of 2 or 4 but a truly massive rectangular table where they encouraged people dining alone to sit in much the same way. (I cannot for the life of me recall the name of the restaurant with any degree of reliability.)

>305 jillmwo:
Is Albedo One still active as a publication?

Albedo One was always an act of love by those involved in editing, compiling and publishing the magazine. The editorial team met on Tuesday nights in a pub to discuss the stories submitted. Between those meetings the team would read and rate submissions. The stories were dished out amongst the team for reading. The first reader could kill a story if they thought it was just not for the magazine. If the first reader thought something was a candidate for publication it was passed on to a second reader. Two "yes" votes put the story on the publication list. One "yes" and a "no" meant a third reader would have the casting vote.

The earliest editions were cut-and-paste then photocopied. Later they were professionally printed with multi-colour covers and black-and-white inside.

Subscriptions and sales just covered production costs. There were/are no support grants from the Arts Council or any other such body.

Given this was a voluntary activity over almost four decades there has been a degree of war-weariness amongst the team members. They never expected the magazine to last into the 21st century. The main driver behind the magazine, Bob Neilson, was intending to call it a day with the 50th edition. There are currently 49 issues. Bob and I meet every few months for lunch and he told me this in 2019. With COVID appearing in early 2020 I did not see him again until earlier this year. In the meantime I had seen an announcement that Albedo One had stopped publication with the 49th issue. I was a bit surprised and disappointed. I thought there must have been a problem with typesetting and other issues and that the team had decided to call it quits.

When I met Bob after COVID he told me the back-story. I will not go into exact detail until we are sitting face-to-face across coffee cups, but what I will say is that due to a Google-screw-up they lost all the submissions they had selected for publication in issue 50. Catastrophe! That prompted the team to call it a day.

HOWEVER, when I met the guys before I went to France, they were working on recovering all the articles and stories and getting ready to publish issue 50.

The guys I meet on Tuesday nights (when I am not in France) are three of the original team of four who started the magazine in 1993. I got to know them* in the mid 90s and joined them as a co-editor for a few years. I stepped back from the editing work and meetings due to day job commitments, but I have kept in touch with them since then. Now that I have retired I have returned to the Tuesday meetings.

The Tuesday night meetings are now taken up with talking about books, discussing music from the 1970s and 1980s, and relating stories about our children and grandchildren. Oh yes, and drinking beer.

*How I got to meet the Albedo One team:

One day in the mid 1990s I went to our local library. I spotted an A5 notice on the noticeboard with "Albedo One" at the top. It was a call for stories.

I promptly wrote a story and submitted it.

It was rejected. :-(

At the time, my wife was in a local writing group. One of the members had his autobiography published. There was a book launch held at the library and my wife brought me along to it.

After speeches, reading and signings there were glasses of wine. We ended up talking to a few people. In general getting-to-know-you conversation one of the people told us he was part of a team producing a science fiction magazine. I immediately said, "Is that Albedo One?"

Well, John was delighted and surprised that I had even heard of the magazine. He asked, "How did you know about Albedo One?"

I replied, "You rejected one of my stories."

He remembered the story and told me to submit more stories. They published one of my stories in Issue 4.

I ended up meeting with the guys at various events and they eventually asked me to join them on the team. That was great fun and we have all been good friends ever since.

>306 pgmcc: What a wonderful piece of background! And after all, you were finally published in their pages.

Another bit out of left field: just seen an ad on TV for a Ralph Lauren Polo men's cologne. It uses Eric Burdon and the Animals' recording of "The House of the Rising Sun" as background. That is just wrong.

>308 haydninvienna: They'll do all sorts of weird things in those ads! You can always tell by the weirdness when it is a cologne or perfume ad here.

As if.
ETA: Until I added this edit, this must have been my shortest ever LT post.

>310 haydninvienna:
That guy is either a liar or is living in Cloud-Cuckoo Land.

LOL! LOL! LOL!...

>311 pgmcc: My point exactly. I vote for cloud-cuckoo-land.

>312 haydninvienna:
I think you are correct. He comes across as delusional rather than devious.
:-)

>310 haydninvienna: I dunno. I kind of liked the tone of this bit:

Those five books you add to the pile while you’re reading? Don’t think of them as the next five books you will read. They are five candidates to be your next book. Only one can actually win that coveted next-book status.

I like the idea of books as job applicants. Where's the resume? Can it prove it has a record of the desirable work ethic? Or does the cover pull the "adorable kitten" routine where the beast is really just looking for undeserved treats?

On the other hand, the man seems to believe I have tons of empty space on my book shelves where I'm supposed to relegate those applying to be my next read. (No, I have books stored in boxes and on shelves and in tote bags...)

>314 jillmwo: "pull the "adorable kitten" routine where the beast is really just looking for undeserved treats"

Are you by any chance describing my Feline Overlord?

I would never offend your Feline Overlord by suggesting that treats were undeserved.

No, I was thinking of appealing dust jackets or bindings that one can't resist so the books get purchased before one realizes (a) that the author is tedious or (b) that the main character is an idiot or (c) that the solution to the mystery involves contortions by the murderer of an entirely unrealistic nature. But, hey, the cover -- I love that cover!!. I actually have a copy of Lost Horizon, purchased under such circumstances. I mean the text itself is okay, but w/o that dust jacket, I'd never have been tempted.

>314 jillmwo: Well, I almost cried a little with relief when I read this. "(No, I have books stored in boxes and on shelves and in tote bags...)" I've been so cranky that I still haven't been able to unpack every book I brought with me yet. I feel a little better.

That said I don't buy much paper anymore, so this guy's speil doesn't really pertain to me.

I often buy books for the cover only as a deliberate strategy. I now have a tag for them: “Unread and unreadable.” Many interesting artists and photographers produced cover art. I invite you to look at, say, Harri Peccinotti’s covers for Penguin editions of Iris Murdoch. Snap them up whenever I see them, but would only open them at gunpoint.

>316 jillmwo: I understood you to be talking about books with "false pretences". However the behaviour you described in #314 is exactly what the Feline Overlord did when we went to the SPCA in need of a kitten. In all honesty I have to add that bossy and demanding as he is (well, he is a Cat after all) he has also made himself adorable and much loved, so maybe the treats he demands are to some extent earned.

>318 booksaplenty1949: I used occasionally to buy books without any intention of reading them, only because they had been banned somewhere. F'r instance, there was a furore some time in the 1980s about a former British security minion named Peter Wright, who had written a tell-all book (Spycatcher) that was a bit too tell-all for the taste of the UK government of the day. The book had been released in Australia so the British government applied to the Supreme Court of New South Wales for an injunction to forbid its publication*. The result can hardly have been worse from their point of view — not only did they not get the injunction, but a Sydney solicitor named Malcolm Turnbull made the chief of MI5 look like an idiot in the witness box (and put into language the expression "economical with the truth"). While the injunction was waiting to be heard, I bought, at some significant trouble, a copy of the US first edition (no hope of preventing publication there). I still have the copy, unopened.

*Since the book had been published in the US, the point of the injunction must have been to make it more difficult to obtain the book in the UK. Those were the days of the Traditional Markets Agreement. I believe they did get an injunction (possibly an interim injunction) against publication in the UK.

Other cases in point: The Satanic Verses (you know why in this case; also bought from the US); Oscar and Lucinda, which had been added to the NSW school reading list, and which a NSW politician attempted to have banned.

Just seen in the Tesco book swap: three (!) copies of Angels and Demons. Am I being told something?

I have just sprung a quid for the kindle version of Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic: From the minds Behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Monty Python. Maybe this will break my longest reading slump ever.

>321 haydninvienna: People don't like Dan Brown books any more?

>322 haydninvienna: I hope it does! Seems like there's a lot of potential for a quirky read there.

Curious re #321: How does a Tesco Book Swap work? Is it like a Little Free Library here in the States where you take a book and leave a book and everybody shares?

>322 haydninvienna: You can chalk me up as a BB hit for that Douglas Adams 99p special offer.

>324 jillmwo: Exactly like one. Bring a book, take a book (or a few). We tend to return books we have finished with, but we also contribute books that we’ve bought from elsewhere. OTOH if I find a book I like there, I tend to keep it. But I think we’re still ahead on numbers.

Sainsbury’s (the other big supermarket) used to sell donated books cheaply (like £1 per book, about the same as the charity shops), but I’ve not noticed the stand in there lately. The local railway station used to have a book swap too, but it’s been a while since I was in there.

Started both The Sinister Booksellers of Bath and Douglas Adams’ Starship Titanic this morning, and I’m up to 31% of the latter. The reviews on LT are indifferent at best. I mainly agree with this review by LT member airship:

I like Terry Jones and I like Douglas Adams, but I don't particularly like 'Starship Titanic', a book written by Jones based on ideas by Adams. It's a run-of-the mill book with a few bright spots, but not as much fun as you might think. Maybe because of the names involved, I expected too much. The whole 'huge passenger starship that's doomed, kind of like the Titanic' thing was done much better, in my opinion, in the film 'The Fifth Element' with Bruce Willis and Milla Jojovich.

I dunno. According to Wikipedia, one critic called The Fifth Element one of the most unhinged films ever. Long time since I’ve seen it but maybe airship was right—Starship Titanic isn’t nearly unhinged enough.

So far, The Sinister Booksellers … (a BB from tardis, IIRC) is much, much better.

I think I agree on Starship Titanic. Recently SWMBO decreed a cleanout of surplus books (shock! horror!), and my copy of that one found its way to the SPCA -- not as much lamented as some others.

>327 haydninvienna: The Fifth Element was unhinged, but still a fun movie to watch. I've seen it a few times and I will still pause to watch it on TV when it is on.

>327 haydninvienna:
We love The Fifth Element and have watched it several times. Gary Oldman is great in it. There are many great performances in what you correctly call an unhinged film. Great fun.

Wasn't the Starship Titanic originally a computer game? Seems like that could be an awkward transition to a novel. Even more so than radio play to novel like THHG.