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Violet Crown

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Everything posted by Violet Crown

  1. What We Talk About etc. is one of the Raymond Carver books I had just been thinking this week I needed to read.
  2. Needing something more modern than Virgil, after finishing the Aeneid this week I read Raymond Carver's short story collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? I can say I think I understood what he was doing with about half the stories. What I understood of it, I thought was very good, and I'll have to keep an eye out for his better-known books. Ricocheting back in time again, some depressing comments on another thread best unmentioned sent me back to Dom Lorenzo Scupoli's 16th-century classic The Spiritual Combat. His caution against indulging in "the feverish search for news" seems especially relevant to the 21st century. Re: August writer birthdays: Just wanted to mention that I get to share a birthday with Borges. :)
  3. Sorry; didn't mean to derail.
  4. Really the rare and surprising thing is when a sequel is better than, or even just as good as, the original. The second book, movie, or drama has the classic Sequel Problem: the audience wants a sequel because they want to recapitulate the experience of having read or watched the original--but part of that experience was the freshness and novelty. So the sequel faces the nearly insuperable dilemma of needing to be simultaneously like the first but not previously experienced. The list of successful sequels (as good as, or better than, the original) is therefore necessarily short. Godfather II comes to mind, probably because it was the second part of the original book. Aliens, which was made with the genius idea of changing genres from horror (in space) to action thriller (in space). Star Trek II, because it didn't face the Sequel Problem as nobody on the planet wanted to experience the first movie again; and also Ricardo Montalban.
  5. Congratulations on getting through Rousseau! On to Hobbes? Or perhaps enough political philosophy for a while? I finished the C. Day Lewis translation of the Aeneid and should finally get around to reading my own book on the Habsburgs. I'm still fired up from the Houston exhibit of Habsburg bling earlier this year. I was reading the Aeneid at Wee Girl's camp, and a nearby dad looked at the cover, got excited and said, "Wow! I had no idea he also translated the classics!" I was perplexed but it occurred to me later the guy was possibly mistaking C. Day for someone else.
  6. I'm having this exact problem. Clearing out the cache had no effect. Any other suggestions?
  7. Sure thing! Re: Faulkner: I think I had some Faulkner comments on last week's thread. I'd try to remember them but an ear infection is dissolving my brain.
  8. I recently recommended The Grapes of Wrath to one young lady, and O! Pioneers to another, so I feel my work is done. Also I've done my duty with regard to The Lost Generation by finishing this week Dos Passos' Three Soldiers, which was disappointing. Dos Passos--whose USA trilogy I may have to re-read just to remind myself I like his writing--managed the difficult feat of writing a WWI novel with a protagonist one doesn't feel sorry for. Ostensibly about three young men serving in the US Army in France toward the end of the War, the novel very much centers on John Andrews, a stand-in for Dos Passos himself. Andrews, an enlisted man, is clearly meant to be suffering the horrors of war, and is in fact injured at one point, though without actually seeing any action: he's apparently (it's not clear) injured, though not permanently, by a stray shell. But his true suffering consists in being in the army at all, and being forced to do unpleasant tasks, have his freedom limited, and worst of all be in the chain of command, including the horror of being forced! to salute men who are his intellectual and educational (he is a music student from Harvard) inferiors. It might have been easier to sympathize with the awfulness of Andrews' "slavery" in the military if I hadn't a short while ago read Goodbye To All That, Robert Graves' account of his service in the Great War, where he engaged in the kind of nightmarish trench warfare one usually associates with that war, had many friends and colleagues die horribly, was severely wounded himself and suffered from PTSD long afterwards. Somehow though, despite his intellect and education, he escaped having his soul crushed by having to salute his military superiors. A special Dishonorable Mention, by the way, for the Penguin editor of Three Soldiers. There's a lot of French in this novel, and the editor footnotes every blessed phrase, no matter how obvious, while failing to provide notes for genuinely confusing references; for instance when Andrews is in the hospital being attended by a friendly man, and sees "the red triangle" on his armband, I had to resort to Google to find out the significance. One character says he's going to the south of France, then lists half a dozen locations; the footnote helpfully informs you that these are places in the south of France. Most unforgivable is the note to this sentence: "A phrase out of "Haner Lad" came to his head: "Ambrosial night, Night ambrosial unending." But better than sitting round a camp fire drinking wine and water and listening to the boastful yarns of long-haired Achaeans, was this hustling through the countryside away from the monotonous whine of past unhappiness, towards joyousness and life." The editor's note: "The editor has not been able to identify the author of this work." Now, if one of Penguin's literary editors failed to recognize the Homeric "ambrosial night" and realize that "Haner Lad" must be some catastrophic error for "The Iliad," you'd think the reference to Achaeans (!!!) might have tipped him off. I've moved on to the C. Day Lewis translation of The Aeneid, for my Choose a Book For Its Cover bingo square. A little poking around shows that one either passionately loves or passionately hates Lewis' translation. I think I like it, but might have been a hater had I not learned from the introduction that it was written specifically for radio broadcast, not for reading. Thus presumably his translation of the famous "cano" in line 1 as "I tell" rather than "I sing," and a number of gentle linguistic anachronisms.
  9. I've only read one of the World Edition list, and nine of the non-world (and four of those I didn't particularly like). I hate to think what that says about me. ETA: ... and only Eliot and Shelley from the women's list.
  10. Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace.
  11. Needing a change of pace, I'm working through Plato's Apology and Crito. Not because I find Plato particularly compelling but because I've assigned them to Middle Girl and she's at an age where her Hypocritimeter is easily set off. "The unexamined life is not worth living." Yes, Socrates. Indeed, Socrates. It is as you say, Socrates.
  12. One last. Stacia, this is for both of us: À Rebours in eight words. http://www.goreystore.com/shop/gashlycrumb-tinies/edward-gorey-n-neville-who-died-ennui-square-magnet
  13. Stacia, I had a mad French professor who was really into the Decadents, the Surrealists, and transgressive literature generally. I think that semester left me permanently scarred.
  14. Stacia, thanks for that link; I especially appreciate the Redons, with which I wasn't familiar. I'm not going to post much more on À Rebours. I think I may have enjoyed it more because I felt as it went that I could firmly place Huysmans between Baudelaire and Genet, and alongside Zola and (to some extent) Wilde. Des Esseintes'/Huysman's keen observations regarding the contribution of a certain strain of Catholicism to the Decadent aesthetic also fell into place, and I'll never read Frédéric Ozanam (founder btw of the now lay-run charity St Vincent de Paul Society) the same way. Also my recent hours scrutinizing Goya's wonderful etchings* were mirrored in Huysman's appeal to an anti-aesthetic in which beauty is exhausted, the senses are beyond stimulation and diseased, and all that's left is ennui, enervation, and lingering death. Books can now only be expensively bound and repeatedly arranged, but no longer read; the natural has neither utility nor appeal but can only serve to mimic the artificial, and then die; sexuality has passed beyond depravity into impotence and sterility. All schools of art, literature, and aesthetics are effectively jewelled tortoises that drag their overladen, exhausted carapaces into the corner of a gorgeous room and quietly die. Five stars. Nobody gets my copy. :D *And wondering how the heck they ended up in Central Texas--especially since the exhibit seems to have been nearly unadvertised and, on the day we went at least, almost completely unattended.
  15. Des Esseintes, in A Rebours, has been referring to art I've recently run into: Here's the Rubens, which happens to be one of my favorite pieces at the National Gallery in Edinburgh, and I got to see it just recently. I love that Rubens thought, "What is the sexiest dancing girl I can imagine?" -- and imagined that healthy-looking gal. And I love that her mother Herodias is the quintessence of a Texas Cheerleader's Mom. "See?" she's saying to Herod. "That's how good she is." Pointing at the head with her dinner fork. And Huysmans is an admirer of Goya's etchings and aquatints, a nicely full exhibition of which is, miracle of miracles, visiting the very modest art museum of our fine arts-deprived town, including the Caprices and the war etchings he particularly mentions. We just saw them the other day. But I have not seen any gilded tortoises.
  16. I don't think that's a shortcoming so much as an indication that one of us isn't utterly heartless. :)
  17. I have to think the tortoise was a metaphor. ETA: Part of what makes it so funny is that Des Esseintes reminds me so much of certain undergraduates who had read Baudelaire for the first time and wore a lot of black. Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère!
  18. Reading Joris-Karl Huysman's Decadent novel Against Nature (À Rebours). Possibly the funniest book I've read since Bel-Ami. No sign of a plot so far; it's just the rich, idle, overeducated and neurotic Des Esseintes and his home decor. His hapless gilded, jewel-encrusted tortoise gets its own chapter. It's fabulous wallowing. Also reading Treasure Island aloud, for the third time. Fifteen men on a dead man's chest, yo ho ho!
  19. There is no end of great quotes from À Rebours: Time to dig out the Baudelaire....
  20. From now on I'll read more books than I buy.
  21. I've seen them in action. You're indeed missing something good.
  22. All the ushers I've ever seen at our downtown parish, where an usher is not infrequently called on to be a bouncer, have been men. Burly men, with calm demeanors.
  23. Jenn, hope you got access to Trek Hall. Thanks for the update on your summer fan foray! Last night was enough to finish the Waugh correspondence, and like Stacia I've launched into J.-K. Huysman's decadent novel À Rebours. Middle girl this summer read both Poe's Pym and Wilde's Dorian Gray, the former of which Stacia told us is referenced in À Rebours, while the latter gives it a page-long encomium without mentioning its name. ("His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him...") I confess to not remembering Wilde's tribute, but it's been a quarter of a century. MG also ran into Pym in Edinburgh, at the Surrealist exhibit hosted by the National Gallery. See this Magritte? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_to_be_Reproduced#/media/File%3APortrait_of_Edward_James.jpg Look closely at the book on the mantel. It's everywhere. From the translator's note:
  24. Finished the ~900 page Palliser novel Phineas Redux. Few of Trollope's novels really require reading a previous novel; but this is a genuine sequel to the (also good and readable) Phineas Finn, which must be read first. Trollope is not profound or highly literary, but his novels are solidly written and skillfully plotted so as to avoid the extremes of surprise or twist endings on the one hand, and predictable, neatly tied, or too-justly distributed outcomes on the other. A little break I think before the next Palliser. Came today in the mail the short book A Bitter Trial, by Evelyn Waugh--his collected correspondence with Cardinal Heenan. Which could be alternatively titled Evelyn Waugh Deplores the New Mass to a Sympathetic Ecclesiastic Ear. Niche reading, but hard to find so I am rather glad to get my hands on a book I'd been looking around for for a while.
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