What’cha Reading?

[Sancho]

Greetings fellow bibliophiles, bookworms, constant readers, bookstore lurkers, and library-card holders. This is the thread that asks — What are you reading right now, and what do you think about it? I’m sure there’s another thread around here somewhere that asks the same thing, but this is the only one that actively encourages straying off topic. I mean, I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve been admonished once or twice or a thousand times for veering off topic to god-knows where, and it’s always a bummer (being admonished not veering).

Anyway, wanderers gonna wander.

So really, what’cha reading, and what’cha think about it?

[Sancho]

I’ll start. I’ve been reading The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride, and I’ve been enjoying it immensely. There’s a warmth and humor in McBride’s writing I don’t get anywhere else.

The novel is set in Pottstown, Pennsylvania and mostly in a neighborhood called Chicken Hill, which is a low-rent area inhabited mostly by immigrant Jews and Black folks. The book starts in the early 70s when a new development of townhouses is being built on Chicken Hill and during the construction they find a skeleton and a few other items at the bottom of a well. The cops go to question one of the old-time residents of Chicken Hill, a Jewish man named Malachi, about what they’d found:


They produced a piece of jewelry, handed it to him, and asked what it was.

A mezuzah, the old man said.

It matches the one on the door, the cops said. Don’t these things belong on doors?

The old man shrugged. Jewish life is portable, he said.

The inscription on the back says “Home of the Greatest Dancer in the World.” It’s in Hebrew. You speak Hebrew?

Do I look like I speak Swahili?

Answer the question. You speak Hebrew or not?

I bang my head against it sometimes.

And you’re Malachi the dancer, right?

That’s what they say around here.

They say you’re a great dancer.

Used to be. I gave that up forty years ago.

And so the book goes back forty years back, to the early 30s, and the action begins.

Wonderful. I’m reading it slowly and enjoying the ride.

[Danik 2016]

Good thread, Sancho!

I was in doubt on which of threads I would post it, but this is definitely not Nature Writing though there are descriptions of nature. The book is Frontiers by Chinese author Can Xue. It´s about people that live in a border town called Pebble Town. So far, so good. But while from an external external point of view nothing much happens, everyone and everything is steeped in a weird atmosphere. People keep seing creatures and sounds that are not there. Places appear and disappear. It is as if toften so as if people were functioning simultaneously on different levels.

it is very puzzling, but in time one gets used to it. All this weirdness becomes somehow the norm of the place. In totalitarian countries artists sometimes invent an own language to escape censorship. I wonder if this is the case here.

[Sancho]

Danik, you’ve got eclectic taste. I’m not sure I can keep up with the breadth of your literary interests.

And thanks, I thought we all might like a place to post a few thoughts about what we’re currently reading, and I’m willing to bet that everybody who visits this website regularly is continuously reading something, or several somethings. In fact, I hatched the idea for this thread when you and I and several other folks were going back and forth on the Cormack McCarthy memorial thread. We started out chatting about McCarthy’s work, but then the conversation shifted to what we were reading at the time, government policies towards indigenous peoples, current affairs, and even to a Pokey LaFarge tune.

So here we are.

Wanderers gonna wander.

[Danik 2016]

Oh, Sancho!I haven´t decided myself if I like the book or not. Speaking of keeping up. I read it because the author might be winner of the Noble this year. People on the Noble thread read about 20, 30 books per year, while I toddle on with my current read. Thankfully here we read without any contest in mind. And I enjoy your comments very much, Sancho, even if I don´t know the book.

Reading for me is a form to travel to distant countries. The only one I praticate today.

[Sancho]

Good point. Reading is a great way to travel, and not just to a place but also to a time. I can read about the Iberian peninsula and then I can visit there, but I can’t visit the Spain of Don Quixote and his time without reading Cervantes.

I suppose I’m as guilty as the next guy for reading a book only because it’s won a Nobel or a Pulitzer or a Man Booker prize. I figure the book has been been vetted by some pretty smart people and therefore must have some value. And I’m sure they’re all good in some sense, but they don’t always hit home with me. I’d read a bunch of George Saunders short stories and liked his writing, but then he wrote Lincoln On The Bardo, which got a lot of buzz in literary circles and won a Man Booker prize. I was looking forward to digging into it. So I did, and I gotta say — what a stinker. I kept wondering if he was dropping acid and writing at the same time.

[bounty]

im reading win by Harlan coben, and like all his books, they are really easy to read and enjoyable for the dramatic tension.

also reading a book about the battle of Antietam in the civil war by a fellow named James mcpherson. his premise is, that this battle, more than any other during the war, was the decisive one that changed the tide of the war.

[Sancho]

Is that James McPherson any kin to the Union General of the same name? There used to be a Fort McPherson in Atlanta named for the Union General who was killed in the Battle of Atlanta.

[bounty]

I read the introductory pages and didn't come across anything indicating that, but i'll take a closer peek at the book Sancho to see if there is anything like that mentioned---or maybe even do an internet search!

[Sancho]

Hah! I only use google to diagnose serious illnesses.

My first thought after reading your post was — hey I didn’t know McPherson wrote a book about his wartime experiences. Then I remembered he died young in Atlanta. There were quite a few generals on both sides who wrote about war, some of them trying to come to grips with what they just went through, and some of them trying to skew the narrative about the war and how they’d be remembered in the history books.

I just picked up Michael Punke’s The Ridgeline. It’s a historical fiction novel set just after the Civil War out in the territories. It leads up to a battle between the northern plains Indians and the Army which has become known as The Fetterman Massacre. The writer uses the basic facts of the fight and then he imagines the thoughts and dialogue of the players, the soldiers and the tribe members.

[Danik 2016]

Still grappling with Frontier. Now there is this baby that drives everyone crazy on several possible levels of narrative. The baby appears as an adult person in the first chapter, but if any one expects a regular flash back, he/she is quite wrong. It is all mixed up, for dear reader to sort the things out.

As for reading possible Noble authors, this is a sort of homework. So many new names crop up in the other forum, that if one doesn´t read some of them one isn´t fit to follow the discussion there.

[Sancho]

Haha! Homework.

Great characterization, Danik. Those books feel like something I hafta read rather something I get to read. After struggling through a Nobel prize winner I’ve gotta go read a genre detective novel or something. It’s like listening to some weird fusion jazz, after jangling my nerves with that I need to listen to a good old 1-4-5 pop song in 12 bar structure just to get my world spinning in greased groves again.

[Danik 2016]

Nevertheless I got to know some very interesting authors that way, Sancho. And, of course, I finish only the books I want to.

[bounty]

I have the "have to" vs "get to" thing going on too---and absolutely love being able to turn to the easy reads by virtue of taking a break from the "higher literature" out there.

one of the worst book I ever read (although I didn't finish it) was either a Pulitzer prize winner or a candidate for it (I don't remember), but I do remember thinking, what the heck, this book is terrible, how on earth is it being recognized for a prize?!

nothing in my Antietam book that links the two McPhersons together, and a Wikipedia page doesn't indicate a connection.

on the point though of "contemporary" writing, one of the things he included in the early part of the book are excerpts of writing from people who fought at Antietam. its interesting that such things have survived.

[Sancho]

Yup, I’ve been suckered into buying a book with a highfalutin prize sticker on the cover more than once (hasta). But I’ve come around to Danik’s way of thinking. I don’t finish the stinkers anymore. Life’s too short.

However I do still enjoy a challenging read, but I also enjoy a good who-done-it (Getsta). Tana French has new book coming out early next year. I got hooked on her detective novels shortly after she published her first one, In The Woods.

So I finished The Heaven And Earth Grocery Store and although it’s literary fiction, it is definitely a getsta rather than a hasta. It’s worth the price of the book just for the characters names. Moshe and Chona, Dodo, Malaki the greatest dancer in the world, Monkey Pants, the Lowgods, Miggy, Fatty, Irv and Marvin Skrupskelis (“the most disagreeable Jews in town”), and Paper to name a few. Paper, by the way, is the neighborhood gossip. Nobody reads the newspaper, they all get their information from Paper, hence the name.

Speaking of names and nicknames I just started Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, a Pulitzer Prize winner…ahem. The title is the nickname name of the main character. Copperhead, because of his hair color and also because they live in an area thick with the venomous snake of the same name. Demon, because the name on his birth certificate is Damon. He comments on this:


As far as the Damon part, leave it to her to pop out a candyass boy-band singer name like that.

The “her” he’s referring to is of course his mother. Demon also comments on given names vs nicknames in general:


I didn’t realize until pretty late in life, like my twenties, that in other places people stick with the names they start out with. Who knew? I mean, Snoop Dogg, Nas, Scarface, these are not Mom-assigned names.

[Danik 2016]

I read somewhere that Demon Copperhead is a parody of David Copperfield. Looks interesting anyway.

Meanwhile I think I'm going to finish Frontier. It has very poetic passages.I suppose there are books one just reads without wanting to understand them.

[Sancho]

Sit back and enjoy the ride with Frontiers, eh Danik?

Also **palm slaps forehead **

I did not make the connection between Demon Copperhead and David Copperfield, but it makes sense. Demon grows up in a trashy southern trailer park, but he’s clever. So maybe this book is inspired by David Copperfield rather than a parody of it. At any rate I’ve never read David Copperfield. I’m afraid Dickens falls into the “hasta” category with me. This is not because his novels are metaphorical homework but rather because his books were actual homework for me in school. I was assigned Great Expectations and A Tale Of Two Cities. I enjoyed both of them, but homework is homework, you know.

[bounty]

that's a bummer Sancho---dickens is one of my favorite authors and david Copperfield is a great literary notch to have on one's belt.

I finished my Harlan coben book and enjoyed it so much im going to read another easy to read jobbie---the hit by david Baldacci.

[Danik 2016]

Yea, bounty! There was a time when Dickens was my favorite author, I read and reread his novels. If you asked me about any episode or figure I would know, where to place it. And no, these books weren´t homework.

[Sancho]

Alright, my friends, you’ve convinced me. As soon as I finish Demon Copperhead I’ll dive into David Copperfield, or maybe The Pickwick Papers. I’ve avoided Dickens for too long. I blame the South Carolina public school system (joking). I forget what we were chatting about about or on what thread, but a Litnet member once posted — Dickens is the Devil. That guy seemed smart and well-read, but also pretentious and insufferable, so I’ll go with you-all’s opinion.

[Danik 2016]

Well, let´s Dickens or rather David Copperfiel, speak for himself. Here is the beginning of the first chapter:


Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.

In consideration of the day and hour of my birth, it was declared by the nurse, and by some sage women in the neighbourhood who had taken a lively interest in me several months before there was any possibility of our becoming personally acquainted, first, that I was destined to be unlucky in life; and secondly, that I was privileged to see ghosts and spirits; both these gifts inevitably attaching, as they believed, to all unlucky infants of either gender, born towards the small hours on a Friday night.

I need say nothing here, on the first head, because nothing can show better than my history whether that prediction was verified or falsified by the result. On the second branch of the question, I will only remark, that unless I ran through that part of my inheritance while I was still a baby, I have not come into it yet. But I do not at all complain of having been kept out of this property; and if anybody else should be in the present enjoyment of it, he is heartily welcome to keep it.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/766/766-h/766-h.htm#link2HCH0001

[Sancho]

Nice. Also a good hook, which I only say because I do believe I’m hooked. By way of comparison and contrast here’s the first two paragraphs of Demon Copperhead. It’s also a first person narrative:


First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they’ve always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let’s just say out of it.

On any other day they’d have seen her outside on the deck of her trailer home, good neighbors taking notice, pestering the tit of trouble as they will. All through the dog-breath air of late summer and fall, cast an eye up the mountain and there she’d be, little bleach-blonde smoking her Pall Malls, hanging on that railing like she’s captain of her ship up there and now might be the hour it’s going down. This is an eighteen-year-old girl we’re discussing, all on her own and as pregnant as it gets. The day she failed to show, it fell to Nance Peggot to go bang on the door, barge inside, and find her passed out on the bathroom floor with her junk all over the place and me already coming out. A slick fish-colored hostage picking up grit from the vinyl tile, worming and shoving around because I’m still inside the sack that babies float in, pre-real-life.

[bounty]

pickwick papers is by far more comedic. I remember laughing in at least a few places. a lot of david Copperfield isn't that but between the two, especially if demon copperhead is a parody, I think the latter might be the better "notch." either way though, both are realllllllly long. and I think that's a good point with dickens too---he goes slow and creates grand plots, and I think more than anything, succeeding with him requires a fair amount of patience. what might be nice about Copperfield too, if you like the book to movie path, is there have been at least a couple of movies made from the book.

small piece of personal trivia----I posted this somewhere here on another thread some many months ago, agnes (in Copperfield) isn't a major character, but she's nevertheless one of my favorite female literary characters.

[Danik 2016]

Interesting detail, the name "Nance Peggot" evokes two Dickens characters:the compassionate prostitute Nancy, killed by Sikes of Oliver Twist and Clara Peggotty, the housekeeper in the house of David Copperfield, who helps to save David Copperfield, saving him from a family, that rejects him.

[Sancho]

So I finished The Ridgeline by Michael Punke, a historical fiction novel about the Fetterman Massacre in 1866 out west between various bands of Indians and an army cavalry unit. Evidently the known facts of the battle and what led up to it are meticulously recounted in the book. The fiction part of the novel is the dialogue of the main characters and their inner thoughts as imagined by the writer. And that’s the problem with historical fiction. How do you know what those guys were thinking? Punke has clearly done his homework and knows his subject well, but extrapolating that into individual thoughts and intentions seemed forced. And the dialogue was atrocious. He used modern American English. It wasn’t this bad but I kept expecting Crazy Horse to say something like: “Fo’sizzle mah nizzle.” I also found myself wishing I was reading Cormack McCarthy, who had gone to great pains to render the speech of the characters in Blood Meridian authentically.

Speaking of historical fiction, I just picked up Zadie Smith’s The Fraud. I might have to read it next. Hey, it’s not Dickens, but it’s got Dickens as a minor character in it. And Zadie Smith has been compared to Dickens from time to time.

[bounty]

a little of what youre describing Sancho reminds me of twain's a Connecticut yankee in king Arthur's court as well as bits and pieces (which is all ive seen) of bill and ted's excellent adventure.

im reading david Baldacci's the hit. its a thriller that starts out with some people being assassinated by a woman named Jessica Reel, who had been, up until the point where she started killing people on her own, a CIA assassin. The CIA has sent the main character, Will Robie, to track her down and kill her but in the last many pages since then, Jessica has saved will's life, and then later, Will saves hers, and although he has the opportunity to kill her, he allows her to escape instead.

it seems there are some baddddddddddddd guys inside the government who are acting on a white paper written by a former analyst and Jessica is actually a good buy trying on her own to prevent them from executing their plan. lots isn't what it seems to be!

[Sancho]

Finished Demon Copperhead. Here’s Ms Kingsolver in the acknowledgments at the end of the book:


I’m grateful to Charles Dickens for writing David Copperfield, his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us. In adapting his novel to my own place and time, working for years with his outrage, inventiveness, and empathy at my elbow, I’ve come to think of him as my genius friend.

As mentioned earlier, I haven’t read David Copperfield, but I’ve just dived into it. A couple of chapters in and I’m still sort of tuning in to his style. Dickens rambles on a bit more than Kingsolver, but I like all the asides. I mean, hey, I started this thread so we could ramble on about the books we’re reading, eh? Anyway both books are more about social ills than they are about the story. But concerning the story, one advantage David has over Demon is that he doesn’t have to deal with Perdue Pharma.

[Danik 2016]

Congrats for finishing the story, Sancho. Dickens really needs some adjusting he is 19C after all. And most if not all his novels where first published in magazine installments. And the book editors favored the doorstoppers.
But who or what is Perdue Pharma?

[Sancho]

One word — Oxy.

Ah well, I’ve never been able to leave it at one word. So Perdue Pharma has been one of the great boogeymen of American society of the past couple of decades. They came up with OxyContin, which they promoted as a non-addictive, time-release pain reliever. But it’s really just the synthetic opioid drug oxycodone with a pill coating. And it works like any other opioid. Perdue aggressively marketed it to doctors and aggressively lobbied the Food And Drug Administration for approval. By “aggressively” I mean they lied their asses off. And that’s where the opioid addiction epidemic came from. It’s costing around 70,000 deaths by overdose per year here. Oxy is more popular on the street than heroin. They also make Fentanyl.

I’ve been lucky health wise. I’ve never taken anything stronger than ibuprofen. You see I was raised by a woman with a healthy fear of pharmaceuticals and it rubbed off. My mother was a fiery-tempered, five-foot-nothing, red-haired Irish woman who was fond of saying — you ain’t hurt, walk it off, boy. I could have an arm off and she’d give me a baby aspirin. Anyway — thanks mom.

[Danik 2016]

I'm afraid, much of this viralized internationally and not only with opioids. Didn´t the US (former government) sell heaps of useless chlorockine to Brazil(former government) as a magical cure for Covid 19?

As for the opioids, here in downtown São Paulo there is the "cracolândia" with tausends of homeless, where any drugs are sold in the open.
Public Administrations have allowed the situation to grow until it became uncontrollable. They merely hunt the people from one place to another in downtown which only makes the situation worse. Shopkeepers become their shops invaded, people who live there are afraid to go out of their homes.

You are right about Perdue Pharma. And your mother was, of course, very much right too!

[Sancho]

Yep. I’m no expert, but I did watch a Netflix miniseries on the opioid epidemic… I think it’s just one example of how profit motive and patient advocacy in the American healthcare system are at odds with each other, another being HMOs.

And yep, right up near the top of the list of debts of gratitude I owe my mother is a healthy skepticism of medicine and doctors. Numero uno is of course her having me in the first place. Sadly (and ironically) prescribed medication is largely what took her. She was put on prednisone (a steroid) for a relatively minor problem and it wound up wasting her bones. My five-foot-nothing mother was about four and a half feet tall when she died. Now I give doctors and hospitals a wide berth. Dentists, not so much.

That said, I haven’t gone down the rabbit hole of internet conspiracy theories where medicine is concerned. I trust science rather than some podcasting blow-hard. I didn’t take a horse wormer (ivermectin) for Covid-19. I got vaccinated. And boosted. In fact, it seems to me vaccines are good medicine. I get all the vaccines I can. The occasional side effect is nothing compared to disease they’re protecting against. They’re good for me and good for the “herd”.

Speaking of herds, I wonder how many wormy horses there are out there because so many internet experts scarfed up all the ivermectin.

[Sancho]

David Copperfield is going swimmingly. The words in my head are coming in with a London accent.

[Danik 2016]

Well, the world of Dickens looks rather innocent in comparison of today.

[Sancho]

Ya know, it seems quaint to us now, but back in the day I’ll bet it seemed anything but.

Also it’s got me wondering if it’s worse to be born in the rabble, or to be born to pretty good circumstances and then descend into the hoi polloi.

[bounty]

am glad you are liking Copperfield so far.

as to your question---and your recent revelation of liking Seinfeld:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2JKXbVGq7A

[Sancho]

Haha! There it is. You can’t go back to coach after you’ve been in First.

Here’s a Seinfeld moment in Dickens:


Tell ‘er Backis is willin’

It’d be funnier if my own early attempts to woo women weren’t about as equally sophisticated.

[bounty]

Well. I'll tell you what," said Mr. Barkis. "P'raps you might be writin' to her?"
"I shall certainly write to her," I rejoined.
"Ah!" he said, slowly turning his eyes toward me. "Well! If
you was writin' to her, p'raps you'd recollect to say that Barkis
was willin'; would you?"
"That Barkis was willing," I replied. "Is that all the message?"
"Ye–es," he said, considering. "Ye–es; Barkis is willin'."


are you half thinking that's kinda like the menage a trois proposition where jerry ironically finds out "she's into it!"

I just found out jane siberry has a song entitled "barkis is willing" how about that.

[Sancho]

Dickens certainly creates vivid characters. With just a few of his words I can picture Barkis sitting there on the driver’s seat, staring at the space between the horse’s ears, thinking about Clara Peggotty. Evidently I’m not the only one who found Barkis vivid. I mean all these years later people are writing songs about him, eh?

As for a ménage á trios, well, Leon weighs in on that subject…

I remember a scene in Curb Your Enthusiasm with Larry David, Tracy Ullman, and Leon Black. Leon wants to eat his breakfast at a table where Tracy is working on a jigsaw puzzle. Things get heated and Tracy tries to get rid of him.

She says something like - I don’t know if you’ve heard, Leon, but two’s company and three’s a crowd.

Leon comes back with - No. The saying goes Three’s company. You know with two girls and one guy.

But my all time favorite Leon scene is when Susie meets Leon for the first time. Two strong personalities collide:

https://youtu.be/2f6ZelaWyC8?si=KlmiKCK3ZFYHZ9kS

I was depressed when Seinfeld ended, but then Curb Your Enthusiasm came along — Woo Hoo.

[bounty]

have never seen an episode of that, but I remember it being popular.

I think that's a good point Sancho, so many of dickens characters have endured in our literary mind, moved to the cinematic one, and then even off into other areas.

who doesn't know "bah humbug!" or "please sir, may I have some more?" or even "it is' a far far better thing I do than I have ever done before"

or tiny tim!

im reading and enjoying a collection of short stories that rod serling bought and turned into the original episodes of the twilight zone.

[Sancho]

No doubt about it, a lot of Dickens has worked its way into our everyday lingo. In that respect it’s like Shakespeare. Someone who reads Shakespeare for the first time will be shocked at the shoddiness of the writing. I mean it’s rife with clichés. (Of course they weren’t clichés when he wrote them.)

One expression that jumped out at me in David Copperfield is “cut and run.” We use it all the time nowadays, particularly in political discourse, but in his time it was mostly a nautical term. It meant a ship was in a tight spot and needed to cut the anchor line and run free, or sail away immediately.

Daniel Peggotty, brother of Clara, has an odd domestic situation. He lives in a converted boat with his orphaned niece and nephew (Em’ly and Ham) and Mrs Grummidge, the widow of his deceased, “drowndead”, fishing partner. This is to say Daniel Peggotty is an immensely generous and good-natured man. Here’s Clara Peggotty describing her brother to Davy:


The only subject, she informed me, on which he ever showed a violent temper or swore an oath, was this generosity of his; and if it were ever referred to, by any one of them, he struck the table a heavy blow with his right hand (had split it on one such occasion), and swore a dreadful oath that he would be ‘Gormed’ if he didn’t cut and run for good, if it was ever mentioned again.

“Gormed” didn’t make it, but we “cut and run” all the time.

[bounty]

i find so much of Shakespeare undecipherable. wish i still had my 10th English teacher around so maybe id feel okay reading another one and he can tell me what the hecks being said.

I see from a wiki page on the idiom that dickens also used it in great expectations. the page concurs with your mentioning political usage, but heck if I had to guess, i would say its gets used often in reference to the ending of romantic entanglements too. kinda close to what peggotty is suggesting.

i cant remember if one of the Copperfield books i have has illustrations, but your mentioning of the converted boat refreshes my mind of a drawing i once saw of it.

this isn't the one i was thinking of, but still kinda neat:

https://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/phiz/dc/boat.html

[Sancho]

Good picture. I may have breezed past the description of Daniel Peggotty’s cottage, but I didn’t picture it with the hull flipped over. I pictured an old style fishing boat, with a wheelhouse, its keel sunken into sand a bit, supported by a few sturdy stanchions, maybe with a picket fence around it, a front door cut into the hull amidship, and maybe a couple of chairs out front with a tub for shucking oysters.

Anyway.

I liked the picture by Frank Reynolds on the wiki page of Daniel Peggotty and Ham walking along the shore. In fact I liked all of Reynolds’s illustrations, particularly the one of Betsy Trotwood. It’s almost exactly how I pictured her in Dickens and in Kingsolver.

I wish St Luke’s Guild still visited this site. That guy had a tremendous knowledge of visual art, and I learned a ton about it from him.

https://charonbackup.wordpress.com/new-page-20/

[Danik 2016]

Under the several contemporaneous ilustrators of David Copperfield, there is at least one from US, Sol Eytinge Jr. I like his character studies,though Frank Raymond's are more expressive still.
https://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/eytinge/dc.html

[bounty]

those were all fun to look at, although I have to take a little umbrage with the illustrations of agnes. she's one of my favorite characters and im sorry, but she just has to be lots prettier!

[Sancho]

Good link, Danik. I like seeing how other people interpret a literary character. Nice job with Uriah Heep, he actually has some depth in the illustration. He’s not simply a conniving villain as in Reynolds’ picture. Swing-and-a-miss with Little Em’ly, though. She looks vacant in the picture. The Em’ly I know lives her life with purpose (it doesn’t always work out, but hey, she has a plan). Reynolds’ picture of her and Davy running on the beach gets at her personality well, I think.

I agree, bounty, Agnes looks a little frumpy in the Reynolds illustration. I think he’s trying to convey a sense of the Victorian ideal of womanhood. I like how she is demurely looking away. Betsey by contrast is staring us right in the eye. She looks like somebody who could do some serious damage without her ever even laying a hand on you. Edward Murdstone is also looking right at us, but his stare is dark and malevolent, and slightly condescending. He’s looking down his nose at us, and what a schnoz it is, eh? I wonder if there isn’t a little subconscious antisemitism going on there.

[Danik 2016]

@bounty- Agnes is seen by some people as the model of Victorian female perfection as Sancho observes in opposition to the child wife Dora, who is full of faults but therefore more human.

@Sancho-I particularly like the portrait of Betsy Trotwood by Eytinge. And I agree with you about Emily.

I suppose you guys know already the ilustration by Phiz or even have books with them as this is the illustrate most often associated with Dickens. His take is very different from Reynolds or Eytinge, I like his collective scenes. Not sure that you will like his Agnes, bounty, as she appears just as a substitute of Dora. It interesting, how each of the ilustrators "tells" a different story by highlighting different episodes or characters.

Anyway here is Phiz: https://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/phiz/dc/index.html

I miss St Luke´s posts too. He visited Litnet I think it was last year, but probably found us too few.

[bounty]

one of the reasons why I like watching movies and then reading the book, is that the movies help me visualize the characters much better. we watched david Copperfield in high school, but I don't remember it. as a result, my actual image of agnes has remained somewhat nebulous. with a lot of the other illustrations its pretty easy to say "yep, that captures so and so really well" but I don't think any of them have done justice to what I hoped agnes would look like. maybe i'll have to watch all the movies and read the book again!

that said, I like this agnes:

(spoiler alert Sancho!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qu67tzc2K8

found this little blurb:

Agnes' character was based on Dickens' sisters-in-law Mary and Georgina Hogarth, both of whom were very close to Dickens. Mary died in 1837 at the age of 17, and Georgina, from 1842, lived with the Dickens family. Dickens referred to her affectionately as his "little housekeeper". After Dickens' separation from his wife Catherine, Georgina stayed with him for the rest of his life and took complete responsibility for managing his household.

Lettice Cooper has suggested that Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts may also have influenced Dickens in the creation of Agnes.

a small piece of trivia. ive been aware of the old English rock band called Uriah heep long before I knew of the character in a dickens' book. I did a little wiki reading---the band renamed itself in 1969 because it was the 100th anniversary of dickens' death and "the name was everywhere." the band still exists today.

[spikepipsqueak]

Great thread Idea, Sancho. Thank you.

I now have a few more books in my "To read" file.

Something you said about Dickens. I've read Great Expectations many times mandated by various schools, and have never liked it. Read Tale of Two Cities and other Dickens of my own free will and love them.

The downside of using force in literature.

[Danik 2016]

I fully agree with you.

[spikepipsqueak]

Oops. What I'm reading is The Joy of High Places, Patti Miller, Nothing if Not Critical, Robert Hughes (at the rate of about one critique a week).


I am going to make a horrible admission in this den of book lovers.

I have just been travelling and I took A Suitable Boy with me. No car, and it wasn't long before my heavy case and my day pack started to give me joint and muscle pain. (I want to report that in France fit young men will help you get your case up the stairs in the Metro without being asked. It was a pleasant confirmation that people are basically kind.)

The book weighs about a kilo and I tore off the first 400 pages, once they were read, and gave them to a woman I'd been speaking to on the train. I discarded swatches every 50 pages or so, grateful that my day pack was getting lighter and lighter. And experiencing less and less guilt with every rip.



But please don't tell anyone.

[Danik 2016]

Hm. You should try E-Books!

[bounty]

Something you said about Dickens. I've read Great Expectations many times mandated by various schools, and have never liked it. Read Tale of Two Cities and other Dickens of my own free will and love them.

The downside of using force in literature.

ah yes, easy enough to say, but then one is "forced" answer the question of how do you otherwise propose to tackle literature with students? particularly high school kids?

that said, I think I might have posted this before, some years ago I was talking with someone I knew from high school days, I asked how his kids were doing in school. he told me his son was hating English because he was being made to read jane austen. how many 15yr old boys can read jane austen??

[spikepipsqueak]

Yeah. Good Point. A good teacher will discuss relevance and context early on, so that the kid can read alertly, knowing what to look for.

The year I first did Great Expectations I had an amazing teacher. She set me up to appreciate Dickens in general but couldn't leaven the lump of GE.

We had Catcher in the Rye one year for that reason. And Only One Earth. And Authority and the Individual.

I think they try to do a little Something for Everyone.

[Sancho]

Welcome to the the thread, Spikepipsqueak. We be readin’. I’m a firm believer in - read what grabs ya, be it highfalutin or pulp, it’s all good for the soul. I used to leave books in airports — read ‘em and set ‘em free. I like to think whoever picks it up will read it and pass it along. But I finally broke down and bought a Kindle. So far, so good. I keep it in my knapsack. The downside is I can’t use it as fire starter if I find myself in a tough spot.

Haha, no worries about the spoiler, bounty. I’m reading David Copperfield after reading Demon Copperhead so I pretty much already know the curve of the story.

Thanks for the link, Danik. I’ve always enjoyed illustrated books, particularly from that era. I have a superb edition of Moby Dick (sorry bounty) with colorized plates. I liked the artist’s idea of Queequeg better than my own.

Concerning illustrated books, I think Lewis Carroll’s Alice said it best:


Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversation?”

[bounty]

noooooooo moby dick sucks!

although i bet illustrations make it suck less.

spike, I used to "teach" (whatever that means) at the college level. outside of some text book stuff, and some other universally required stuff, I would give the students choices of what to read and we'd do lots of work in small groups.

its possible a great teacher could make jane austen palatable to a 15yr old boy, but if I were a high school English and I wanted to expose kids to the classics, id offer up 4-5 choices and have the kids alternate back and forth between homogenous and heterogenous groups. there is nothing so magical about pride and prejudice that i think some similar meaningful experience couldn't also be gotten from say Frankenstein, Dracula, huckleberry finn, or 20,000 leagues under the sea.

related to Sancho's airport book leavings, have you all ever heard of a thing called "book crossing?"

[tailor STATELY]

My brief interpretation of Moby Dick... "" Call me Ishmael"... call me anything but late for dinner." finis.

Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor

[bounty]

some of you might remember john the motormouth moschitta

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKhUoFCBhNE

[tailor STATELY]

Lol... perfect !

Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor

[Sancho]

Hahahah!

THAR SHE BLOWS… and everyone dies, except the fish and Ish’

School assigned reading really does set the tone, eh? Sometimes for life. One of my early assignments was Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. And at that point in my school career (7th grade I think) it was pretty much indecipherable to me. It put me off reading for a while. I wish they’d ease us into that sort of book . You know, they could start us with something fun, something more contemporary, like a Stephen King book.

What got me back on track (by and large) was my next English teacher. She was a woman who got us reading in spite of the school board’s reading list. I remember an incident with her like it was yesterday. It was a watershed moment in my reading career. I had a copy of Mad Magazine with me in class and I had it under a pile of textbooks, you know hiding it from her. She walked by my desk and said something along the lines of — “What’cha hiding there, Lil’ Sancho?” I sort of sheepishly handed it over to her. She got a big smile on her face and handed it back. She said something like, “What’cha hiding that for? There’s a lot of good stuff in Mad Magazine. Keep on reading.”

What — Me worry?

[spikepipsqueak]

What got me back on track (by and large) was my next English teacher. She was a woman who got us reading in spite of the school board’s reading list. I remember an incident with her like it was yesterday. It was a watershed moment in my reading career. I had a copy of Mad Magazine with me in class and I had it under a pile of textbooks, you know hiding it from her. She walked by my desk and said something along the lines of — “What’cha hiding there, Lil’ Sancho?” I sort of sheepishly handed it over to her. She got a big smile on her face and handed it back. She said something like, “What’cha hiding that for? There’s a lot of good stuff in Mad Magazine. Keep on reading.”



I think I love this teacher.

[Sancho]

Yeah, I pretty much had a school-boy crush on her from that moment on.

[bounty]

heyyyy, you all missed my wonderfully pertinent "are you familiar with book crossing" question!

[Sancho]

Sorry, yep I’ve heard of it, but I haven’t come across it in the wild yet. I do come across unofficial Book Crossings all the time. For instance where I work, in the lounge, there’s what I’d call an unofficial Book Crossing. However due to the nature of guys I work with it’s mostly Tom Clancy novels and police procedurals. Also the aforementioned airport Book Crossings aka The Lost and Found. If you find yourself at an airport with nothing to read, just head over to the L & F and pick out a couple of books for your trip — and then set them free at some other far flung airport.

[Danik 2016]

No bounty, only wasn´t so sure about the meaning.
In Germany, I know, they actually have public bookcases. People leave books they don´t want anymore and they are free to take home any books they want. And it works because the Germans are so organized. I have a digital friend that buys so many books, that I'm afraid one day there won´t be any room for herself in her house. But she also regularly sorts these book out, distributing books among her friends and the public bookcases.

Here in Brazil attempts have been also made of leaving books on certain places. Usually it doesn´t work because there aren't enough readers.

[bounty]

we're in the ballpark but the "book crossing" im a little bit familiar with is more formal. its a web-based organization at which you can register the book you leave out for the public to find, with a directive inside the book to visit the book crossing site and record the find. over time, the book moves around the world and the previous owners can track its course.

[Danik 2016]

we're in the ballpark but the "book crossing" im a little bit familiar with is more formal. its a web-based organization at which you can register the book you leave out for the public to find, with a directive inside the book to visit the book crossing site and record the find. over time, the book moves around the world and the previous owners can track its course.
That´s nice, bounty. But does it work?

[bounty]

alas, unbeknownst to me, when my high-speed internet automatically downloaded the newest windows updates, my internet explorer either disappeared or otherwise became non-functional. im able to be here via microsoft edge, but all the traditional formatting and coloring of the forum has disappeared. now everything is weird looking and kind of a pain in the hind end!

yes, check out the site danik, bookcrossing.com

ps: might have "fixed" my problem by opening the site in an "in private window."

[spikepipsqueak]

We call them street libraries. Yesterday I cleaned an ant's nest out of one. I have gotten some great reads, and also found homes for books that I knew I would never read again.

My problem with the " the book you leave out for the public to find" concept has always been rain. It's whimsical but impractical.

[Danik 2016]

alas, unbeknownst to me, when my high-speed internet automatically downloaded the newest windows updates, my internet explorer either disappeared or otherwise became non-functional. im able to be here via microsoft edge, but all the traditional formatting and coloring of the forum has disappeared. now everything is weird looking and kind of a pain in the hind end!

yes, check out the site danik, bookcrossing.com

ps: might have "fixed" my problem by opening the site in an "in private window."

Lol! Welcome to the world of advanced electronic technology, bounty. Probably your PC downloaded a more recent version of windows, 7, 10 or even 11.. And dear internet explorer has been replaced by windows edge.

Just an alert about a problem I had with litnet months ago, and which might happen to you as you have more advanced software now: my Litnet page was disfigured on most new browsers so that I couldn't write and read other posts anymore. I used sucessively windows edge,firefox, opera, google chrome,bravo and the Russian Yandex. The problem disappeared only after I installed specially for Litnet older and simpler browsers like duck duck and sea monkey.

[Danik 2016]

We call them street libraries. Yesterday I cleaned an ant's nest out of one. I have gotten some great reads, and also found homes for books that I knew I would never read again.

My problem with the " the book you leave out for the public to find" concept has always been rain. It's whimsical but impractical.

At the place near my building they used to put out a supermarket car where one could leave books and also take them out. I put some books there but I haven't seen
the cart of late.

[Sancho]

Hey, I just joined the Book Crossing project. Tragically my username, Sancho, was already taken so I wound up going with my dog’s name. What a Springer Spaniel with behavioral issues has to do with book migration, I don’t know, but he was leaning against me when I was trying to think of username, so there you go.

Gotta go print out some labels.

[bounty]

i just posted a message and it didnt send!

does anyone else hate the IA auto suggestions all over the internet these days? i find they get in the way of my tying/spelling.

whats going on now is that every time i switch threads i have to log back in!

sancho, am glad you joined. looking forward to hearing the news of any of your books making headway into the world. maybe i'll join in too...

[tailor STATELY]

re: "whats going on now is that every time i switch threads i have to log back in!"

... some instability here as well... was completely locked out for a while and sent a note to the powers that be in case I had been banned. I have logged in many times in this last spate of posts trying to get caught up... but it's better than the last few days :)

Note: Always copy your post before sending... it will save you a headache or two.

Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor

[Danik 2016]

Bounty and tailor, glad you are back! I wrote bounty a post on the matter, which disappeared mysteriously

Suggestion:
If log in problems or disfigured pages happen, try one of this older browsers exclusively on Litnet:

Duck duck
Sea Monkey
Midori

What calls my attention: usually foreign users are more affected with these instabilities. This time it seems to affect USA nationals.

[Sancho]

***TEST TEST TEST 1-4-3-2-1 TEST TEST***

Well you guys warned me. Dickens is wordy. I kept wondering, since it was serialized, if he wasn’t getting paid by the word. It was fun to read David Copperfield after reading Demon Copperhead. Kingsolver certainly used Dickens as a guide and I used Kingsolver as a guide to Dickens, but the stories are different on many levels. Although at times enjoyed being carried along by Dickens’ prose, more often than not I found myself wishing he was more crisp and to the point, like Kingsolver. Probably a result of reading her first.

Anyway an old engineer joke kept bouncing around my brain:

There’s a 12 ounce glass on the table with 6 ounces of water in it.
An optimist says the glass is half full.
A pessimist says the glass is half empty.
An engineer says the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

David Copperfield has twice the number of words it needs.

Speaking of wordy, I’m reading Stephen King’s Holly now. King really likes his character, Holly Gibney, and it shows. I like her too..

[bounty]

that's funny...

by contrast, I don't like hemingway so much because his writing style seems too "crisp and to the point."

[Danik 2016]

In a way Dickens was paid by the word. The Victorians loved door stoppers ( noTV, bo radios, no sport programs, no internet). So the editors showed their preference for larger novels or, when publishing in a magazine, for an endless number of installments.

[Sancho]

Ah-hah! There it is.

Yep, Hemingway has sort of fallen out of favor in literature departments. In fact I’ve heard non-tenured professors won’t teach him for fear of never becoming tenured professors.

Anyway I like his stuff, particularly the Nick Adams stories. His writing seems to me to epitomize the iceberg metaphor — most of it is below the surface. I read that his early drafts were a lot wordier, but then he’d slash and burn in the editing process. He said he could edit a word out, but it was somehow still there, just below the surface. Something like that.

At any rate I think a lot of his popularity back in the day was a direct result of people being fed up with the excessive wordiness of the Victorian novel. Then there was a backlash and the literati quit liking his stuff. Now I think we can move on from the backlash and put books like The Sun Also Rises in their rightful place in the American Canon — next to Moby Dick. Speaking of Moby, Hemingway was kind of a dick.

[bounty]

one wonders if hemingways current downtrending is because of his writing style or because of the content and his reputation of being a man's man.

[Sancho]

Probably some of both. E.H. was certainly a manly-man, who liked to do man-things, in a manly manner, with other men. (For some strange reason Monty Python’s Lumberjack tune just popped into my head).

https://youtu.be/pfRdur8GLBM?si=2M3F6eN-NC7FOV0o

The man has probably been posthumously psychoanalyzed more than any other writer. Say what you will about him, but he was no armchair adventurer. He wrote from personal experience. And I’ve heard he broke nearly every bone in his body in pursuit of adventure.

[Danik 2016]

Thanks for explaining what a man's man is, Sancho.I like several of his works, like The Old Man and the Sea, Lady Chatterly' s Lover and the short stories, but he certainly has a very masculine point of view. But, if he had been different, he wouldn't have been Hemingway.

[Sancho]

True that.

I think armchair psychiatrists looked at EH’s virulent masculinity and asked — what’s he compensating for? The idea being, someone who likes hunting, bullfighting, brawling, drinking, womanizing, and war as much as Hemingway did must be hiding some deep insecurity. Maybe he was. Or maybe he truly enjoyed those things. The next question is, well if EH really liked doing all that manly stuff with other men, did he prefer men to women in other ways? I doubt it. He was a man of his times and he exhibited (or tried to exhibit) the the alpha male characteristics as he understood them.

Speaking of manliness and one’s manhood, there’s a funny story in A Movable Feast about just that subject. (A Movable Feast is about Hemingway in Paris in the 1920s when he was in his 20s. It was a “feast”, and the “feast” was “movable”. It stayed with him his whole life.) In this story, during a night of drinking , Scott Fitzgerald confides in him that he cannot sexually satisfy Zelda. He worries that he doesn’t measure up. Hemingway takes Fitzgerald around back and personally inspects his junk. Hemingway tells him — naw, you’re fine. Fitzgerald isn’t convinced, so Hemingway suggests he go over to The Louvre and check out the genitalia on the Greek statues. You know, make a comparison. Funny. Also cruel. It’s just not cricket to publish that sort of thing about your friend.

[bounty]

im a lumberjack and im okay!

[Sancho]

Haha.

Not judging you, man.

So I’ve been watching the coverage of the latest senseless shooting in these United States, up in Lewiston, Maine. I won’t comment on guns, or mental health, but I will say I’ve been fascinated by the press conferences. They’ve got a city official giving updates on the manhunt and patiently answering press questions. Next to him is a woman translating everything into American Sign Language. She is quite expressive and animated. It’s mesmerizing to watch and it’s given me a new appreciation for ASL. I think I’ve learned a fair amount of it just watching her. I’d like to learn more. Does anybody here know ASL?

[bounty]

i took a class a longgggggggggggg time ago, and bought a book too, but the opportunities to practice are really limited and so what little I learned faded away into oblivion.

i wanted to make a career out of coaching cross-country and track & field, and was never able to make it happen, but i was able to cobble together some experiences. one of them exposed me to track athletes from gallaudet university. you might enjoy looking around.

https://gallaudet.edu/

at the same time i was taking the sign language class, i was taking a Chinese language class. i have old friend who spent a semester abroad in Beijing, married a Chinese girl, has spent most of his working life back and forth there, and picked up the language seemingly pretty easily, but i found it torturous.

[Sancho]

Thanks for the link. You’re right, interesting.

I think those of us who speak as a primary language any of the Indo-European languages would have trouble with a tonal language. I’ve spent time in Japan and Korea and toyed around with both languages. When I try to use them with a native I pretty much get the same reaction — the women avert their eyes and giggle. The men just display a perplexed look. Anyway I haven’t tried the Chinese languages but I hear Mandarin is way more assessable than Cantonese.

[bounty]

I have a "penpal" from china right now and she's studying to be an international Chinese teacher.

I have a bunch of old Chinese language instruction cassette tapes. I was hoping the books through bars folks would have wanted them, but they told me they cant send tapes to prisons.

and on the topic of the thread, ive only got two pages left in the twilight zone book ive been reading for many weeks now (supplemented by a couple of dilberts and a far side), will be looking for something new to start tomorrow.

[spikepipsqueak]

At the place near my building they used to put out a supermarket car where one could leave books and also take them out. I put some books there but I haven't seen
the cart of late.

I've never found how to post photos here, or I'd show you some of the purpose built street libraries within 5k of my place. I just put out an old chest of drawers but some people REALLY go to town.


Thanks for explaining what a man's man is, Sancho.I like several of his works, like The Old Man and the Sea, Lady Chatterly' s Lover and the short stories, but he certainly has a very masculine point of view. But, if he had been different, he wouldn't have been Hemingway.

[being picky] Lady Chatterley was D. H. Lawrence. [/being picky] :)

[spikepipsqueak]

True that.

I think armchair psychiatrists looked at EH’s virulent masculinity and asked — what’s he compensating for? The idea being, someone who likes hunting, bullfighting, brawling, drinking, womanizing, and war as much as Hemingway did must be hiding some deep insecurity. Maybe he was. Or maybe he truly enjoyed those things. The next question is, well if EH really liked doing all that manly stuff with other men, did he prefer men to women in other ways? I doubt it. He was a man of his times and he exhibited (or tried to exhibit) the the alpha male characteristics as he understood them.

Speaking of manliness and one’s manhood, there’s a funny story in A Movable Feast about just that subject. (A Movable Feast is about Hemingway in Paris in the 1920s when he was in his 20s. It was a “feast”, and the “feast” was “movable”. It stayed with him his whole life.) In this story, during a night of drinking , Scott Fitzgerald confides in him that he cannot sexually satisfy Zelda. He worries that he doesn’t measure up. Hemingway takes Fitzgerald around back and personally inspects his junk. Hemingway tells him — naw, you’re fine. Fitzgerald isn’t convinced, so Hemingway suggests he go over to The Louvre and check out the genitalia on the Greek statues. You know, make a comparison. Funny. Also cruel. It’s just not cricket to publish that sort of thing about your friend.

Good advice, though. The Greeks didn't exaggerate "endowment", quite the opposite.

Should have helped Fitzgerald's confidence.

What I'm reading?

The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories.

IMO everybody should read The Majesty of the Law by Frank O'Connor and then the principles in it should be universally adopted. The world would improve, no end.

[Danik 2016]

I've never found how to post photos here, or I'd show you some of the purpose built street libraries within 5k of my place. I just put out an old chest of drawers but some people REALLY go to town.



[being picky] Lady Chatterley was D. H. Lawrence. [/being picky] :)

Lol!

As for the photos, try sending a PM to Tony Walton. He hasn´t posted for some time, but he used to post wonderful photos here. But not directly. He has an account on Flicker and from there he somehow manages to post the pictures on Litnet.

[Sancho]

I haven’t posted a picture here in a while. Used to be you’d get a Photobucket account and paste the link.

Majesty of the Law sounds interesting. Gonna have to look for it. I’ve never read anything by Frank O’Connor. Leads like this are why I like this website.

I’m still reading Stephen King’s Holly. There was a hiccup. I left my Kindle in the seat pocket in front of me on the airplane. So I’ll bet one of the cabin cleaners is now reading it. Ah well. I didn’t even get to put a Book Crossing sticker on it. My new Kindle was delivered yesterday by a nice man in an Amazon van. He didn’t even seem to mind when my dog, with muddy paws, climbed into his van to inspect the packages.

[bounty]

Good advice, though. The Greeks didn't exaggerate "endowment", quite the opposite.


https://pictolic.com/en/article/6-reasons-why-ancient-statues-have-such-small-penises

[Sancho]

I guess that makes sense. It’s probably easier to gird your loins when you’ve got a little Willie rather than a big ole swinging Johnson, and the Greeks valued prowess in battle.

Lately for some reason Seinfeld quotes keep popping up (no pun). I remember Elaine once saying, with a dismissive wave, “I don’t know how you guys walk around with those things.”

[bounty]

i think we had the "shrinkage" conversation here somewhere not long ago.

the greeks had pools right?

i was in the pool! i was in the pool!

[Sancho]

That’s gold, Jerry! Gold!

(Ovaltine bit)

Currently reading The Fraud, by Zadie Smith

[bounty]

its still hard to beat the soup Nazi.

I love in the last episode where the lawyer asked him to spell his name and the guy says "no, next question!"

i haven't paid enough attention to remember---did you put dickens on hold for a while?

[Sancho]

Larry David deserves a Nobel IMO.

Yep, finished David Copperfield despite its annoying verbosity. I wound up reading it with an eye towards how Barbara Kingsolver created Demon Copperhead.

Then I read Stephen King’s Holly. It was a good read, a real page turner. One of the things I like about his books are all the asides, stuff he’s researched and thrown in. It can be straight-up information, pop culture, politics, or whatever. In this novel at one point he writes about the “blue Chevy effect” — if you buy a blue Chevy all of a sudden you start noticing all the blue Chevys on the road. Later he mentions a wounded quail and I realized how many times I’ve noticed the wounded bird thing since we chatted about it in reference to the recent Michael Punke book.

Then I read, or started to read, Zadie Smith’s The Fraud. I kinda bogged down. So I bought another page turner. I burned through Michael Connelly’s Black Echo, the first of his Detective Bosch books. Great fun.

And now I’m back on The Fraud.

[bounty]

ive often said this when it comes to authors and reading, theres so much good stuff out there.

ive read lots and enjoyed all the Michael Connelly books ive read but I haven't read black echo.

I recently picked up 2-3 new lee child "jack reacher" books and that's almost like having candy in the cupboard.

also got a few tom Clancy books in the "jack ryan jr.' series, and I wonder if I have them all in order to have continuity if I want to read those.

right now im into an act of treason by new authors to me, jack coughlin and don davis, who write sniper novels with kyle swanson as a recurring character. its a political/military thriller where kyle has just been double-crossed and set-up by his former mentor, who just faked his own death and is planning on betraying America to a Taliban figure with eyes on the presidency of Pakistan.

have been wondering---did you end up making some book crossing labels and set some books free?

[Sancho]

Absolutely agree. There are so many good writers of genre fiction out there. I just gotta say, lit snobs who only read literary fiction are missing out. I took an American Lit class in college. The professor had all the classics on a shelf in his office and he also had a drawer full of well-thumbed crime novels.

My wife wants to thank you, bounty. I’ve been flinging books in airports all over the place and slowly clearing out the basement. Book Crossing lets you design your own label, so I made one with Don and Sancho. Lemme know if you ever come across one.

I haven’t started it yet, but I just downloaded Neon Rain, by James Lee Burke.

[bounty]

and a variant of that is, theres something for everyone.

that's fun---I look forward to hearing if you get any book crossing hits.

my an act of treason had an interesting moral dilemma last night. kyle's trapped behind enemy lines with all the authorities in the city searching for him. he was able to disguise himself as a local cop and is trying to make his way to safety. there had been a large explosion triggered by an insider faction trying to overthrow the present government, so there is death and destruction all over. on his way to the US embassy, kyle comes across a little girl with an injured mother, and the girl begs him for help...

as an aside, cant remember if I shared this with you before:

https://cycling.today/live-streaming/

[Sancho]

Thanks for the link.

As for the dilemma faced by the protagonist in your novel, it sounds a little like the lifeboat dilemma, an ethical thought experiment used by philosophers for ages. Do you sacrifice a few for the many, and if so how do choose who buys it? There are thirteen people in a lifeboat that’ll only hold twelve, so somebody has to go or everybody will wind up in a watery grave at the bottom of the ocean. There’s an old nun, a young child, a pregnant woman, a newlywed couple, a single father of four, a nurse, a teacher, an ex-con, the ship captain, teenage twins, and, uhhh, Sancho. Who goes? Who stays? And who gets to choose? (That is of course after the nun jumps up and volunteers to throw herself off the boat to save everybody else, but is shouted down — sit down, sister, the world needs people like you.)

At any rate I bet your protagonist figures out how to help the woman and complete his mission, which of course is cheating the thought experiment.

I’ve on a roll. I read Connelly’s first Harry Bosch novel, then I read the first Dave Robicheaux novel by James Lee Burke, then I read C.J. Box’s first book about Joe Pickett. Now I’m reading Thomas Berger’s comic novel about King Arthur — Arthur Rex.

[bounty]

on the topic of my hatred for moby dick---the true story that inspired the novel, written as the tragedy of the whaleship Essex has accounts of what they did in the lifeboats. that is a great read.

also, relative to my screen name here---most people have heard of mutiny on the bounty but lots of people don't know that's just the first book in a trilogy. one of the books is [/I]men against the sea[/I] and its the account of captain bligh and his followers after the mutiny and they got put off ship.

and then im thinking of the survival at sea stories of ernest shackleton.

all great stuff!

and since ive been reading the far side recently, ive included a few life boat ones.

kyle got captured and it was interesting how it happened. he decided not just to help, but to continue to help as the opportunity presented itself. in the process, he spoke English to the woman he was helping. as time went by and a crowd started to gather, the bystanders, some of whom were the very people looking for him, realized something was amiss when she was speaking in English to him. after he'd been severely beaten and imprisoned, the author has him saying to himself that he made the right decision and that he'd do it all over again.

have you ever read James Rollins, or matthew reilly? I bet youd like them.

[Sancho]

I haven’t read either of those guys, but I’ll give them a try. I’ve been kind of binging on detective novels lately.

I’m familiar with the story of the Whaleship Essex. I read Nathaniel Philbrick’s In The Heart of the Sea when it came out. As far as what they did in the lifeboats to survive, well, ya gotta do what ya gotta do. (I also read Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, by Piers Paul Reade)

Fair is fair, Larry, we drew straws…

Philbrick is one of those rare historians who can write history like a page turner. I’ve read most of his books. He’s got another seafaring book you may like: Sea Of Glory. It’s about America’s exploration expedition (The Ex Ex) of the south seas 1838-42. It had the potential to go down in history on an equal footing with Lewis and Clark’s expedition, but it fell into obscurity instead. The leader of the expedition, Lieutenant Wilkes, had a leadership style like Captain Bligh but lacked his maritime acumen. Anyway I read that book while I was on maritime/shipwreck book binge.

[bounty]

lemme know what you think if you end up trying either.

sometime in the near future I might try an old perry mason book I have, and then watch the movie version online.

im also thinking of some old mickey spillane and rex stout detective stories.

i'll keep my eyes peeled for sea of glory

you'll get a kick out of this, although it seems like ive written it before---when I was in high school, 12th grade English consisted of 4 ten-week mini courses. the students had a variety from which to choose. during my junior year, the school solicited us for new ideas for the mini courses. I suggested "survival literature" and it got picked up.

[Sancho]

Warning. Full Metal Jacket Quote:


Sgt Hartman — Cowboy!
Pvt Cowboy — Sir yes sir!
Hartman — Oh three hundred, infantry. Taylor!
Pvt Taylor — Sir yes sir!
Hartman — 0300, infantry. Joker!
Pvt Joker — Sir yes sir!
Hartman — 4212. Basic Military Journalism. You gotta be sh*ttin' me, Joker. You think you're Mickey Spillane? You think you're some kind of a f*ckin' writer?
Joker — Sir, I wrote for my high school newspaper, sir!
Hartman — Jesus H. Christ! You're not a writer. You're a killer!

Yeah, I started the Harry Bosch, Dave Robicheaux, Joe Picket series books so I wouldn’t have to think too hard to find my next book. They’ve all got a hook in the first couple of pages and wind up with bang in the last couple pages. They’re not exactly potboilers, but they follow that structure. I did read a few Mike Hammer stories years ago.

You know Herman Melville used to write raucous sea tales and he had a pretty good following. Then he wrote Moby and most of his readers felt betrayed and dropped off.

BTW good idea with the survival literature. I suppose on some level or another a lot of writing could be considered survival literature. Homer’s Odyssey for instance.

[Sancho]

Here’s a few quotes from John Lee Burke’s Heaven’s Prisoners, the second book in the Dave Robicheaux series. The books are set in New Orleans and south Louisiana and hence have a readymade colorful background of people, music, food, and the bayou.

This is a section of the Breaux Bridge highway, a row of dive bars, brothels, gambling establishments, and juke joints:


Emergency flares burned next to the wrecked automobiles and shattered glass on the two-lane blacktop, the dance floors roared with electronic noise and fistfights. You could get laid, beat up, shanked, and dosed with clap, all in one night and for less than five dollars.

Here’s Dave recalling a life-lesson he learned in Little League:


But maybe the most important lesson I had learned about addressing complexity was from an elderly Negro janitor who had once pitched for the Kansas City Monarchs in the old Negro leagues. He used to watch our games in the afternoon, and one day when I’d been shotgunned off the mound and was walking off the field toward the shower, he walked along beside me and said, “Sliders and screwballs is cute, and spitters shows ’em you can be nasty. But if you want to make that batter’s pecker shrivel up, you throw a forkball at his head.”

I liked this description of the swamp:


The wind was still blowing hard as I drove down the long concrete causeway over the Atchafalaya swamp. The sky was still a soft blue and filled with tumbling white clouds, but a good storm was building out on the Gulf and I knew that by evening the southern horizon would be black and streaked with rain and lightning. I watched the flooded willow trees bend in the wind, and the moss on the dead cypress in the bays straighten and fall, and the way the sunlight danced and shattered on the water when the surface suddenly wrinkled from one shore to the next. The Atchafalaya basin encompasses hundreds of square miles of bayous, willow islands, sand bogs, green levees covered with buttercups, wide bays dotted with dead cypress and oil-well platforms, and flooded woods filled with cottonmouths, alligators, and black clouds of mosquitoes.

Speaking of the wildlife:


…high above me pelicans floated on the warm air currents, their extended wings gilded in the sunlight, until suddenly one would drop from the sky like a bomb from its rack, its wings cocked back against its sides, and explode against the water’s surface and then rise dripping with a menhaden or a mullet flapping from its pouched beak.

Okay, one more. Here’s Dave’s wife reminding him of what he thought of Kansas, where she’d grown up:


You remember what you said about Kansas when you visited there? ‘This is probably the only place in the United States that would be improved by nuclear war.’

[Sancho]

Sheesh! James Lee Burke not John

[bounty]

didn't know that about Melville. if it wasn't for all the worthwhile pop-cultural references (star trek: first contact and the far side come to mind) to moby dick, id wanna travel back in time and prevent him from writing the gosh darned thing.

i was super proud of the idea, took the class as a senior and its been an ongoing favorite genre of mine. yes the odyssey would have fit.

i might have ya beat for quotes Sancho. i just started reading huntedby William Johnstone:

(its rich guy talking to a bunch of mercenaries hired to capture a man who has lived for centuries, is immortal, and described as the consummate warrior)


"the man you are searching for is rumored to have the ability to change into animal form. of course that is pure bunk."

"shape-shifter" the questioner whispered. he had been raised in the white world until he was ten...now the indian in him surfaced. "he is doubly dangerous. what animal is he akin to?"

"vlad is rumored to have the ability to change into a wolf."

the Indian's eyes narrowed. "you will never have this man. he is a brother to the wolf. the most intelligent, dangerous and cunning predator to walk the face of the earth. i tell you now, you are wasting your money."

"then you refuse to take the job?"

George eagle dancer smiled "i did not say that. i will take your money, and i will do the best i can. and i alone will survive the hunt...along with the shape-shifter. the rest will fail."

"George, you're a bleedin' harbinger of doom" the Englishman standing next to him said.

the indian merely grunted a noncommittal reply.

hows that for dramatic tension building!

[Sancho]

Haha,
The Harbingers of Doom, isn’t that a British heavy metal band?

Here’s one from Arthur Rex: A Legendary Novel. It concerns the birth of King Arthur


But finally the day came when the queen was delivered of her child, by many of physicians and attendants, all of whom were afterwards put to death because they had seen the royal nether parts uncovered, and the babe was put into the hands of a wet nurse, who would also be disposed of when her job was done, along with her own infant and whichever other children had fed from the milk now being used to nourish a future king.


Yep, seems Herman’s readers felt betrayed when they tried to slog through Moby Dick. I wanna think Melville never really recovered and Moby only became popular after his death.

[bounty]

that would make a good band name.

have you seen monty python's the meaning of life? there is a scene where the grim reaper shows up at a dinner party, wade into the middle of the table and says "I have come for you...to take you away. that is my purpose. I am death."

and graham chapman responds "well that's cast a rather gloom over the evening hasn't it?"

or a big bang theory where the characters show up on some guys doorstep trying to get back Sheldon's belongings from a video game that the guy had hacked and stolen. they knock on the door and the guy says "who is it?" and Sheldon says "your doom!" and one of the guys goes "don't say 'your doom' who opens the door for their doom??"

so royal ob/gyns had a short career path.

yes, I just read that it wasn't until a few decades after moby dickwas published that it started to become critically acclaimed.

by the way, hunted has gone off in a direction I hadn't foreseen...its like a ruby ridge and Waco on steroids.

[hellsapoppin]

Am finishing Willa Cather's My Antonía.


Interesting story of laborious life in the Plains with social contract implications. Some endure, some do not. The pioneer spirit lasted well into the 20th century as embodied in the resilient and spirited Bohemian immigrant Antonía. Despite life's injustices and inequities, she manages to survive and brings many healthy children into the world. The narrator, a childhood friend of hers, succeeds financially, moves to NYC to become a lawyer, travels very widely. Despite all his material success he yearns for the times in which he knew the girl and admires her for her life success despite her very evident lack of prosperity.

[Sancho]

Loved My Antonia!

Based on bounty’s recommendation of Zane Gray, I’m reading Riders of the Purple Sage. I picked that one because of the title. You see, I spent a lot of my misspent youth listening to hippy bands like The New Riders of the Purple Sage, so it seemed like a good call. And yet I’m pretty sure the New Riders had something entirely different in mind about purple sage than Mr. Gray did.

So far, so good.


My woman said, "hey **Sancho**
You're actin' crazy like a clown"
Nobody feels like working
Panama Red is back in town

https://youtu.be/O9G0emfp87E?si=d1M35XvWHSVvNSiq

¡El steel guitar es muy bueno!

[bounty]

thats funny---I remember the song "panama red" buy I wasn't remembering the name of the group.

"In addition to Nelson, Dawson (on acoustic guitar), and Garcia (continuing to play pedal steel), the original line-up of the band that came to be known as the New Riders of the Purple Sage (a nod to the Foy Willing-led Western swing combo from the 1940s, Riders of the Purple Sage, which borrowed its name from the Zane Grey novel)…"

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

that might be grey's most recognizably famous work. looking forward to hearing if you like it. I got into reading him from being a big fan of M*A*S*H, there are a number of episodes where colonel potter is reading him. my thinking was "hmm, I like colonel potter, I will probably like reading what he likes to read."

[bounty]

I have my Antonia but haven't read it yet...maybe after the book I just started, an easy beach read of sorts that i'll get through pretty quickly.

[Sancho]

Bay-area bands from them days mixed and matched a lot. Jerry in particular got around. He could get along with anybody. And he got really good really fast at the pedal steel. Anybody who’s ever tried to operate one those machines knows the pedal steel guitar ain’t easy to play well. Then for some reason he quit playing it. You can hear his distinct sound here:

https://youtu.be/EkaKwXddT_I?si=Su2UQ83Dk3Zyjurs
Teach Your Children, Crosby Stills Nash and Young

https://youtu.be/VWY4hyIlsqQ?si=E-T77H2kdN06-o8F
Dire Wolf, Grateful Dead

https://youtu.be/rYGatU18PMQ?si=WKubtyLJEWMqJD8L
The Wheel, Jerry Garcia

[bounty]

i had friends growing up who were big fans of the dead, but I never really gave them much of a listen outside of what was playing on the radio. but everytime I hear something new, I enjoy it.

and one of the nifty things about YouTube are all the cover versions out there, many of them I think better than the originals.

if youre up for the same song three times in a row, give these a shot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o05f8yLaaKM (1:38 and 2:22 just crush me)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=909wQior51Q (wish there were more of these guys, the cross-cultural/cross genre stuff is fantastic)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmocY6WQX6c (check out the instrument!)

[Sancho]

What is that thing on that guitar? A lyre? A lute?

So I recently read Thomas Berger’s Arthur Rex, which is a hilarious satire of the legend of King Arthur, kinda like Don Quixote.

Here’s Sir Tristram and Lady La Belle Isold:


Indeed in the violence of the emotion which they shared, mere fleshly contact would not have sufficed, therefore they did not join together except for one burning kiss, and then they sent Brangwain to fetch both their lyres, upon which they played a duet and sang together, making music so sweet that the fearsome serpents rose from the bottom of the sea to float and listen with eyes soft as lambs’, and the melody calmed the previously truculent waters and the warm sun dissipated the gray clouds.

[Danik 2016]

Wonderful citation, Sancho!

[bounty]

the title below the video says its a "harp guitar" which Ive never heard of before.

Arthur rex sounds like it would make good source material for monty python.

[Sancho]

Haha. Thanks, Danik. The whole book is like that. Here’s the good knight, Tristram, preparing to fight the Irish giant Morholt on his island:


And Tristram did grimace from the stink of the Morholt’s breath, which was foul with a corruption which made sweet the odors of rotten cheese and the foist of dogs, and a gull flying through it fell stone dead onto the beach.

Bounty, I need to check the copy write date to see who influenced who.

[hellsapoppin]

Death Comes for the Archbishop ~ Willa Cather [1927]



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

[Sancho]

Reading Why Read Moby Dick, by Nathaniel Philbrick.

...because, Ah jess hasta know...

[spikepipsqueak]

I had a bunch of books going concurrently, in various locations.

Just finished most of them.

Wolf Hall. Hilary Mantel. HenryVIII gets lots of exposure, this is a fictionalised treatment of some of what happened at the time behind the scenes.

My Cousin Rachel. Daphne du Maurier. Shades of Rebecca and The Turning of the Screw.

The life you can save. Peter Singer. A plea for greater, and better targeted, generosity from us all. Also a very interesting examination of how foreign aid works. Or doesn't.


The Hunstman on my wall has reminded me that everybody, whether you like science fiction or not, needs to read Children of Time. Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Just read it. Let me know what you think.

[Sancho]

I’ve left the watery deep and I’m back on firm ground, specifically the intermountain west region of the U-S of A. Riders of the Purple Sage (Zane Grey) is set in 1871 in southern Utah, which at the time was not yet a state but a territory of the United States. There are Mormons and Gentiles (a word that, weirdly, Mormons use for non-Mormons). There are cowboys and cattle rustlers and gun-slingers. And there’s a pretty lady rancher who is Mormon, but unlike her fellow churchmen is not bigoted towards the gentiles of the town. And I’m not sure yet, but I’m willing to bet there’s going to be an issue with water rights. It is the desert southwest after all. I’m about a third of the way through it.

[Sancho]

Finished Riders of the Purple Sage.

I’m thinking you probably won’t find a copy of it in a Deseret Books Store (book stores and a publishing house owned by The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints, The Mormons) The book really takes a cheap shot at the Mormons, and Zane’s description of them is not even close to being historically accurate. They’re just a handy villain for him.

Aside from that, as a work of genre fiction, I thought it might fit better in the romance section than the western section. It was really just a love story with some cows, horses, six-shooters, and a lot of purple sage in it. Water rights never did figure into it as I thought it might.

Currently reading The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson…Boo!

[bounty]

Sancho, I have perused that book by Philbrick, hoping for enlightenment, alas it didn't occur.

ah, am a little bummer zane grey didn't seem to do the trick for you---for what its worth thought, almost every western ive read seems to be a love story and more often or not, the guy gets the girl.

you might enjoy peeking here:

https://www.millennialstar.org/zane-grey-and-mormonism-today/

https://byustudies.byu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/18.4ToppingZane-ad40da0b-18e0-446a-958a-d027e8d3e9de.pdf

meanwhile, in the caine mutiny herman wouk is doing a really good job of building a story of empathy towards the sailors, and disgruntledness and incompetence as concerns captain queeg---given the title, you know something big is coming along.

[Sancho]

Hey, thanks for the links. It’s nice to know Grey had a little more nuanced view of the Mormons than it first seems in Riders. One of the characters in the book winds up leaving southern Utah and taking his girl, Bess, back to his hometown in Illinois. I wondered if this reversing of the Mormon migration west meant something.

Anyway, I didn’t hate the book. It was a fun read. In fact I’ll probably read more of Grey’s books in the future. It’s nice to know he’s there. I’d kinda like to reread Lonesome Dove now. Ya know, reading this book right after reading Moby Dick felt a little like Jake and Elwood stumbling into Bob’s Country Bunker and asking, “What kind of music do you usually have here?” And the barmaid saying, proudly, “Oh, we got both kinds — we got Country and Western.”

https://youtu.be/vS-zEH8YmiM?si=UC7Gyxg3BH8ed91z

I try to keep a little balance in my life. If I listen to Tammy Wynette song, I’m gonna need to listen to Miles Davis next.

[bounty]

I did lots of peeking here many years ago:

https://www.zgws.org/index.php

I remember that scene well---and then how they started off playing spencer davis and got pelted with beer bottles before they figured out that rawhide and stand by your man was the musical coin of the realm.

I do similarly---I make sure to add some non-fiction to the reading, and also jump around between various genres, easy reads, and harder ones, etc.

next section in wouk is the mutiny!

[Sancho]

Sheesh! Sorry Spike, I breezed right past your post whilst I was going on about westerns and romance novels and stuff. Can I just say — you have eclectic taste. That's quite the list.

Conversations on these forums sometimes reminds me of a quip by Fran Lebowitz:


The opposite of talking is not listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.

Yup. Guilty.

[bounty]

in a recent reading of the caine mutiny the author mentions some impromptu celebrations after the crew defeats queeg in the affair of the missing strawberries. among other things, they sang a bunch of songs, one them called the man who shagged o'reilly's daughter.

the song is apparently more commonly known just as o'reilly's daughter and its somewhat ribald. I was surprised by the word "shagged" in the title and the lyrics. I have been to the uk bunches of times in the 80s and it wasn't until the Austin powers movies that I first heard the word, and so I was half thinking it must have been a relatively new word, kinda like "snoggin'" in harry potter (although I might be wrong about that one too!), but apparently, its been around at least since herman wouk wrote the book, and since the song was written.

[Sancho]

Ah yes, and all this time I thought the song was — Boinking O’Reilly’s daughter. It might say something about us as a species that we have so many words to describe that action. We’ve also got a lot of words that describe drinking or getting drunk, but only a few for staying sober.

Presently reading Harlen Coben’s Deal Breaker. Pretty good so far. Totally enjoyed The Haunting Of Hill House.

[bounty]

I like Harlan coben. you can always look forward to easy reading with intriguing plots, twists and surprise endings. i'm still convinced you'll like James Rollins.

im nearing the end of the caine mutiny, its been a very thoughtful and compelling book.

[Sancho]

The court-martial and its aftermath was the best part in my humble opinion. If you liked this one, bounty, there’s a short novel from the next war you may like. The Hunters by James Salter. It’s a dark, psychological book about war, ambition, self-doubt, and air combat in the skies over the Korean peninsula. Salter writes from experience. He was an F-86 pilot in the Korean War.

[spikepipsqueak]

No need for apologies, Sancho.

The nature of fora is you reply to the things that need a reply and just enjoy the rest.

I've been enjoying the Caine discussion, and the Zane Grey talk, though it's many years since I read either and I would have no way to join in.

[bounty]

I finished the book last night and I really enjoyed wouks writing. heres a nifty little sample:


even at anchor, on an idle forgotten old ship, willie experienced the strange sensations of the first days of a new captain: a shrinking of his personal identity, and a stretching out of his nerve ends to all the spaces and machinery of his ship. he was less free than before. he developed the apprehensive listening ears of a young mother; the ears listened on in his sleep; he never quite slept, not the way he had before. he had the sense of having been reduced from an individual to a sort of brain of a composite animal., the crew and ship combined. the reward for these disturbing sensations came when he walked the decks. power seemed to flow out of the plates into his body. the respectful demeanor of the officers and crew thrust him into a loneliness he had never known, but it wasn't a frigid loneliness. through the transparent barrier of manners came the warming unspoken word that his men liked him and believed in him.

and what was particularly interesting nearing the end of the book was willie's return to his love of the girl he had left, may, and his desire to have her back in his life. ive shared this pushkin quote elsewhere. it seems worth sharing again:

"The delightful attention of women, almost the sole aim of man's exertions..." -- pushkin

thanks Sancho, i'll keep my eyes peeled for the salter book.

in the meantime, I just started house of sand and fog by andre dubus. I watched the movie some months ago and I love reading the books afterwards. the big mystery here is, I hated the ending of the movie, but I know the book ends differently---so we'll see.

[Sancho]

Good quote. It gets at Wouk’s artistry well.

Here’s one from my present read:


She crossed her legs the way few women could, turning an ordinary event into a moment of sexual intrigue. Myron tried not to stare. He also tried not to remember the luscious feel of those legs in bed. He was unsuccessful in both endeavors.

Deal Breaker, Harlan Coben. It’s been a fun book. Probably not gonna win a Pulitzer though.

The thing I remember most about The Caine Mutiny was how Wouk sort of reeled the reader in. I mean during the first part of the book I totally threw in with the mutineers. Then at the court-martial I kept thinking — Man! The navy just doesn’t get it. It wasn’t until after the trial, when the defense attorney upbraided the mutineers that I figured it out. Lt Keefer had sown the seeds, but they all had a hand in torpedoing Queeg. If they’d’ve supported the Captain, it could’ve been a successful cruise. Also, nothing against Iowa, but could there be a worse place for a career navy man to end up?

[bounty]

just recently I found myself wondering, not for the first time, why women wear skirts and dresses and the answer is overwhelmingly related to sex.

I think you captured the arc of the book pretty well. it reminds me a bit from a very memorable scene i can share from star trek: deep space nine. have you seen the series?

[Sancho]

I haven’t seen a single episode of Star Trek: deep space nine. It’s been only fairly recently that I’ve watched much TV at all. I was raised by a woman who had a hostile attitude towards television. She called it the boob tube and people who watched it boobs. My father had an ambivalent towards it, but I think he liked tinkering with our set. We had an old (even for back then) B&W TV. It wasn’t solid-state. It had vacuum tubes that he’d pull out one-by-one and take down to a hardware store. The store had a DYI tube tester and for a buck or two you could replace a bad tube — then for a few weeks the TV’s vertical-hold was semi-stable. We had 3 commercial stations and National Educational Television (early version of PBS) all broadcasting on a UHF band. The reception wasn’t great, but with the help of a couple of coat hangers and some aluminum foil, the antenna was OK. We’d all be in the den watching a show and my mother would walk in, look at the antenna/modern-art project, shake her head, call us all a bunch of boobs, and then stomp out. Now I’ve got a bunch of streaming services, but I’m still catching up. Honestly, I still feel a little guilty sitting in front of the TV. Something in the back of my head is still shouting at me — Get outta the house, ya boob! Go do something!

[bounty]

i remember the "boob tube" moniker. I think our parents did a pretty good job though of never letting tv take over our lives. I don't know that they ever needed to actually, we were always outside playing. im able to avoid some guilt nowadays by watching while im indoor riding.

I think the clips worth watching in so much as it has some fundamental connections to what you said about the caine mutiny.

the quick back story: the federation is at war with the dominion. the foot soldiers of the dominion are an artificially spawned warlike species known as the jem hadar. another species, the vorta, who are conniving and duplicitous, command the jem hadar, who are in part controlled by their requiring a life sustaining chemical compound called ketracel white.

the jem hadar have a little litany they regularly practice amongst themselves. "obedience brings victory and victory brings life."

in the clip below, there is a group of federation officers and a group of jem hadar crashed on a deserted planet. through some parlay, captain sisko, the federation officer in command, learns from the vorta that he's running out of ketracel white and soon the jem hadar will be unmanageable and will kill him. in exchange for his life, the vorta tells captain sisko that he is going to order the jem hadar to attack the federation crew at a particular place where they will be able to be ambushed.

watching up until ~2:00 does the trick but the whole thing might be worth it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgQVGziemsQ

[Sancho]

I read an actual D-Day account of soldiers on Omaha Beach. A couple of young privates are taking cover behind a large log. A sergeant casually walks across the log, through heavy fire, and says something like — get up and fight you cowards. The privates duck as another wave of bullets impact. Then they look up at the log and all that’s left of the sergeant are a couple of smoking boots.

Presently reading Black Cherry Blues, by James Lee Burke. In this one Dave Robicheaux leaves Southern Louisiana and travels to Montana to investigate a murder, and also to defend himself against a murder charge.

[hellsapoppin]

https://tbclrarebooks.cdn.bibliopolis.com/pictures/31020.jpg?width=768&height=1000&fit=bounds&auto=webp&v=1544117456


The Vanishing American by Zane Grey [1925]


Reading via audio book.

[bounty]

the tension between loyalty, obedience, self-preservation, and victory is a fun one.

poppin, I cant remember from earlier if you said you had read some zane grey before.

[hellsapoppin]

the tension between loyalty, obedience, self-preservation, and victory is a fun one.

poppin, I cant remember from earlier if you said you had read some zane grey before.




I recall reading Riders of the Purple Sage many moons ago. Read a couple of baseball short stories and at least one more book but cannot recall which one. How I wish I had a super good memory!

[hellsapoppin]

just recently I found myself wondering, not for the first time, why women wear skirts and dresses and the answer is overwhelmingly related to sex.

I think you captured the arc of the book pretty well. it reminds me a bit from a very memorable scene i can share from star trek: deep space nine. have you seen the series?



Did you read Henry James's The Bostonians [1886]? One of my favorite characters was Dr Mary Prance. I have previously written about her and the woman who inspired the creation of this fascinating character:


http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?73674-February-13-James-Reading-The-Bostonians&p=1393789&viewfull=1#post1393789


She wrote about womens attire and complained that it was highly damaging to women. See the segment on "dress reform".

[bounty]

I have a few old zane baseball books but haven't read any yet. its as if I want to preserve him solely as a western author.

ive read either daisy miller or the turn of the screw or the portrait of a lady (I forget which) because it was "good for me" but boy I don't remember a thing about it or them.

that's pretty neat poppin, I love when fictional characters are based on real life inspirations. i actually knew someone who knew someone who was the basis for a zane grey character.

I hadn't heard of dr walker before but if i ever came across a book about her in my used book shopping, id snatch it up.

i wrote a very enjoyable paper once about the role of the bicycle in the emancipation of Victorian women, and clothing was an integral part of the paper.

and the question of clothing on women is an interesting double edge sword to say the least.

[hellsapoppin]

Martin Eden by Jack London via audio book. Several parallels could be drawn between this book and Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment because of the conflicts over social status, economic inequality, injustice, and materialism.

[Sancho]

Currently reading Black Ice, by Michael Connelly. Just finished reading a thriller about Detective Porfiry Petrovitch of St Petersburg, Russia, and now I’m reading another crime novel, this one about Detective Harry Bosch of the LAPD, Hollywood division.

[bounty]

I have martin eden poppin but I haven't read it yet.

ive read bunches of Connelly and I have that particular title. I could say if ive read it by going out in my garage to see if its still on a shelf. if its not, then ive read it and its somewhere in a bin. i don't remember the plot to that one, but i can at least say ive enjoyed all of his books.

while we're doing crime and punishment im also reading broken prey by john Sandford. its been an enjoyable book to read but one of the extra perks from it is that it takes place somewhere I went to school and there are lots of reference points the author uses that ive been to or am familiar with.

[Sancho]

Reading Drop Shot, by Harlan Coben, the second Myron Bolitar book. I just can’t help myself. This kind of stuff is so much fun.

[Sancho]

“Lil’ ol’ town, you don’t amount to much,” said Harry Destry. “You never done nothin’ an’ you ain’t gunna come to no good. Doggone me if you ain’t pretty much like me!”

Reading Destry Rides Again, by Max Brand

Yee-Haw!

[bounty]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbNFKKfcWcQ

[Sancho]

Yee-Haw! Ride ‘em cowboy.

From the book, here’s old Pop talking to Destry, about Destry, not knowing the man he’s talking to is Destry:


“Fact is,” he said to Destry, “that a woman can make a pile of words, but not much sense. You know how it is! But it takes a man like Destry to come along and make ’em hop into their right place.”

Yup, yup, yup, howdy, howdy.

[bounty]

seems to me I just recently read that, but im not seeing written in the list of books I have.

belated justice (or revenge) is a great theme for a story.

[Sancho]

Ya know, I’d seen the movie with Jimmy Stewart years ago and it doesn’t even bear a slight resemblance to the book. The book was surprisingly good, nuanced, not at all a cookie-cutter western, although there’s still plenty of fightin’ an shootin’ an horse ridin’ an stuff.

Presently reading (rereading) Wise Blood, by Flannery O’Connor. I just couldn’t shake the idea that it shares some ideas with Crime and Punishment. It begins:


Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car. The train was racing through tree tops that fell away at intervals and showed the sun standing, very red, on the edge of the farthest woods. Nearer, the plowed fields curved and faded and the few hogs nosing in the furrows looked like large spotted stones.

Oh yeah, Miss Flannery can write!

[bounty]

I did a quick internet look for the book title, wondering if maybe "destry" appeared in some other max brand book. at the wiki page I noted there were three movies made from the book, so apparently the story's pretty popular.

[Sancho]

I’m reading Twilight Territory, by Andrew X. Pham. It’s a novel set in 1942 during the occupation of French Indochina (Vietnam) by the Japanese.

So far, so good.

[bounty]

are you sure you are actually reading and not listening to books on tape at 1.5x normal speed??

[Sancho]

I'm on a roll.

Ya know, I've never been able to listen to audio books. I tried them a few times in the car, but it just doesn't work for me. I'd rather listen to the radio. Seattle still has a few good independent radio stations. We have a station outta Bellevue College that has a program for just about every kind of music that anyone can think of. Their afternoon guy, Ian Hughs, is always coming up with something good, something I’ve never heard before. I’ve listened to his show so many times, he seems like a personal friend. He’s got an easy-going delivery naturally chills everybody out, and since he’s on during drive-time he’s probably personally responsible for preventing more road-rage incidents than anybody else in town.

91.3, KBCS. Give em a listen. They have an app.

Oh alright, one more plug. They also have a Hawaiian show on the weekend. It’s hosted by the “Hula Sisters.” These women make you feel like you’re part of a big Hawaiian family. It’s like you’re out at Ala Moana Beach Park on a Sunday afternoon with all your aunts and uncles and cousins, grilling up some wings, sipping a Heineken, playing volleyball, kids splashing in the water, and somebody brought his ukulele. Anyway these gals will get to laughing and joking and playing music and every once in while there’ll be a minute or two of dead air. Then the sound will cut back on and they’ll be just howling in the background — “Oh, we’re sorry. We forgot to turn on the mic. Wooo! How about a little music from the islands…”

[bounty]

I just saved the station to my favorites and i'll take a peek in every once in awhile. right now its got one of those great old-fashioned twangy country tunes in the "walkin' the floor" program.

as a kid, I remember liking the don ho episodes on I dream of Jeannie.

I just started and gave up on dune and defaulted to a favorite standby, a lee child jack reacher story, past tense.

im thinking of re-reading whichever one the new series is based on, and then giving the series a viewing.

[Sancho]

Oh man, I like twangy ole country music. It reminds me of the music my granny used to play on her radio. She had an AM radio and tuned it to one of those 3-letter flame-thrower stations, 50,000 Watts (plus). The kind of station if you got too close to the antennae, you could pick up the signal in your dental work.

There’s a lot of new stuff coming out of the islands. With the first few notes on a Hawaiian steel guitar, my blood pressure ratchets down at least 10 points. So there’s that.

With KBCS I like to test my boundaries. They’ve got a Latin Jazz program, a Hip-Hop program, all kinds of stuff. There’s a weekend show of 70s Funk. The DJs go by - Funkscribe and Megabooty, two white kids, but they know their Funk, and also they’re damn good.

Anyway, enough of that. I took a side trip to read Stephen Crane’s novella Maggie, Girl of the Streets with Poppin over on another thread. And now I’m back to Twilight Territory. I’ll probably need a good detective novel after this one. Tana French’s new book is out now. Might read it next. The Hunter.

[bounty]

i didn't grew up liking the old twangy stuff, despite being a fan of hee haw which might have been influenced more by the women than the music. now I like it though.

but I think music is all the niftier when it comes with memories.

have I recommended any of Jeffrey deaver's Lincoln rhyme novels to you?

[Sancho]

Call BR-549, ask for Junior.

I’ll check out Deaver. I haven’t read anything by him.

[bounty]

gloom, despair and agony on me
deep dark depression, excessive misery
if it weren't for bad luck id have no luck at all
gloom, despair and agony on me.

make sure to get a Lincoln rhyme one!

if you like the book to movie trail, and an introduction to the characters the bone collector might be a good place to start.

[bounty]

im reading I am legend by Richard Mathison. its the book that was made into a movie with will smith playing the lead. I usually prefer reading the book after the movie. I find that order actually makes the comparison enjoyable as opposed to critical.

in this particular case its interesting to note that the main character in the book is a white man with long blond hair and so casting will smith was a departure from that. I don't remember if the movie actually uses the word "zombie" but I do know in retrospect that's how I viewed it. however, the book makes it clear the main character sees them as vampires.

the dog relationship, which was very sad in the movie, is very different in the book, and there is character in the book who is not in the movie that creates a paradigmatic change between the two.

[Sancho]

So I downloaded The Bone Collector on my kindle. I’m looking forward to starting it. Twilight Territory has been fascinating, mainly from a historical standpoint. Also it’s good to see this slice of Vietnam’s history from a Vietnamese perspective.

[bounty]

i look forward to hearing how it goes. if it helps you to visualize the characters, in the movie, Lincoln rhyme is played by denzel Washington and amelia sachs is played my Angelina jolie.

meanwhile, I was surprised to find out that about half my I am legend book was actually short stories, so the story itself is pretty short. and there have been three movie versions of the book.

I hopped into a western that im really enjoying, reckoning at rimbow by Norman fox.

[Sancho]

Just now starting The Bone Collector, by Jeffrey Deaver.

The book I just finished, Twilight Territory, is a stand-out novel. It takes place over about a ten-year period of Vietnam’s history from the early 40s to the early 50s and it’s told mainly from the perspective of a young Vietnamese woman, Tuyet. It’s probably the first time I ever got a sense for the oppression endured by a colonized people. During the time of the novel, the Vietnamese are ruled by the French then occupied by the Japanese army then sort of recolonized by the French and at times brutalized by the resistance, the Vietminh. All the while the huge juggernaut of China is waiting on the doorstep. The book is poetic at times, spiritual at times, and brutally direct at other times. The story ends with an introspective moment for Tuyet and I can’t help but to be hopeful for her, but I know what is coming. At any rate, it’s a good book and I can recommend it without reservation.

[bounty]

i'll keep my eyes peeled for twilight territory. sometimes I find one of the nifty things about life is it that something gets mentioned, and then in the not too distant future, the thing appears.

I flew through reckoning at rimbow and thoroughly enjoyed it. unfortunately its the only book I have by that author.

right after that I started voyage to the bottom of the sea by theodore sturgeon. I love the story, but I really dislike the telling and wouldn't recommend the book at all! ive been skipping all sorts of sections and im looking forward to it being over.

I hope you'll love deaver and I look forward to hearing...

[Sancho]

Oh yeah, Deaver’s book is going swimmingly so far. I’m 3 or 4 chapters in and already I’ve learned a few things about the tribulations a quadriplegic endures day in and day out. It’s smoothly written and fun to read. Also … I wanna know what’s going to happen next. (And then…)


I highlighted this metafictional moment. Lincoln Rhyme and Thom, his assistant, are bantering with police detective, Sellitto about whether or not Rhyme reads newspapers:


“I only read literature now,” Rhyme said pompously, and falsely.

Thom added, “*‘Literature is news that stays news.’*”

Rhyme ignored him.

More to come I’m sure on how these three men interact with each other.

[bounty]

am glad to hear.

i had forgotten about thom---he's an important and enjoyable character in the stories.

this is the first book of 16 where Lincoln and amelia sachs exist---on the topic of "whats going to happen next" from a macro perspective, its interesting to see how their relationship grows.

[Sancho]

Currently reading The Hunter, by Tana French.

I’ve read all her books, starting with In The Woods. Most of them are detective novels set in Dublin, but in the last couple she’s moved to rural, western Ireland. I’m so tuned into her style by now that when I sat down and started reading this one, it was like sitting down with a friend I haven’t seen in a while and sliding right back into an old conversation.

Here’s a sample of her writing. She’s describing Cal’s (one of the main characters) dog:


He’s half beagle, with a beagle’s sweet face and a beagle’s haphazard patches of black and tan and white, but Cal hasn’t worked out the other half. He suspects wolverine.

I once had a dog like that.

[bounty]

heyyyyyyy, whats the thumbs up or down on Lincoln rhyme?

on the topic of "dog description" have you seen this fellow on YouTube?

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/bPq_QTdPolo?feature=share

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Ul0XtsBhvuw?feature=share

a lot of his clips are of how different breeds react to various life situations (beagles are often in the mix) he makes me laugh out loud.

[Sancho]

I enjoyed The Bone Collector. Thanks for the rec. I particularly liked the science-y stuff. The twist/hook at the end seemed highly improbable, but I’ll have to read the next one to see if starts to make sense or if if was just a wild coincidence. Maybe that’s the point — get Sancho to read the next one, and then another, and another, and so forth and so on. Anyway I’m sure Deaver will continue to develop his characters — Rhyme, Sachs, Thom, Sellito, Banks, and even Dellray. I was happy none of them fell into clichéd stereotypes. Dellray was heading that way, (an all dick-balls-and-no-forehead federal agent) but he managed to become a real dude after they switched the case back to the NYPD. Yay!

At any rate I’ll probably read the next one, but not right away. Gonna take my time with the Tana French book because I enjoy her style so much. After The Hunter I’m thinking a sci-fi novel. Maybe Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Donno.

BTW good video clips. Film and literature is full of anthropomorphism, but not a lot of animalmorphism(?) zoomorphism(?), donno. People going the other way, werewolves and such, I suppose.

[bounty]

its been so long since ive read the book and seen the movie I don't remember the ending, but im glad deaver turned out successfully and that maybe you'll return to him someday.

meanwhile, the dog loving guy continues to make me laugh out loud.

[Sancho]

***SPOILER ALERT***

The psycho killer, the bone collector, I more-or-less figured out. He was playing the cops with a specific target in mind — Rhyme. In a parallel story, there's actionable intel that someone is planning a terrorist attack at the big hoopla they're having at the United Nations building that week, and that someone will be coming in to Kennedy airport. Hence the plussed-up FBI presence in town. Well, one of the bone collector's victims, who is rescued by Rhyme's team, turns out to be the terrorist. Hmmm. Uh-huh. It's the hook for the next book.

Speaking of dogs, and how they work on our emotions, and how we humans probably don't deserve their good-natured affection, there is such a dog in my preset read - The Hunter. The dog's name is Banjo (good name) and he is the companion of the young girl, Trey. At one point the chief villain backhands Trey and stomps on Banjo's paw causing injury to both. Ooo, burn, payback is a B. And I'm going to enjoy it when it comes around. Don't deny me that, Ms French.

[bounty]

my deaver reading, as much as I like him, has been so far between that I cant remember how much the books are tied together.

ive seen some YouTube shorts where this particular dog guy (and some others too) decry or even punish screen writers for having dogs die.

there was one god/angel one where john wick is about to be sent to hell but when it comes out that all his killings were motivated by revenge for the bag guys killing his puppy, he's forgiven.

one guy gets in such a huff that he immediately leaves the house, goes to an airport, buys a ticket, flies to where the writer is, confronts him and whaps him.

[Sancho]

Ya know, I think that’s a valid defense for murder in some states:

Judge — Why’d you do it?
Defendant — He killed my dog, your honor.
Judge — You’re free to go, sir.

I’m aware that there are people who don’t much care for dogs, but I don’t socialize those folks. They’re missing something deep down in their psyche, some sort of genetic defect, maybe a recessive gene, something, and I prefer to keep my distance from them. I can’t imagine living without dogs.

There is of course a downside. One of our pups is a year-old Springer named Ruby. We recently switched her food and now Ruby has some sort of gastrointestinal brouhaha rumbling around in there. She can clear the room. There ain’t nothing in the world that can move at the speed of fart stink. Persistence too. The other day we walked back into a recently vacated room and my señora did a quick sniff check — “Oh damn, that one had some hang-time!”

^ Could’a posted that on the sports or the metaphor thread.

[bounty]

one of the ones in question: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dtVauxioVCM?feature=share

poor ruby!

[Sancho]

Hey, I read Marley and Me a while back. Enjoyed it. At the time we had a dog named Molly, so for me the book was Molly and Me.

Gotta say, I totally enjoyed The Hunter. It’s a who-done-it, but it’s so much more. One of the running gags in this book and the last in the series concerns rooks. We don’t really have rooks in North America, but they’re crow-like birds and highly intelligent. Cal, a retired Chicago police detective, has moved to a small Irish town and into a place that already has a vibrant population of rooks about it. He begrudgingly tries to get along with the birds rather than trying to eradicate them. (Wise move, Cal) At any rate the rooks act as a sort of peanut gallery to the action at Cal’s house.

In this chapter Cal and Lena (his lady friend) are having a light lunch on Cal’s back porch, and discussing whether or not to get involved in a recent development in town:


“Not much else I can do, right now,” Cal says. He pulls a chunk of crust off his sandwich, avoiding the mustard, and throws it to the rooks. Two of them get into a tug-of-war over it. “If something does come up, I want to be there to catch it.”

The heavy discussion goes on. Meanwhile:


The two rooks are still fighting over Cal’s sandwich crust. A third one sneaks up on them, gets within a couple of feet, and lets loose an explosion of barking. The first two shoot into the air, and the third one grabs the chunk of crust and heads for the hills. Lena and Cal both burst out laughing.

Later in the novel, a Dublin detective and a local uniformed policeman show up at Cal’s house as part of a murder investigation:


The uniform is sitting up very straight in the driver’s seat with his hands ready on the wheel, resolutely ignoring the rooks, who, delighted to have a fresh target, are jeering down at him and dropping acorns on the car.

The questioning goes on for a while between Cal and Nealon (the detective). All the while the policeman stays in the car:


Nealon watches the rooks, who have worked their way up to jumping up and down on the roof of his car. Cal finds himself kind of flattered: the rooks may give him sh*t, but they won’t permit anyone else to take liberties. The uniform bangs on the roof, and they scatter.

Finally, right before they depart, the rooks have gotten bolder and in a rook sort of way, one of them bids the cops adieu:


One of the rooks lands on the hood, looks the uniform in the eye, and takes a sh*t.

Later in book when Nealon returns to Cal’s house, he parks his car down the road. (Smart guy)
The score: Rooks - 1, Po-Po - zip.

Currently reading:

The Moor’s Account, by Laila Lalami

[Danik 2016]

Love these animal stories stories! Never read the book, but saw the movie Marley and Me years ago.Cute story but with a sad end,

[Sancho]

I’m having an exceptional reading year thus far. I’ve managed to get ahold of some good ones.

Just finished The Moor’s Account, by Laila Lalami

I came to this one in a round about way: I was cheating on a crossword puzzle. The clue was — Author of The Moor’s Account — and the answer was, well, the author’s name. Ya gotta admit, Laila Lalami is a good crossword puzzle word. Anyway I was stuck on the puzzle, so I googled it, and in that process I found a book I wanted to read. So I did.

It’s a historical fiction novel about the 16th century Narváez expedition in the Americas, which ran into some rotten luck. Only 4 of the original explorers survived. One was Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Another was a dark-skinned Moroccan slave who went by the name, Estebanico.

Ten years or so ago I read Castaways, which is a translated version of Cabeza de Vaca’s account of the expedition. It is a fascinating first-person account of first contact between European and Native American peoples. The Moor’s Account more-or-less follows Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative but tells the story from Estebanico’s perspective. I think Ms Lalami saw through some of the whitewashing and BS in Cabeza de Vaca’s account and imagined what the story would have been like through Estebanico’s eyes. And who knows? She may have gotten closer to the truth through her fiction than Cabeza de Vaca did through his memoir.

The expedition started somewhere on Florida’s gulf coast, and meandered along the coast through Louisiana and Texas where the Spanish were shipwrecked, maybe due to a hurricane, and probably on Galveston Island. They were in quite poor shape by that time, but were helped by a group of indigenous people who found them on the beach. Later they were enslaved by the indians. Then there was a process of assimilation. The 4 survivors eventually married native women and somewhere along the line became pretty good at first aid and medicine, which gained them some respect with the indians. Anyway over the course of 8 years they traveled through the southwest making their way eventually to the Pacific Ocean. Along the way they built their reputation as healers and gained somewhat of a following. They were known as the Children of the Sun to the locals. Somewhere on the frontier of the Spanish Main they reestablished contact with the Europeans. In Castaways Cabeza de Vaca commented that he had trouble speaking Spanish again after going native for so long.

At any rate both books were fascinating reads. Of all the people here on the Litnet, I think Danik would really like The Moor’s Account. In some ways it reminded me a little of Gold Dust, by Ibrahim Al-Koni.

Currently reading 11/22/63, by Stephen King

[Sancho]

Finished Stephen King’s 11/22/63.

If you could go back in time and change something, would you? If you could pick a historical event to change, what would it be? Would you stop John Wilkes Booth from killing Abraham Lincoln? Would you shoot Lee Harvey Oswald before he could shoot JFK? Would changing this thing kick off a whole other unintended chain of events?

By the way, in 11/22/63 the protagonist of the novel weighs in on that ^ metaphor:


If there’s a stupider metaphor than a chain of events in the English language, I don’t know what it is.

He goes on to explain that chains are strong, but the thing that links a series of events together is weak and that thing is known as the butterfly effect.

Currently reading The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler

[bounty]

a few semi-connected thoughts...

I usually really enjoy time travel stories.

im slow watching star trek: picard and season two kicked off with a huge bang. q appeared at the end of the first episode and rescued the the stargazer from being assimilated by the borg queen only to land picard and crew in an alternative time line in a xenophobic totalitarian regime where picard is a somewhat blood thirsty general and seven is the "confederation" president. they have to rescue the borg queen from a public execution because she has the ability to take them back in time to the switchpoint that set the future off in a different direction.

on that note---in the original series, the city on the edge of forever is often cited as one of the best episodes. yesterday's enterprise in next generation is really good, and the series finale, all good things is really innovative.

one of the more fun aspects of family guy is stewies time machine and all the ways mayhem can or does ensue when they travel to the past, even when they make well intentioned or very small choices.

have you seen Deadpool 2?

[Sancho]

Ya know, I’ve never watched any of that stuff. I haven’t caught the super-hero bug and the special effects in TV sci-fi has always seemed a little cheesy to me. I’m willing to bet though, regardless of genre, what’s compelling about any of those shows is the story, and more specifically the humanistic part of the story. I think that’s why I keep reading Stephen King novels. There’s almost always a supernatural aspect, but the good part is how regular people deal with it, and I like how he fleshes out the story with little details.

For example, in 11/22/63 the time portal is in the pantry of Al’s Diner — Eat At Al’s, Home of the Famous Fat Burger. The locals can’t figure out how Al can sell the Fat Burger so cheaply. And although it’s a tasty burger, rumor has it Al uses road-kill to beef it up. High School kids call it Al’s Famous Cat Burger. As it turns out, Al has been going through the portal and buying the ground-round in 1958. Ta-da! The portal drops him off at the exact same time and place every time. He’s been buying the same package of ground beef from the same butcher in ‘58 for years, then bringing it back to 2011 and cooking it up. He’s fed Fat Burgers to a generation of town-folk … from the same package of 1958 beef. (Talk about loaves and fishes, eh?) One of the main characters asked Al how that could be. Al replied with something like — uhh, I don’t know. Who cares?

[Sancho]

Well hi-de-ho I finished The Big Sleep. What a gas. Lotsa twists and turns in this one and I do believe I’ve figured out where the Coen Brothers got their outline for The Big Lebowski. Of course the slang in The Big Sleep was more conducive to Bogey than to The Dude, but hey it is what it is. Anyway it’s always fun to stumble across something and make a connection like that. The closest correlation in the two is probably Bunny in The Big Lebowski to Carmen in The Big Sleep. They could’a been twins.

Now reading The Spy Coast, by Tess Gerritsen.

[bounty]

I think part of the allure of many time travel stories has to be an element of fixing what went wrong/making things right (or better). the "what if" is fascinating.

the potential for comedy is good too. here's a quick clip of kirk and spock back in 20th century earth trying to board a bus:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyVnoe9EF30

the last Stephen king book i read (and watched) was misery. I remember enjoying it, and ive got a large selection of his waiting to be read.

its interesting how experiences and interests can be different---ive not seen/read the big sleep or the big Lebowski and ive only got one Gerritsen book and i haven't read it yet.

ive been reading the lovely bones by alice sebold for the past 2ish weeks. its about a 14yr old girl who is raped and murdered and then narrates the remainder of the story from her view in heaven. its not a theologically correct book, but the concept is interesting.

in a real world connection part of the story, the author herself was raped early in her life and she ended up playing a part in sending an innocent man to prison for the crime.

[hellsapoppin]

Sancho,

If you could go back in time and change something, would you? If you could pick a historical event to change, what would it be? Would you stop John Wilkes Booth from killing Abraham Lincoln? Would you shoot Lee Harvey Oswald before he could shoot JFK? Would changing this thing kick off a whole other unintended chain of events?




I have always had that fantasy and recommend the following Twilight Zone episode:


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


The original story was written by Parke Godwin who was a personal friend of mine. How I wish you had the opportunity to meet and know him like I did. He was truly a special kind of human being, never to be forgotten.

[Sancho]

Oh man, as far as female antagonists go I’ll put Kathy Bates’ Annie Wilkes on a level plane with Louise Fletcher’s Nurse Ratched (One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest).

I’m sympathetic with Kirk and Spock in that scene — been there, done that. I travel quite a bit and one of the things I like to do when I’m dropped off in a new town and have a little time to kill is to jump on the bus and see what I can see.

I got on a city bus in Pittsburg once and the driver said — Our machine is broke. Exact change only.
I said — I don’t have exact change.
She said — You know what that means?
I said — Nope.
She said — That means you ride for free.
I said — Yay! I like free stuff.

I kinda remember that episode of The Twilight Zone, Poppin. I’m gonna have to search around and see if I can find it on a streaming service. Parke Godwin sounds like someone I’d like to meet. Of course that’ll never happen, but you know this world has certain rhythms and resonances, and since we were just chatting about taking the bus and also about Spock and Kirk trying to figure out city-bus travel, maybe I’ll try his novel Waiting For The Galactic Bus. It sounds like a fun read.

Okay, one more bus story. This one from the mid 90s and quite possibly on a bus you yourself have been on, Poppin. It was a cold and slushy night and I was on the Q40 somewhere near Sutphin Blvd. The bus was hot so I had the window next to my seat slid open. As we pulled away from the stop I noticed several yutes on the sidewalk, watching our bus. Not even a split second later I took a slush ball directly to the side of my head. Lesson learned.

Here’s my time-travel fantasy. When the planes hit the buildings on 9/11 I was actively serving in the Louisiana National Guard. Almost immediately I had the fantasy of putting 4 teams together and going back to that morning and boarding those planes. My teams would include the biggest, meanest, backwater Cajuns we had in the unit. And — Aiyee! Laissez le bon temps roule!

[bounty]

interestingly, one of the time travel episodes in family guy has brian sneakingly using stewies time travel machine, going back, and preventing 9/11.

I cant remember if I have asked before---have you seen Deadpool 2? ryan Reynolds goes back to visit baby hitler in the maternity ward...

[Sancho]

I haven’t watched Deadpool 2. I gotta think though, going back in time and visiting baby Hitler in his crib would kick off a nature-vs-nuture scenario.

[bounty]

that's kinda how Deadpool dealt with it, in a somewhat comical way.

what you wrote makes me think of the book/movie the boys from brazil. are you familiar with that?

[Sancho]

I read The Boys From Brazil probably 30-40 years ago. If I’m remembering correctly the ending was left ambiguous, but suggested the answer came down on the “nature” side. Never saw the movie. I asked the nature-vs-nurture question on this website a while back on the ask-the-person-below-you thread, and the answer I got was spot-on. It went something like this — Oh I don’t know, probably 80% nature and 20% nurture. (The question didn’t have anything to do with Hitler. It was more of a free-will vs determinism thing.)

[bounty]

im remembering the movie more than the book (but isn't that always the case?). id say the ending came down on the nurture side. the question came up of whether or not to hunt down all the hitler clones and kill them and the argument against that was that since the plot was uncovered, and some of the future necessary elements were removed, that the boys wouldn't grew up anymore to be hitlers.

[Sancho]

Haha. Figures.

How do you feel about optimistic bias vs pessimistic bias? I normally take the optimistic side, but looks like in this case I’m on the side of the pessimists. I’m not terribly invested in either side of this one though. I mean it’s been a loooong time since I read the book.

But I’m gonna float this idea, and I don’t remember where I heard it: On any given day, given the right set of circumstances, just about anybody could become a murderer. But a pedophile is a pedophile. Someone who is not a pedophile will not become one because of a set of unfortunate events. Hitler, I’m sure, had a personality disorder or two. Cloning that dude would produce somebody with the same predilections. A narcissist is a narcissist. It’s his nature. He’s probably not going kick off a global war and dabble in genocide every time, but still…

Ah crap. Now I gotta go read that book again.

[bounty]

I think in the tension between "glooooom, despaaaaaaair and agony on me. deep, dark depression, excessive miserrry" and "the sun'll come out tomorrow" im on annie's side. that's not necessarily the same as the bias question, which I totally believe exists, but maybe it trumps it. hope is probably one of the best things in the world.

on the whole though, I don't think I agree with what youre suggesting, at least in an absolute sense. despite how powerful genetics are (have you ever peeked at any of the academic literature on twin studies?), we are all a combination of genetics, nature and socialization and that leaves room for some movement/variance as it comes to personalities and moral issues.

the question I think, forms a part of the tension in one of my all-time favorite movies X-Men: days of future past. have you seen it?

I just finished the lovely bones. the book is a first person narration, mostly after death, of a 14yr old girl who was raped and murdered by an adult neighbor. parts of the book were intense and captivating, some small segments were exquisitely written, and it was worth reading, but im not sure I would recommend the book to everyone.

don't know what comes next yet---maybe a fallback western or star trek...

[Sancho]

I don’t know.


She (Ruby Sue) falls in a well, eyes go crossed. She gets kicked by a mule, they go back to normal… I don’t know.
— Christmas Vacation

(I’m not sure I could communicate without movie quotes) But I haven’t seen any of the X-men movies.

I remember a twin study from the 90s about homosexuality. It got some press. They used identical twins who grew up in separate situations. Adopted out, I reckon. Anyway they found a correlation, which seemed to confirm what gay people had said for years — It’s not a choice. We’re born this way. Oddly gay-advocacy groups were not too keen on DNA testing to identify whether or not somebody has the “gay gene.” Seemingly they acknowledged a certain amount of variability in the nature/nurture continuum. Also they were concerned that someone who is identified with having the “gay gene” would be discriminated against.

I like some of the explorations of the nature-vs-nurture question in film. There’s My Fair Lady, and of course, Trading Places:


Hey that's the motherf- I mean... that's the gentleman that had me busted.
— Billy Ray Valentine


He was wearing my Harvard tie. Can you believe it? MY Harvard tie. Like, Oh sure, HE went to Harvard.
— Louis Winthorpe III

I just finished The Spy Coast. I also am trying decide what to read next. BTW, The Spy Coast was not bad, not bad at all.

[Sancho]

Ta-da. Found one.

Currently reading James, by Percival Everett.

I don’t know much about it except that it’s a reimagining of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn only from Jim’s point of view.

[bounty]

I think I remember your mentioning trading places before. ive not seen the movie, but im familiar with the broad strokes. i don't know enough to know though---did the old guys succeed in elevating eddie murphy to his role and displacing dan akroyd? what was the questions conclusion?

i like the innovation of stories like that---there is a movie called vantage point that did that really well in the beginning of the film. ive read online, though i don't think it actually happened, that someone was going to write the story of Lolita from the perspective of dolores.

if you've not seen all the other X-Men movies, i wouldn't recommend watching days of future past but it might still be worth mentioning a bit. the movie starts in contemporary times where the mutants are on the edge of extinction, hunted by things called sentinels. the sentinels came into existence and the hunting down of the mutants occurred because mystique had killed a weapons inventor named trask. the remaining mutants figure out a way to send wolverines consciousness back in time to his younger self in order to prevent mystique from killing trask, thereby altering the future. at some point in the effort, hank (beast) is in conversation with Charles and wolverine:

(this is an interesting intersection between time travel and the question of nature/nurture)

hank: Now there's a theory in time physics that time is immutable. It's like a river, you can throw a pebble and it will create a ripple but the current always corrects itself. No matter what you do the river just keeps flowing in the same direction.

Charles: What are you trying to say?

hank: I'm saying that, what if the war is inevitable? What if she's meant to kill Trask? What if this is just simply who she is?

charles: Just because someone stumbles, loses their way doesn't mean they're lost forever?* No I don't believe that theory Hank and I cannot believe that that is who she is.

*Charles learns this from having a conversation, through wolverine, with his future self. its pretty nifty...

part 1:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrluzgNU3BA

part 2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdbXMQdPGBA

[Sancho]

I’m pretty sure Trading Places comes down on the nurture side of the argument. As you noted, the Duke Brothers (the old guys) not only tried to pull Billy Ray up, but they also tried to knock Louis down. Billy Ray probably adapted a little quicker than Louis. In my opinion the movie is less about moving up and down the stratum of society than it is about calling out the upper class for having no class. Billy Ray is a street hustler and he recognizes fairly quickly that the Dukes are simply suit-wearing hustlers. Louis catches on too once he sheds his prejudices.

***SPOILER ALERT***

They wind up banding together and going to the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to take down the Duke Brothers, and in the process make a ton of money for themselves. The Duke Brothers had essentially bet the future of their firm with a huge margin call on Orange Juice futures. They based the call on the US Crop Report that they had early access to, which of course is illegal. However Louis, Billy Ray, Ophelia (Jamie Lee Curtis), and Coleman (the butler) had pulled a switcheroo with the crop report, giving the Dukes bad insider info. It’s a good scene, also a nostalgic scene, with actual traders on the floor shouting their trades and writing them down on slips of paper. Nowadays trading floors are pretty quiet, populated mostly with computers whirring away.

Anyway Trading Places and my current read, James, are good at using language as a marker for class. Billy Ray’s language of the streets morphs to the language of the Upper East Side. In James, to comic effect, the slaves use the language that’s expected of them when they’re around the slavers, but they use a more standard American English amongst themselves.

It reminds me of the Mad Jailer scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian:

https://youtu.be/0HclevKb3XY?si=qspFOKNWV1_0bHB2

I’ve probably posted this before too.

[bounty]

I remember the mad jailer scene well.

that's interesting about James and language.

also interesting that the two characters can overcome their class differences in order to exact vengeance. its easy to understand louis' motivation, but what was billy ray's?

[Sancho]

Well, in short Billy Ray figures out he's being used in a rich man's game and nobody likes to be used. The whole scheme was set up by the Dukes as a bet. So after a while Billy Ray is killing it as a trader and running the brothers firm, but he overhears them settling their bet (nurture won). In that conversation he learns that they plan to put him back on the street and they aren't going to bring Louis back. So he seeks out Louis, who meanwhile has hit rock bottom. It's an important plot point. Billy Ray wants to make things right before it becomes a get-rich quick scenario. There's also a racial aspect to the conversation Billy Ray overhears. The bothers can't imagine letting an African American run their family firm. (That's not the word they used)

Anyway:

Louis - How much was the bet?
Billy Ray - A dollah
Louis - A dollar!?
Billy Ray - A dollah.

Something like that.

I'm kinda surprised you've never seen it. It has turned into a Christmas movie that airs every year on one network or another.

On to James and his language ruse. Here James and Huck are hiding out on the island in the middle of the Mississippi and watching some men on a boat setting depth charges in the river:


“Why they doin’ that, Jim?”
“Dey’s tryin’ to get yo dead body to float up to the top o’ da water.”
“Be funny if some other body float up,” he said.
"Hilarious,” I said.
"What?” He looked at me.
“I say da ‘he harry us.’ ”
"What’s that mean?”
"What? Looky naw,” I said.
The boy turned back and we watched

James goes on to comment that he must be stressed because it's the first time he's made a language slip-up in front of a white person.

[bounty]

I was just recently talking with someone about reading things/watching things because they are a part of the cultural landscape and they might be worth doing in that regards alone. I don't know how it is ive not seen trading places, especially as I like dan akroyd. I wonder if its something I "should" watch.

i don't have tv anymore, but I gave up on movies on the telly a long time ago. the amount of commercials made movie watching too torturous to endure.

[Sancho]

Totally agree with you about trying to watch a movie with commercial breaks. P’tooey! That, in a nutshell, is what blew the doors off the television biz when streaming services came along — no ads. I mean who ever thought it was a good idea to break up the action in a movie just when things are getting good? ***Bad Credit? No Credit? No Problem. C’mon down to Billy Bob’s*** Anyway, it’s just my opinion, but I think this movie is well worth the time investment.

Finished James. It’s a wonderful book. There is a lot to like in it, but I’d like to concentrate on this — James himself.

Everett’s James speaks directly to the reader in the reader’s language, making him highly relatable. Twain’s Jim speaks in a slave dialect, creating distance between the character and the reader. I say James is highly relatable, and that may be the wrong word. How is it possible for a modern reader to relate to his experiences as a 19th century American slave? And that’s just it. Everett’s James, like all good story tellers (Mark Twain included) relates his story to us with humor and humanity. And all the while James is matter-of-factly bearing the indignities and peril that go along with the slavery of the day. It is bracing. I’d be reading along, enjoying the story, feeling that I’m sitting on the banks of the Mississippi with the two fugitives, laughing at their jokes, and chuckling about the situations they keep getting themselves into. Then all of a sudden James is being lashed to a post and whipped, “for his own good.” Or he is going hungry for long periods of time. Or he has to helplessly watch a slave woman, who had been kind to him, get raped by the overseer. There’s more.

Famously Ernest Hemingway weighed in on Twain’s Huckleberry Finn in his The Green Hills of Africa:


The good writers are Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain. That's not the order they're good in. There is no order for good writers. . . . All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where the N__ Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.

Hemingway, were he still alive, might think something has finally come along that is just as good, or maybe even better. At any rate, going forward people now have the option to read James right along side Huckleberry Finn. And as a bonus, it fixes the ending.

Currently reading Concrete Blonde, by Michael Connelly.

[Sancho]

Finished Concrete Blonde, by Michael Connelly.
Finished A Morning For Flamingos, by James Lee Burke
Finished Winterkill, by C.J. Box

I was not disappointed with any of those novels.

Presently reading The Blessing Way, by Tony Hillerman

I’m thinking of a challenging text for my next reading project. Maybe Underworld, by Don Delillo. Anyone?

[bounty]

its going to be awhile I think before I read anything challenging, but I hope you'll keep making the suggestions when they come to you.

im presently reading deliver us from evil by david Baldacci. the tensions been great so far---there are two groups of people after a particular bad guy and each group doesn't know the other exists. one is a group of amateur Nazi hunters, the other a multi-national quasi off the books government agency. whats really nifty is that the two respective point people for the efforts have crossed paths, are spending lots of time together, and each knows something is quite on the up and up about the other.

while im here---matteo Jorgensen, an American rider, almost pulled off an upset over primoz roglic in the dauphine, which concluded this past weekend. roglic was coming to the finish line with Jorgensen already having finished, and was running out of time. he hung on by the skin of his shorts to win by only 8 seconds.

[bounty]

I have lots of time on my hands lately and I flew through deliver us from evil. I really enjoyed at except for the ending, while not quite bittersweet, wasn't as happy as I would have liked it.

I just started octopussy by ian fleming, the movie version of which only bears resemblance to the book by virtue of them both having a character in them named James bond, and a brief appearance of an octopus.

interestingly, the book is actually a collection of three short stories, octopussy being the first, the property of a lady and the last being the living daylights which was the first timothy Dalton bond movie which I also suspect has no allegiance to the source material.

[Sancho]

Welcome back, bounty.

Presently reading Underworld by Don DeLillo.

I’ve heard it described as one of the great American novels. It does start out in a uniquely American way — at a baseball game. The writing style in the prologue is fascinating. It jumps around from action on the field to unrelated stuff going on in the stands and elsewhere. It gave me the feeling of being at the game.

It more-or-less starts with a skinny kid jumping the turnstile to get into the game:


It’s a school day, sure, but he’s nowhere near the classroom. He wants to be here instead, standing in the shadow of this old rust-hulk of a structure, and it’s hard to blame him—this metropolis of steel and concrete and flaky paint and cropped grass and enormous Chesterfield packs aslant on the scoreboards, a couple of cigarettes jutting from each.

If the description of the park rings a bell, congratulations you’re a sports fan. It’s the Polo Grounds, home field of the NY Giants. The game itself is a fairly famous one in baseball lore — Game three of the ‘51 National League pennant series, Giants and Dodgers. Also known as The miracle at Coogan’s Bluff or The Shot Heard ‘round the World.

I had to read the prologue twice, and I think I picked up just as many details on the second go-round as the first. I might need to read it a third time. Sheesh!

[hellsapoppin]

The N______r of the 'Narcissus'
Book by Joseph Conrad


Highly controversial novel but said to be one of the best of all time. Very interesting intro:



PREFACE
A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line. And art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colours, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and in the facts of life what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential—their one illuminating and convincing quality—the very truth of their existence. The artist, then, like the thinker or the scientist, seeks the truth and makes his appeal. Impressed by the aspect of the world the thinker plunges into ideas, the scientist into facts—whence, presently, emerging they make their appeal to those qualities of our being that fit us best for the hazardous enterprise of living. They speak authoritatively to our common-sense, to our intelligence, to our desire of peace or to our desire of unrest; not seldom to our prejudices, sometimes to our fears, often to our egoism—but always to our credulity. And their words are heard with reverence, for their concern is with weighty matters: with the cultivation of our minds and the proper care of our bodies, with the attainment of our ambitions, with the perfection of the means and the glorification of our precious aims.

It is otherwise with the artist.

Confronted by the same enigmatical spectacle the artist descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal. His appeal is made to our less obvious capacities: to that part of our nature which, because of the warlike conditions of existence, is necessarily kept out of sight within the more resisting and hard qualities—like the vulnerable body within a steel armour. His appeal is less loud, more profound, less distinct, more stirring—and sooner forgotten. Yet its effect endures forever. The changing wisdom of successive generations discards ideas, questions facts, demolishes theories. But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition—and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation—and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.

It is only some such train of thought, or rather of feeling, that can in a measure explain the aim of the attempt, made in the tale which follows, to present an unrestful episode in the obscure lives of a few individuals out of all the disregarded multitude of the bewildered, the simple and the voiceless. For, if any part of truth dwells in the belief confessed above, it becomes evident that there is not a place of splendour or a dark corner of the earth that does not deserve, if only a passing glance of wonder and pity. The motive then, may be held to justify the matter of the work; but this preface, which is simply an avowal of endeavour, cannot end here—for the avowal is not yet complete. Fiction—if it at all aspires to be art—appeals to temperament. And in truth it must be, like painting, like music, like all art, the appeal of one temperament to all the other innumerable temperaments whose subtle and resistless power endows passing events with their true meaning, and creates the moral, the emotional atmosphere of the place and time. Such an appeal to be effective must be an impression conveyed through the senses; and, in fact, it cannot be made in any other way, because temperament, whether individual or collective, is not amenable to persuasion. All art, therefore, appeals primarily to the senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses, if its highest desire is to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. It must strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music—which is the art of arts. And it is only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance; it is only through an unremitting never-discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to plasticity, to colour, and that the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage.

The sincere endeavour to accomplish that creative task, to go as far on that road as his strength will carry him, to go undeterred by faltering, weariness or reproach, is the only valid justification for the worker in prose. And if his conscience is clear, his answer to those who in the fulness of a wisdom which looks for immediate profit, demand specifically to be edified, consoled, amused; who demand to be promptly improved, or encouraged, or frightened, or shocked, or charmed, must run thus:—My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand—and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask. To snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time, a passing phase of life, is only the beginning of the task. The task approached in tenderness and faith is to hold up unquestioningly, without choice and without fear, the rescued fragment before all eyes in the light of a sincere mood. It is to show its vibration, its colour, its form; and through its movement, its form, and its colour, reveal the substance of its truth—disclose its inspiring secret: the stress and passion within the core of each convincing moment. In a single-minded attempt of that kind, if one be deserving and fortunate, one may perchance attain to such clearness of sincerity that at last the presented vision of regret or pity, of terror or mirth, shall awaken in the hearts of the beholders that feeling of unavoidable solidarity; of the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible world. It is evident that he who, rightly or wrongly, holds by the convictions expressed above cannot be faithful to any one of the temporary formulas of his craft. The enduring part of them—the truth which each only imperfectly veils—should abide with him as the most precious of his possessions, but they all: Realism, Romanticism, Naturalism, even the unofficial sentimentalism (which like the poor, is exceedingly difficult to get rid of,) all these gods must, after a short period of fellowship, abandon him—even on the very threshold of the temple—to the stammerings of his conscience and to the outspoken consciousness of the difficulties of his work. In that uneasy solitude the supreme cry of Art for Art itself, loses the exciting ring of its apparent immorality. It sounds far off. It has ceased to be a cry, and is heard only as a whisper, often incomprehensible, but at times and faintly encouraging.

Sometimes, stretched at ease in the shade of a roadside tree, we watch the motions of a labourer in a distant field, and after a time, begin to wonder languidly as to what the fellow may be at. We watch the movements of his body, the waving of his arms, we see him bend down, stand up, hesitate, begin again. It may add to the charm of an idle hour to be told the purpose of his exertions. If we know he is trying to lift a stone, to dig a ditch, to uproot a stump, we look with a more real interest at his efforts; we are disposed to condone the jar of his agitation upon the restfulness of the landscape; and even, if in a brotherly frame of mind, we may bring ourselves to forgive his failure. We understood his object, and, after all, the fellow has tried, and perhaps he had not the strength—and perhaps he had not the knowledge. We forgive, go on our way—and forget.

And so it is with the workman of art. Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off. And thus, doubtful of strength to travel so far, we talk a little about the aim—the aim of art, which, like life itself, is inspiring, difficult—obscured by mists; it is not in the clear logic of a triumphant conclusion; it is not in the unveiling of one of those heartless secrets which are called the Laws of Nature. It is not less great, but only more difficult.

To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the earth, and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for a moment at the surrounding vision of form and colour, of sunshine and shadows; to make them pause for a look, for a sigh, for a smile—such is the aim, difficult and evanescent, and reserved only for a very few to achieve. But sometimes, by the deserving and the fortunate, even that task is accomplished. And when it is accomplished—behold!—all the truth of life is there: a moment of vision, a sigh, a smile—and the return to an eternal rest.

1897. J. C.

[bounty]

i think anything with baseball in it gets made more enjoyable Sancho.

I have a few conrad books poppin, but I haven't read any yet. ive not heard of the one youre presently in.

ive used the excessive "rest" ive been getting lately to fly through lots of easy reading books. a louis l'amour, a stuart woods, an ian fleming and a couple of thoroughly enjoyable star trekbooks. this morning I grabbed a columbo book and will start that sometime today.

[Sancho]

I’ve read a grand total of one books by Joseph Conrad, but I’ve read it a couple of times. I don’t think I understood it on the first run through when I was in my 20s, but when I reread it in my 40s, I think I got it. By that time I had a much better understanding of European colonization efforts in Africa. It wasn’t Lord Jim. I wouldn’t mind reading it again. The horror, the horror.

Anyway Underworld jumps around in time a lot and covers a lot of territory, but baseball is a thread that runs throughout the book. (So far anyway. I haven’t finished it.) The kid who jumped the turnstile to get into the game finds a seat behind left field. The guy he’s sitting next to strikes up a sort of avuncular conversation with him:


“That’s the thing about baseball, Cotter. You do what they did before you. That’s the connection you make. There’s a whole long line. A man takes his kid to a game and thirty years later this is what they talk about when the poor old mutt’s wasting away in the hospital.”

If you know the game, you know that in the top of the ninth, Giants third baseman, Bobby Thompson, hits a three run homer off Dodgers pitcher, Ralph Branca, for the win. That was the “Shot heard ‘round the world” in baseball lore. Here’s a character in the novel at an LA Dodgers game in the 90s talking about the game back in the 50s:


Glassic said, “When JFK was shot, people went inside. We watched TV in dark rooms and talked on the phone with friends and relatives. We were all separate and alone. But when Thomson hit the homer, people rushed outside. People wanted to be together. Maybe it was the last time people spontaneously went out of their houses for something. Some wonder, some amazement. Like a footnote to the end of the war. I don’t know.”

[bounty]

all that reminds me a little bit of the classic James earl jones' speech from field of dreams.

[Sancho]

Oh yeah, talk about avuncularity “They will come, Ray.” James Earl Jones definitely gives off an uncle vibe in that scene, as well as in Sandlot. In the book by contrast Bill looses his friendliness towards Cotter when Thompson swats the homer off Branca and the ball comes their way. The street kid and the uncle-like businessman get into struggle for the ball. The street kid wins. And then the ball sort of bounces the rest of the way through the novel.

In the real world, in the real game — game 3, NLCS, NY Giants v Brooklyn Dodgers — the ball has never surfaced. Here’s a fun fact. Guess who was on deck for the Giants when Bobby Thompson hit the homer — Rookie of the Year, Willie Mays.

RIP Willie Mays
(He died yesterday aged 93)

[bounty]

a little bit of the "avuncularity" but also just the romantic treatment of the game.

I had read about willy mays---it reminded me of how, despite being a little bit of a mets fan when I was a kid, how sacrilegious it was for him to be playing for them.

im reading, and most enjoying, my first conan the barbarian book and just last night discovered an interesting connection between conan, the particular book I have, and princess leia's "slave bikini."

[Sancho]

Finished Underworld. It’s widely regarded as one of the Great American Novels, but I was never so happy to be done with a book. It covers American life (and beyond) from the 50s through the 90s, though not in a linear fashion. There’s no plot that I could suss out, just a bunch of loosely related events, historical and fictional. And there seems to be no point to it either, or maybe that is the point — as in life, stuff just happens. It doesn’t have to mean anything. — Anyway I sort of dreaded picking it up at the end of the day because I wasn’t curious to see what was going to happen. I already knew what was going to happen. But then, when I got to the end of 830 pages of densely-packed prose, I felt like I’d just lived through the era of American that went from the end of WWII to just before 9/11.

This is by no means a complete list of what’s covered in this novel:

Baseball
Agent Orange
The mob
J Edgar
Waste Management
The Cold War
Graffiti
Vietnam
Serial Killer
Civil Rights
Lenny Bruce
The A-Bomb
Jazz
Albert Einstein
JFK
FBI
Saul Bellow
Ralph Ellison
McGeorge Bundy
Urban Decay
Watergate
Adultery
Mutual Assured Destruction
Late Capitalism
Visual Art
Sports Memorabilia

I’m currently reading The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
(And I can’t wait to get back to it!)

[hellsapoppin]

all that reminds me a little bit of the classic James earl jones' speech from field of dreams.


That is one of the greatest scenes in Hollywood history. Director Phil Alden Robinson did a great job first through the dialog in the narration; then, by the shadows that slowly work their way towards Terence Mann as he narrates. That symbolism of the shadows and the spirits of those past great players is so powerful. Incredible art work by the director!

[bounty]

field of dreams is one of my all-time favorite movies poppin, and I agree, that particular scene is fantastic. I think there might be some fan fiction (im not sure) of what James earl jones encounters as he disappears in the cornfield.

I am skeptical of it ever coming to fruition, but id like to ride coast to coast someday, a northern route, and among other places, id like to stop at the field of dreams site.

Sancho---im surprised you've not read hunger games before. I remember liking the reading too and I liked the second book, catching fire even better.

if you have not already seen the movies, I encourage you to do all the books and all the movies, boom boom boom.

meanwhile, I am still enjoying conan.

[Sancho]

Ya know, I’ve been aware of the Hunger Game books (and the movie) for quite some time. I think I avoided reading them because I usually see them described as Young Adult fiction. The last time I tried a YA book was a few years ago when somebody gave me a copy of the first Harry Potter book (maybe you’ve heard of the series). Anyway I got through a couple of chapters and decided it wasn’t for me.

That said I enjoyed the first book of The Hunger Games immensely. I mean who wouldn’t enjoy a post-apocalyptic book about adolescent gladiatorial combat. Also it’s been while since I read it, but I was definitely getting Lord of the Flies vibes.

Anyway, I’ll read the next two, but I like to mix up my reading. I’m currently reading Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton. Next I might need to go see what Harry Bosch is up to, or Myron Bolitar, or Dave Robicheaux, or Joe Pickett. Also I’m trying to decide what my next “literary fiction” read will be. Maybe Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead.

But I will get back to The Hunger Games series. I’m sure Katniss has something up her sleeve for the Capitol — This aggression will not stand!

[bounty]

when you read hunger games were you picturing Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss?

or Donald Sutherland as president snow?

[Sancho]

Nope. Ya know, one of the prime reasons I don't like to watch the movie after reading the book is that I've already got a picture in my head of what the characters look like and it rarely matches what Hollywood comes up with.

For Katniss I pictured more-or-less a woman from my youth, but if I had to nail down an actress, it'd be somewhere between Holly Hunter in Raising Arizona and Carrie Fisher in Blues Brothers. I know, I know. I'm giving myself a timestamp.

Here's a few more Sancho's casting decisions:

Peeta - For young Peeta, the kid who gave Katniss a couple loaves of bread as an act if kindness and got a good beating for his efforts I can see Thurman Merman from Bad Santa. The older Peeta who competed in the games, well, try Thurman again only older and mostly rid of his baby fat.

Haymitch - Nick Nolte, 48 Hours

Effie - Joan Cusack, My Blue Heaven

President Snow - A fairly minor character in the book, but I was getting more of a Jack Nicholson from Mars Attacks than a Don Sutherland. And I wish it was President Camacho from Idiocracy

Caesar - I'll go with a TV pitchman here. Maybe Ron Popeil — But wait! There's moooore! It slices, it dices, it'll wash your caaaar!

[bounty]

I think there were lots of characters who could be played by other actors, but Stanley tucci did a great job with Caesar and its hard to imagine a better president snow (who grows in importance as the story goes along) than Donald Sutherland. strong nod to Elizabeth banks too as Effie.

[Sancho]

Well, now I'm curious. Gonna have to watch the movie after I read the next two.

Finished Pirate Latitudes. Dud. Read like a bad Hollywood script.

I'm reading a good one now: Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane.

It's set in the Southie section of Boston in the early 1970s. Southie, if you're not familiar, is an Irish, working-class neighborhood in south Boston known for its working-class Irishness.

Q - When did the Irish learn to walk on their hind legs?
A - When the English invented the wheelbarrow.
--Buh-dump-bump

Anyway it's the summer before desegregation and everybody is all riled up. On a personal note, I got to participate in South Carolina's version of the desegregation program as a middle schooler. I got bussed to the black kid's school for a couple of years and then they got bussed to ours for the next couple of years. It wasn't so bad. Coaches and teachers were the unsung heroes of the program.

So, in the book, on a hot summer night, a young black kid gets killed on the subway tracks. He falls, or is pushed, in front of the train. On the same night, a young Southie girl disappears. The girl's mother, Mary Pat, sets out to find her. Coincidently Mary Pat works with the mother of the black kid who was killed. She goes by Dreamy.

There's cops, mobsters, hippies, and Harvard students. There's kids from Southie, Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. There's drugs, racism, Vietnam, and public housing. There's Catholics, Jews, and Protestants. There's Teddy Kennedy. And there's one real tough mama - Mary Pat. I have no idea where thing will wind up. I'm about halfway through.

[bounty]

i'll look forward to your views on the casting.

that sounds like a good read. ive seen books by lehane out there when I used-book shop. i'll start grabbing 'em now.

I wonder how I feel about "bussing." the goal was laudable, but im not fan of most things "big government."

im nearing the halfway point of this side of paradise by f. scott fitzgerald.

[Sancho]

I’ll let’ya know. I’m looking forward to to watching it. Gonna get back to the Hunger Games series soon.

Finished Small Mercies. I couldn’t put it down. It’s a who-done-it, but in the process of figuring out who done it, the reader gets to look at the bussing project from a number of perspectives: the kids, the parents, the politicians, poor neighborhoods, rich neighborhoods. I’m sure there’ve been studies that examined the bussing of school kids in the 70s, but I haven’t read any. From my perspective, I don’t feel too too worse for wear for having participated in SC’s bussing program. If fact I think it broadened my horizons a bit. The book got a rare 5 out of 5 stars from me over on Good Reads.

I’m currently reading another good one — The Lincoln Highway, by Amor Towles. The style is interesting. The story is told in the first person by one character then another, chapter by chapter. Sometimes you’ll get the same event told by several different people. It’s a POV extravaganza.

[bounty]

this came to me last night---I think when I read a book from which a movie has been made, but I haven't seen the movie, the characters in the book remain nebulously imagined in my mind. I don't think ive ever thought to myself "I see 'so and so' playing this character."

I saw a movie a bunch of years ago that that did what your amor towles book is doing, vantage point. the imdb ratings aren't great for it, but I remember liking it.

I have temporarily (maybe permanently) paused this side of paradise and started a fallback lee child jack reacher story, blue moon.

[Sancho]

I had a similar experience with This Side of Paradise. I don’t think I ever finished it. I enjoyed The Great Gatsby though.

Never heard of the movie Vantage Point. I’ll keep my eyes peeled. I suppose creating a vision of a character in book is directly related to how vividly the author’s description is. I read Pat Conroy’s The Great Santini before I watched the movie, and although Robert Duvall did a bang up job in the lead role, he did not at all look the way Conroy described Bull Meecham. The same goes for Blythe Danner as Lilian Meecham. At the time it seemed like a huge violation of the rules of nature by the people who cast actors in Hollywood. Then a weird thing happened. A couple of years ago I reread the book and despite the descriptions, all I could see was Duvall, Danner, and for that matter Michael O’Keefe as Ben, in those roles.

I’m enjoying The Lincoln Highway tremendously. It’s the first book in long time I’m purposely taking slowly because I’m enjoying it so much.

[bounty]

i liked some of fitzgeralds insights and thoughtfulness, but there was little to commend the story in terms of plot and even character development, so it was a challenge to keep reading to begin with; but the reason i started reading it in the first place was, as is the case with many things in life, because of a girl. the girl disappeared and so did the motivation for the book.

i wonder if anyone's ever written a book about all the fascinating aspects of the book/movie relationship. i think itd be an interesting read. as a part of that, there have been some egregious "violations" in my own reading/viewing over the years. the first was willam defoe as jack clark in a tom Clancy movie. apparently Clancy took lots of grief for it, threw his arms up in the air and said "i had nothing to do with it!!" then there was tom hanks as forrest gump, but people didn't care about that because so few people had read the book. the worst might have been tom cruise as jack reacher---who is 6' 5" and ~250lbs.

i gotta get you to try a jack reacher book---i suspect youd like them.

[Sancho]

Ouch! I’m tempted to say something stupid like — ah well, there’s plenty o’ fish in the sea.

I can commiserate though. I got stuck reading The Lord of the Rings because of a girl. Yeech! Hated it. And then she dumped me anyway. Hated it even more then. I did like the Harvard Lampoon satire Bored of the Rings though. I guess what I’m saying is the girl and I were on different wavelengths and it’s probably best we split.

I don’t know of a book that covers book-to-movie adaptations, but the movie Adaptation is fantastic. Nick Cage plays Charlie Kaufman, a neurotic screen writer, who’s struggling to adapt Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief to film. Orlean is played by Meryl Streep. Cage also plays Kaufman’s brother, Donald, who, after going to a seminar on how to write a movie script, manages to sell his first screen play for really good money. The orchid thief, John Laroche, is played by Chris Cooper, who won an Oscar for the role. At any rate, that movie was well worth my time.

I haven’t watched the Jack Reacher movie although I did watch a few episodes of Reacher on Netflix. It came across as a tad one dimensional to me. But hey, the actor who plays Jack Reacher in the series is pretty beefy guy. So there’s that.

[Sancho]

Okay, this is serendipity for ya. I make a post about the movie Adaptation and the very next day I get an article in my New Yorker feed. Susan Orlean interviewing Nick Cage:


https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/nicolas-cage-is-still-evolving?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_071424&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&utm_term=tny_daily_digest&bxid=5bea14792ddf9c72dc90fc17&cndid=31243839&hasha=4ef0aa99e88e25947d4a65a4965c5124&hashb=eef2dd3e90ece580e5c1d9190c6b9f347e1de0f1&hashc=bb98327637840296e54160e46f4263e58d4d7a44705a 4418ddb83eff30fa0b1b&esrc=nyr_merge5122_subs&mbid=CRMNYR062419

[bounty]

thanks---its okay, very little hopes or expectations and maybe even less emotional investment.

I like Nicholas cage and meryl streep. heck, there is so much good stuff out there one could spend all day every day watching movies.

I think a lot of life is serendipitous that way.

by the way---did you know there was a superman movie with Nicholas cage as superman that was somewhat made/mostly made but never saw the light of day?

I think the attraction of the reacher books might be the same as for people who like batman. not totally a vengeful vigilante, but at least motivated by a strong sense of right and wrong. reacher wanders the country, not seeking problems out, but nevertheless encountering them, and he brings himself to bear enacting justice where its needed.

[Sancho]

I’m about two thirds of the way through the second book in The Hunger Games series, Catching Fire. I think you’re right, bounty, about reading these books back-to-back. They’re really more like one big book rather than three little ones. I can definitely see Donald Sutherland as President Snow. What a dick. I’m not familiar enough with Jennifer Lawrence’s work to see her as Katniss. I’m still getting Holly Hunter energy:

https://youtu.be/IsiMJDCWvFQ?si=tJm1-P2ZgqiLlwyq

Nathan needs his Huggies!

Looking forward to the movie now.

[bounty]

im not wedded to Jennifer Lawrence in the role, I think a lot of people could have played it, and played it better.

that's funny--I saw raising Arizona a long time ago, but I don't remember anything from it really. I can see holly hunter, but she'd have to be lots younger than in the clip.

I suspect you'll like woody harrelson as haymitch

im still working through lee child/jack reacher with a possibility of an Agatha Christie or a Stephen king next.

[Sancho]

Well, I finished Catching Fire and Mockingjay and now I’m looking forward to watching the movie(s).

I also finished a book my neighbor gave me: A Coat Dyed Black, by Don Pugnetti Jr. It’s a historical fiction novel about the Norwegian resistance to Nazi occupation in the 1940s. It was written by a journalist from around here. I gotta say, historical fiction is a tough genre to pull off well.

I’m currently reading the second book in Becky Chambers Wayfarer series — A Closed and Common Orbit. I enjoyed immensely the first book in the series — The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. (It’s Sci-fi if the title didn’t give it away)

[bounty]

i haven't heard of any of the other books/authors you mention but I know I have said this before---there is soooo much good stuff out there.

think you'll have a hunger games binge? or take them one at a time over some days?

[Sancho]

The Wayfarer series so far has been a good mix of hard science, character study, and pure imagination.

Hey, you didn’t warn me there is more than one movie. It usually takes me a week or so to get through a standard Hollywood-length movie on a streaming platform. I can sit in a chair and read a book for hours on end, but I can only go 20 minutes or so at a pop while watching TV. Sometimes I never finish a movie. When I call up my Netflix feed, there’s probably 2 dozen half-watched movies under the “Continue Watching?” Tab.

[Sancho]

Bah-hahahaha!

It’s about time somebody deciphered book blurbs for me:

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/shouts-murmurs/what-blurbs-really-mean

[bounty]

those were funny.

these past couple of years I watch movies in bits and pieces over many days. i'll ride my bike on an old wind trainer and watch 20-45 minutes at a time. cant say that I have done that though for 4 movies in the same series for two weeks straight.

im delighting in an old western by wade Everett, texas rangers before I hopefully start a Stephen king book, Gerald's game.

[Sancho]

I’m still working on the sci-fi book. Been busy-busy. I’m painting my house before it starts raining here again. Thinking of reading another classic next. Maybe A Tale of Two Cities. Talk about great opening lines!

[bounty]

its hard to watch hunger games during painting.

have been doing similarly---painting, staining, minor carpentry and a few other things. a couple of roof jobs coming up in the next few weeks.

I read that and remember really enjoying it. dickens is one of my favorite old authors.

[Sancho]

I’m warming up to it. I read it once in school because it was assigned, but I somehow think I’ll get more out of it if I’m reading it because I want to. Anyway watching the games in Paris has stoked my interest in that city.

Summer is a time-crunch for outdoor projects around here. If history is a guide, I’ll get the house about half painted and then it’ll start raining again, and I’ll finish it up next summer. Oy vey.

[bounty]

when I started reading in earnest back in the middle 90s, one of the things I made a point of doing was going back and re-reading a lot of things we got made to read in high school.

that's funny---im lamenting even the rain we get here and how it makes getting certain things done an exercise in timing and patience.

[Sancho]

Hah!
I'm good at starting projects. I'll probably get half the house painted before the rain starts, then I'll finish up next summer.

A Closed And Common Orbit is turning out (among other things) to be a meditation on consciousness and how AI could figure into it, fascinating.

[bounty]

what happened with dickens?

my hopes for a Stephen king read got derailed, and I just recently started the golden compass.

[Sancho]

I just started it. However, I left my G-D Kindle on the G-D airplane again. Curses. I might get it back.

Anyway, as you know, A Tale of Two Cities has probably got the most iconic first sentence of any novel, ever:


It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

I tend to try to make comparisons between whatever I’m reading and what’s happening around me at the time. So this dichotomy Dickens lays out in sentence one sounds familiar to what I’m seeing right here and now in the good old U. S. of A. particularly the part about the noisiest authorities. And anyway isn’t Dickens doing just what I’m doing by comparing what’s happening around him to what happened earlier, around the time of the French Revolution?

[Danik 2016]

I first read this book in a very bad comic stripes Brazilian version but it made me want to learn English to read more Dickens.
It is still my favorite though not the most typical Dickens.

Something in it that reminds me of current times are extreme attitudes and feelings. I don't say anything more not to spoil the reading.

And I agree with you, the opening is specially inspired.

[Sancho]

I’m tuning into this one fairly well. And that’s saying something because I’ve always found Dickens’ wordiness to be pure drudgery. Anyway, it’s not just the iconic first sentence, he’s got strong lead-ins to several chapters:

Chapter III

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.

He goes on:

A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all.

[Sancho]

Oh hey, the airline found my Kindle and is sending it back to me. Woo-Hoo!

[Danik 2016]

Congrats! It reminds me of a story in Germany many years ago. I went to a bakery and forgot to take the change away. They didn't know my name and address, but when I got there 2 days later I fond the 10 marks (it was before the euro) waiting for me.

[Danik 2016]

I’m tuning into this one fairly well. And that’s saying something because I’ve always found Dickens’ wordiness to be pure drudgery. Anyway, it’s not just the iconic first sentence, he’s got strong lead-ins to several chapters:

Chapter III


He goes on:

Lol. Litnet doesn't quote the quotes.

But I agree with you. I loved these reflections. It seems however that a lot of this secrecy got lost in these times of internet and exposure.
You mentioned Dickens verbosity.A part of it was due to the exigency of the editors. The Victorians enjoyed lots of installments or voluminous books and good reviews.

I think one gets the feeling of both cities.

[bounty]

i think one of the great things about really good authors is their insight into life and their ability to express it.

[Sancho]

Amazon Kindle is safely back from the airline (thanks Delta) and I've finished A Tale of Two Cities. Gotta say, I have a newfound respect for Charles Dickens. I've never much cared for his writing style (wordy), but this one is different. The plot is as intricate as a spy novel. I'm not sure what I was expecting, maybe a big, sprawling history of the French Revolution, but that's not what it is. It's an intimate tale of several people caught up in the revolution and the rein of terror that followed. And I ask you, what gets at history better than a well told story?

Any thoughts on the characters? Initially I was fairly taken with Madame DeFarge. I suppose I admired her skill as a revolutionist the way I admired Captain Ahab’s skill as a mariner. Teresa DeFarge was calm, cool, collected, and patiently righting the wrongs of the aristocracy, but woo-eee! did she ever go off the reservation.