Caroline > Recent Status Updates

On leaving Latin America out of the Marshall Plan, to condemn it to indefinite supplier of cheap raw materials rather than support industrialization, Grandin remarks on the region’s distress at the delays in opening a second (western) front in WWII. Echoes my recent reading of Maisky’s diary; his persistent plaint in London, to take pressure iff USSR

Halfway there! Worth the effort

Or, more significant and essential, ranging through the whole book and appearing in many variations, the motif of cold, which is related to the motif of laughter.
In that laughter the devil, the secret hero of the book, is invisibly present.”

Pp 70-71 [Franz Werfel notes Adrian’s laughter in the draft] “with insight and foresight, he thus picked out one of the small motifs of the book, the kind I most enjoy working with—like, say, the erotic motif of the blue and black eyes; the mother motif; the parallelism of the landscapes…

[Mann reading Adorno on Schönberg in the early stages of writing] “Moreover, this reading nourished the musical conception which had long been my ideal of form and for which this time there was a special esthetic necessity. I felt clearly that my book itself would have to become the thing it dealt with: namely, a musical composition.

Alert to my Global Reading Friends: 50% off Margellos World Republic of Letters titles at Yale Univ Press

Of General Rafael Buelna: He was one of the very few who were conscious of the tragedy of the revolution: the moral impossibility of not supporting it, and the material and psychological impossibility of achieving through it the regeneration that would justify it.

“Captain [John C.] Fremont should be placed front and center among those spirited adventurers who…swarmed over Alta California in 1846. [He] was blessed with an unwavering perseverance, more than average courage, admirable foresight, and a very elastic conscience.”

I find I can listen to half of a Donald Westlake caper in about the same time it takes to read 10 pages of Bukharin and the Bolshivik Revolution: A Political Biography. I'm going to be finished re-reading all of Dortmunder for comic relief before I run out of Bukharin.

How does Jennifer Croft turn out so many fabulous translations in both Polish and Spanish? And Martinez appears to have written a terrific book in the first place. I have read lots of so-so books for several months and now three books in a row that I want to press on every reader I know. I hope this book holds up throughout.

Keats was situated in a small way of life…He nevertheless at every moment took life in the largest possible way and seems never to have been without the sense that to be, or to become, a man was an adventurous problem.

When I came across a library copy I decided to read it in honor of Kalliope’s Episodios Nacionales project. The initial introduction to the characters, and using a waspish war-weary elderly naval wife to name all the battles of the last fifty years to set the stage, is nicely done.

Good thing I just read up on cricket. Ford and Arthur have just landed in the middle of Lord’s cricket grounds after a 2 million year leap through the space time continuum.

[Interviewer: you’ve really written about all kinds of things: prose, poetry, film, painting, scripts, cars. And you’ve written novels, literary theory, scripts, essays,….Is there anything, Viktor Borisovich, which you haven’t done in your life?]
Yes, there’s one thing, actually two things, that I’ve never written: poetry and denunciations.

I believe that, normally, novels cannot be finished…Russian literature…struggles to comprehend the world, and the world has no end..[Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky]…A novel can come to an end, but it has no ending…Pushkin couldn’t finish Onegin. It got swept up in history. History can extend the novel just as it can obstruct it.

Really enjoying this exuberant story about an elusive, mysterious cricket phenomenon who dropped out of sight and the obsessive journalist and his pal who are writing about him. I had to take a few days break to do a crash course in cricket; half the words are cricket terms. And I am learning some modern Sri Lankan history; bone up on that too. Author has another book on this year’s Booker short list.

To be discussed: “There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life which is the more free the more abstract its interests, and his elemental swarm-life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid down for him. “

First few chapters were quite good, but the middle is sagging. I’m moving on to another book.

[advising girls on how to be healthy, starting with a quote from an ad] ‘ “the Magnolia [balm] will make a lady of thirty look like a girl of sixteen.” Now what sensible woman of thirty, with all the marks of intelligence and cultivation that well spent years must give, would desire to look like an inexperienced girl of sixteen?’

‘That national supremacy that holds individual freedom and equality more sacred than State rights, and secures representation to all classes of people, is a very different form of centralization from that in which all the forces of society are centered in a single arm’ [ECS in National Protection for National Citizens’ testimony Jan 1878 before Congress]

‘Without going back further than our recent elections, and the debates growing out of them as to the ultimate appeal in deciding the legal vote in the contested States, we have sufficient proof of our need as a nation of a clear understanding of our Constitution, and of the underlying principles of a republican form of government. ‘

‘There is nothing a foreigner coming here finds it so difficult to understand as the wheel within a wheel in our national and state governments, and the possibility of carrying them on without friction; and this is the difficulty and danger we are fast finding out.’ (Testimony before Congress on the proposed 16th amendment) plus ça change…

“This may be said to show how much human reason is capable of misleading us. It has been given to us to direct us to the right road but is an uncertain, changeable, and flexible instrument, which may be turned in all directions like a weather vane.”

“…to put an end to the [modern writer’s] me, and get rid of it once and for all…And yet there are the sublime I-myselfs here and there [Pessoa, Kafka,Casanova]…That’s a seizure of power: the replacement of the I of literature with the me of literary career.

“It would be futile to exhume Francis Bacon or Christopher Marlowe in order to make Shakespeare exist, after all, that’s what Hamlet is there for, to prove his existence while miraculously renouncing his eternal hesitations…

Physically beautiful—stunning even. Lovely and very usable layout with annotations in the side margins. Beautiful illustrations from widely diverse sources. Reminds me of the Landmark editions of Thucydides, Xenophon and Herodotus.

I’m bailing. Lots of verbiage meant to be elegant in the British tradition, it seems to me, but to no purpose. It’s merely wordy and obfuscating.

[western Europe’s strategy after Russia cut gas supply to Ukraine (and thus thru Ukraine to the West) as political leverage in 2006] “To diversify transit routes to take Ukraine out of the equation…served Russia’s goals as well..would then allow Russia to cut off supplies from Ukraine without cutting off Europe…the means to do this was the Nord Stream project…”

Great portraits of Babur’s family, fellow Timurads, etc: ‘Khusrau Shah…although he prayed and abstained from forbidden aliments, yet was he black-souled and vicious, dunder-headed and senseless, disloyal and a traitor to his salt…he had not pluck to stand up to a hen