Haydninvienna, 2024/2: the library of the future

As Karlstar and I both recognised, the previous thread was getting a bt long. The title of the new one is inspired by the hope that, after the measures I described near the end of the old thread (see here if you're curious), I will be able to get at least most of my long-suffering books out of boxes and onto shelves. I even have a librarian for them:

>1 haydninvienna: ook. Dr. Worblehat, I presume

>1 haydninvienna: Have fun with the unboxing. I know it is both work and enjoyment, I hope it goes well. if only we had robot assistants to help with that sort of task.

Happy new thread too.

Happy new thread! And your librarian looks as if he is probably prepared for whatever your selections require of him. That said, based on your previous thread, I would think that vocabulary like neotenous should be added to the uncommon words thread. I had to go look it up.

>1 haydninvienna: You don't have a librarian, you have The Librarian! I never realized he was so cute.

>1 haydninvienna: Happy New Thread!

I am happy to finally meet The Librarian :)

First book for the new thread: The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older. I liked this. Holmes and Watson (sort of), with a real mystery involving train timetables and all, but set on Jupiter. (Railways on Jupiter? There aren't many SFF stories I know of that have human constructions on Jupiter itself — the only other one I know of is They Shall Have Stars by James Blish, which has a Bridge on Jupiter with small railcars on it.) "Holmes" and "Watson" are former sapphic lovers who broke up and rebuild the relationship in the course of solving an apparent murder or suicide (or was it neither?). Little bits I liked: at one point Pleiti ("Watson") refers to another character as having used "the c-word" about her, and why did he say such a vile thing? I couldn't remember the obvious word having appeared, and then realised that the awful insult was "conservative". Another is the use of the word "radiation" as a curse.

>5 MrsLee: , >6 Alexandra_book_life: I've never met an orangoutang in person but I'm given to understand that they are not necessarily pleasant company, unlike The Librarian, or Sir Oran Haut-ton in Thomas Love Peacock's novel Melincourt.

I had a grizzle a while back about how most cookbooks were written around the supposedly standard four-person household (here, if you're curious). I've now found one that is expressly for 2 people, and mostly sticks to it: Table for Two by Bre Graham. It looks decent, and there are one or two recipes at least that look workable for us. Only trouble is, it's based on the assumption that the two people concerned are in a romantic (as distinct from matrimonial) relationship, and there's rather a lot in there about her love life, which I suppose you can just skip. A plus is that the author is Australian although she lives in London.

Part-way through Grave Expectations by Alice Bell. This one ought to be promising. Claire is a freelance medium. She would actually be a pretty crap medium except that she can see dead people, and she has a sort of familiar: the ghost of her former best friend Sophie, who disappeared years ago (and now only Claire knows for sure that Sophie is dead). Claire gets a gig to do a seance at a remote country house and finds the place swarming with ghosts, including one that obviously died quite recently. For Reasons, it's not clear whose ghost it is, so Clair and Sophie, with a couple of the less repellent members of the family (and most of them really are repellent), find themselves investigating not only who dun it, but who they dun it to, and when and how. One bit I liked: Claire is eating pheasant stew for the first time at the local pub:

The pheasant stew arrived in large, steaming bowls. it was very hearty. There were dumplings and everything. Claire hadn't eaten any kind of game before. She discovered that pheasant tasted luxurious and meaty. Like chicken, but if hens voted Tory.

Trouble is, Claire is so wet (for want of a better word) and Sophie, still a teenager though she has been dead for years, is the more competent of the two. The two less repellent family members are a fellow in his late teens who seems to spend a lot of time smoking weed, and his uncle, a former policeman who is very cagey about his reasons for leaving the police service (although the last sentence* of the book gives a strong hint).

*Yes, I skipped to the end. Having done so, I really don't feel the need to find out what happened in between.

>8 haydninvienna: So it started out promising but wasn't?

>9 Karlstar: at the start it looked at least worth the effort. Halfway through and I just don’t care. Unlike The Mimicking of Known Successes, in which I actually did care.

The Invention of Scotland by H R Trevor-Roper. I picked this up in History Fans, one the groups I lurk in. I knew a bit of the story (mainly the part that relates to how the kilt became "traditional" Scottish men's garb, even though invented by an Englishman, Thomas Rawlinson, as late as 1730 — as working clothes for Highlanders employed by him to cut timber). The idea of traditional clan tartans was created, ahem, out of whole cloth in the mid-nineteenth century. But the story of how a mythical history of Scotland, and an equally mythical poetic tradition, were created was mostly new to me. Odd that in the time of Chaucer in England, there was a flourishing literature in Scotland (see the early chapters of Lewis's English Literature in the Sixteenth Century for details); but this was more or less forgotten until fairly recently because it didn't fit with the Romantic ideal of unlettered bards creating epics.

One reflects that a similar story of the creation of a myth could probably be told about most nations or cultures or whatever with a long history. Trevor-Roper asserts that England has made no national myth, but I'm inclined to wonder. I know there are books arguing that Brexit was largely founded on a national myth which is being created right now.

ETA some browsing among the recommendations, and a tag search, eventually produced a book called The English Nation: The Great Myth, which apparently argues that something vaguely similar happened in England. I would have been surprised if it hadn't.

Fabulous Monsters by Alberto Manguel. A collection of short essays on imaginary characters (not all "monsters" by any means) in literature. I thought this was good, from the essay on Cide Hamete Benegeli:

Writers today complain that they are asked to deliver opinions on everything from food to fashion and from ethics to gender politics. In this vein, we ask writers long dead to comment on these things too — Homer on war, Sophocles on women, Shakespeare on the Jews, Voltaire on civic duties — and then assume that they meant their work to instruct us on all these things. We forget that fiction is neither accountancy nor dogma and does not deliver messages or catechisms. On the contrary, it thrives on ambiguity, in opinions raw or half-baked, in suggestions, intuitions, and emotions.

We can try, of course, to have Cide Hamete speak to us now, in the present, and we can question his pages much as in the Middle Ages readers sought answers in the verses of Virgil, casting the sortes Virgilianae. We can make a book converse with us, illuminate us, grant us each the vicarious pleasure of foresight and rebellion, and stand up heroically against the darkness of its time — a stance that would probably have astonished poor Cide Hamete.

Genius, as we well know, seldom manifests itself on the side of the angels, and it is only because we associate great art with virtue that we imagine that great artists are themselves good and virtuous. Whoever Cervantes was, and whatever he might have thought about Spain and its politics, ultimately matters little. More important is the fact that for the readers of Don Quixote today, the overwhelming presence of Cide Hamete tells us that a rejected culture will not easily be silenced, that absence in history is as solid as presence, and that literature is often wiser than the wisest of its practitioners.

Cide Hamete Benegeli was the supposed author of the supposed manuscript that, translated, furnished Cervantes with the second part of Don Quixote. The manuscript was said to be in Arabic, and Cide Hamete Benegeli would have been a Morisco (a Muslim forced by law to convert to Christianity — but then expelled from Spain).

ETA things you see in the notes: writers are beset by Titivillus, the imp of typos and factual errors.

>11 haydninvienna: and >12 haydninvienna: Both of those titles look good. (I seem to think that I have the Manguel on my Kindle, but I've not yet read it.) And given all of the people I know who are intrigued by Scotland, I may have to splurge and buy the book on Scotland. Reading it may help me reign in the frabjous romanticism that threatens to overwhelm.

>13 jillmwo: There is an updated edition of The Invention of Scotland. The edition I read was the first. The second edition is apparently "revised and updated". The book was put together from unfinished manuscript and notes that Trevor-Roper left after his death in 2003. Wikipedia isn't saying what was revised and updated for the second edition. Both editions are expensive-ish, about £30 a copy. The English Myth can be had for a fiver, and I've ordered a copy to be sent to my daughter Laura's address so that she can bring it to me when she visits in a fortnight's time.

The Lifeline Bookfest is on in Brisbane this week. Lifeline is an Australia-wide charity that runs a suicide counselling hotline and possibly other stuff. They hold annual Bookfests in various places around the country and sell tonnes of donated books. I went to the ones in Canberra a few times but never in Brisbane before.

I came away with:
The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway (I already have this in a ratty paperback, so was glad to find a hardback copy in decent condition)
Lyra's Oxford by Philip Pullman
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (a book that everybody should have, according to Pterry)
and an oddity, My Life by Thomas Bewick, in a slightly foxed but otherwise presentable Folio Society edition.

And I am now in a position to say authoritatively that an awful lot of copies of Dan Brown's books get donated.

Oh and happy birthday Canada!

>15 haydninvienna:
The only hard copy of The Gone-Away World I have seen is the one Nick read from at the convention where he was my Guest of Honour in 2010. He described it as a brick that he used for weights training.

Without giving too much away he read the part covering the state of un-war and sheep in a time of war.

>16 haydninvienna: And congrats to the Edmonton Oilers, they came close. Maybe next year.

>17 pgmcc: Published by Heinemann in 2008.

>18 Karlstar: I know nothing of Canadian sport. This is either CFL or hockey, right?

Saw a couple of galahs on the footpath across the street this morning. In Canberra we used to see them in big flocks on the road median strips, fossicking for seeds.

Happy new thread! I l do love the photo in the first post.

>19 haydninvienna: Hockey, in this case. A Canadian team hasn't won the Stanley Cup in 30 years. This year it was won by a team in, of all places - Miami, Florida.

>20 clamairy: Thanks clam. Re loving the photo: I want you all to know that I read every single post in the GD, and look at every single photo, and I am awed by the skill of the photographers who post here. I don't usually say anything because I've run out of ways to say "wonderful".

I've recently been being a nuisance in the formerly dormant group "The City and the Book", because I didn't think it was right that there weren't any Australian cities listed. I posted a few myself and got the members of Australian Librarythingers to suggest some more. I've just picked up Zig Zag Street by Nick Earls, one of the suggestions for Brisbane. Sorry, not for me, no matter how well he evokes late 1960s Brisbane. Going on the first few pages, it's the story of a loser regretting his lack of success with women. It's present tense and first person. Sorry, going back to the library. I also have The True Story of Butterfish by Earle, and maybe that will hit the spot. Earls's books have been described as "chicklit for men" — I'm not sure whether I like that idea or not.

Another one that's going back to the library is Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers.This one seems to have picked up quite a bit of love on LT, but a San Francisco Chinese mother who spends a lot of her time texting unsolicited good advice to her son? In stereotypical not-quite-English? Then a man dies in her tea shop. I have some issues with cosy mysteries at the best of times.

A third one going back half-read is In the Company of Ogres by A Lee Martinez. I think I still have a copy of Gil's All Fright Diner and I recall enjoying it, but I got weary quickly of the idea of Never Dead Ned (who gets killed quite often but doesn't stay dead) having to turn a crowd of misfits who happen to be monsters into a viable military unit.

>21 Karlstar: Are you suggesting that Miami is an unlikely home for an ice hockey team? At least 2 of the big shopping malls in Doha have ice rinks and hockey is played on them. Playing hockey when the temperature outside is a balmy 45℃ (113℉).

>24 haydninvienna: Yes and no. They aren't the only 'southern' team in the NHL and the season extends well into June now, so warm weather hockey is normal. It wasn't that long ago though that my brother and I, while down in Miami for a football game, also went to a Florida Panthers game because the tickets were $20 and included a free hot dog and the stadium was mostly empty. Now they've won the Cup and the stadium was full of what looked like wildly enthusiastic fans.

Considering the energy expenditure, should we have hockey teams in such warm places? Probably not.

>23 haydninvienna:. I am having to seriously wrestle with any tagline like chicklit for men being developed and used as a marketing ploy. Because really, it's too early in my day here in the US to start drinking.

>26 jillmwo: LOL it's early here too, but with our current temperatures, I'm not sure a gin and tonic would go amiss at 9:30 a.m.

I'm interested in how chick lit for men would play out. I always thought of Lee Child and Tom Clancy and others of that ilk to be the "chick lit" for men.

>26 jillmwo: >27 MrsLee: Does anyone ever mean anything complimentary by describing something as "chicklit"? I doubt it. I can't see "chicklit for men" ever becoming an advertising tag, I wondered if "chicklit for men" was the text parts of the magazines that men used to buy "for the stories".

>28 haydninvienna: *snort*

>28 haydninvienna: The short answer to your question is "no". In my view, ChickLit has always been a derogatory term. However, I do know women who embrace it as indicative of a very particular genre aimed at a particular demographic and who give a darn if others don't...

But I just don't see why men would need their own form of it. As >27 MrsLee: notes, there are already oceans of fiction that exist for their -- diplomatic pause -- would reading pleasure be the right phrase here?

>30 jillmwo: I originally quoted the phrase "chicklit for men" because I thought it amusing. The book in question isn't for me, for reasons simply of form. But now I've had to think a bit about "chicklit" even though I'm not sure exactly what it is. Reading Lewis's An Experiment in Criticism years ago gave me a lot to think about, and still does. Lewis asserts that "a book is not good or bad per se, it is good or bad in relation to its reader" (I'm quoting from memory). His point was along the lines of how the experience of reading any book regarded as "bad" might be very different for different readers, and we have no way to know what is going on inside the reader's head (cf the notorious difficulty of defining "pornography"). It follows that describing something as "chicklit" is no more than a way of saying "I don't like this book (or books of this kind)", and is empty as a literary judgment*. It also follows that most literary judgments are empty.

In another thread long ago I remember seeing mention of the book Mobius Dick by Andrew Crumey. The Amazon customer reviews on this book are entertaining — all the way from "This is terrific — original, thought-provoking, erudite" (5 stars) to "pretentious drivel" (1 star)**. I've just picked up a copy of How Proust Can Change Your Life which I had on library hold. I have the impression, rightly or wrongly, that certain persons regard de Botton as a purveyor of a kind of "philosophical chicklit", yet the flyleaf has quotations from (among others) Edmund White, Muriel Spark, John Updike, Sebastian Faulks and Cressida Connolly praising the book. Surely they can't all be deluded. Like the time someone described Robertson Davies as a talentless hack. Really? I infer the First Law of highbrow lit crit: don't be popular.

In my last thread I quoted Rabbi Lionel Blue on books with happy endings. He was talking specifically about Mills & Boon, which I assume is the epitome of chicklit. He liked at least some chicklit, and I see no reason to slight him for that.

And re chicklit for men: as long as people buy "chicklit" or the works of Mickey Spillane or John Ringo, other people will write such stuff and sell it. I may not want to read it, but I'm not going to try to stop anyone else doing so.

And notice that I am staying well away from your "diplomatic pause".

*I don't know if it's in An Experiment in Criticism or not, but somewhere Lewis argues that one should be very careful about criticising any book of a kind that one doesn't like — e g if you don't read thrillers, don't try to criticise them.

**Almost makes me want to at least try the book, but neither library system has a copy.

>31 haydninvienna: Hear hear. I believe that I would be able to read a well written book in any genre. I have certainly enjoyed some books labeled "chick lit" and others which people assume are written for men. I choose not to wade into pornography or horror, so I can't say about those. Much of genre reading depends on my mood at the time. As has been said before, there is nothing wrong with light reading if it's well written.

>32 MrsLee: Thank you. I might think that what Mickey Spillane produced is repulsive rubbish, but that's not a literary judgment*.

I finished How Proust Can Change Your Life — it's quite short. The idea of treating the enormous book Remembrance of Things Past aka In Search of Lost Time as a kind of self-help book sounds weird but it works. I learned a good deal about Proust (although I would have liked more about Proust's relationship with the composer Reynaldo Hahn) and I may now work up the resolution to try reading the book itself (promises, promises ...). I used to have a copy of James Grieve's translation of volume 1, Swann's Way**, and actually did read that. The new Penguin Modern Classics translation is by a team of an editor for the series as a whole and individual translators for each volume; and Penguin Books, having presumably paid for that huge project, is keeping the old Scott-Moncrieff translation in print as well, in Penguin Classics. Grieve translated volume 2, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, in the new translation, and Wikipedia in its article on Grieve quotes de Botton as having said that this volume is his favourite of the 7-volume set. I remember Grieve's preface to Swann's Way being quite acerbic about the old translation, but that was before the revision by Terence Kilmartin.

*Spelling: back in the age of the dinosaurs, when I was a law student, I was told that the spelling "judgment" was for a court judgment, and that for any other use the appropriate spelling was "judgement". I dunno. There might be a reasoned answer in Garner's Modern Legal Usage, which is in a box somewhere.

**Well, I'll be. I've just discovered that this has been recently issued in the US by NYRB.

ETA the interest in Grieve is that he was Australian: he was an academic in French language and literature at the Australian National University, and used to write reviews for the Canberra Times back when it was a real newspaper.

More on Proust. Neither library has the new translation (look for Dr Christopher Prendergast's name as editor) and I've been trawling booksellers' websites to find out who sells what. I suspect that the old translation by C K Scott Moncrieff is now out of copyright*, and most published sets are of that translation or revisions of it. The Penguin Classics set is of that translation revised by Terence Kilmartin; the Penguin Modern Classics set is of the new translation by Prendergast et al (weird: I can only see 6 volumes on any of the websites, but according to the all-knowing there are 7). There are also a few single volumes translated separately. Just to make it all more confusing, Scott Moncrieff used Remembrance of Things Past as a title, which Proust objected to as inaccurate; some of the revised versions of that translation have adopted In Search of Lost Time, which my very limited French tells me is more accurate. That is also Prendergast et al's title. But searching the entries on most websites (even Penguin's own!) under that title gets you a jumble of everything. I'm beginning to think that the only way of being sure of what you will get is to go into a physical bookshop and take the volumes off the shelf personally.

Also, I note that Clive James has written a commentary on Proust in verse: Gate of Lilacs. Who could resist that?

*Scott Moncrieff died in 1930. He did not finish the last volume.

On Jill's thead just now I mentioned a list of "long books that are worth the time". Here is the list, sorted by authors' names for convenience in searching library catalogues, plus occasional comments by me. (It's actually a combination of 2 lists, one from Penguin's website and the other from BookRiot.)
Atkinson, Kate, Life After Life (The Brisbane library service has 47 holds for this book! There is one available copy in the Logan City system.)
Atwood, Margaret, The Blind Assassin
Bronté, Charlotte, Villette
Catton, Eleanor, The Luminaries
Chabon, Michael , The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Chakraborty, S. A., The City of Brass
Chee, Alexander, The Queen of the Night
Clarke, Susanna, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (I have 2 copies of this, I think. Have tried to read it a couple of times but haven't finished yet. I loved Clarke's other two books so there's hope.)
Eliot, George, Middlemarch
Ford, Ford Madox, Parade's End
French, Tana, The Witch Elm
Gaiman, Neil, American Gods (Tried to read this, but found it too depressing at the time.)
Galsworthy, John, The Forsyte Saga
Harkness, Deborah, A Discovery of Witches
Hugo, Victor, Les Misérables
Jemisin, N.K., The Fifth Season
Joyce, James, Ulysses (Have actually read this.)
Kadish, Rachel, The Weight of Ink
Knox, Elizabeth, The Absolute Book
Kuang, R.F., The Poppy War
Liu, Ken, The Grace of Kings
McKay, Ami, The Witches of New York
Morgenstern, Erin, The Night Circus (read this too, and loved it.)
Moriarty, Liane, Big Little Lies
Murakami, Haruki, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Niffenegger, Audrey, The Time Traveler’s Wife
Owen, Lauren, The Quick
Pessl, Marisha, Night Film (read her first novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, years ago and liked it.)
Rushdie, Salman, Midnight’s Children
Setterfield, Diane, Once Upon a River
Verghese, Abraham, Cutting for Stone
Verne, Jules, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea
Waters, Sarah, Fingersmith
Wecker, Helene, The Golem and the Jinni.

To which one would of course add War and Peace*, Don Quixote, In Search of Lost Time, The Magic Mountain*, The Glass Bead Game*, The Man Without Qualities ... (* = read these)

Haven't broken the touchstones yet ...

>35 haydninvienna:
I have read and enjoyed nine books on the list.

American Gods is on my shelves but so far unread. I was disappointed by the other Gaiman books I have read and am having difficulty building up enthusiasm to read any more of his novels.

>36 pgmcc: I have several of Gaiman's books, but the only one I've actually finished is Stardust. I don't see American Gods in the catalogue — must have been a library copy.

It's noticeable how much of the list is fantasy. Also, 33 titles of which 23 are by women writers.

>35 haydninvienna: That's a nice list!

I've read ten books on it, and enjoyed them all, except The Witch Elm, one of the two Tana French books I strongly disliked (I loved all the others I had read) :)

>32 MrsLee: I agree with your statement "I believe that I would be able to read a well written book in any genre." I think I could also, but I struggle with the 'well written' part. I think I know it when I see it, but how is it defined?

This came up recently when someone online posted a quote from a book they thought was memorable, but to me, not being familiar with the character, I was looking for elegant phrasing or clever word choice or something, and there was none of that. I think of authors like Patricia McKillip or Donaldson as examples of well written prose, but there are many, many others.

>35 haydninvienna: That's an interesting list, I've read a few. I find it amusing that Weight of Ink is on the list, just based on the title.

>36 pgmcc: >37 haydninvienna: I have read American Gods and enjoyed it quite a bit both times, but it is very American.

>35 haydninvienna: I have read nine of your big books, with mixed responses. American Gods is one of my least favorites of Gaiman.

I used to love big books, but I'm reluctant to start them these days. Especially in the fantasy genre.

>35 haydninvienna: I have read about 7 or 8 of those shown on your list. I think everyone should read Les Miserables as it has such depth to it. It can stab to the heart. What-sis-name did a good job with the musical but the book has so much to offer.

I don't know what has happened to my copy of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell but I do have the collection of short stories she did.

I read American Gods with a book group but honestly felt that it should come equipped with a reader's guide. So many of the allusions and references can slide past.

>41 jillmwo: The short story collection is The Ladies of Grace Adieu. I loved it. Beautiful cover too.

Re Les Mis: I thought this para in the Wikipedia page was interesting:

Critical reactions were wide-ranging and often negative. Some critics found the subject matter immoral, others complained of its excessive sentimentality, and others were disquieted by its apparent sympathy with the revolutionaries. L. Gauthier wrote in Le Monde of 17 August 1862: "One cannot read without an unconquerable disgust all the details Monsieur Hugo gives regarding the successful planning of riots." The Goncourt brothers judged the novel artificial and disappointing. Flaubert found "neither truth nor greatness" in it. He complained that the characters were crude stereotypes who all "speak very well – but all in the same way". He deemed it an "infantile" effort and brought an end to Hugo's career like "the fall of a god". In a newspaper review, Charles Baudelaire praised Hugo's success in focusing public attention on social problems, though he believed that such propaganda was the opposite of art. In private he castigated it as "repulsive and inept" ("immonde et inepte").

The work was a commercial success and has been a popular book ever since it was published.

Shows you how much critics know (sometimes),

The list above is my list, as I noted. The BookRiot list is here. I removed a number of titles that I had read (such as Dune) or didn't find interesting.

I did a bit of a library crawl yesterday morning and picked up five of the list:
Chakraborty, S. A., The City of Brass
Chee, Alexander, The Queen of the Night
Pessl, Marisha, Night Film
Setterfield, Diane, Once Upon a River
Wecker, Helene, The Golem and the Jinni
and a couple of cheat books (that is, books I can read to put off the moment when I actually have to start one of the big ones). (My besetting library sin: eyes bigger than tummy, as my mother used to say.)

The first cheat book was The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie. This is yet another book about the creation of the great Oxford Dictionary, but this time it's about the thousands of (mostly unpaid) people who sent in slips with quotations to Murray or his successors, and acted as experts on topics that Murray and the sub-editors needed specialist help with. Among them were three murderers: the well-known Dr Minor, the subject of The Surgeon of Crowthorne; Edweard Muybridge, famous for his stop-motion photography of animal locomotion, who killed his wife's lover but was acquitted; and Dr John Richardson, who sailed with Franklin's first expedition to the Arctic and killed a man who was apparently a cannibal. Karl Marx's daughter was a contributor, as was the owner of the world's largest collection of pornography. And they are still doing it. I was astonished to discover that a Brisbane man was until recently a very prolific contributor, with the result that the Brisbane Courier-Mail is disproportionately represented among the Dictionary's quotations. He died only in 2010, and was still perusing the Courier-Mail for quotations two days before his death.

Still regretting that when I saw a full set of the Dictionary in its bookcase in an Oxfam shop in Dublin, I didn't haven €500 to spare.

>43 haydninvienna:
Do you want me to check if it is still in the Oxfam shop?
:-)
The shipping would probably be more than €500 at this stage.

>44 pgmcc: You're probably right about the shipping, Peter. Thanks but no thanks. It was something like 15 years ago anyway.

>43 haydninvienna:. That's quite a haul of very long books. How long can you keep those out?

>46 jillmwo: Four weeks, renewable for a further 4 weeks, in both systems.

And on the topic of long books, Laura (see https://www.librarything.com/topic/361851#8574306) is bringing me a copy of The Hands of the Emperor.

ETA Laura and the book (and another book) safely arrived.

>48 haydninvienna: I read that, and promptly went out and purchased everything else she wrote apart from the Greenwing & Dart series (book 1 was in a bundle of her books and I found it a bit too cutesy and YA).

>48 haydninvienna: Yay :)
Your other long library picks look good too.

>49 Maddz: I've heard from other people that Greenwing & Dart books get better and better. I've only read the first one so far, though (I liked it).

>51 Alexandra_book_life: I'm still trying to finish up the Hugo packet... Maybe in the autumn.

Reading a couple of the reviews of The Hands ... and Thomas Mann's huge (1200 pages) novel Joseph and His Brothers came to mind. I read this many years ago — must see if I can find it again.

>53 haydninvienna: I never managed to finish Joseph and His Brothers, it was one of the few DNF's in my life. I usually persevere until the end, no matter what.

We've just driven to Canberra and back and on the way stopped at a village called Ulmarra for lunch. Ulmarra has a bookshop! The sort of ratty old bookshop in which no ray of sunlight ever pierces the gloom and half the stock seems to be older than I am. Of course I bought something! I bought a copy of The Lady's Not for Burning by Christopher Fry (of which I already have at least 2 copies, but I love it this much); Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin (not really sure why I bought this — LBGT literature is not a central interest of mine); Complete Verse by Hilaire Belloc; Reach for the Sky by Paul Brickhill (I had a paperback copy of this as a flying-mad boy, and read it almost to pieces); Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man by Thomas Mann (I think this is the only one of Mann's "big" novels that I haven't read); and some Australian poetry, of which possibly more later.

Incidentally, it was an excellent lunch.

Laura is in Canberra with her brothers and sister in law and new nephew, and seems to be having a good time.

ETA Just read The Lady's Not for Burning again. According to my catalogue I now have 3 copies.

Latest read, and it's a surprise: Gate of Lilacs by Clive James. I'm not sure if this is the last book he finished but it reads like it. It describes itself as "a verse commentary on Proust". It's a short book, 15 blank-verse essays on various aspects of Remembrance of Things Past*, plus introduction, postscript and notes.

I always approach James's books with caution because of his reputation of being too clever by half. But I thought this one was brilliant. Much to ponder, and the postscript (about the importance of blank verse as a poetic form) and notes are almost worth the price of the book. As an example of his tendency to be witty, he says that Proust aimed a whole book at Sainte-Beuve "(as a great chef might construct a custard pie/Specifically to fit a certain face)".

But:

...Now my turn
Has come to quit the stage, I only hope
I've used my time between strength and departure,
The extra time, a tenth as well as he.
Ah, soldier: what you did. It's in those shelves
Of books by and about you I will leave
Here in my kitchen which has no cork walls,
Only the English early summer light
That pours in from the garden where my wife
And I meet on my balcony to count
The birds and wonder how to make them stay.
We've overdone the food, I think. Next spring,
If I'm still here to help, we might dial down
The chow supply. It's like Maxim's out there.
It's too much. Proust is sometimes that as well,
But not so often as he is austere,
Saying enough to make you see the rest,
As the face of Oriane is not described
But only conjured from your memories
Of everything that you have loved. And soon
All that I love will leave me, as I go
First into silence, then the fire, and then
The harbour water, in which there will be
At last no room to breathe, no time to think:
No time to think even of you, Marcel.

*Weird. If I use the title In Search of Lost Time, the touchstone doesn't work correctly. If I use Scott Moncreiff's title, I get the preferable title as the touchstone. Oh well.

>55 haydninvienna: Sounds like a wonderful time.
I have to ask, did you buy a third copy because your other two copies are in boxes somewhere?

>55 haydninvienna: I really like this bit. One can hear the humor but also his point about Proust. Conversational.

We've overdone the food, I think. Next spring,
If I'm still here to help, we might dial down
The chow supply. It's like Maxim's out there.
It's too much. Proust is sometimes that as well,
But not so often as he is austere,
Saying enough to make you see the rest,
As the face of Oriane is not described
But only conjured from your memories
Of everything that you have loved.

>58 jillmwo: Exactly. It’s quite an achievement technically. The verse flows freely and it is indeed conversational but you have to concentrate because very often a sentence carries across several lines. I found it hard to quote from for exactly that reason. But that last bit was just too good to pass up. I tried to see if he had wanted his ashes scattered in Sydney Harbour (“… then the fire, and then/The harbour water …”) but couldn’t find an answer.

As I said, I approach James’s books cautiously, but three or four pages in and I was convinced.

>57 clamairy: Just so. Also, I have a tendency to liberate copies wherever I see them. Fry as blank-verse dramatist actually gets a mention in Clive James’s Postscript.

And so the young lady is now somewhere over the Arabian Sea and our week of madness is over. It was fun, and I'll miss her sorely. During the ten days, we put something over 3000 km on the car, driving to Canberra and back, to Brisbane Airport 3 times (30 km or so each way each time) and up to Bribie Island (100 km each way) to have lunch with Auntie Marcia and as many of the family as could be rounded up.

Moreton Bay is a shallow curve in the coast of Queensland and has 4 big sand islands at its seaward side, of which Bribie is the northernmost. It's effectively 2 suburbs (Woorim and Bongaree) of the Greater Brisbane area, and is basically wall to wall retirees. The surf club* at Woorim does a decent lunch, with a sea view:



(Laura facing the camera; Auntie Marilyn (in purple jumper) holding forth; Auntie Marcia at extreme left).

*No surf in the picture because this side of the club looks south towards Moreton Island, the second one in the group. But on the eastern side (just round the corner, so to speak) there's nothing much between Woorim and the coast of South America.

>60 haydninvienna: I'm glad you made the most of your time together. That's a great view to go with your lunch!

>60 haydninvienna: What a great time you had! And that lunch view is wonderful :)

>60 haydninvienna: Glad you had the opportunity for a family visit. Great view.

I am glad you had a good week. Now you need a nice rest after all that running around.

Random sighting this morning. Mrs H and I were leaving the Coopers Plains library this morning with a bagful (mainly Kathy Reichs for her) when I heard a louder and deeper than usual engine noise overhead. I saw an aircraft on final approach (it's quite near Archerfield Airport — Brisbane's second airport, used mainly by business and private aircraft) and said to Mrs H that I wasn't sure what it was but it looked like a Mustang. I didn't have a chance to check FlightRadar24 on the phone for a while, but when I did, there was indeed a Mustang on the ground at Archerfield.

>65 haydninvienna:
Wow!

>65 haydninvienna: What a great sighting.

>67 Karlstar: Glad to see you back in action! Hope it all went OK.

>68 haydninvienna: Thank you, thought I'd stop by and see how all of you folks are doing. Time will tell I think but I walked a little less like a zombie today.

>60 haydninvienna: What a view! So happy to hear you enjoyed your time with her.

>69 Karlstar: Very glad to hear this, but what kind of noises are you making?

Another small surprise: Strange Meetings by Harry Ricketts. This is a kind of group biography of the British poets of the First World War — Rupert Brooke, Charles Sorley, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Ivor Gurney, David Jones, Vera Brittain and others. The title is of course a reference to Wilfred Owen's poem "Strange Meeting*". The book is organised as descriptions of meetings: many of them knew each other. Some of the meetings are known to have taken place and others are plausible or near-misses (for example, David Jones's battalion relieved Siegfried Sassoon's battalion in France at a time when Robert Graves's battalion is recorded as having been nearby). One of the themes of the book is how much the First World War still shapes the British collective consciousness.

Which makes me wonder why there is seemingly no recognised genre of Second World War poetry. Not quite no poetry: I can think of a few names (Alun Lewis for British; Randall Jarrell for American; Kenneth Slessor for Australian) but no vast outpouring and no huge literature about it. Not saying there's none, just that the bulk is very much less.

* https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47395/strange-meeting. Not going to quote it.

Serendipitous discoveries number 3,188: that there is a TV series based on the life and poetry of Emily Dickinson. Does anyone have anything to say about it? Is it worth the price of a subscription to Apple TV?

ETA this was actually the end of a weird chain of associations. Robert Graves wrote a biography of Lawrence of Arabia in 1919 (this is mentioned in Strange Meetings). Lawrence seems to have been on the fringe of the "war poets" circle — as noted above, many of them knew each other. When Siegfried Sassoon married in 1933, Lawrence, by then known as Aircraftsman Shaw, was a guest. He had a motorcycle, which he called "Boanerges". I thought, "... and neigh like Boanerges" — that's Emily Dickinson, isn't it?". In looking up references to Boanerges and Emily Dickinson (I wanted to know why Dickinson used that precise simile), I found not only the reference to the TV series but also Dickinson's black cake recipe.

But now I have another question: who or what was "Boanerges" in the poem? The word is the nickname that Jesus gives James and John, the sons of Zebedee, in Mark 3:17, and Dickinson would certainly have known that. But did the household have a horse called Boanerges?

>71 haydninvienna:. Now that book on poets of World War One sounds very interesting. As for why there's no parallel body of work for the Second World War, I would assume that the second war was not nearly as much of a shock to the population as the first one had been. (I say that without much documentation behind it.)

>73 jillmwo: One way of looking at it, found in an unexpected place: the introduction to The English Nation: The Great Myth by Edwin Jones:

More's words ... represent a view of the English past which was an assumption of thought in England up to the time of the Reformation. He believed that he could be a patriotic Englishman and a loyal member of the Catholic Church, covering the whole of Europe, at the same time. This idea was unrecognizable to later English people who had been taught a nationalistic set of assumptions of thought in which the central and exclusive loyalty was to their own nation and its ruler....
[More and Erasmus] both had a loathing for war and its effects. In his famous Utopia (1516) More described it 'as a thing very beastly, and yet to no kind of beast in so much use as man', and the inhabitants of Utopia 'do detest and abhor it'. ... The real question was how to arrange the affairs of the world in order to control and limit these evils, while allowing the good to emerge. Medieval conflicts happened in spite of the community ideals, but modern wars would occur as a positive result of the new philosophy of aggressive and independent nationalisms in which there would be no greater allegiance than to one's own state. More had the vision to see where this was leading. Both Erasmus and More felt keenly that it was not the common people, on any side, who caused wars, but they were 'driven and enforced to war against their wills by the furious madness of their princes and heads' .
Indeed the whole section 'Of Warfare' in the Utopia has an extraordinary feeling to it which strikes one as very modern now at the end of the twentieth century. It is difficult to recall any piece of English writing, from the sixteenth century to the the Peace Movement in the second half of our century, which so vividly brings out the utter absurdity and horror of war. Certainly it strikes a discordant note when against the utterances concerning the glories of war and conquest which characterized so much of English writing up to the First World War - as if war was a romantic and glorious venture of some sort.
More's view of the past was confronted in 1535 by the new and official version which had just been concocted by Thomas Cromwell in the preambles to the Reformation statutes. More's voice was silenced by the brute force of the new nation state. In future the heroes of English history books were to be the national war leaders and generals who achieved spectacular victories over other European countries in the spate of internecine wars in Europe and the colonies over the next four centuries. The glory of the nation was achieved often at the expense of the misery of many ordinary people.

Against the pre-war background of war as a "romantic and glorious venture", and the realisation of its real nature, the shift (in the space of three years!) from

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

to this:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori*.

makes perfect sense. Also, the First World War was England's first mass war in which large numbers of educated men experienced the reality of war. Those men were accustomed to expressing themselves in poetry.

*This motto is usually translated "It is a sweet and fitting thing to die for one's country", but I wonder if "patria" is really "one's homeland" or "the land of one's fathers"?

>74 haydninvienna: I'm in awe that you would type all that for us. Thank you, very interesting.

I became aware of Robert Graves and some of the others you mentioned when I was in a group which used to read the Lord Peter Wimsey Canon each year and assign different members to research and discuss each novel.

>74 haydninvienna: and >75 MrsLee: I was introduced to Dulce et Decorum Est in high school English and it made an strong impression on me. Gas, GAS, quick, boys How can one ever consider the backstory of Sayers' Lord Peter without hearkening back to that entire stanza?

>75 MrsLee: Thank you, but (much as I love and respect you all) I didn't type it. Most of the familiar poems are on line somewhere now and just have to be copied. I've been familiar with both poems since high school though.

I've never read Vanity Fair, but doesn't it stay safely in Brussels dancing and partying while the Battle of Waterloo is being fought not very far away? That sort of detachment wasn't possible in 1917.

I don't think I'm going to read The English Nation, because I think I have the general idea (that the myth of England being "special" and not part of Europe was the creation of Tudor propaganda) and also because I suspect that it would not play well with my opinion of St Thomas More. My older view of More was based on the character of him in Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons, which we studied in high school. More there is shown as being faithful to his own conscience in rejecting Henry VIII's substitution of the King for the Pope as the head of the Church. In both the play and the film that was made from it, More has some great lines about one's duty of conscience. OTOH, More approved of the burning of heretics. Do we judge him by the standards of his own time or the standards of today?

I've been moved to try some of the notable Australian novels. I have a copy of "Tom Collins"'s Such is Life somewhere*, and actually read it, a long time ago. With luck it's still in one of the boxes and I'll read it again. I picked up Border Districts by Gerald Murnane from the library. (Murnane is supposedly the greatest Australian novelist that you've never heard of.) It's quite a short book, and I have no idea what to make of it. I'm nervous about saying anything about it in case I reveal myself to be a clod incapable of appreciating great literature**. First person, written by an old man sorting out his memories after moving from the (un-named) capital city of an un-named state to an un-named town in the far west of the state to spend the remainder of his life. He never names any of the places, nor any of the people: all are referred to in circumlocutions. That's pretty much it. Murnane has in fact done exactly this: moved from Melbourne to a town called Goroke, in the far west of Victoria. Almost nothing actually happens. The style demands some attention  — long, rambling sentences that tend to be half-repetitions of the previous sentence. I have another book by Murnane, A Season on Earth, and we'll see.

Another random library pick was The Withering World, translations of poetry by the Hungarian writer Sándor Márai. In the notes I found this quotation from Márai's diaries:

The world is wondrous; nature is infinite and bountiful. God, on the seventh day, might have let his eyes wander contentedly over this miracle and justly observed that "it is good". ... . But beyond the miracle of nature there is yet more. Man gave nature something else: only humanity capped Creation with creations whose collective name is art. Ocean, valley, forest, river, plains: all these are essential. But a fugue by Bach, a poem by Rilke, a painting by Cranach or Goya, a building by Palladio, a thought of Goethe, a statue by Pheidias or Rodin: these are gifts that only humanity — alone among all living beings — added by its own will to the world's miraculous creation. And this is the only thing that counts for humanity: art. Everything else is mere existence, the rhythmic combination of the interactive relations of matter and energy. (c.20th August 1944)

And finally: re the Steps That Had to be Taken (see here if you're curious) I spent almost no time at all last Thursday afternoon buying yet another stash of Billy bookcases (this is now the fourth country in which I have bought Billy bookcases). Delivery next Tuesday.

*Found it! (18 August).

**On which see The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 by Professor John Carey.

>77 haydninvienna: That's quite the record, 4 countries!

Heaven help me, I've just joined another library system, that of Redland City! Probably will not be using it much though, since the nearest branch is 30 km away. What prompted this rash move was The Antipodean Express, which neither the Brisbane City nor Logan City system appears to have but looks fascinating.

The only other reasonably nearby local government area is Ipswich, but I'm not sure whether their library system would be worth joining. Further away and the traffic on the way there is horrendous.

>79 haydninvienna: Good luck! I think it sounds like a great decision, though :)

Bookcases now delivered, 3 so far assembled. Awed respect for the bloke who delivered them: an 800 wide Billy in its packaging weighs 40 kg (88lb for US-ians) and he carried 4 of them up a double staircase without puffing. Not all at once of course. He was very dark skinned and out of curiosity I asked him where he was from (expecting him to say Sudan), but he said "Congo". Interesting. Haven't encountered a Congolese in Australia before.

Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner went in to help out the Congolese. Of course, he had a head when he did.

>82 Bookmarque: I'm not sure I care to google that ...

It's only one of Warren Zevon's finest songs. It's about Norway's bravest son.

>82 Bookmarque: One of my favorites back in the day!!!

>83 haydninvienna: You're not alone. I had to Google it myself. Quite the charming little ditty.

Betrayal is never pretty, is it? Poor Roland.

Paid my first visit to the Redland City library system yesterday. The Capalaba branch is a nice little building which looks just like all the other libraries in the Greater Brisbane area (they all use the same checkout kiosks and catalogue software). It had some interesting things though. I found a book called Fake Heroes by "Otto English" (it's a pseudonym, and you are told his real name on the back flap). I found this a little challenging because his first "fake hero" is Douglas Bader, who was a hero of mine when I was a boy, although in the times between I had realised that the fit between the legend and the reality was a bit loose in places. "English" doesn't actually set Bader up as completely fake, to be fair: just that there was more to Bader than the legend, and some of it wasn't particularly nice. At least one of the fake heroes is actually presented as completely fake: to misapply a famous phrase, there's no "there" there. Not going to say who it is.

The most interesting fake hero, though, is King Henry V. In the course of debunking the legend, "English" has quite a bit to say about the monarchs of England/Britain/the United Kingdom, and isn't greatly impressed with any of them. I saw somewhere that Shakespeare was basically a Tudor propagandist (maybe in The Daughter of Time?). "English" doesn't go into how far the mythos of Henry V and the Battle of Agincourt is due to Shakespeare. I have long thought that the Olivier film of Henry V makes Henry sound uncomfortably like Hitler. English notes that Henry orders his soldiers to kill their prisoners, but that both Olivier and Kenneth Branagh omit that line.

ETA that I don't know what the usual practice was at the time in regard to taking prisoners. There were certainly no Laws of War, and no Red Cross to look after prisoners of war. A prisoner whom seemed likely to be worth ransoming would be held to ransom, in circumstances proportionate to the ransom expected. But what happened to the footsloggers, I don't know. Given that they would not be worth ransoming, and probably could not safely be simply set free, they probably were killed.

>82 Bookmarque: That was interesting, don't think I'd ever heard that one. They should have sent lawyers, guns and money instead.

That was probably the follow up.

If you can find it, one of the most touching performances of that song (and others) is when David Letterman gave him a whole show just before Warren's death. I cried the whole time. Enjoy every sandwich.

I now have all the bookcases assembled and have to face the job of filling them. Many of the boxes seem to have been packed on the assumption that they will be carried about by gorillas, though, and I have to figure out how to get them from the garage to the upper storey of the unit. I can't even lift some of them. Maybe Mrs H's stairlift will get pressed into service.

On one of our library visits I Picked up The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton. So far he has visited factories (a biscuit factory in Belgium, a fish cannery in the Maldives) and vast warehouses in industrial parks, where he watches huge semitrailers coming and going. But I found this:

In the fourth century BC, Aristotle defined an attitude that was to last more than two millennia .... For the Greek philosopher, financial need placed one on a par with slaves and animals. The labour of the hands, as much as of the mercantile sides of the mind, would lead to psychological deformation. Only a private income and a life of leisure could afford citizens adequate opportunity to enjoy the higher pleasures gifted by music and philosophy.

Early Christianity appended to Aristotle's notion the still darker doctrine that the miseries of work were an appropriate and immovable means of expiating the sins of Adam. It was not until the Renaissance that new notes began to be heard. In the biographies of great artists, men like Leonardo and Michelangelo, we hear the first references to the glories of practical activity. ... this re-evaluation was at first limited to artistic work and even then, only to its most exalted examples ..., By the middle of the eighteenth century, in a direct challenge to the Aristotelian position, Diderot and d'Alembert published their twenty-seven-volume Encyclopédie, filled with articles celebrating the particular genius and joy involved in baking bread, planting asparagus, operating a windmill, forging an anchor, printing a book and running a silver mine. Accompanying the text were illustrations of the tools employed to complete such tasks: among them pulleys, tongs and clamps, instruments whose precise purpose readers might not always understand, but which they could nonetheless recognise as furthering the pursuit of skilful and dignified ends. After spending a month in a needle-making workshop in Normandy, the writer Alexandre Deleyre produced perhaps the most influential article in the Encyclopédie, in which he respectfully described the fifteen steps required to transform a lump of metal into one of those deft and often overlooked instruments used to sew on buttons.

Purported to be a sober compendium of knowledge, the Encyclopédie was in truth a paean to the nobility of labour. Diderot laid bare his motives in an entry on 'Art', lambasting those who were inclined to venerate only the 'liberal' arts (Aristotle's music and philosophy) whilst ignoring their 'mechanical' equivalents (such as clock-making and silk-weaving): 'The liberal arts have sung their own praise long enough; they should now raise their voice in praise of the mechanical arts. The liberal arts must free the mechanical arts from the degradation in which these have so long been held by prejudice.'

I also have The Proust Project, by Andrew Aciman; Human Diversity by Charles Murray*; The Janus Point: A New Theory of Time by Julian Barbour; George Macdonald (an anthology selected by C Lewis); and (just to show that I haven't totally gone serious) The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands by Sarah Brooks. The last one is described as His Dark Materials meets Piranesi": should be fun.

*The touchstone for this book has his names the wrong way around. I'm not entirely sure that he's my kinda guy; I'm relying on the flap copy. But we will see.

ETA Having now opened the book, he isn't my kinda guy. My initial doubt was based on the fact that he is a scholar in residence at the American Enterprise Institute — as clear a warning as one could want about his ideological stance. On page 274 he mentions "... IQ scores used by social scientists with no training in constructing IQ tests". (Can the average laboratory chemist build a pH meter?) On IQ tests, see The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould. I also question whether a political scientist (as Murray is) can properly describe himself as a social scientist.

>91 haydninvienna: A wonderful quote! This was very interesting, thank you. I did not know about this aspect of the Encyclopédie!

>91 haydninvienna: Our technique is to load reasonably robust plastic bags with books to be transferred up or down stairs. It will take longer to fill up the bookshelves using this approach, but it saves one's back and one makes steadier progress.

As a quick question, what's the copyright date on The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work? I must admit that the quote is engaging.

>91 haydninvienna: I know that feeling, anything larger than a 'medium' sized box of books is too heavy. Jill's approach sounds like a good one.

>93 jillmwo: >94 Karlstar: Yes indeed. I hadn't thought of using a plastic bag, but we have a couple of the big blue bags from IKEA, which are just about indestructible. Oh, and we have some reusable shopping bags from supermarkets in both the UK and Australia, such as this one from Sainsbury's in the UK:


So thanks, Jill.

I've been haunted for some time by the idea that there aren't enough boxes — that I have lost some of the collection along the way. So as I go I'm trying to audit what I have compared to what I should have. What I did was to create a new collection called "not found" and then add everything in "Your library" to it. Now as I shelve a book I have this laptop by me, and I search for the book and remove it from "not found". As a bonus, I've found a few books that haven't been catalogued.

Of course, as I sort and shelve I'm finding things. One book I just found, and I'm very glad I still have, is De Alfonce Tennis by J P Donleavy. I'm not a huge fan of Donleavy but it's hard to live in Dublin and not be frequently reminded of him. De Alfonce Tennis is not in the fighting, drinking fornicating mode that you might associate with him. It's about a sport, as the title suggests: a very weird form of tennis, its inventor and how he invented it. I must read it again.

>95 haydninvienna: As pgmcc often says, #thereisalwaysanelephant !

>95 haydninvienna:
There is always an elephant. I love the bag.

>96 haydninvienna: I'm glad that's working out for you. I did find that moving was one good way of reorganizing the library and checking to see what was listed here in LT. We think we lost at least 2 books in the move, somehow.

The unpacking continues. When I started unpacking I had (IIRC) 2308 books in "your library" and the same number in "not found". I now have 2362 books in "your library" and 1607 in "not found". I have unpacked 755 books (including 54 uncatalogued ones!) and am running out of shelves. The elephant bag has been an absolute godsend. Thanks to Jill once again for the suggestion!

>100 haydninvienna: That's a lot of unpacking!

I use plastic milk crates!

>100 haydninvienna: My head hurts trying to do that math.

I finally finished The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. Mostly sorrows although he visited some interesting places: after the vast warehouse parks I mentioned in >91 haydninvienna: , he visited the French space centre at Kourou in French Guiana to watch the successful launch of a Japanese TV satellite; an aviation trade show at Le Bourget near Paris; and the aircraft boneyard at Mojave. OTOH he also sat in on a huge international audit firm and an inventors' convention (which at least produced the gem " ... a subgenre of contemporary fiction, the business plan ..."). We meet the venture capitalist who receives 2,000 business plans a year, immediately bins 1,950 of them, invests in 10 of the rest and reckons that within five years, four of those ten would be bankrupt, another four would be stuck in a cycle of low profits and only the remaining two would actually be making a significant return on his investment. All in all, not a riveting read.

ETA >93 jillmwo: 2009, all editions.

Started reading Lost in Thought by Zena Hitz. So far she is arguing that the "intellectual life" can be about literally anything so long as it's engaged in for its own sake, citing birdwatching and building model trains as examples. This recalled a faint memory of a book that I think I used to own, Homo Ludens by the Dutch historian and mediaevalist Johan Huizinga. Huizinga's book is a study (one of very few, apparently) that tries to put play into a cultural context. From the Amazon description:

... Huizinga defines play as the central activity in flourishing societies. He identifies five characteristics of play: it is free; it is not “ordinary” or “real” life; it is distinct from “ordinary” life both as to locality and duration; it creates order; it is connected with no material interest, and from it no profit can be gained.

With cross-cultural examples from the humanities, business, and politics, Huizinga examines play in all its diverse guises―as it relates to language, law, war, knowledge, poetry, myth, philosophy, art, and much more. As he writes, “Civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play like a baby detaching itself from the womb: it arises in and as play, and never leaves it.”

Heh. None of my public libraries has it. I could get a copy from the Griffith University library (just up the road) on inter-library loan for just about the price of buying my own copy from Amazon.

This stuff is immediately interesting to me as a retired person and something of a geek. I thought I'd mentioned that one of the bodies that I have a consultancy contract with asked me if I would be interested in providing some "on site support" in Doha for a month or so. Since I have the prospect of a hospital stay in the reasonably near future, I asked my doctor if going to Doha for a month posed any problems. Rather to my surprise he recommended that I should go, and treat it as a kind of working holiday. (I told the organisation I was interested but so far they haven't been back to me.) His view was partly based on the fact that at my age people tend to die from the head: the people who stay well and happy tend to be the ones who have interests and activities. He even told me about a woman patient of his, vaguely about my age, who has started a law degree. No interest in practising, just that she always wanted to do it.

So I'm wondering if I should start some sort of humanities degree, or at least learn some languages properly.

>104 haydninvienna: " ... a subgenre of contemporary fiction, the business plan ..."

This made me laugh so much :))) A true gem!

>105 haydninvienna: Now here's a coincidence for you. I have two books by Zena Hitz sitting on my couch at this very moment -- Lost in Thought and A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life. Of the two, I have read the latter in full, but haven't yet gotten through the somewhat longer Lost in Thought. I have a sense of what the message is, but I haven't really plumped myself down to read it with full attention. I will be very interested to hear what you have to say about it. (And departments in the humanities need all the bodies they can get. You'd be doing them a huge favor.)

>102 clamairy: I used large flat vegetable boxes from the supermarket when we moved. I think I had 50+ - they were brilliant for mass market paperbacks as you could get 2 rows spine out (~40 books) and still lift them. Trade paperbacks & hard backs required a different strategy.

>107 jillmwo: No pressure, huh? I'm only up to p47 (and I skipped most of the first section, about how she got to where she is now), but I suspect that this is the central message: "But I do think it ought to be clear by the end of this book that contemplation in the form of learning is a robust human good, valuable for its own sake and worthy of time and resources."

Another quotation: "To read and enquire as a free adult is to take on the awesome responsibility of allowing oneself to be changed. If the change were certain to be positive, no risk would be involved, and the freedom to think would not mean nearly as much as it does." (pp 79-80).

Some discussion of the fate of Strepsiades in Aristophanes' play Clouds: "Strepsiades' view that intellectual work is measuring flea feet* is the distorted perception of a man who sees only 'practical' value.". This is in the context of courses of higher learning that are aimed at getting a better job. I don't doubt that the humanities faculties need all the warm bodies that they can find, but ... Here in Australia, the academic year for tertiary institutions begins at the end of February, and lately we have been seeing a good many advertisements from various universities seeking enrolments. Without exception the advertisements stress how beneficial their degrees are for getting a better job. On the fundamental paradox about wealth:

Like Strepsiades, we have lost contact with our rustic roots — our roots in simple, natural goods, in hard work and embodied practical excellence, and in the basic pleasures. Likewise, our anxieties to preserve or advance our comfortable lifestyles distort and diminish our vision of the human splendor in art and intellect, which is the best fruit of wealth, luxury, and urban life. For as wealth and luxury cover over our rustic human roots, they also make possible comedy and tragedy, art and sculpture, history and philosophy.

I've been to a few palaces — Versailles, Schǒnbrunn, the Winter Palace in St Petersburg — and they're glorious; but they were built on the grinding poverty of the common people. The art of Haydn and Michelangelo was at the expense of the poverty of many (particularly Haydn: his patrons, the Esterhazy family, owned half of Central Europe).

*Sic. It makes sense in context.

Another coincidence: a couple of nights ago we were watching TV and an advertisement for motor oil came on. Along with all the computer graphics was a voice-over saying "Come, my friends! It is not too late to seek a newer world!" and of course I knew that! (Confession: I recognised it as something I remembered but had to google it.) It's from "Ulysses", by Tennyson:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.

But on p 142 I find (in the course of a discussion about St Augustine and cockfighting):

In Dante's Inferno, Dante meets Ulysses, who tells him about his last voyage. After his homecoming from Troy, Ulysses sets out again and dedicates the rest of his life to voyaging, dying near the edge of the world. His condemnation to a deep circle of hell is puzzling, until we reflect on the strangeness of his choice. The lengthy travels that constitute his homecoming (told in Homer's Odyssey), diverting and spectacular as they were, have been an occasion for growth: healing from the wounds of war, a preparation for homecoming, a search for a kind of wisdom. Such are the goods that traveling serves: growth, healing, understanding, awe at something greater than oneself—not experience for its own sake. For Ulysses to leave behind his wife, son, and aging father to set out again is madness; there is no point to it beyond the experience alone. So he appeals to his men to push past to the edge of the world and to their deaths for the sake of esperĩenza, since the time given to the senses is short. His endeavor and his leadership are driven by the love of spectacle. But while spectacles are useful for raising questions, for opening up forms of inquiry, or for resting in awe at something beyond oneself, they are not ends in themselves. He abandons his family and dies for the sake of a few thrilling moments at the surfaces of things.

A minor issue that I see here is that Dante does not actually consign Ulysses to the eighth circle of hell for his renewed voyaging, but for the trick of the Trojan horse:

"Tormented there," said he, "Ulysses goes
With Diomede, for as they ran one course,
Sharing their wrath, they share the avenging throes.

In fire they mourn the trickery of the horse,
That opened up the gates through which the high
Seed of the Romans issued forth perforce;

There mourn the cheat by which betrayed to die
Deidamia wails Achilles still;
And the Palladium is avenged thereby.

(Canto XXVI, lines 55-63; Dorothy Sayers' translation.) The story of Ulysses' continued voyages follows at lines 91 to 142. Sayers notes that there is no classical source for the story, and it appears to have been Dante's own invention.

However you feel about Ulysses (Hitz clearly does not approve), Tennyson could write! But I did think that his reference to Ulysses' "aged wife" was a bit thick:

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

This post is already too long so I'll post it now. More later, maybe. Fairly obviously, I am enjoying Hitz's book.

In the end, I was mildly disappointed in Lost in Thought. At bottom, it's an argument about values: that a certain way of life is better. Choose different premises and you reach a different conclusion. In the end, I wonder if it was all worth it. We might agree with Ms Hitz (as of course I do) about the value of an intellectual life, but is the book likely to convince anyone who doesn't agree already? I doubt it. The book got somewhat depressing about the current state of American universities, and "... 'the humanities' have suffered particularly but not exclusively."

>110 haydninvienna:. There was a flurry of titles about the diminishing space for the humanities in U.S. institutions of higher ed both before and following the pandemic. The worry is that without an emphasis on the importance of reading, the rising population will lose the value of literature in allowing them to flourish as humans (rather than just as worker bees). One of the pages that I had marked with a post-it had to do with how freeing up time in human lives ought to result in knowledge expansion as workers generated independent work through the pursuit of private studies of various sorts. (The way that certain eighteenth and nineteenth landowners managed to create foundational works of their own -- botanical encyclopedias, etc.) If faculty don't awaken awareness in students that it is possible to enjoy this kind of activity, we will all lose out because the output born of internal passions never comes to the fore.

The problem with the production of so many of these books from faculty (in my view) is that the audience for the work must either be (a) students or (b) administrators in higher ed. Generally speaking, the books aren't written in such a way as to appeal to the (A) group and the (B) group is faced with funding pressures to get students in and out in 3-5 years.

So yes, I agree with you. The works don't reach or appeal to anyone who doesn't already agree.

The book that I joined the Redland City library system for arrived: The Antipodean Express by Gregory Hill. He turns out to be a retired French horn player — I had been expecting someone rather more hippyish. He and his wife live in Wellington, in New Zealand, and he discovered that New Zealand has antipodes in France and Spain — specifically, the antipode* of their lounge room in Wellington is in a wheat field near Salamanca in Spain. Of course just flying there would have been boring, so he and his wife did the whole journey by train, so far as physically possible, with stops along the way to look at interesting places. Just on three months overall, taking in Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Tibet, Mongolia, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany, France, Spain ... and then back to London for an Air New Zealand flight home via Los Angeles. Lots in there about food: he is something of a foodie. Also a train geek, although he doesn't seem to say so: I noticed that he gives the service number for every train they travelled on.

Hard to know what to say about the book without sounding patronising. It's a straightforward account of one journey after another. I'm not sorry I read it, but I don't feel any need to buy it.

I looked up the antipodes of the five cities I've lived in, in four countries. All five antipodes are in oceans, far from land. No risk of me trying to reach any of them by train, and little point in doing so by ship.

*Incidentally, I had to look up whether "antipodes" is singular or plural. According to Wikipedia, the singular is antipode.

My wife and I were watching a house hunting programme, “Secret Location”. One of the properties in the show was in Bicester. The programme is pre-Brexit so you would still have been based there.

>113 pgmcc: Not our house, for several reasons. I just had a Quick Look at Bicester on Rightmove, and I think we probably did OK to get out when we did.

Still unboxing books, although I long ago ran out of shelves so they are being stacked on the floor. We are now under 1000 books left to unpack.

Still unboxing. I have only 563 unaccounted for, and there is enough boxes left that I'm pretty sure I've got them all. In the last box I opened I found the gorgeous illustrated Lord of the Rings that I was given for Christmas three years ago, and that made me very happy.

>116 haydninvienna: I love unpacking book boxes, it's like finding old friends again!

>116 haydninvienna:
I agree with >117 Sakerfalcon:'s comments. If I were in your shoes I would be really enjoying myself. I find spending time with books lowers my blood pressure. I hope you are enjoying the work.

>116 haydninvienna: That's a great edition, glad you found it again.

A couple or three recent reads.

Human Rights: The Case for the Defence by Shami Chakrabarti. Just what it says on the tin. A good book, I think, but I bailed about two-thirds of the way through--it was just getting too scary.

A Short History of Truth by Julian Baggini. This time, not quite what it says on the tin; not so much a history of truth as a description of the ways in which we use the word "true". Baggini doesn't think we have given up on truth quite yet, despite all the rhetoric about a post-truth society.

Faber & Faber: The Untold Story is a history of the publishing firm, told in letters, readers' reports, board papers and other documents from the firm's archives. T S Eliot, who was an editor and later a director, figures quite largely. Not as interesting as I expected. I want to drop a name here though: I actually met Matthew Evans, who was Faber's Managing Director and then Chairman, once, under slightly unusual circumstances. It was in 2006 or 2007 and I was working in the legal department of what was then the Department of Constitutional Affairs of the UK Government. We had something before the House of Lords and a couple of us went to the House to meet the Government Deputy Whip* in that House, which Evans then was — by then he was Baron Evans of Temple Guiting. (That spell with the DCA was interesting in a number of ways: in the course of it I met at least six people with entries in Wikipedia.)

Just One Thing by Michael Mosley. This is a catalogue of small ways you can change your life for the better. Some of them are obvious (exercise, early-morning walks, get more sun); some are less obvious (get some house plants, eat oily fish) and some are almost weird (eat beetroot). I must admit I like the last one — I like beetroot.

*"A whip is an official of a political party whose task is to ensure party discipline in a legislature. This means ensuring that members of the party vote according to the party platform, rather than according to their own individual ideology or the will of their donors or constituents. Whips are the party's "enforcers". They work to ensure that their fellow political party legislators attend voting sessions and vote according to their party's official policy. Members who vote against party policy may "lose the whip", being effectively expelled from the party."

>120 haydninvienna: Nice collection of reads. I've always been a fan of beetroot and converted my wife as well.

>120 haydninvienna: You might want to check the touchstone on A Short History of Truth as the author names aren't matching up. Your described experience of the book is much more tempting than the title brought up from the database (at least in my humble view).

>120 haydninvienna:
I have always liked beetroot.

>122 jillmwo:
Is there a possibility that the touchstones are not truthful?

>122 jillmwo: Thanks, fixed. I’m pretty sure I checked it as I typed the post, too …

Another recent read, which gave me a lot to think about: Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera. Sanghera is a British journalist of Sikh heritage who grew up in Wolverhampton in England. The book is about the history of the British Empire and the influence of that history on British attitudes today. First and foremost, institutional racism, which Sanghera, as a brown person in a white country, probably has a lot of experience of. Along the way, we learn a lot about the slave trade, in which Britain was predominant up till the time of its abolition at the beginning of the 19th century. Much of the wealth of Bristol and Liverpool came directly or indirectly from the slave trade. But there's other little vignettes along the way, like a quick account of the extermination (yes, extermination — the only successful genocide in modern history, so far as I know) of the Tasmanian Aborigines. Surprisingly, it's not particularly an angry book. He sees signs of hope that Britain is becoming less racist, although he doesn't deal with a lot of the other foolery that led up to Brexit (some of which is a kind of racism-lite: the British "race" as superior to the French, German, etc "races"). He has a bit to say about the British taste for disaster, in that seemingly the most celebrated bits of its history are the ones that can be cast as disasters, such as the evacuation from Dunkirk, which wasn't a disaster at all. (He mentions Fintan O'Toole's book Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain, which I have somewhere and should read if I can find it.)

He mentions in passing that the website of the National Museum of Australia presents you with a splash screen acknowledging the First Peoples of Australia when you open the link. This sort of thing is part of the new normal in Australia: here is the equivalent for my local shopping centre:


Next thing for Australia though will be to acknowledge our own slavery narratives. Much of what Sanghera has to say about the non-existence of brown people in British history could be applied equally to Australia. The acknowledgements of the First Peoples are a start.

We ought to have a thread for "sentences I could never have expected to read". Here's one: "I rarely find llama pancreas an
enticing accompaniment to cake." (Bibliomaniac, by Robin Ince, p 114).

>126 haydninvienna: I'd love to have a thread like that :)
Priceless sentence!

>126 haydninvienna:
Great idea and a great sentence.

Robin Ince is endlessly quotable:

... a hotel room that has an uncertain smell created by budget carpet-cleanser and a dehydrated toilet air-freshener. I think that is what robot sweat would smell like.

Oh, and he mentions reading Sarah Bakewell's books on Montaigne (How to live: a life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer) and on the Existentialists (At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others) and says that he has four copies of the latter. He also says that if she recommends a book the chance of his buying it quadruples, and that Deepak Chopra is the polar opposite (as in, a recommendation by him makes a purchase vanishingly less likely). As yet, fortunately he has not encountered a book recommended by both of them.

>129 haydninvienna: Ask clamairy about Bakewell's Montaigne book. I am fairly confident that she lured me into reading it some ten years ago.

>130 jillmwo: No need: I found it on my own (see https://www.librarything.com/topic/338151#7700758). I agree with Robin Ince: it's a wonderful book.

Hope and Fear: Modern Myths, Conspiracy Theories and Pseudo-History: I feel ever so slightly guilty to have found this book kind of dull. As a long-time sceptic about UFOs, "ancient astronauts" and other foolery, and even more the wilder shores of tales about secret societies plotting to take over the world, little in it was new to me. I think it could be improved by being a bit more focused: there is a chapter about the myths associated with the town of Roswell, which is essentially frivolous; but it follows 3 chapters dealing with much more serious matters: anti-semitic pseudo-history such as the fraudulent "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", and the really weird stuff that fed into the racial and pseudo-historical underpinnings of Nazi Germany. The last chapter deals briefly with some of the loonier imaginings associated with a certain recent US election. In other words, it's a bit of a grab bag. There are probably better books dealing with each topic.

>132 haydninvienna:
Interesting review. Have you read Umberto Eco’s Prague Cemetery? I found it fascinating. Eco was also good at exposing fraud.

>133 pgmcc: Prague Cemetery was a very interesting read, I agree. Disturbing, too.

>133 pgmcc: >134 Alexandra_book_life: I think I have a copy of The Prague Cemetery somewhere but no hope of finding it at present.

Latest read (selectively) is Even Greater Mistakes by Charlie Jane Anders. This is a collection of short stories. I loved All the Birds in the Sky and the reason I read the stories selectively is that there's a lot of anger in them (understandably), and I don't deal well with anger at present. But the ones I've read are really fun. Last person alive on earth, who finds a bottle with a genie in it, and has to figure out what to do with three wishes? A club of would-be time travellers, and someone shows up who really does have a Time Machine? A couple of interstellar grifters who save the galaxy from being eaten (literally)?

>135 haydninvienna: I have this on my TBR shelf. I've had mixed reactions to Anders' novels but the short fiction I've enjoyed a lot. I'll try to start dipping into it soon.

Latest read, and a really good one: Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk by Massimo Pigliucci. I'd put this on the same shelf as How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World by Francis Wheen, although the emphasis is different: Wheen's book is an answer to the question "what happened?"; Pigliucci's book is about how we tell when to trust an authority, with diversions along the way into postmodernism and other delusions. Whereas Fritze's book mentioned in >132 haydninvienna: is mainly denunciation of "modern myths, conspiracy theories and pseudo history", Pigliucci seeks to equip us (as much as possible) to tell the difference. Measured and reasonable in tone, and even better, actionable.

Alien Earths: Planet Hunting in the Cosmos by Lisa Kaltenegger. Fair to say that not much here was new to me. I'm reasonably familiar with the current state of play in exoplanet research, and I don't need to be told what a light-year is. Also the odd mildly annoying editing issue. Still, you could say I read it for the good of the cause. Ms Kaltenegger heads a research institute at Cornell University named after Carl Sagan, and she has Sagan's old office (I wish ...).

>137 haydninvienna: That sounds good.

>139 Karlstar: If I could find my copy of Pale Blue Dot, I'd read that next.

The Colour of Magic: An oldie but a goodie. I first encountered this in an airport bookshop in Fiji in 1989, when looking for something to read on the flight home, and didn't really care for it then. But of course as Pterry went on he got better and better. Having said which, I think better of The Colour ... than I did 35(!) years ago. Some of the characters aren't quite there yet — Death isn't fully realised, and the Patrician is definitely not Vetinari — but the wordplay and riotous invention are definitely there.

And now I have a small problem. That's 99 books on the slate this year. I would like the 100th to be a really top-quality read. I'm sitting in the middle of a couple of thousand of them. Maybe I'll just go and stare vacantly at the shelves and stacks for a while.

>140 haydninvienna: Staring a bit vacantly at the book shelves is a very necessary part of the process.

And for the record, I never think to read Pratchett until someone here in the Pub says something about him. But he is growing on me. As I said to someone else, I have read far more Pratchett after fifteen years here in the Pub than I'd ever read before. I think that's a good thing.

>140 haydninvienna: I would loan you my copy of Pale Blue Dot, but I'm not sure where mine is either!

Well, I haven't done the stare-vacantly thing yet. Instead I just picked up the nearest book that I felt like reading, which turned out to be How to Cook a Rogue Elephant: The Recollections and Recipes of Peter van Rensselaer Livingston. This is an early example of the cookbook-as-memoir genre, published in 1971. If you believe the "Recollections", the author, born into a family with a considerable history in the northeastern parts of the United States, had a varied career as an Army officer during WW2, and then with NATO in the early 50s. The recipes are said to have been collected from a lifetime of good eating in the US, Europe and North Africa, plus some of his own inventions. Apart from the "memoir" aspect, the book is a record of what "good food" used to be like: the legacy of Carême, Escoffier and Louis Diat. And the recipes are for six, with a few exceptions. Supposedly the recipes are suitable for home cooks, but are far more elaborate than I would want to try on a regular basis. I can't see much in the book that I would want to cook now, but I've had the copy since 1975 and won't be discarding it. But I won't be marking it down as "read" either, so I'll still have to go and stare.

Just goes to show you. I finally went and stared vacantly at a bookcase or two, and there's Pale Blue Dot looking right back at me. I pull it out, and of course there's the essay "Pale Blue Dot":

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

I'd like to engrave those three paragraphs on the heart of every politician on earth.

>144 haydninvienna:
Words that put us all in perspective.

>143 haydninvienna:
There is always an elephant.

>145 pgmcc: Oddly, there isn’t a single mention of elephants anywhere in the text.

>146 haydninvienna: Wait a minute. There was no charming anecdote about some diplomatic dinner involving the preparation of rogue elephant for six guests at any point? That's just false advertising then. (Can we sue someone?)

>143 haydninvienna:, >147 jillmwo: Sounds a bit like one of Lawrence Durrell's Antrobus stories about a disgraced Blues officer hiding in Africa. Ah yes, 'Something À La Carte'. The cook-book in question was Buffon's Natural History...

>144 haydninvienna: That is the part of Pale Blue Dot that I remember. The rest was interesting, but the section you quoted is what has always stuck with me, particularly the last paragraph.

>143 haydninvienna: >>145 pgmcc: >147 jillmwo: I kind of suspect that the "elephant" was Mr van Rensselaer Livingston himself.

>148 Maddz: Like the story of a former grandee at Oxford (I've forgotten who) who was trying to eat the flesh of every animal in the world.

>149 Karlstar: The book is worth it just for those three paragraphs.

ETA a small humblebrag. Peter van (etc) says that while in Europe after WW2 he spent some time in Berchtesgaden, where he and his entourage were quartered in a hotel which was comfortable but had mediocre food. Searching for better, he found a restaurant in Salzburg called the Goldener Hirsch (Golden Deer). I can confirm that there is a restaurant by that name in Salzburg, and apparently has been since Mozart's time; and it's said that Mozart used to eat there. Mrs H and I found it by accident when looking for some lunch the first time we went to Salzburg (not the time I got stuck in a toilet in the Castle). After an excellent lunch I commented to the waiter about the story of Mozart having been a habitué. He said, "well, we are not sure about Mozart having eaten here, but (Herbert) von Karajan certainly did."

>150 haydninvienna: Awesome story, but I'm wondering if we need to hear about the Castle?

>151 Karlstar: Just that. Second time we went to Salzburg (with a tour). Went to one of the Castle toilets, and couldn't get the door open afterwards. Fortunately, this being the age of the mobile phone, I rang Mrs H and got her to chase up the attendant, but they had to get a fellow to take the door off to get me out. Bit disconcerting hearing Mrs H outside telling people "My husband is locked in there!".

>152 haydninvienna:
Are the toilets located in the dungeon?

>152 haydninvienna: If they had to actually take the door off of the hinges, how long were you locked in the Castle dungeon's loo? Honestly, this sounds like something out of Pratchett's Discworld novels...

>150 haydninvienna: "Oh dear, what can the matter be? 7 old ladies..."

Or should that be 1 gentleman?

(Sorry...)

>130 jillmwo: Nope! It was not me! The first person to mention that book in this group was you, Jill.

https://www.librarything.com/topic/123604#2935267

Someone who is no longer a member of LibraryThing read it and mentioned it after you.

Pale Blue Dot is one of those books I bought as soon as it was published, and it's been waiting for me... For 30 years apparently. Sweet cheeses... That means I moved it from Illinois to Connecticut to New York.

>156 clamairy: Wow. And I have been crediting you with that recommendation for at least a decade.

>157 jillmwo: It looks like OldSarge read it back in 2011. Perhaps you got the recommendation from him.

The Rings of Saturn by W G Sebald. I mentioned quite a while ago that I was thinking of trying this book. Well, now I have. I can't describe it better than the back cover does:

The Rings of Saturn begins as the record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia. From Lowestoft to Southwold to Bungay, Sebald 's own story becomes the conductor of evocations of people and cultures past and present: of Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, of fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms. The result is a book unlike any other in contemporary literature, an intricately patterned and endlessly thought-provoking meditation on the transience of all things human.

Quite.

>159 haydninvienna: That sounds most interesting.

>160 MrsLee: The reason I quoted the cover description was that I don't know how else to describe it. It's strange, occasionally beautiful, and full of insights into unexpected matters: for example, the connection between Sir Roger Casement (who was hanged for treason in 1916), the Belgian colonisation of the Congo, and Joseph Conrad and Conrad's Heart of Darkness. It's not cheerful though: Sebald hasn't a particularly favourable view of human nature.

Next read was a somewhat more cheerful book which also sometimes has a dim view of human nature: Guards! Guards!. First appearance of Sam Vimes and the Watch and (I think) first appearance of Havelock Vetinari as Patrician.

>161 haydninvienna: The reason I like Pratchett's dim view of humanity is that he says "yes, we know we are all that, now let's get on and make the best of it." Not a direct quote, just the vibe I get from him.

I've read a couple of very light entertainments that I'm not even going to count as books toward my annual total: Idiots, Follies and Misadventures by Mikey Robins, and Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell. The former is very lightweight even by Mikey's standard, but it was entertaining in spots. (Mikey is a much loved figure in Australia, but his books are not going to add much to the sum of human knowledge.) The author of the latter is the owner of a bookshop in Wigtown in Scotland (I have been to the town, and the shop, and did actually buy something). It's Bythell's second book (the first being Diary of a Bookseller) and there is at least one more. The weary, cynical put-upon persona gets a little tiresome after a while.

Back up in #105 I mentioned that there was the prospect of a trip to Doha. Having not had any reply to a couple of emails I sent them, I assumed it was all off. Apparently not so: I've now had an answer and it looks like I could be going during November. The next month is going to be interesting. I need to find some respite care for Mrs H while I'm away, since she can't be left on her own. As a carer, I'm entitled to subsidised respite care for her for up to 63 days in a year, but "entitled to" apparently doesn't imply availability. Been trying this for a month now — no success so far.

Finally, a small rant. I watch TV cooking shows. Therefore, I see a fair number of chefs in action. One thing I've been noticing is that they sometimes suggest that a dish goes into the oven for a short time. This might make sense in a restaurant, where the ovens are always going, but rather less in the home, when you have to turn the bloody oven on and wait for it to heat! Ovens are expensive to run. In a restaurant that's all part of the running cost. I think putting a dish in the oven for a few minutes is a sign of a chef who hasn't grasped the realities of home cooking.

>163 haydninvienna: Good luck finding care for Mrs. H for your trip.

Good point on the oven, it would often take longer to get the oven up to temp than the dish would be in the oven.

>163 haydninvienna:
The author of the latter is the owner of a bookshop in Wigtown in Scotland (I have been to the town, and the shop, and did actually buy something.

How come I am not surprised? You should write a book about all the bookshops you have visited throughout the world. You are a well travelled and bookshopped person.

All the best with getting respite care.

Your oven rant is well made. A gripe I have with TV cooks is their constant use of various prepared stocks as if every home cook spends hours preparing them from leftovers. Also, does their constant use of stock mean they believe the food has no flavour without adding stock?

>165 pgmcc: Thank you for the compliment, but it wouldn't be a very interesting book. After all, all I did was buy books.

Making stock isn't difficult, or so I am led to believe. I buy roast chickens from the supermarket from time to time, and always feel slightly guilty about throwing away the carcase. A bigger issue with stock is the storing of it. People who make stock and keep it long enough to be useful (it freezes well) must have enormous freezers.

Incidentally, another small grizzle about TV cooking shows: the frequent advice that you should buy your meat, fish and fruit&veg from your local purveyor rather than the supermarket. Granted that if I had a local butcher or fishmonger I might be well advised to buy from them. But within 10 minutes' drive from here there are 5 small or medium-sized shopping centres. None has a fishmonger. There are 2 butcher shops, one of which is halal (no problem with that per se, but I'd be out of luck if I wanted a pork roast). There are fruit&veg shops, which tend to have a somewhat wider range than the supermarkets, but the stock isn't as pretty. None has a delicatessen. I wanted to buy some provolone cheese the other day, but neither of the big supermarkets seems to carry it. The nearest "European Deli & Grocery" is several miles away. Basically, the big supermarkets have eaten almost everything else.

>166 haydninvienna:
When we have a chicken or turkey we will boil the carcass and make soup with the stock.

>165 pgmcc: &>166 haydninvienna: I make my own stock. I save the trimmings from vegetables and meats in a sealed bag in the freezer. When it is full, I buy a chicken or beef bones, whatever kind of stock I want, add the freezer things and water and simmer 1 or 2 days. If I'm doing a chicken I take most of the meat of the bones after about 40 minutes then put the skin and bones back in the broth. This won't get you a beautifully clear broth, but that doesn't matter for most of the things I use broths in. I make 2 gallons at a time, usually make a soup right away and freeze the rest. I have two small refrigerator freezers. You can make smaller amounts too.

I do this for several reasons. I like having it on hand, I hate throwing scraps away, and I try to avoid processes food.

Still, I think there are some good brands of broth on the market you can keep in your pantry. It does make a lot of dishes nicer

On the stock issue: I wouldn't make a risotto with water, although I've seen it suggested.

While we are on the subject of grizzles: how about having to buy something but the smallest package you can buy is more than you need? This is a particular problem with cream for us, because we don't eat desserts. I try to schedule dishes so that I can use up everything I buy, but it isn't always easy. But I've just picked up a copy of The Zero F*cks Cookbook from the library, and I see the the third of her Commandments is, "You shall use the whole tub or container, rather than leave an annoying blob in the bottom".

>169 haydninvienna: I agree on the package size. I would think that one way to reduce food waste would be to sell smaller amounts of some things, like bread or rolls - there's just two of us at home, we really don't need 8 hamburger buns or hot dog rolls. We used to live near a store where you could buy a stalk of celery or a carrot, but that's very unusual.

>166 haydninvienna: I am surprised you can't find provolone!

>170 Karlstar: Here in the UK you can buy small sliced loaves, but they work out more expensive than buying a normal sized one! Bread is okay after being frozen, but I find rolls and hamburger buns go quite strange after defrosting. And I wish more stores sold loose vegetables, rather than packaging them. Then you'd be able to buy exactly as many as you need, and save on plastic wrapping too.

>170 Karlstar: >171 Sakerfalcon: We freeze whole loaves of (sliced) bread, and just take slices out as we need them. Supermarkets here are generally ok with selling you loose fruit or veg, or even halves or quarters of large things like cabbages or pumpkins. (Note to self: cut pumpkin does not keep well.)

I was surprised about the provolone too, but hey ho: I used dried mozzarella instead, which worked well enough.

>169 haydninvienna: Cream: How about letting it sour, then making a Gulyas, Tokany or Pörkölt -- or something else central European? Much Hungarian, Czech etc. cuisine seems to be based of sour cream and cholesterol.

>173 hfglen: Once it’s been pasteurised it doesn’t seem to sour properly, just goes mouldy. But the idea of going Central European is a good one. I’ll look around for a decent gulyas recipe (although it’s said that if you have three Hungarians together they will have four recipes for goulash, all of them absolutely authentic and the only genuine recipe).

>163 haydninvienna: Good luck with finding respite care!

I agree with your oven rant, and enjoyed reading the rest of the thread.

>168 MrsLee: I am always impressed when people make their own stock. For some reason, I don't seem to get into the habit ;)

>174 haydninvienna: József Venesz has several in Hungarian Cuisine, and AFAIK they all work. Yonks ago there was a Time-Life series featuring cuisines of various regions. IIRC Cooking of Vienna's Empire has a couple of cream-and-cholesterol recipes. The ones in this series all work, though they are often far from economical.

Best of luck getting help with Mrs H. I've heard similar stories from people who have/had insurance coverage for in-home care for loved ones, but no one available in the area.

Last year I purchased a multifunction air fryer, and I use that instead of my gigantic gas oven when I have something that needs to be cooked only briefly. It does the job very well. And it is fast! It's not one of those ones that uses a basket and handle, it's more like a toaster oven.

I find myself nodding in agreement from about message #163 on. (Although I have nothing useful to offer otherwise.) Food packaging is generally annoying. I am particularly annoyed when things in the meat section are offered in "threes". Three chicken breasts, three pork chops, etc. Sometimes it's cost-effective to buy two packages but many times, it's just not. (I also wonder about the current size of pigs these days, given the size of the chops. But maybe that's just me.)

And some things are just inexplicable. The small cans of tomato paste! You can't use it up appropriately in that particular weenie size! You cover the can with foil but inevitably it gets shoved around in the wee small places in the fridge. And then it goes moldy. Just sell tomato paste in the damn tubes, people!

And you have no idea how much I envy those of you who live without easy distance of specialty stores. Our stand-alone butcher shop and fresh veggie place closed four years back and I miss them every day. There are no specialty cheese outlets anywhere near us (we're not chi-chi enough in this neighborhood). And the wonderful bakery that was within walking distance closed because of some greedy landlord/developer who drove them out but who has not done anything with the empty property.

>174 haydninvienna: Same with chicken paprika/paprikash. I was introduced to it by my former Hungarian project leader, she made a great version. One of my favorite fall dishes, which means it is time to make it again.

>178 jillmwo: We have a great dessert bakery here, their cupcakes, muffins and pies are amazing, but they don't do much bread or rolls, they have a very small shop. I'm still looking for a good cheese-shop, so far I have to rely on a gourmet grocery story or Whole Foods.

>170 Karlstar: We keep our breads in the fridge, and for supermarket loaves (albeit the quality ones not the usual cotton wool) that's fine, they usually last the week that way. Package sizes are a problem when there's only 2 people to cater for; pre-packed meats are a pain but as it's cheaper to get large 1kg packs (chicken pieces, mince, pork loin steaks), we split them up into single meal sizes.

Fortunately, I can get most veggies loose round here. Older veggies get used up in a casserole.

I find the trouble with making stock is finding the tubs in the freezer 6 months later and wondering what they are because the label has come off... It's also a complete faff roasting the meat bones then boiling them up. Luckily I'm no stranger to buying stock cubes. About the only time I buy stock pots is at Xmas when I buy tubs of turkey stock for the Xmas day gravy and the turkey soup a couple of days later.

From the library: Imperial Tragedy by Michael Kulikowski. This is a history of the Roman Empire from about 363 AD to 568 AD, according to the subtitle of the UK edition. From the description on the Brisbane library website:

Imperial Tragedy tells the story of Rome's gradual collapse. Full of palace intrigue, religious conflicts and military history, as well as details of the shifts in social, religious and political structures, Imperial Tragedy contests the idea that Rome fell due to external invasions. Instead, it focuses on how the choices and conditions of those living within the empire led to its fall. For it was not a single catastrophic moment that broke the Empire but a creeping process; by the time people understood that Rome had fallen, the west of the Empire had long since broken the Imperial yoke.

I got put on to it by a mention in the History Fans group (https://www.librarything.com/topic/363171#8634608). I second what Shrike58 had to say there, since I can't describe it better (I disagree that it's a bit of a slog though: I found it riveting, although the pace at which the book covers the ground makes it very hard to keep track of who was who). I might see if I can get hold of the earlier volume, Imperial Triumph : the Roman world from Hadrian to Constantine. The Brisbane library system has it.

>181 haydninvienna: That sounds like a good one. Have you read the book(s) by Edward Gibbon, how do they compare?

>182 Karlstar: Many years since I read Gibbon. The style is magnificent if you like stately 18th century prose, and he is often witty: for example of the younger Gordian, emperor briefly in AD 238:

Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than ostentation. [Footnote] By each of his concubines the younger Gordian left three or four children. His literary productions were by no means contemptible.

But I doubt if he is taken seriously as a historian now — he isn't so much as mentioned by Kulikowski. TBF, modern historiography has had the benefit of 250 or so years of archaeology and scholarship that weren't available to Gibbon.

One odd way in which they overlap though is in the role of the Christian churches. Gibbon, as an atheist, had little use for the churches of the time (some editions apparently omit some or all of his footnotes, as being anti-Christian). Kulikowski makes clear the role of the churches in creating disorder, both as against the pagans, Jews and Manichaeans, and between various strands of the Church. Many of the bishops seem to have been quite ruthless in their pursuit of power, up to and including inciting their followers to riot and sometimes murder. Ambrose, bishop of Milan, is described as "a master of spiritual flummery", in the course of describing his manipulations of emperor Valentinian.

Kulikowski is explicit that he has no message for our times:

That the current world order is in crisis seems, as I write, to have become an article of faith. At all such moments, invocations of Rome's decline and fall are de rigueur, their vehemence in inverse proportion to their discernment. Professional historians can be forgiven the urge to contribute: a mistake. Historical analogy requires, by definition, simplification at odds with historical understanding. History neither repeats nor rhymes, and the only thing it should teach us is that, constrained by custom, by psychology, and by our always faulty memories, constrained most of all by circumstance not of our individual making, humans tend to make a mess of making their own fate. I hope I do justice to the mess and the muddle

>183 haydninvienna:
Brilliant post, especially the bit about using all those books.

>184 pgmcc: Thanks, Peter! {bows}

>183 haydninvienna: Thanks, I appreciate the comparison and notes, great post. I will put that on my TBR.

I've put in a library hold for the previous volume, Imperial Triumph.

Timothy Snyder, On Freedom. I truly believe this to be a worthwhile and important book, and yet I can't read it: it's too disturbing. (Recommended, if you can take it.) But I notice some themes in common with another book I actually did read, Julian Baggini's The Edge of Reason — on what we mean when we talk of "reason", and what we should regard as rational. There are also some connections with Kulikowski's book and even with a kindle book that I read a sample of, A Short History of the World in 50 Lies. I actually learned something from the last one: that Caesar's De Bello Gallico was a massive piece of spin-doctoring. Caesar undertook the conquest of Gaul not to preserve Rome from the Gauls but, bluntly, for personal profit: although already deep in debt, he borrowed still more from the banker Crassus to provide funds to bribe his way into the highest offices in the Republic. He invaded Gaul so as to be able to repay Crassus* with the plunder. This sounds familiar — it has been asserted, on I know not what authority, that Pope Innocent XI financed William of Orange's invasion of England in 1688 so that William could repay his debts to the papacy incurred in William's wars with Louis XIV. Also, the never-ending wars in Europe up till the early modern era took money, lots of it; before modern systems of taxation, much of that money had to be borrowed. (It often still is, just less obviously.)

*Wouldn't you have loved to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation:
Julius: Crassus, I need to borrow ($lots!!!) from you.
Crassus: But Julie, you already owe me ($even more!!!!)!
Julius: That's OK, I'll just take the army and go and conquer Gaul.

Slightly more cheerful, and nice to see that our grandson is being raised right:

>189 haydninvienna:
Taking after his grandfather.

>189 haydninvienna: Nice to see a future reader!

>189 haydninvienna: Not to be difficult, but should we be encouraging reading Heart of Darkness at such an early age? I mean, Joseph Conrad could have a negative impact on the child's excitement in climbing out of the crib each morning. (As an author, he certainly had that effect on me.)

>189 haydninvienna: Here is to future readers!

>189 haydninvienna: Learning the function of the throne room early (meaning extra reading time).

>194 MrsLee: Just occurred to me to wonder why Mum & Dad have that book in there ...

>194 MrsLee: All is resolved. It's not what you thought (although I admit it looks like it). Just checked with his dad: it's in their dining room and he is hanging on to his high chair. Almost disappointing in a way.

>196 haydninvienna: I was wondering! But then I thought surely not - it's a bit heavy to read in there. Is that his bedtime reading? There are some books that induce instant slumber...

I remember my Dad saying the only place he could read undisturbed was in the loo; if he was reading in his usual place (on a chair by a table in the sitting room bay window with cigarettes and coffee), Mum would turn up within 10 minutes asking him to do something around the house or garden. His invariable response was 'let me finish the chapter' - carefully not saying which chapter.

>196 haydninvienna: I did think it was a funny sort of potty chair, but you know, foreigners and such. ;)

>197 Maddz: Your dad and were soulmates I think. Mom was always asking me to do pesky chores while I was reading. Never mind that I read for hours. "Just let me finish this (500 page novel), mom.

>198 MrsLee: Well, things were compounded because my dad was travelling overseas for 6 months of the year, and when he wasn't travelling, we only saw him at weekends - he worked in London which at the time would have been 3 hours of travelling each way. He lodged in London 4 nights of the week and only came home for weekends.

Mum would save things up and get annoyed when he wasn't interested in doing things and was even less interested in paying someone else to do it instead. I suspect this is why I'm fairly practical at fixing minor things around the house because Mum ended up having to fix things herself.

Mrs H and I did our democratic duty this morning — that is, we voted in the Queensland election. Election day is actually 26 October, which is a Saturday*, but (in answer to a question Karlstar asked some time ago) the Queensland electoral commission makes polling places available early, so that you can vote early if you choose. Much more peaceful than the hubbub of election day itself. You can vote (early or on election day) at any open polling place, whether it is your own electorate (US: district) or not. You can also vote by post — the commission just sends you the application form and you can apply directly or through a political party.

*Elections are always held on a Saturday in Australia. There are 3 possible elections, Federal, State and local government, and it would be very unusual to have two elections on the same Saturday. There are periods during which elections are traditionally not held, such as close to Christmas. Otherwise any Saturday could be an election day. Voting is compulsory, and there's a trivial fine for not voting, but most people vote. No machines — you mark a ballot paper with a pencil. Systems vary, but in Queensland the ballot paper for an electorate has the candidates' names and party (if any) in a list with a square next to each, and you have to place a number from 1 to x (where x is the number of candidates) in each square. Failing to number all the squares renders your vote "informal" and it will not be counted, but you've still fulfilled your obligation to vote. Anything else but numbering the squares (Australians traditionally do not love their politicians) is disregarded, although I'll bet that the tally clerks get the occasional laugh.

Back to business. Prompted by a mention in another group that I lurk in, I've been reading the mystery novels of J S Fletcher, described rather hyperbolically as "one of the leading writers of detective fiction in the 'Golden Age'". The particular book that I'm concerned with is Murder of the Ninth Baronet. I'm going to redact the rest of this post because I want to ask a couple of questions, and to do that I need to reveal who dun it.

Camberwell and his partner Chaney run a private investigation agency. One morning, their London office is visited by Sir Stephen Maxtondale and his solicitor. Sir Stephen is the ninth holder of the baronetcy of Maxendale. Sir Stephen is puzzled: he has been told that the previous day a man claiming to be his elder brother John had appeared, then vanished without a trace. John Maxtondale would have succeeded to the baronetcy except that their father Sir William Maxtondale and John had quarrelled violently many years before, and John walked out and disappeared. He had not been heard of for many years when Sir William died intestate. The probate court sanctioned an application to presume the death of John Maxtondale, and Stephen succeeded to the title under the rules of promogeniture, and, since Sir William had left no will, to the estate, which was very valuable. The person who has appeared, asserting that he is John, would be entitled to both the title and the estate if he could prove that he really was John.

It's not long before "John" is found, obviously murdered. Then two more people are found murdered in the same way.

We need to meet some others of the dramatic personae. First, Sir Stephen's son and only child Rupert. He has been sowing his wild oats — sent down from Oxford after having run up substantial debts which his father paid, he is now, at his father's dictate, living quietly in London as a manager in the estate's London business under the tuition of another senior employee, Collinghurst The deal is that Rupert is to stay in London earning a salary and not to come to the family estate, where he is thought to be likely to get into bad company. He is to do this for then years. Then we meet the estate manager, Weekes, his wife and their daughter Ettie. Then Sir Stephen dies in an accident which is quickly shown to be murder. He has also left no will. Suspicion falls on a former employee of the estate whom Weekes had dismissed, and who had sworn revenge.

Camberwell and Chaney show that Rupert is not quietly living in London as a manager, but with Collinghurst is running a successful and profitable nightclub. He has married Ettie and they have a son, who would be in line to become the 11th baronet, except that Sir Stephen had very decided views about fit and proper marriage partners for Rupert and would certainly have disinherited him if he found out. (The boy would inherit the title by the rules of primogeniture, regardless of Sir Stephen's wishes, if Stephen's and consequently Rupert's right to it is established.)

The Weekes' house is set on fire one morning. Weekes is killed. Mrs Weekes is seriously injured but attempts to get to an old bureau in a room at the back of the house. She dies without reaching it. The bureau mostly survives the fire and it contains documents that show that Mrs Weekes knew of the marriage. So, the reasoning goes, Mrs Weekes murdered all four of "John", the two more people I mentioned (because they knew), and Sir Stephen himself — to protect her daughter's position as Lady Maxtondale and Rupert and Ettie's enjoyment of the estate. There is no suggestion that either Rupert or Ettie knew anything of this. (The fire was set by the dismissed workman, not that it matters for our present purpose.)

However, presumably the police cannot sweep four murders under the carpet. Now my questions are: supposing you were Rupert, how would you feel, knowing that you enjoyed your wealth and exalted position as a result of a quadruple murder? If you were Ettie, knowing that your own mother was a quadruple murderer?

>201 haydninvienna: There is an alarmingly casual attitude towards the drawing of wills in that novel. Just a passing observation.

>201 haydninvienna: I do not recall ever reading any J S Fletcher, but the plot is very familiar. Was it lifted from R Austin Freeman?

To answer your question, I am assuming this is set pre-WWII. Given the usual shenanigans in the British aristocracy since the Norman Conquest, I doubt Rupert would turn a hair (what's another murder or 4? It's no skin off his nose; he didn't do it.) Ettie on the other hand would likely be socially ostracised on the grounds of being a social inferior and the daughter of a murderess. As to how she would feel, I suppose it depends on how close she was to her mother. I guess the couple would head to the colonies and lie low for a few years until the London scandal died down.

>200 haydninvienna: Thank you for the information! Turns out, I may have to vote early this year, if the option is still available, I have to look into it.

>203 Maddz: Early 1920s. You may well be right about the idea of scarpering to the Colonies (!) — after all, that's essentially what John had done. I didn't add that the cause of the quarrel with Sir William was that John wanted to marry a social inferior, and did so. As to the plot possibly having been lifted from R Austin Freeman, no idea.

>202 jillmwo: Indeed. I have a vague memory of a wealthy elderly lady in some novel or other who was in the habit of visiting her solicitor periodically to revise her will according to whoever had most recently displeased her. Of course she got done in one night after having given notice that she would be seeing her solicitor next morning. (Pity the solicitor who had the job of getting probate for that will!)

Small smile. As some of you know, I admin the Good Show Sir! — bad science fiction and fantasy covers group. We just had a spammer in there (might have shown up elsewhere, of course). What amused me was that the spammer operated out of a place called Thane, which is a city in India near Mumbai. What amused me was that Thane is also the name of a railway siding about 200 km west of here, and my mother came from that Thane. Not much there now, not even the railway.

The spammer lasted about 20 minutes before being flagged into oblivion.

OK, it was fairly minor amusement, but it made me smile.

ETA forgot to mention that the spammer was a "marriage consultant".

>206 haydninvienna:
Well played! Good Show Sir!

Watching Adam Liaw making Turkish delight. The theme for the episode was "Favourite books", and Adam was of course inspired by The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. But I was reminded of this:

Then how is it," asked ..., coolly, but with something menacing in his rigidly controlled voice, "how is it that you have this evening consumed, without apparent effect, a dose of arsenic sufficient to kill two or three ordinary people? That disgusting sweetmeat on which you have been gorging yourself in, I may say, a manner wholly unsuited to your age and position, is smothered in white arsenic. ..."

.Whose name did I omit, and what book was I quoting?

>208 haydninvienna: I would say "Poirot" but I can't tell you which book. In the new LT Trivia game, that is the hardest thing for me, deciding which book in the series a book is from.

I remember that episode in a book I read, it doesn't sound like something Nero Wolfe would do, Lord Peter might be up to it, and one of his cases did revolve around arsenic, so I doubt myself, but somehow it doesn't quite seem like him. That being said, I've missed almost every quote from the Sayers' novels in spite of loving them and having read them at least three times, some as recently as this month!

>208 haydninvienna: I know that's Peter Wimsey, but can't recall for certain which of the books it's from! OTOH, I'd bet MrsLee would know off the top of her head.

>210 jillmwo: You didn't read my post in >209 MrsLee: LOL

>209 MrsLee: >210 jillmwo: Oh dear. I now feel slightly better about my own failures to recognise quotations! The omitted name was indeed Wimsey, and the book was Strong Poison. The quotation is from the climactic scene in which, by means of supposedly arsenic-laden Turkish delight, Wimsey tricks Urquhart the solicitor into giving himself away.

>212 haydninvienna: :) Well, I start that book tomorrow in my reread program, so I will read the passage carefully. I really am one of those readers who can't help but gobble a story, even on a reread. I always admire jillmwo for her ability to read carefully and thoughtfully, and then evaluate. I am only ever left with impressions. Hmm, I gobble my food as well.

Chortling at the two of you! (I had almost guessed Strong Poison but couldn't reach my copy to verify and I don't like looking foolish when it comes to recognizing Dorothy Sayers.)

And you give me too much credit, MrsLee, I am just as likely as you to inhale both books and food. I then feel guilty because I have to go back and review the reading material. With the food, it just sticks to the hips.

>208 haydninvienna: Incidentally, isn't that scene (chapter 21) a masterpiece! Wimsey is interviewing the dodgy solicitor and murder suspect Urquhart over coffee and Turkish delight, and in the course of it manoeuvres Urquhart into, effectively, a confession. At the beginning Wimsey is just being a Wooster-like silly ass; by the end he is something like judge and executioner.

Ive been quieter than usual this week — it's been an interesting week. On Wednesday I took Mrs H to our GP because a certain condition (oedema) from which she has suffered for years seemed to be getting worse. The GP took one look and said What ho, you have cellulitis. I had always thought that this was a bacterial infection, but apparently there are several possible causes and one of them is a weak heart. Mrs H has a history of being investigated for possible heart problems and nothing being found. So the GP sent us to the emergency department at Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Hospital, which is the nearest large hospital to our house, and gave us a letter to take along. So we did that, and Mrs H got inspected and prodded and tested and finally admitted. To the cardiac ward.

Well, she was there Wednesday and Thursday nights, and further inspected and poked and prodded, none of which improved her disposition, and yesterday (Friday) they sent her home with a new drug prescription to be taken for three months, basically to see what happens, and with the promise of continued treatment as an outpatient. We'll see. If the NHS Oxfordshire Trust in 2022 and the Mater a few weeks ago didn't find anything, I'm not confident that QE2 will.

>216 haydninvienna: Keeping my fingers crossed! Good luck with the new treatment, I hope Mrs H will be better soon.

>217 Alexandra_book_life: We thank you!

A surprise, mentioned in another group I lurk in: Death of an Airman by Christopher St John Sprigg, who also wrote as Christopher Caudwell, a Communist intellectual, who was killed in the Spanish civil war. But he wrote detective novels on the side. This one is a thoroughly professional performance, better than most of the golden age mysteries. A crash at a flying club is found to be more than just an accident when the Bishop of Cootamundra, who is present, notices that the corpse of the flying instructor who was supposedly killed in the crash shows no signs of rigor mortis. (Cootamundra is a perfectly real town in rural Australia, but it’s not the seat of a diocese. The relevant bishop in 1935 was, and is now, the Bishop of Canberra and Goulburn.)

The book gives what seems to be a pretty fair picture of what flying clubs were like in 1930s England. Caudwell appears to have known a lot about flying also.

The book has been reprinted as a British Library Crime Classic, but I read it from the Faded Page website.

Edited to get the relationship between real name and pseudonym the right way round. Well, it was late and I was on the iPad ...

>216 haydninvienna:
Wish Mrs H well. I hope her treatment yields good results.

>216 haydninvienna: Strength and a rapid (and permanent!) improvement to Mrs H.

>216 haydninvienna: I know what it is to have too many medical professionals in the mix, but you never know when one of them will get it right. Hope this time will do it and that the prescribed medication won't cause other ill effects.

>216 haydninvienna: I hope the new treatment works for her.

>219 pgmcc: — >222 Karlstar: Thanks all. Preliminary signs are that it's working.

Crossing my fingers for you and Mrs. H. Health stuff is such a complicated issue these days so I hope she has answers and solutions now.

>216 haydninvienna: The visit to the hospital and the two night stay may not have improved her disposition, but that is generally perceived as a healthy response by the medical community. (Patients should WANT to get up out of bed and away from the hospital building.) Hopefully, her improvement will continue.

>223 haydninvienna: Good to hear it seems to be working. Hoping for her continued improvement!

>223 haydninvienna: That's good news! I hope the trend continues.

How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra won't tell you much in the literal sense of the title (although the description of "Electric Mountain", a huge pumped-storage hydroelectric facility in Wales, is fascinating) but there's a lot in there about the politics of infrastrucure — in particular, who benefits and who bears the burdens. It's pretty obvious that a lot of present infrastructure is all about fossil fuels, but there seems no way back. Chachra thinks that there is a way back, and in fact it's already happening*. (Example: I'm seeing very annoying advertisements on TV here about how wonderful natural gas is, placed by the "Australian Energy Producers Association", hinting that gas is the only way to provide backup capacity for unreliable renewables (they aren't, and it isn't) and how wonderful gas is for providing high levels of process heat (apparently there is already a glassblowing works in New Zealand for which the heat is provided by renewables)). I also found out about the connection between BP, whose environmental record is well known, and the concept of "carbon footprint". Even if BP didn't invent the idea, they did a lot to raise public awareness of it. But of course BP telling me to minimise my carbon footprint has the advantage for BP of making global warming my responsibility rather than theirs. After all, any of our individual contributions is small, and even collectively our personal contributions are dwarfed by that of activities like steelmaking, which not only requires enormous amounts of process heat but actually uses carbon to reduce iron ore to iron, so that carbon dioxide is an inevitable waste product.

I vaguely remember an article, probably in Analog, years ago, asserting that there was no resources crisis and never would be: ordinary granite rock contains iron, aluminium and every other necessary metal in sufficient quantity to last for ever. It even contains all the energy necessary to extract and refine all the others, in the form of uranium and thorium. Not going to argue that one way or the other, but Chachra makes a similar point: at present we absorb and use only a tiny fraction of the incident solar radiation. Her estimate is that could meet all the energy needs of every human being on earth with 0.04% of the incident solar radiation. If there is enough energy, we can recycle literally anything.

*Half of the houses in Brisbane seem to have solar arrays on their roofs.

My before-bed reading for the last couple of days has been Dr Thorndyke: His Famous Cases. First, a gripe. I'm reading this book as an ebook from Faded Page Canada. It's an omnibus of 37 longish short stories, but no contents page! Nor does the HTML version have links to the individual stories. I assume that the book didn't have a contents page either. Who ever thought this was a good idea?

Anyway, Dr Thorndyke is fascinating partly for historical reasons. I've just read a story ("The Naturalist at Law") in which Thorndyke determines that a corpse found in a duck pond, apparently a suicide, had been murdered somewhere else by noting that the species of duckweed and water snails in the corpse's lungs and stomach were not those of the pond in which he was found. Shades of CSI and Grissom's forensic entomology. The book was published in 1929.

ETA Ah, the progress of science. To quote Dr Thorndyke in or before 1929: "There is no known method by which the blood of one person can be distinguished with certainty from that of another.".

Finished with all the Doctor Thorndyke mysteries that are available on line. It is said that R Austin Freeman, the creator of Thorndyke, was superior in creating complex plots, but Conan Doyle was the better writer. I'm not so sure. Freeman does indeed create some remarkably complex plots, and apparently he personally tested all the experiments that Thorndyke does, to be sure that they work. But you start to notice that Freeman repeats his plot motifs (such as disguises, and the substitution of one person to another). On the other hand, Thorndyke's "Watson" (variously Jervis or Jardine, and sometimes both) is somewhat less of a cipher than Watson. Freeman is't such a bad writer either — if you can handle the mild pomposity, he gets away with a bit of reasonable banter from time to time (Jervis has just met Thorndyke in wig and gown near the Royal Courts of Justice):

"My dear Jervis," he exclaimed, as we clasped hands warmly, "this is a great and delightful surprise. How often have I thought of my old comrade and wondered if I should ever see him again, and lo! here he is, thrown up on the sounding beach of the Inner Temple, like the proverbial bread cast upon the waters."

"Your surprise, Thorndyke, is nothing to mine," I replied, "for your bread has at least returned as bread; whereas I am in the position of a man who, having cast his bread upon the waters, sees it return in the form of a buttered muffin or a Bath bun. I left a respectable medical practitioner and I find him transformed into a bewigged and begowned limb of the law."

Next read is another turn off the road. Living for Pleasure is not what you might expect: in fact, as the extended title says, it's an exposition of the philosophy of Epicureanism. In the pre-Christian Roman world, the 2 main competing philosophies of life were Stoicism and Epicureanism. Stoicism seems to be having a moment currently, but Epicureanism has consistently had a bad press ever since Cicero (who was a Stoic). Dante puts Epicurus in the sixth circle of hell. I thought I picked the book out of the latest lot of LT recommendations (although I can't now find it there) and if so it was spot on. Much food for thought here. As explained by Emily Austin, Epicurus has a philosophy that should enable us to value the good things (friendships, sufficiency, tranquility of life). A really good little book, I thought.

>229 haydninvienna:. I honestly could never get past the prose style. Which of his do you think was his best? Maybe I should try something by him that a more experienced reader (like you) can vouch for...

>230 jillmwo: Please bear in mind that this week I've been in great need of undemanding distraction (not alone in that, I'm sure). The most I'd say for Freeman's prose is that it's no worse than that of the run of popular novelists of the period — which goes to show how much better Dorothy Sayers was. As to which to try, it probably doesn't matter a great deal. I can just about cope with the style but even thenI got irked from time to time by constantly being told what a super person Dr Thorndyke was. In short, pick two or three at random and hope for the best. The largest selection seems to be at Project Gutenberg Australia (these are out of copyright in Australia but may not be in the US).

>231 haydninvienna: I feel like I have watched a show making fun of a detective like that.

>231 haydninvienna:. Laughing --> I got irked from time to time by constantly being told what a super person Dr Thorndyke was. In short, pick two or three at random and hope for the best. . I am --ahem-- not at my best this week and very much in need of distraction. I will rummage about and see what's available in Gutenberg.

>216 haydninvienna: Ah, I'm sorry you've both been dealing with this. I hope they figure out what's going on, and find a way to treat it. Keeping my fingers crossed for both of you.

>234 clamairy: Thanks, Clam. With Mrs H it's kind of a tiresomely familiar story.

Latest read is Imperial Triumph by Michael Kulikowski. This is the previous volume to Imperial Tragedy, which I read a few weeks ago. Triumph starts roughly with Emperor Hadrian (the emperor who built the wall between England and Scotland), and ends with the death of Emperor Julian "the Apostate", although IIRC most of Julian's monkey business trying to undo the Christianisation of the empire under Constantine is described in Tragedy. For me, the two together make up all the Roman imperial history I'm ever likely to need (leaving aside Gibbon — see below). My goodness, what a crew! Once an emperor was securely on the throne, the first step was to eliminate the competitors. One wonders how, between the constant warfare (both civil and external), and the ruthless politics, plus the frequent outbreaks of plague, there were any Romans at all.

Incidentally, Karlstar asked me how Gibbon was regarded as a historian today, and I suggested that he wasn't taken seriously (>182 Karlstar: >183 haydninvienna:). I'm pleased to say that I was wrong, at least as far as Michael Kulikowski is concerned:

Two hundred and fifty years ago, Edward Gibbon began his story of Rome's decline and fall more or less where we began ours, in what he saw as a golden age of the Antonine emperors. So captivated was he by his tale of the 'barbarism and religion' that brought down the empire that he carried his narrative forward to the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Mehmet Il, over a millennium later. All of us who write on the later Roman empire, or more broadly on the cultural world of what we now call Late Antiquity, tread in Gibbon's footsteps and in the shadow of his intellect, his prose and his ambition. But no one today would attempt to match his scope. This volume and the one that follows cover a very specific set of stages in the journey from the early Roman empire to a Greek Roman empire in the east standing alongside a postimperial west. We have moved from an empire ruled by Romans to an empire filled with Romans, and from a Rome whose horizons were those of a somewhat expanded Classical Mediterranean world to a Rome that was one of Eurasia’s four great civilisations in an era of archaic globalisation.

>235 haydninvienna:
You might find How the World Made the West of interest. It starts well before the Greek and Roman empires existed and shows how much of what we call classical Greek elements, such as alphabet, councils of citizens, etc... are the result of interaction with, and migration from, the Levant and further east. It gives the example of the Archimedes Screw in use in Nineveh to irrigate its hanging gardens 500 years before Archimedes was born.

I am looking forward to the chapter entitled, "Of Elephants and Kings". There is always an elephant.

#thereisalwaysanelephant :-)

>235 haydninvienna: Thanks for that information!

>235 haydninvienna: I'll echo >237 Karlstar: on that. I had wondered off-handedly how Gibbon might be viewed these days, because perceptions of history shift over time and Gibbon was undoubtedly up for a re-evaluation. The bit about archaic globalization is an interesting thought.

A quick (at least partly because I skimmed it) bedtime read: The Footsteps that Stopped by "A Fielding", whoever he or she really was. "A. Fielding" is known to be a pen-name, but the real name is unknown. Which makes you think, given that the book was published in 1926. It's thought that "A Fielding" was a British woman but little more than that is known. There are some speculations at http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2014/01/a-fielding-queen-of-crime.html.*

I found this kind of frustrating. It has a dizzyingly complex plot, and it's not even certain until close to the end whether the dead woman was murdered, died by accident or committed suicide. Some details of how she met her end are implausible ( she was shot in the chest at very close range with a Webley revolver. The Webley was the British Army service revolver in WW1. It was a big, powerful .45 calibre weapon and a shot at close range would make a considerable mess, of which there its no mention); there is a whirl of suspects and motives; there is a Criminal Mastermind, who is adept at disguise; the dead woman turns out to have had a really, really exotic matrimonial history; and something that seems to be endemic in second-string Golden Age mysteries, continual harping on how wonderful a human being the Great Detective is. Also, the Great Detective is a policeman, but he is also a master cracksman. At one point he burgles the office of the dead woman's husband, laws of evidence be damned. (Not only would any evidence so obtained be inadmissible in court, but, duh, burglary is illegal even when committed by a senior police officer in search of evidence.) Also, lots of padding: there's a description of the detective salmon-fishing that goes on for, I guess, three pages and is completely inessential even as atmosphere.

*It occurred to me at one point to wonder if he/she was Australian. The firm of stockbrokers in Dublin whose financial collapse forms a thread in one possible motive is called Deakin and O'Malley. As it happens, both Deakin and O'Malley were Australian politicians of the period.

Just to prove that I'm not abandoning myself to frivolity: The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes. This was a BB from Karlstar, who IIRC found it heavy going in places. I didn't. This part of the history of Australia wasn't exactly ignored in my schooling, but we were spared the worst horrors and most of the detail. This passage from the last chapter produced a rueful smile of recognition:

Nothing could be allowed to diminish the gratitude Australians were meant to feel for the imperial umbrella. The essence of colonization was that they could claim no history of their own. Some years before the Centenary*, the English gold-seeker John Sherer had complained of the blankness of the antipodean landscape, where nothing recognisable had happened for millennia:

There can be no walk, no journey of any kind, more monotonous than one through the bush. …There is no association of the past connected with it. Your sight is never regaled with the "ruins grey" of some fine old fortress. Imagination is at a standstill—fairly bogged, as your body may be in the mud-swamp. There are no sacred groves . . . No time-hallowed fanes, sanctified by the recollections of hospitable deeds. No fields, recalling the downfall of tyranny . . . Nothing whatever to visit as a spot noted as being capable of exalting the mind by the memories with which it is associated. No locality, memorable as the haunt of genius. No birthplaces of great men . . . Nothing of this kind; all is dully-dead, uninspiring mud-work.

But if the landscape carried no such litany of association, Australian children would; they were made to read the novels of Walter Scott and the deeds of Sir Francis Drake, to recite like parrots the names of English kings, the dates of unexplained events like the Rump Parliament and the Gunpowder Plot, the lengths of European rivers they would never see— while, as the poet Henry Lawson complained in the Republican in 1888, they were shown nothing of Australian history earlier than 1850. Educators played their part, with the result that it became impossible to find, in any history book used in Australian schools up to the mid-1960s, a satisfactory or even coherent account of penal Australia.

I've commented more than once before on how Anglocentric my education was — not only as to history but literature and even nature study.

*In 1888.

I think it gave me a bit of a sleepless night, brooding on the horror of the colonial stations that were intended as places of the severest punishment: Port Arthur and Macquarie Harbour in Van Diemen's Land, Norfolk Island and (heaven help me) Moreton Bay (which is now Brisbane!). (The last was run by Captain Patrick Logan, a notorious disciplinarian who would now be called a psychopath, until he was killed, apparently by the indigenous people. But his name is still all over the map here.) Hughes compares the System of transportation more than once to the Soviet gulags.

And yet it succeeded, in a sort of a way. Despite the cruelty and the corruption, and the frequent incompetence in London or the Colonies or both, the System of transportation eventually produced the country that I'm living in now. According to Hughes, it was saved by gold. The discovery of gold in Australia in 1850 led to a boom in immigration, and for the first time a stable export economy. By mid-1852, the gold diggings in Victoria were producing an average of half a ton of gold a week. (Hughes might have added that it led to an unhealthy focus on living well by digging bloody great holes and shipping the contents overseas.) The assignment system, under which "trusties" were sent to work for free masters, thereby working off their sentences, succeeded to a considerable extent in producing reformed characters, if a trusty had the good luck to draw a good master. A trusty's prospects under a good master were far better than they ever would have been in England, and the assignment system to a large extent did what it was intended to do — produce a population of free workers.

I think this will be one of my top reads for the year, and I'm going to buy a copy.

>240 haydninvienna: The outstanding characteristics shown by the Colonial Office in London in dealings with the Cape were also incompetence, arrogance and bloody-mindedness, often both together. Here Lord Glenelg managed to start at least one war and precipitate the Great Trek (1835--1838) by remote control, using those characteristics.

>241 hfglen: Glenelg comes in for a bit of stick from Robert Hughes too, IIRC. Still managed to get a nice beach-side suburb of Adelaide named after him tho.

>240 haydninvienna: I'm not really surprised, but it is horrifying. They did a decent job of erasing and whitewashing their transgressions.

>240 haydninvienna: I'm glad you read it and enjoyed it! I was hoping to get your feedback on that book.

I thought his going back to Norfolk multiple times was a bit much, I would have preferred one chapter that covered Norfolk Island in the entirety, rather than multiple chapters. That's just me.

>243 clamairy: Depending on who "they" are, I may have to respectfully disagree. If "they" is the British government of the day, there was no effort to hide anything: the records are still there and Hughes used them extensively. Let's remember that the policy of transportation originated under King George III, not the most competent of kings nor blessed with the most competent advisors: after all, they managed to provoke a war with certain other colonists in North America and then lose that war. "They" who did the whitewashing were the colonists themselves and their descendants. Hughes has quite a bit to say about this: the paragraphs I quoted above are simply ones that resonated with me. But it's worth noting that until relatively recently it was regarded as shameful to have had a convict ancestor. I'm not sure exactly when the world changed, but a convict ancestor is now a source of pride: the Fellowship of First Fleeters was founded, according to its website, in 1968. Membership is open to anyone who can prove that they had an ancestor who arrived on the First Fleet (explicitly including a convict ancestor). Associate membership is available to anyone with an ancestor who arrived on the Second or Third Fleet, again explicitly including a convict ancestor.

Also, one mildly weird social distinction in the early 19th century was between "currency"and "sterling". "Currency" were people who had been born in the colony; "sterling" were people who had emigrated. "Sterling" were regarded as superior.

ETA Losing that war was part of the reason for transportation to Australia. During the period up to 1776, there had been money to be made from selling the labour of convicted prisoners to plantation owners in North America and the Caribbean. About 60,000 prisoners offered "this thinly disguised form of slavery", but of course it came to an end when the American colonies rebelled.

Since we haven't had any poetry for a while:

The Georges
by Walter Savage Landor

George the First was always reckoned
Vile, but viler George the Second;
And what mortal ever heard
Any good of George the Third?
When from earth the Fourth descended
(God be praised!) the Georges ended.

>245 haydninvienna: By 'they' I meant your local purveyors of history. In the US the history books I read as a child all started with the so-called 'Discovery of America.' As if there weren't people here already. Edited to add: there also was quite a bit about so-called manifest destiny, which sounded grand on the page, but was just an excuse for genocide.

In your case I'm glad those convict ancestors are being given some long due notoriety.

>245 haydninvienna:. I'm surprised that it took Australians so long to come to that sense of pride in those ancestors sent over in the initial ships. Yes, one didn't brag about having criminal family members, but so many of those who were shipped out were guilty of relatively minor crimes. They weren't all murderers, embezzlers, and women of ill-repute. (Or am I dredging up out-of-date historical renderings? Does your author go into that aspect?)

>246 haydninvienna:. Ouch!!

>248 jillmwo: Hughes definitely made the point, repeatedly, that many of the crimes were minor, particularly minor theft.

>248 jillmwo: & >250 Karlstar: What percentage of people survived the voyage?

>251 clamairy: The three "fleets" show how dangerous it could be. The First Fleet, which sailed from England on 13 May 1787, had as its commander Captain Arthur Phillip, a career Royal Navy officer with a competent but undistinguished record. The Fleet included 2 Royal Navy ships, HMS Sirius and Supply, and 9 transports hired from civilian contractors. The contractors were generally corrupt, and the government administration was both corrupt and incompetent. Fortunately Phillip was neither. By arrival at Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788, he had lost 40 of 736 convicts, and eight other people. (Somewhere I saw a mention of the loss rates expected during a voyage of a Royal Navy ship, otherwise than as battle casualties — that is, deaths just from the ordinary rigours of the voyage. It was higher than that, I'm pretty sure.) The Second and Third Fleets were less fortunate or had less competent commanders. The Second Fleet had embarked more than a thousand convicts, but a quarter of them died on the voyage, and many of the remainder were helplessly ill when landed. The Third Fleet embarked 1,864 convicts, but lost ten percent of them on the voyage, and the remainder were, when landed, "so emaciated" as to be unable to work.

>248 jillmwo: No murderers and no rapists. Those were routinely hanged and applications for mercy would not be considered. No prostitutes either, because prostitution was never a transportable offence. The savagery of the Georgian penal code meant that there were literally hundreds of minor offences for which hanging was the stated penalty, although it is well known that juries frequently refused to convict, and merciful judges refused to impose a sentence of execution. Also it was not unknown for stolen valuable property to be undervalued when the theft was charged, so that the death penalty would not be applicable.

>252 haydninvienna: It's very difficult for me to wrap my head around. Eight and a half months? It sounds brutal.

>253 clamairy: That included three stops for provisions and repairs, including a stop at Rio.

Edited: that doesn't make it any less brutal.

>253 clamairy: In the days of sail, it usually took three to four months to get from UK or Netherlands to Cape Town. Australia is twice as far. That's why the Portuguese and the VOC only had one fleet a year between Lisbon / Amsterdam and the Indies.

>248 jillmwo:
Transportation from Ireland was a regular occurrence for people robbing food to feed their families or rebelling against the crown forces. The opening paragraphs of George A. Birmingham's first novel, The Seething Pot, gave the speech of a judge sentencing a rebel to be hung, drawn and quartered. The guilty person had his sentence commuted to transportation to Australia.

Birmingham's first five novels were attempts at strong political statements, but he met with strong prejudiced opposition and abandoned much of his political themes for his novels.

>255 hfglen: Phillip spent considerable time in Tenerife, Rio and Cape Town buying supplies (since the Fleet had been grossly under-provisioned, thanks to incompetence and corruption in the Colonial Office), and allowing the convicts to eat as much as possible and exercise — reasons why he had such a small (by the standards of the time) loss rate.

>256 pgmcc: Hughes gives some statistics on who came from where, why, and the sentence. Undoubtedly many Irish ended up coming to Australia, but I'm respectfully doubtful about "hung, drawn and quartered". Hanging, drawing and quartering had mostly passed out of use by the time transportation to Australia began (according to Wikipedia, the last time the sentence was actually inflicted was in 1781), although it remained on the statute book for longer. Hughes notes that some of the conspirators in the Cato Street Conspiracy in 1820 (to murder the Prime Minister and Cabinet) were transported; five others were hanged and then beheaded. The largest contingent of Irish political prisoners seems to have gone to Western Australia, and transportation there didn't begin until 1849 and ended in 1867. The Irish in West Oz led to the celebrated incident of the Catalpa, in which an American ship took six militant Fenians on board and carried them to New York.

The Irish presence in Australia has long been almost an obsession among historians. Oddly, many Scots came too, but (I think) generally as free settlers (some of them were ancestors of mine), and you hear little or nothing about them.

I'm now reading Empireworld by Sathnam Sanghera, whose Empireland is mentioned above (#125). Even more to think about. I'm not sure I'll finish it: too depressing. It's like one of those slow-motion train crashes where you can't bear to look but can't look away. This is a criticism of Sanghera's subject-matter, not his writing. Gibbon's comment about history being "little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind" never seemed so appropriate.

I think I need some cheerful reading. I probably also need to start a new thread, but will have to think of a title first.

ETA I did finish Empireworld. Rather surprisingly, it finishes in a positive way: Sanghera even manages to find a reason for the Commonwealth of Nations (formerly the British Commonwealth, and before that the British Empire) to exist. After the horrors of The Fatal Shore, that was uncommonly welcome.

One of the benefits bestowed on me as a carer by a benevolent government is access to a counsellor. I get 6 free sessions a year to watch over my continuing mental health. As it happens, the counsellor I drew is a very pleasant lady with whom I seem to get on pretty well. I was telling her this morning about the depressing stuff I'd been reading and that i felt i needed something cheerful, and in the course of the ensuing discussion she confessed to never having heard of Terry Pratchett ...

>258 haydninvienna: One is inclined to ask what rock she's been living under these last 30 years!

>258 haydninvienna:
Wow!

>258 haydninvienna: Think of all the good you can (hopefully) do now! :)))

>259 hfglen:  — >261 Alexandra_book_life: I tried. As I said, she is a nice lady and puts up gracefully with my ramblings.

I found that the Brisbane library system has quite extensive lists of Libby ebooks. In the interests of cheerful reading, I was browsing the randomised list and I spotted The Cello Suites: In Search of a Baroque Masterpiece by Eric Siblin. Siblin is a Canadian rock music journalist who more or less accidentally got hooked on the Bach cello suites. From the publisher's description:

So began an epic quest that would unravel three centuries of mystery, intrigue, history, politics and passion.The result has the power to obsess readers in the way the Cello Suites enthrall listeners and players alike; part biography, part music history, and part literary mystery, the book follows three strands of an evolving story. The first is a dramatic narrative featuring Johann Sebastian Bach and a missing manuscript from the eighteenth century; the second is a key discovery by Pablo Casals in Spain and his rise to fame; and the third is Eric Siblin's own discovery of, and infatuation with, The Cello Suites, which takes him to the back streets of Barcelona, a Belgian mansion, and a bombed-out German palace; to interviews with cellists Mischa Maisky, Anner Bylsma, and Pieter Wispelwey; to archives, festivals, conferences, and cemeteries; and even to cello lessons - all in pursuit of uncovering the mysteries that continue to haunt this piece of music more than 250 years after the composer's death.

There's sketches of biographies of J S Bach himself, and of Casals, the Catalan cellist who for practical purposes discovered the suites when in 1893 he found a copy in a second-hand bookshop in Barcelona. Siblin points out how surprisingly little is known about Bach's life, although I disagree that we know no more about Bach than about Shakespeare. (There's probably someone out there working out a theory about how all the music that we now attribute to J S Bach was really written by Georg Philip Telemann or whoever.)

>262 haydninvienna: It seems to be a fascinating book! And now I feel like listening to some Bach ;)

>263 Alexandra_book_life: By all means! I’m not partisan for Haydn; quite the contrary. You may have seen the eighteenth-century “Sun of composers” (https://secm.org/misc/sun/sun.html). Today Graun would probably not be the third side of the central triangle; it would be either Telemann (my pick) or Mozart. But J S Bach is still unquestionably in the middle.

>264 haydninvienna: I have not seen it, so I am glad you shared. I would not question J S Bach's place in the "Sun of Composers".

Right now I am listening to Bach Cello Suites performed by Yo Yo Ma :)))

>265 Alexandra_book_life: 👍👍👍

Aargh. Tried to check something on the net a while ago and found no wifi. Fortunately still able to pair the computer with the mobile and can get connected that way. Got on the chat line with Telstra and a new modem is coming our way, delivery expected on the 29th. Not ideal but they gave me 10 gig of data for the phone, free. And the new modem is also free.

>267 haydninvienna: Free is good, but not as good as trouble-free internet connectivity.

>267 haydninvienna: Having that kind of connectivity is no longer a luxury "nice to have" kind of thing. It's like water, gas, and electric. You need it to do so many commonplace things. (I think of wifi as a utility and I wish to heck that consumers had a growling watchdog agency to sic on providers when it gets screwed up.)

>269 jillmwo: Agreed! About half of the lights in my house are smart, and when I lose connectivity I cannot control them. I can still turn them on and off with a switch, but if I have them set for lower lighting or a different color I cannot adjust it until the Wi-Fi comes back online.

I know... It's a First World problem.

A good friend has had a couple of "smart" houses over the years and being in them is largely annoying. Everything beeps and flashes and makes noise. The doors constantly lock themselves. The oven light blinks to tell you it's up to temperature as if the beeping wasn't enough. The light by the water dispenser comes on when you walk by the fridge. Ditto the thermostat in the halll. It's crazy and really irritating. She either doesn't care or doesn't know how to turn off all that stuff. Every time the power cuts out or blinks really hard, I have to reset our appliances to the least amount of lights etc. Oy. Give me a dumb house and smart owners.

>271 Bookmarque: I don't have any motion sensor devices. I quite like the smart lights and outlets when they are working correctly, which is 99.9% of the time. In my previous home I had a lot of dimmer switches, but when I made the switch to LED lights I had a weird flickering problem.

I agree that having a net connection is essential because most things that used to be done in person or by letter have moved on line, and some of them can only be done on line.

Villa Costa Lotta has no "internet of things" things and I will resist them with my dying breath. All that stuff depends on software, and as we well know, software is always perfect, right? (For a really horrific example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25.) Also, too many hidden agendas: I understand that one US car manufacturer has stopped installing Apple CarPlay because they can't sell the user data. The user data is a significant revenue stream, apparently. What are your smart devices telling the world about you?

Most of the infrastructure for the net here is owned by the Commonwealth Government, which grants access rights to the ISPs. Their commercial conduct is overseen by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which tends to be fairly activist and tough on the more egregious commercial misconduct.

I'm with >271 Bookmarque:. Give me a dumb house with smart owners.

Just had the new modem delivered (2 days early) and we are now back on the air.

>275 haydninvienna: Good service! I prefer as few IoT devices as possible, we really don't need a smart refrigerator, stove or other appliances.

>275 haydninvienna: and Telstra has just refunded us $7 for the service disruption.

>277 haydninvienna:
As my mother would have said, “Better than a slap in the teeth with a wet fish.”

>278 pgmcc: The imagery in that is great. My husband's mother used to tell her kids they were going to die with a snake in their mouths if they spoke disrespectfully to her. She was Mexican, not Irish.

>276 Karlstar: Oh, I don't think I could trust a smart refrigerator, stove, etc. Maybe someday, definitely not yet. I won't even use the programmable settings on my Roomba, because I've heard horror stories about disgusting things being smeared around carpets.

>277 haydninvienna: Yay!

>276 Karlstar:. >280 clamairy:. It was when the salesman assured me that all new washers have a USB port that I visibly rolled my eyes. Water is an integral aspect of the function of a washer and you don't want a d*mn USB port anywhere near water. (At least, insofar as I have a grip on reality.) And then he admitted it was more to help any appliance repairman diagnose problems with the machine than because consumers were asking for it.

>281 jillmwo:
A few months ago we acquired a new tumble drier. It came with smart remote control via your smart phone. Beside the on machine controls there was a little square area with a Bluetooth sign on it. Reading the instructions I discovered that to use the smart remote control via my smart phone I had to download an app. No surprise there.

Next I was instructed how to set the controls on the app on my smart phone. So far so good, although I did think operating a tumble drier remotely sounded strange. I was wondering how the app loaded the machine with wet clothes.

Any way, the next step struck me as a bit strange. To activate the settings I had just entered on the app on my smart phone I had to hold the phone beside the square with the Bluetooth sign and press a control on the app.

My use of the word "smart" in the above paragraphs is true to what it said in the instructions. The added cynicism and sarcasm is purely mine. I accept full responsibility for those. I still do not see the sense in setting the instructions on the app and having to stand beside the machine to activate them when I could just as easily push the very clear buttons and turn the knobs on the machine that I have to stand beside to activate the programme. To use a famous quotation from The Princess Bride in reference to the manufacturer's use of the word "remote", "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

>282 pgmcc: That's hilarious.

>282 pgmcc: Sounds like my new dishwasher. To manage the settings around water hardness means using an app. No thanks, ditto my new car. Both are Chinese made.

>281 jillmwo: To diagnose problems? With a washer? So they are saying there are more software problems than mechanical or plumbing problems? Maybe they need less software, or at least proven software that doesn't need to change often.

>282 pgmcc: Sad and funny both.

>282 pgmcc: "Inconceivable!"

>286 ScoLgo:
:-)

>285 Karlstar: Theoretically, I would want the USB port because it meant the appliance repair man will more readily and accurately ascertain the problem with the malfunctioning appliance. A washer however doesn't need to be all that complicated. It's a tin box with a rotary thing in the middle of the tank. Software shouldn't come into it in any way, at least in my view. However, how can a manufacturer justify an increase in the price of their product if they can't show some kind of novel improvement. The USB port added at least $100 to the price.

>288 jillmwo: Exactly.

It's been an interesting week.

First was the internet outage, discussed above.

Then we had 2 appointments with different, unrelated people in the aged care system on successive days. Both cancelled because the people concerned were both having a week's sick leave. Makes you wonder.

Then, late in the week, I realised that a couple of things that I should have done before we left England (because they weren't then urgent and we had a lot else to do) were now urgent. I thought one would be easy (cancelling Mrs H's old UK mobile contract) and one would be hard ( a bit of banking). Both had to be done over the phone. So I waited till UK office hours (which means 6 pm here) and spent the next hour on the phone. They both got done, but the "easy' one took most of an hour and the "hard" one took about ten minutes.

Then last night I got an email purporting to be from the Australian Taxation Office with a heading about an increase in benefit payment. This was a trifle puzzling because I don't actually have any benefit payments. I thought of various possibilities but of course my use just now of "purporting" has telegraphed the punch line: it was a phish. A pretty good one too. Australian government coat of arms, logos and so on, but: the ATO doesn't usually talk of "benefits" (they would name the specific payment); the ATO doesn't do business by email; the ATO isn't in the benefits business anyway; the date format was wrong; but the clincher was that clicking the "Forward" button in Apple Mail (which shows you the real sender) shows that it came from "farm-market.net", which is apparently an ISP somewhere in Texas. So I reported it wherever I could and deleted it. Bastards. As I said previously, I just want the whole business of internet phishing to be a smoking hole in the ground.

One of the first things we bought when we moved in here was a nice new washing machine. It is a nice machine: European (not naming the make, just in case); it has a good range of programs but no "smarts". It Just Works (so far, anyway). We haven't bought a drier (I just load the wet washing into the car and drive to the local laundromat, which seems quite happy to take $9 off me to dry four baskets of wet washing). If I bought a drier it would be the same make as the washing machine and still wouldn't have any smarts.

ETA and somewhere along the way the Regulatory Authority notified me that they wouldn't be renewing my contract for 2025. I had expected this: my position as a consultant was always to allow them to build up their in-house expertise, which they have now done.

>290 haydninvienna: That's a tough week. I like your choice of fates for the phishers and spammers.

>290 haydninvienna:. Deeply sympathetic commiseration with you over the phishing crap. I swear I double-check every single thing these days. Medicare, my local bank, etc. (At least you didn't get called to jury duty on top of everything else!)

>290 haydninvienna:
Sorry to hear about the trials and tribulations.

I hope you and Mrs Haydninvienna have respite from issues over the Christmas period and beyond.

>293 pgmcc: Thanks Peter. None of it was actually that bad, I just got to worrying about some of it.

>291 Karlstar: >292 jillmwo: Thanks guys. I didn't mention that somewhere along the way I also got another of the threatening emails (one that demands payment for not doing something unpleasant). I've now had enough of them that I don't read past the heading: I just report them and delete them.

From time to time I wonder whether it might be worth signing up for one of the paid, secure email services like Protonmail. But of course it wouldn't get rid of the present annoyances, since my present email address has obviously appeared on the dark web. I would have to discontinue that email address entirely so that a sender to it would just get a bounce message.

Public service announcement: If you are in the Apple ecosystem you can forward phish and other suspicious emails to reportphishing(at)apple.com; if you are in the UK you can forward such emails to report(at)phishing.gov.uk (run by the National Cyber Security Centre, and they don't seem to mind your doing so even if you are outside the UK); if you are in Australia you can report them to Scamwatch (https://www.scamwatch.gov.au/report-a-scam) (a government agency, as the URL makes clear). Worth checking whether your own government has such an agency.

Is Spamhaus still a thing? It's where I used to send spam to before it started getting blocked by the ISPs.

>290 haydninvienna: Ouch. I am sorry about the phishing and all the other issues. I hope your next week will be a lot better!

Reading The Father Brown Stories, "The Insoluble Problem":

As they drove along through a densely wooded but sparsely inhabited landscape, in which inns and all other buildings seemed to grow rarer and rarer, the daylight began to take on the character of a stormy twilight even in the heat of noon; and dark purple clouds gathered over the dark grey forests. As is common under the lurid quietude of that kind of light, what colour there was in the landscape gained a sort of secretive glow which is not found in objects under the full sunlight; and ragged red leaves or golden or orange fungi seemed to burn with a dark fire of their own. Under such a half-light they came to a break in the woods like a great rent in a grey wall, and saw beyond, standing above the gap, the tall and rather outlandish-looking inn that bore the name of the Green Dragon.

>297 haydninvienna: Outlandish-looking? Yes, please.

>297 haydninvienna:
Excellent approach to our watering hole.

>297 haydninvienna: >298 Alexandra_book_life: >299 pgmcc: Yes, one can recognize the west entrance from that description.

>298 Alexandra_book_life: It's the special room we built for Rosy the dragon. Sort of lumpish when seen from a distance.

>301 MrsLee: But of course! Rosy needs her space.

If I've counted correctly, Google Maps shows 12 pubs* in Great Britain called the Green Dragon, plus one in New Zealand, plus ours of course. What odds that they're all connected through a higher-dimensional space?

In the story, of course Father Brown and his friend Flambeau have a very strange adventure.

*ETA I searched on the iPad. Doing the same search on the MacBook shows a lot more, too many to count, plus a couple in North America.

There is an Iain Banks story in which a person builds their home with portals to different planets. Each room of the home is on a different planet. Using this technology it could be that there is only one Green Dragon pub, but it has many rooms and they are linked by such portals.

>297 haydninvienna: What a lovely descriptive passage.
(The Green Dragon Tavern in Boston has been in business for almost 400 years.) The only Green Dragon I can find when I Google New York is a Chinese restaurant in the Bronx.

>297 haydninvienna: Apparently there is an Amish farmers market in Lancaster Co, PA, named Green Dragon.

>303 haydninvienna: I love the idea of Father Brown puttering around in our pub. Beware those who hold evil intentions in their heart! jillmwo, we may have to put the cabal on hold.

>307 MrsLee: Well, it's a busy time of year anyway. I'm okay with putting off the cabal-recruiting efforts for a bit.

>307 MrsLee: Wait, what? There is a cabal, too? Do let me know when you are recruiting again.

The thread is definitely too long, and now I've got a title for the new one.