Haydninvienna, 2024/3: the mimicking of known successes

Because that's what I seem to be doing, with apologies to Malka Older.

I edited this post to remove a reference to my first thought for a. title, which on further reflection seemed both incorrect and inappropriate.

Happy New Thread!

However, last week was another interesting week. Among Mrs H's health issues is a pain of unknown origin in her left arm. This recurs every once in a while, and has put her in hospital at least once before. She woke me because of it at 1 am on Monday last week and for lack of anything else I took her to the emergency department at Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Hospital. (Gotta love hospital names in Brisbane. I think all the State-run ones have names in honour of some member of the royal family.) After the usual delay and investigations they admitted her and she spent the night in the cardiac ward. Nothing found to indicate a cause, as was the case last time. She was discharged on Tuesday morning with some referrals for imaging procedures and a couple of new drugs. That basically took care of Tuesday. Wednesday was recovery and, in the afternoon, a session with a physiotherapist.

Thursday morning the car was due at a service establishment at Moorooka, 10 km or so from here, and since it would be there for about 4 hours we made an appointment to see our regular GP after the hospital visit. Taxi to the GP and the sod insisted on dropping us a couple of streets away on a hot Brisbane morning. After the doctor we taxi-ed back into the city centre to find some lunch, and had a decent lunch in an open-air cafe in Queen Street Mall. Hot day but the cafe was under cover. After lunch I wanted to buy a copy of The Fatal Shore, so hiked up to the Dymocks store at the river end of the Mall. (Bear in mind I'm pushing Mrs H around in the wheelchair.) Almost right outside, the Queensland Police Band and others are doing a Christmas concert at a level that ought to be prohibited under the strategic arms limitation treaties, and bloody Dymocks didn't have the book although their website says they did. Fortunately the car was now due to be ready so we taxi-ed back to Moorooka and collected it, after having unbelted a not-small amount of solvency. But they did do a good job.

Friday was the first of the imaging appointments. Turns out that the imaging practice has 2 locations about 100 metres apart, and Apple Maps knows about only one, which turned out to be the wrong one. Having fixed that, and after the usual quarrels with Brisbane morning traffic, we persuaded Mrs H to endure an injection of radioactive tracer medium only to find that the technician couldn't persuade the tracer injection to go into the vein. (We had a similar problem at the hospital with the insertion of a cannula to take blood samples — the doctor could get a cannula into a vein but nothing came out. Fortunately they got some eventually.) So Friday went for nothing.

This week I have a medical appointment tomorrow (skin check, since I haven't had one for years — they are regarded as a necessity in Queensland, which used to be the skin cancer capital of the world).

>1 haydninvienna: Happy New Thread.

>3 haydninvienna: Sorry you had such an interesting week. Good luck with the remaining appointments for Mrs. H and yourself.

>1 haydninvienna: Happy new thread! I love the title.

>3 haydninvienna: I am sorry you've been having such an eventful week. I hope the coming one will be better.

>3 haydninvienna:
Sorry to hear about the "interesting" week. Hopefully this week will be less interesting.

By the way, our storyteller son was greatly amused by your using the phrase about knowing a bloke whose son was a storyteller in a Leprechaun museum. :-) He is very grateful for the good wishes from you and Mrs. H.

Happy New Thread, and the best of luck with all of the medical issues. I'm sending good juju your way.

Happy new thread! I hope the frustrations will abate as the thread progresses.

>3 haydninvienna: I stand in awe of your patience and endurance in the face of such ups and downs at the hospital, the testing facility and the auto mechanics. But what >8 Sakerfalcon: said. Hopefully, things will settle down a bit. (Happy new thread!)

>3 haydninvienna: Strength to you and Mrs H with the medical and other problems! And a somewhat belated Happy New Thread.

I did not wish "interesting times" for you, but glad to see you are managing them. May your days be dull. ;)

Happy new thread! Hopefully your "interesting" week will quiet down soon.

Thanks for the good wishes, all. Except for my doctor's appointment this morning, so far so good for this week.

Update on the skin check: all clear. That's a bit of relative tranquility for the week.

>14 haydninvienna: Good news.

>14 haydninvienna:
Excellent news.

Phew! Now maybe you can cruise into the new year with a lighter heart.

*sound of masses cheering* Take a deep breath, cross off one more thing on the list of things allowed to keep you awake and night, and then do a little jig to express all the cheap jolly!!

Yay! Seriously good news there.

>14 haydninvienna: That's wonderful news!

Thanks once again for all the good wishes.

Partly inspired by the article Jill recently linked to, I went and stared at the bookcases for a while looking for a book that I hadn't read (no problem there!) that I felt like reading (more difficult). What I took off the shelf was The Verse of Christopher Brennan (which oddly doesn't return a touchstone although there is 12 copies on LT). Brennan was an Australian poet of the early part of the last century. He was highly regarded once, but I have no idea how his reputation stands now. According to my signature inside the front cover, I bought this on 9 October 1974, and I doubt if I've so much as opened it since. I'll let you know how I go with it.

>21 haydninvienna: 50 years unread! That's quite the long duration on the TBR pile.

>22 Karlstar: Not one I'm proud of! Anyway, I have sampled Brennan as much as I think necessary, and although I'll keep the book I don't think he's for me. He died in 1932, although most of the poetry was written well before that. Given that he was contemporary with the Georgians, the First World War War poets and even the early Eliot, I think it's fair to say that his style was dated even then. He reads like Swinburne out of Keats, with a dash of pre-Raphaelite.

>23 haydninvienna: reads like Swinburne out of Keats, with a dash of pre-Raphaelite.

It's not clear (or perhaps I'm missing something) whether you are more disdainful of the Romantic poets or of Brennan himself.

Congrats on the check-up, and enjoy that 50 year old book! Perhaps it's aged like an expensive wine...

>24 jillmwo: I wasn't intending to be disdainful of anybody, only trying to describe the style. I like Keats and the Rosettis (brother and sister), although Swinburne not so much.

No, I'm not disdainful of the romantic poets, though I'm not sure that Tennyson counts as a romantic. Randomly scooting about on the net, I saw the first stanza of "Tithonus":

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-hair’d shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.

(The rest is here.) This is another poem I've known since high school. I vaguely remember an essay by Robert Graves in which he asserts that a good poem must make good prose sense. Tennyson shows that it's possible to do so and still create perfection.

Another Australian book that I found by accident browsing through the Brisbane City Council library system's Libby list: Best Wishes by Richard Glover. Glover is an Australian journalist, radio presenter and essayist (who apparently occasionally appears in the Washington Post). The book sets out 365 "wishes", serious or not, for a better world. A couple that particularly caught my eye:

236. I wish to place a book in the hands of every child. Actually, more than one book; a lifetime's supply. Almost any book will do. With a good book, you become what you read. I, for example, was effectively Jewish for most of my early adolescence. This followed the consumption of one Chaim Potok novel too many. Later I'd alternate between Potok, PG Wodehouse and The Wonderful World of Barry McKenzie, creating a 16-year-old who'd greet his friends, 'Mazel tov, pip-pip, and how are they hanging?' The point is: reading gives you a break from yourself. And a break from ourselves, it seems to me, is precisely the thing most needed in our online, narcissistic, perpetually connected world.
It was in 'Good Weekend' in the Sydnev Morning Herald, back in the 1980s, that the model Elle Macpherson asked about her reading habits. 'Oh,' she answered, 'I never read anything I haven't written myself.' She was much mocked at the time, but social media has now left many people in the same situation. They only read stuff they've written themselves. Or stuff their friends have written about their shared circle. Or stuff that's been curated for them by Facebook's algorithms, designed to match their existing enthusiasms and interests. We have created a pre-Copernican universe in which every person is the Earth about whom all planets revolve. It creates a narcissistic form of self-love. And, as we all know, the problem with self-love is that it's so rarely reciprocated...

237. I wish people would acknowledge that Proust is funny. The novelist Marcel Proust died a bit over a century ago, and people write all the time about his brilliance. Here's the weird thing: they rarely mention how funny he was. This may be because funny writers are looked down upon. Australia has been home to quite a few of them: C J Dennis, Lennie Lower, Ross Campbell and Wendy Harmer but they're never rated as highly as the writers who never crack a smile. In the literary world, the funny novel rarely wins. ... In marking the centenary of his death, readers around the world celebrated Proust's high-minded meditation on the meaning of life. Me? I find myself smiling at all the salacious slapstick. I wish more people would join me.

Finding Proust funny puts him on the same page as Clive James.

I'm making grand or grandiose plans again.

A couple of days ago I posted in Jill's thread about Vulture's list of very long books that are worth the time. Not all of them interest me, but for the sake of nothing in particular, here are the ones that do:
1. Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes (976 pp.)

2. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens (960 pp.)

3. War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy (1,296 pp.)

4. Middlemarch, by George Eliot (880 pp.)

5. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (824 pp.)
6. 
In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust (4,215 pp.)

7. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia, by Rebecca West (1,181 pp.)

8. The Man Without Qualities, by Robert Musil (1,744 pp.)

9. Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman (896 pp.)
10. 
Canopus in Argos: Archives, by Doris Lessing (1,228 pp.)

11. Jerusalem, by Alan Moore (1,280 pp.)

Total 15,480 pages. Two of these (6 and 10) are in several volumes, but 6 at least is clearly a single, unified work. (The Lord of the Rings is not on my list only because I have already read it several times.) At 100 pages a day, I could read this lot within 6 months and finish Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell as well.

Of the 11 books, I have copies of 1, 2, 3 and 8, and have already read 2, 3 and about half of 8 (but would re-read 2 and the whole of 8, and probably 3 also). Of the others, the Brisbane public library system has 4, 5, 9 and 11. I would want 6 in the new Penguin Modern Classics edition translated by Christopher Prendergast et al, but the Brisbane system has all the volumes except the first one. (Have you noticed that libraries and bookshops frequently don't have volume 1 of a series?) Realistically, I will probably have to buy all 6 volumes. That leaves 7 and 10 to be acquired otherwise. Both are very expensive from Amazon Australia but can possibly be had from the UK for more reasonable prices (even allowing for postage).

>28 haydninvienna:
Thank you for the list. I have read 2 and am interested in 1 and 3.
I had not realised Bleak House was so long. I enjoyed it a lot. Of particular interest was the description of how the court cases over properties absorbed all the value and left both parties with little or nothing to show for their troubles.

>29 pgmcc: I must say I hadn't realised how long The Man Without Qualities was either! And of course, of the books I have the ony one that I can find is Don Quixote, which is the one I least feel like reading right now.

>28 haydninvienna: That's an interesting list. I have only heard of the first six, and not a single one of the last five. I've read #2, #4 & #5, and of those I liked the George Eliot the best.

>28 haydninvienna:. On an immediate basis, I'd likely go with 2, 3, 4, or 7. Just sitting here and looking at the traditional classics there, it occurs to me that I have always hesitated in reading either Middlemarch or Don Quixote because they strike me as being deeply sad (if truthful) books. Bleak House has the virtue of periodic humor. I own the Eliot, the Dickens, and the Tolstoy titles (and can immediately put my hands on two of the three). Rebecca West isn't nearly as popular, but she does write beautifully.

Sadly, I can't reach the full text of the Vulture article. (They think I've reached my limit of however many I'm permitted. That bugs me. Because I had never heard of numbers 8-11 and now I'm wondering what other weighty titles may have eluded me.)

>32 jillmwo: I don't remember Middlemarch being particularly sad... but it's definitely sobering. I do have Don Quixote as an Audible book, but I keep putting that off.

>32 jillmwo: Here's the ones I didn't include (except, as noted, LOTR):

The Power Broker, by Robert Caro (1,336 pp.)

Shogun, by James Clavell (1,192 pp.)

The Stand, by Stephen King (823/1,152 pp.)

The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett (816 pp.)

The Hunchback of Notre Dame, by Victor Hugo (940 pp.)

A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth (1,349 pp.)

Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace (1,079 pp.)

Underworld, by Don DeLillo (827 pp.)

Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts (2004, 936 pp.)

2666, by Roberto Bolaño (2004, 912 pp.)

Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon (1,086 pp.)

Sacred Games, by Vikram Chandra (928 pp.)

1Q84, by Haruki Murakami (928 pp.)

The Neapolitan Novels, by Elena Ferrante (1,682 pp.)


I could, I suppose, have added the Hugo, the Pynchon or the Murakami to my list, but that's long enough already.

I have the impression that Middlemarch is sad. At the moment I'm having trouble reading anything — I have Edmund Crispin's Holy Disorders from the library and have hardly touched it. Never mind, I've dived in at the deep end and put in a library hold for Jerusalem.

>34 haydninvienna:

Shogun is on my shelf, but I have not reached it yet. The size of the book may have something to do with that.

I read the extended edition of The Stand. That was when I realised that the editor was probably correct to cut over three hundred pages from the submitted script.

I bounced off The Pillars of the Earth. I felt it would be a great book if the reader was a fourteen year old doing a school project on 11th century culture and society. The book had so much detail that I found it dreadfully tedious. The main character in the early part of the book was a mason. We were treated to a detailed description of the form and function of every tool in his tool pouch. The straw that broke the camel's back was the six page description of someone trying to enter the cathedral after dark. That included an architectural description of the stone work around every window and doorway. When entry was finally made we were treated to very detailed description of the vaulting, the joints involved, the fastenings, etc... That was the point I jumped ship. I did not watch the screen adaptation but with Ian McShane in it I am sure it is good. The TV series would have cut out all the unnecessary, tedious descriptions of absolutely everything.

I loved The Hunchback of Notre Dame when I read it many decades ago. I am tempted to try it again.

Infinite Jest, Underworld and 2666 are all on my shelves awaiting attention.

I really enjoyed 1Q84. It was my first Murakami and I have been a keen Murakami reader ever since, with the caveat that his latest book is not giving me the usual Murakami buzz.

I read Shogun and Pillars of the Earth when I was in high school. I was blown away by them then, still remember what each was about. I believe PotE was an eye opener as far as sex went for this little country girl. Have no desire to reread them.

I enjoyed reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but I don't remember it being a really long book. I also don't remember much about the story, except I cried.

>34 haydninvienna:. Thank you for filling in the blanks for me. I read Shogun back in the crazed '90's I think when American business community was convinced that we were all about to be bought out by the highly successful Japanese. We'd thought we might need to learn something more about them and acquiring a taste for sushi was recommended. I actually found it interesting. (The length should not intimidate you pgmcc.)

The other one there that I read was Underworld by Don DeLillo. The driving factor for me in that instance was that it was going to be discussed in a very high end book group (the type where they would know if you were bluffing). I focused on the theme of art that ran through it (although I can't tell you much more about that now because of my swiss cheese memory).

I stopped reading Pillars when I picked up on the narrative thread involving violence against women. At that point in time, I lacked the bandwidth to deal with it. I haven't circled back and now I wonder if the paperback copy is buried upstairs or if I passed it along.

"2024 in review" is now up. I have posted over 90,000 words of Talk posts, and the year isn't quite over. Oh my.

Latest read was a surprise good one. I found Au Revoir, Tristesse through the Brisbane library's search engine because there's an essay in it about Proust. The title is of course a reference to the notorious Bonjour, Tristesse by Francoișe Sagan, which the first essay is about. There are 12 essays in all, including the one about In Search of Lost Time and one about L'Étranger by Camus. The general theme is the author's efforts to become French, by spending as much time as possible in France, learning the language and reading its literature, and finally deciding it was impossible: as a person raised in England, she would always be an outsider in France no matter how fluent she became in the language. But there was a lot of good stuff along the way: she decides that there's lessons about being happy even in the darkest of the classic novels. Plus the odd vignette like the one of Clive James trying to interview Françoise Sagan while she drives maniacally through Paris, almost killing a pedestrian on the way while Clive "whimpers quietly". Recommended as a relatively painless introduction to 12 classic French novels.

Thanks for the heads-up on the Year in Review.

>38 haydninvienna: Thanks for the reminder. I appreciate you sharing all of those words.

Happy December solstice, everyone (happens today at 1920 local time, 0920 UTC).

Queensland doesn't do daylight saving, and I've often thought that the south-east should; sunrise today was at 0449 local time, sunset at 1842. Yes, I know it would cause all sorts of problems if the south-east was a different time zone to the rest of the state.

On these summer mornings I tend to wake up much earlier than Mrs H and I've worked out that I can borrow e-books from the libraries and read them on the iPad. At the moment I'm reading How Words Get Good by Rebecca Lee. This is about how a book gets published. I'm finding it quite fun, although there's a lot of endnotes and Borrowbox doesn't deal with them very well. There's the odd nugget, like the blurb writer who describes herself as an inveterate reader of last pages. Or the fact that one use of the waste from pulping unsold copies is as an extender for the tar used for surfacing roads (a mile of motorway consumes about 45,000 books; apparently the M6, the main motorway between London and the north-west of England, accounted for two and a half million unsold Mills&Boon paperbacks — I've driven on the M6 many times but never imagined that I was rolling on thousands of pulped books). Or the story of how Sir Allen Lane, a director of Penguin, raided his own warehouse one night, removed all the copies of a book on whose publishing decision he had been outvoted, and apparently then buried the copies somewhere on his farm. (This wasn't entirely a censorship outrage: Penguin had had angry letters from clergymen, but also quite a few from booksellers who refused to stock it, so a commercial decision as well. One contrasts Rupert Hart-Davis, who wouldn't publish a book that he didn't think good enough regardless of how well it would sell, but published quite a few that didn't sell because he thought they were too good not to publish. The price was a huge overhead in unsold copies and many calls on the shareholders for more capital. Publishers have to make a profit, folks.)

Another quickie: Taking Flight by Lev Parikian. This came very highly recommended by MarthaJeanne (https://www.librarything.com/topic/362380#8688070) and I have to say I agree. It's about the animals that have evolved flight — insects, pterosaurs, birds and mammals. The evolutionary story is there but really most of the text is about how remarkable are some of the things that flying animals can do. Even managed to make me feel more kindly about those damn' pigeons.

>42 haydninvienna: It would take a good deal to make me feel more kindly towards pigeons. But I suppose, for the sake of the season, that one might manage to summon up some degree of charity for them. How did she manage it? What socially redeeming value is one to find in pigeons?

>43 jillmwo: Pie? I keep mentioning the presence of pastry blankets to the ones that infest our garden, but so far I've had no takers for some reason...

>43 jillmwo: No social redeeming value in pigeons — he isn't particularly interested in socially redeeming value, just in that they're expert fliers and lunch for peregrine falcons.

>44 Maddz: Never tried it, and I'm not sure about pie from a bunch of feral pigeons. Who knows where they've been?

>45 haydninvienna: Lurking on the roof and fences, waiting for the finches to come visit the sunflower hearts and the magpies and starlings visit the mealworm feeder. Manna from heaven, you see. As though they don't scarf up enough when Paul puts food out for the ground feeders early in the morning.

It's really astounding how many Columbidae fly up when I go to the back door (wood pigeons, town pigeons and collared doves).

>41 haydninvienna: Amazing facts about the books in roads.

>46 Maddz: We used to see all of those in Bicester too. Here we have feral pigeons and a couple of native species of doves.

>43 jillmwo: "socially redeeming value": They're not monkeys.

>49 hfglen: Maybe so, but as >45 haydninvienna: explained, they are at least a food option for the peregrine falcons. So there's some potential for value.

>50 jillmwo: Aye. It's a second point in the pigeons' favour. We need a couple of leopards in this suburb ...

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it tomorrow and to those who don’t (either not at all or on a different day), have a wonderful day. Mrs H and I are going to the pub for lunch again—a different one from the one we went to last Christmas, which isn’t doing a Christmas Day lunch this year.

>52 haydninvienna: The same to you, have a great day!

>52 haydninvienna:
Enjoy your lunch and your Christmas.

>52 haydninvienna: And likewise to you!

Happy holiday to all! The turkey has gone in the oven.

Boxing Day. Bright, sunny Brisbane summer day, and I'm desultorily reading Bleak House while doing the washing (we normally wash on Wednesday at Villa Costa Lotta, but that wasn't to be thought of this week). I got distracted with the character of Harold Skimpole. Skimpole is a poet and musician and has other accomplishments but is incapable of managing his life, and he lives, basically, by sponging on his friends. Skimpole is supposed to be an exact portrait of the poet, essayist and journalist Leigh Hunt, and what interests me is that I can find nothing in the brief biography of Hunt in Wikipedia to justify the assertion that he was a sponger. True, he was often in financial difficulty but he seems to have been uncommonly hard-working, and since he was on the Whig side he must have found it hard to make a living as a journalist under what was at times a pretty oppressive government. In 1812 (probably a bad time to do it; there was a war on at the time) Hunt and his brother published an article libelling the Prince Regent, who later became King George IV. I copy shamelessly from the blog 1812now:

On March 22, 1812, Leigh Hunt and his brother, John, publish an article written by Leigh under the title “The Prince on St. Patrick’s Day.” The article is a scathing response to the sycophantic encomium to the Prince Regent that had been published by the Morning Post on March 19, 1812. Leigh Hunt's article is a thundering sarcastic hammer that destroys every phrase of praise that the Morning Post had used with respect to the Prince. Hunt writes, in part, as follows:

"What person, unacquainted with the true state of the case, would imagine, in reading these astounding eulogies, that this Glory of the People was the subject of millions of shrugs and reproaches! That this Protector of the Arts had named a wretched Foreigner his Historical Painter in disparagement or in ignorance of the merits of his own countrymen! That this Maeceans* of the Age patronized not a single deserving writer! That this Breather of Eloquence could not say a few decent extempore words -- if we are to judge at least from what he said to his regiment on its embarkation to Portugal! That this Conquerer of Hearts was the disappointer of hopes! That this Exciter of Desire—this Adonis in loveliness, was a corpulent man of fifty!— In short, this delightful, blissful, wise, pleasurable, honourable, virtuous, true, and immortal PRINCE, was a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps**, a man who had just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country, or the respect of posterity.

The Hunts knew that they could be charged with libel. They had already been to court to face libel charges as a result of articles condemning flogging of British soldiers and sailors, corruption in military promotions and the rights of Irish Catholics. Juries had on each occasion refused to convict. The same would not happen after the 22nd of March. The government brought charges for libel. A trial was held on December 1812. They were found guilty. The Court's sentence was read:

The sentence of the court upon you, therefore, is, that you severally pay to the king a fine of £500 each; that you be severally imprisoned for the space of two years; you, John Hunt, in the prison in Coldbath-fields, and you, Leigh Hunt, in the New Jail for the county of Surrey in Horsemonger-lane; that at the expiration of that time, you each of you give security in £500 and two sufficient sureties in £250 for your good behaviour during five years, and that you be further severally imprisoned until such fine be paid, and such security given."

On hearing the sentence, the Hunts bowed to the Court and withdrew. The sentence and imprisonment made them heroes to the Whig opposition.

Original here.

*sic: "Maecenas". Patron of the arts under the Emperor Augustus.

** Good word, this. "Demi-rep": half a reputation. A lady of easy virtue, as the time had it.

In justification of Hunt's diatribe, I refer you to the brief epigram on the four Georges that I quoted a few weeks ago here. Walter Savage Landor, who wrote that little squib, was one of a circle that included Leigh Hunt.