LW's clubbable 2021

This year is shaping to be a strange one, with a (possibly) lethargic first half and (probably) hectic second half. I'm in a kind of limbo at the moment, with too many uncertainties and other people's decisions affecting any long-term plans I'd make. So, as one simple thing I can do right now, that's entirely up to me... let there be this thread. :)

I don't make reading plans or go for "challenges" but I found my reading clumps around a few abiding interests anyway--for example, what I call "the 20th century blues", the inter-war decades, modernism in art and literature, all emancipatory trends--feminism, anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, etc. I read more non-fiction than fiction. I read more old/classic fiction than contemporary.

In a typical year I go through too much material to discuss everything (last year I read 222 books--a good hundred or so under my average), and the fact that quite a lot of it is stuff inexistent or difficult to procure in English makes me hesitant to talk about it. However, insofar I'd like to leave as authentic a record of this year as possible, I'll try to mark everything but expand on just a minority of titles.



Don't kiss me : the art of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Jersey Heritage Trust, 2006

Héroïnes, Claude Cahun, Original Publication Date (OPD)--1925

The year began with a monograph on the life-and-work partnership of two extraordinary women, Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob) and Marcel Moore (Suzanne Malherbe). They met in Nantes in 1909 as girls of fifteen and seventeen, respectively, and remained together until Cahun's death in 1954. Cahun is the better known one, being recognised as one of the key figures in Surrealism and a pioneering "alternative"-thinker of gender, but even she has only relatively recently started to be valued as the pivotal artist she was. (A theme that comes up a lot when revisiting history of art.)

Heroines is a collection of prose pieces originally published in a literary journal. Almost all present famous female figures of myth or history--Eve, Judith, Salome, Sappho, Cinderella... seen, to put it mildly, under a different light. Cinderella, for instance, turns out to be a masochist absolutely delighted with the mistreatment she suffers at the hands of her evil stepmother and stepsisters, and agrees to marry the Prince (a shoe fetishist whose interest in women begins and ends at their feet) only after her fairy godmother convinces her that the torment of submitting to that match, therefore going against her nature, would be the greatest yet.

We have gotten used to "retellings" of this kind, but in 1925... The facsimile of the first batch can be viewed here:

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k201972m.image.r=claude+cahun.f64.langEN#

The war and occupying Nazi forces found Cahun and Moore living on Jersey island. Remarkably, the couple launched a covert resistance campaign that lasted four years, until they were caught in 1944, imprisoned, tried and sentenced to death. They tried to commit suicide but were found on time and transported to the hospital, and eventually returned to the prison. They were released about a year later upon the arrival of the Allied forces, but Cahun's health never recovered from the prison experience. Moore survived her by some eighteen years and died by suicide.

Composite photo of Cahun and Moore:

The walk by Robert Walser (no relation!) is perfect. That is all.

Kurt Tucholsky's name will be coming up a lot this year. Sehnsucht nach der Sehnsucht (Yearning after yearning) is a collection of this unforgettable, tragically prescient man-of-letters' more or less light verse on the topic of love. While hardly a feminist, Tucholsky was clear-eyed about the faults of his own sex:

Frauen sind eitel? I bewahre.
Das ist nichts gegen männliche Exemplare. ...

(Women are vain? Gimme a break. That's nothing compared to male specimens...)

The hanging tree by Ben Aaronovitch--I'm afraid I forget what happened with the last page, but they are fairly amusing while they last.

Moving pictures:

I prattled about two 1970s French televisual Gothic delights here:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/327219#7371340

In addition to that, I saw Melville's beautiful-looking and impeccably directed Un flic (1972), with Alain Delon and Catherine Deneuve at their most impossibly gorgeous. Not my favourite actors and a rather trite story, but the whole package is supreme eye candy (for those who can withstand 1970s homophobia etc.)

Last but not least, the only "category" of film I'll deliberately pursue while possible are East German movies made by the DEFA. These were a revelation to me just a couple years back, on a now-gone YouTube channel. Amazingly, the North American streaming service Kanopy offers quite a selection of DEFA films and I intend to see as many as I can fit.

Number 37 of those seen so far, Spur der Steine (The trace of stones), 1966, with Manfred Krug (the only one I recognised, thanks to his role in the Tatort series). The film is based on a novel (touchstoned) about a small band of workers who go about their job in a manner deemed "anarchic" by their uptight "good Communist" bosses. When the (sole) female engineer on site falls pregnant by her married lover--the Party conscience of the company as it were--the latter's hypocrisy and cowardice are shown up by the rude but honourable leader of the "anarchists".

The story delightfully doesn't go where an American movie would take it, repeatedly. The adulterer is a schmoe and a weakling, but also a loving dad, and funny on occasion. Balla "the anarchist" brawler and sexist pig becomes the girl's true friend. And she fends for herself without losing her sense of humour or respect for the workers.

Not in the top class of my favourites but a solid movie, and interesting for many reasons beyond purely filmic.

It was distributed and shown long enough to win a prize (FIRESCI) then bunkered until 1991.

Kathi and Balla, intelligentsia and labour, woman and man, overcoming differences:

>2 LolaWalser: The walk by Robert Walser (no relation!) is perfect. That is all.

Yes, it should be a compulsory New Year re-read!

I’ve got the book of Spur der Steine lined up on the TBR pile, hoping to get to it this year. Slightly intimidating in length...

>3 thorold:

I remembered you had read it but I figure it was another book of the author's. Frankly, unless the guy writes like an angel, I'd as soon recommend seeing the movie instead. Ooooh now I'll never make it to book-heaven... :p

Starring your thread.

>1 LolaWalser: How did I not hear of them before? I looked up Claude Cahun on my local library website: a handful of titles are available... as long as you're a fine arts student! I might have to befriend one just to get access to their library card...

>2 LolaWalser: >3 thorold: I've been meaning to read Robert Walser for years, but never got round to it. I've now placed a library hold on The Walk.

So glad to see you here, Lola! ;-)

>6 avaland:

Lois! Thank you, gracious lady. :)

>5 Dilara86:

It is amazing that more hasn't been written about them way before. Cahun's photography is best known, they were both interested in experimental theatre, Moore worked as an illustrator in many venues--books, fashion... I suggest googling for Images under their names (e.g. cahun moore) to get some sense of what they did.

They are bound to become better known--and three years ago they became the first same-sex couple anywhere to be recognised with an official street name!



By the way, I didn't mention it before as there's so much, and this is probably a tidbit known to whoever knew of Cahun anyway--she is the niece of the symbolist writer Marcel Schwob and there are many connections in her early evolution to him and that generation.

>1 LolaWalser: "So, as one simple thing I can do right now, that's entirely up to me... let there be this thread. :)"

Amen! I always learn a lot from your posts. Looking forward to following your reading this year.

I’m also glad to see your thread. So far everything posted is new to me and fascinating.

>1 LolaWalser: That looks fascinating and also somehow familiar... I feel like I've seen their work before. Maybe in my other life many moons ago as an art student. Anyway, thanks for the exposition on the book, and I'm glad to have it on my radar.

>1 LolaWalser: Happy to lurk through your thread this year!

>7 LolaWalser: Seeing the street name sign brings up vague memories. I might actually have read an article about them in the Guardian... Anyway, thanks for bringing them to my attention. I've placed a hold on Le coeur de Pic. It may not be a perfect introduction to their work, but it is borrowable from my library.

I am going to enjoy this thread - plunging into European culture. I am sure there will be lots here to explore; Cahun and Moore to start with.

Greetings, visitors, thanks for dropping by, and remember natter is welcome regardless of matter... :) (and yes I shall rhyme unconcerned for sense or shame...)

>12 Dilara86:

Curses! None of Deharme's books are available for circulation! and I lost my super-special uni lib privileges. Thanks for the ref though (adds entry to the infinite wishlist).

Last evening I was unexpectedly yet predictably gripped by an old book, Die drei gerechten Kammacher (Three just comb-makers) by the Swiss Gottfried Keller--a schooldays staple, at least in my generation. I actually bought this book for the edition, which is from 1918 (but a 1923 printing, my copy) by the legendary Kurt Wolff--well, he's a legend to me anyway... Wolff published first editions of Kafka and other young writers of the time and became known as a cutting-edge modernist publisher (not the only one, of course, that period was bursting with invention and progressive zeal). He escaped from the Nazis to the States (eventually) and continued publishing--he and his wife started Pantheon Books. But he was never to Americans what he was to Germans in the teenies and the twenties of last century...

I'm a "collector" mostly by default, but in the case of the Kurt Wolff Verlag I'd ideally want the entire catalogue. So far, alas, I have but five, one of which is this Keller.



The novella was first published in 1856 in a collection of stories about the imaginary but totally Swiss little town called Seldwyla at which Keller pokes fun in a more or less (mostly less) loving manner. Three poor journeymen work for a master combmaker and compete, in silent torment, to be the one who'll buy the shop off him when he retires. The poor sods work non-stop, sleep three to a bed and subsist mostly on cabbage, and yet rather than think to organise and present a united front to their outrageous exploiter, they suffer ever-longer hours with ever-decreasing pay. As the prospects for the shop get worse--they have enriched the master so much he decides to fire them all--they start competing for the one eligible girl within their reach, the town washerwoman's somewhat oldish and bizarre daughter.

The story is contemporary but the work system looks medieval--the journeymen are hired on a temporary basis and expected to take off in spring--skilled migrant labour then as now. They carry little ledgers with good conduct testimonies and references that they present in each new town. Completely at the mercy of the town authorities, the masters, and the weather.

The story ends with the youngest journeyman getting the insufferable girl, while the other two end up one a suicide and the other a lunatic. Almost to the end it still reads as a protracted joke, and then--bam! Swiss Realismus painting the need for Socialismus!

I meant to take a few pics of the beautiful Fraktur type and the woodcuts (by Ernst Würtenberger) but it turns out all the illustrations are right here and you can enlarge them too! In case you happen to be a woodcut nerd...

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_drei_gerechten_Kammmacher

Under Moving pictures, in the eternal shuffling stuff around to put away, watched Claire Denis' Beau Travail from 1999, which I hadn't seen since it came out. Just as beautiful and upsetting as I remembered. A tale of jealousy and some other mess of feelings among soldiers in a Foreign Legion outpost in Djibouti. The scenes of training are my favourite, the emphasis, unlike in other films about soldiers, is on the grace and beauty of physical exertion, not its brutalising effect on the body (and mind).

I don't think I have the background to appreciate your reading, but I am looking forward to witnessing it. My husband is/was a photographer and taught university photography classes. I think I know that photograph of Cahun and Moore.

>15 sallypursell:

Half the time--OK, four-fifths of the time--I don't have the background to appreciate what I read, but has it stopped me?! Not so far! :) At some level this is me trying to feed all the hungry curiosities I had to leave behind to specialise.

Yes, I think the first half of the image above, with Cahun, is the one often seen as one of her auto-portraits.

>16 LolaWalser: That was lovely, gentle, encouragement. I'll see you later.

“a schooldays staple” ? Interesting Swiss school kids

Cool edition and history of it.

Heh, it's like posting about a story by, ummm let's say Hawthorne... but without the cool Vincent Price movie adaptations.

Just got a truly embarrassing haul from the library. Must read SOME of these first pronto.

The truth is that I'm in withdrawal with all the bookshops closed and this is sort of like shopping/browsing, the next best, in the circumstances.

La piramide di fango by Andrea Camilleri

I've been reading these since... forever? but took a break a few years ago after one with a particularly sadistic murder of a woman. I get a kick out of the dialect, Salvo's character, his and the author's leftism, and, last but not least, because of a familiar sense of quiet doom descending on a Mediterranean scene pretty much like my own--and for the same reasons: a dying off, decay, pollution, corruption, political paralysis, stupidity, cruelty. If that seems vague, more often than not there are concrete (ha) analogies, for example the rampant and unstoppable destruction of the coast by illegal (or "legal") building, mafioso wheeling and dealing etc.

For these features I overlook the terrible women and foreigners--one could argue at least that that too reflects simply Italian truth, which is still one of a society extremely sexist and racist regardless of the good intentions of many.

This entry begins with a dead man on a construction site who didn't die there. The conspiracy Montalbano uncovers rings only too true to the reality of such settings.

Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man, by Emmanuel Acho (2020).

This is an excellent primer for the current discussion about racism and anti-racism, covering everything from terminology, implicit bias, cultural appropriation, white privilege, systemic racism, interracial relationships and more. The writing is concise and the tone warm--hard to imagine "uncomfortable" conversations approached with greater care for the other side. The primary target audience are white Americans but no doubt any white person could profit from it. Acho, who I didn't know of before, is a Nigerian-American sports figure and football analogies and references are ingeniously and appropriately made. So, among other qualities, could be an especially apt introduction for a youngster in one's life.

Hilma af Klint, visionary (various authors) was published in the wake of the 2018 Guggenheim exhibition of af Klint's paintings. This is the second book about af Klint (1862-1944) I've read and complements the other by offering essays on theosophy, the context in which it (and af Klint and her art) developed, the connections made by "seekers" between spiritualism and science at the turn of the past century, and so on.

(Re)discoveries are always exciting. Whether one agrees or not that af Klint is the "first" abstract painter, beating to the title the usual row of white men--Kupka, Malevich, Kandinsky, Mondrian...--her (re)appearance means another salutary rethinking about what we know and how we see the history of art.

Af Klint was academically trained and worked, among other, as a scientific illustrator in a veterinary school. In her mid-forties she abandoned figurative painting and turned to creating vast mystical (and mysterious) canvasses bursting with a often familiar but highly personalised symbology. These projects were planned and sketched with the aid of numerous notebooks, many of which she destroyed before death, but what she left is being used to decipher and throw more light on the paintings.

Because so much or perhaps all of this work is therefore "illustrative" in a way, expressive of ideas, in the 1980s when she first came back to notice she was dismissed as somehow not a real artist, a lesser type of artist, and her paintings not real paintings but rather "diagrams". We can all ponder for ourselves whether it makes sense to judge what is and isn't art on the basis of "idea-content" behind it... Of course, af Klint's intentions were also scrutinised. Did SHE think she was making art or was she merely communicating mystical messages--or, not much more "artistic"--communicating with the spiritual world via her paintings?

Well, while she doesn't seem to have expanded on the question herself, what is certain is that she tried to get her work exhibited and after repeated failures to interest anyone, retreated into isolation, as far as the art world was concerned.

This case is a must for anyone interested in the roots of abstract art or pioneering women painters.

Note to self: could she have crossed paths with, or crossed the path of, occultist Strindberg? Just how large could have been the spiritualist scene in Sweden, and didn't Strindberg himself paint in service of mystical interests.

This picture to show the scale of the paintings:

Sorry about the touchstones. They were there, now they are not, and nothing seems to work to bring them back. Oh, well, maybe later.

The Moving pictures roundup.

Groundhog day, 1993. Never seen it before, although I knew the main premise vaguely--guy lives through the same day over and over--and thought I'd finally flesh out that bit of pop culture. I was under the impression that it's a children's movie so it's a good thing it's not. Also, I didn't know Andie MacDowell was in it or I'd never have started watching, can't stand her. Not a huge fan of Murray either. After such unpromising setup, I was pleasantly surprised to discover the script was great (barring some elements, like the caricaturally "brilliant" prowess in everything the hero achieves during his temporal loop imprisonment) and really moving. Not for the, yuck, romance (not that I grudge it), but the questions it raises--how many things in the past would we rewrite if we could? Which ones? But would it be fair to people around us, treating them like extras in our lives, manipulating their responses?

One might note this manipulation is all the hero can think about in the first part and it's precisely what he has to give up in order to break the spell.

So in the end, what CAN be done about the past mistakes? Nothing. but you can 1. slow down somehow 2. to recognise them 3. and try not to repeat them.

Killer Klowns From Outer Space, 1988--it just came to me, after watching the attack on the US Capitol, that I wanted to see this movie again. I swear I wasn't even making a conscious connection--THEN, I just wanted to unwind and relax with something colourfully silly with my dinner after a nerve-wracking day.

Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears, 2019. Strictly for the fans of the TV series. I love Essie Davis and her divine Miss Fisher, enjoy the retro music and the costumes, Phryne and Jack have great chemistry--mucho sizzle, love wins. Special plus for gorgeous location filming in Morocco.

Was amazed to hear about the fans crowd-funding the film and taking part in it as extras. Good vibes all around.

Love the Montalbano TV show

>20 LolaWalser: >23 baswood: Luca Zingaretti taking his shirt off in every episode of the TV series is fun, but I think I enjoy the books more. I only read about one a year, so it's a new challenge getting to grips with the dialect every time.

I thought I'd read that one, but I was thinking of the earlier short story "Il quarto segreto" which I read last year, that also starts with a corpse on a building site.

I think the touchstones get broken if you edit a post several times in quick succession. They usually seem to come back after a while.

>22 LolaWalser: We were supposed to go and see the Phryne Fisher movie last year however Covid happened. Thanks to your reminder I've requested it from the library.

I love Groundhog Day! 🙂

Your comments on Hilma af Klint take me straight to The Blazing World, the Siri Hustvedt version (not the Cavendish one, which I haven’t read). I wasn’t aware of af Klint’s history or that Hustvedt must have had her (a non-Minnesotan Swedish counterpart!) in mind. Interesting

>23 baswood:, >24 thorold:

I'm aware of the show but haven't watched it, like Mark, I find the books have a charm all their own. Plus I have a very definite image of Salvo and that bruiser doesn't look anything like him!

Sorta kinda... the poet/singer Francesco Guccini :)



Always glad to hear people like the show, though, because worry #188,967 keeping me awake at night is "the television is terrible, the cinema is in shambles, the theatre is moribund--what are poor Italian actors to do? Will there be any in the future? Finita la Commedia?"

>25 rhian_of_oz:

So cool! I have no other fans around me--I'd love to hear your impressions. The DVD extras by the way--do check them out!

>26 dchaikin:

I shall be watching Groundhog Day again for sure.

Hmmm, now I'm intrigued about that Hustvedt book again. I did start once but for whatever reason it was heavy-going for me. Maybe just a bad moment... I suppose there will be a lot of material coming out about af Klint yet. There is a lot of disparate stuff to consider and process, including (I forget where I got the hint of this) that she/her family weren't on the good side of history in the WWII.

>27 LolaWalser: Hustvedt’s novel timeline perspective is “today”, which I think means 2015 or something like that. I don’t recall af Klint mentioned. It’s just the artist she creates has some parallels to af Klint that I’m thinking now are meaningful. I first read Hustvedt last year, and just really enjoyed being in her mindset.

From the MIT Press Reader, on the occasion of the publication of The Broadcast 41: Women and the Anti-Communist blacklist by Carol A. Stabile:

How the FBI Destroyed the Careers of 41 Women in TV and Radio

... there was a great deal of optimism after World War II, that people could use television to promote civil rights, democracy, to educate and uplift people. Then you have the blacklist. By 1950, many of the innovators who had written and worked on progressive programs prior to 1950 were out of the industry. They had been silenced by the force of the anti-communist backlash. A lot of the book is based on FBI files which I’m still receiving 10 years later. What’s revealed in these documents really emphasized that there was this whole other possible trajectory for TV. Imagine American television if W.E.B. Du Bois had been a news commentator at CBS. This was one of the things that the FBI was really concerned about. And this was a real possibility, CBS was actually talking about the whiteness of their newsroom and the need to have rich and varied voices. (...)

Reading “Red Channels,” I noticed that in an industry that was overwhelmingly male: 41 of the 151 people listed in the pages were women. That surprised me so I started looking at the profiles of these women, and found that it was a fascinating group. Anti-communists were casting a wide net so some of these women were classical musicians, some of them were choreographers or actors. A handful were writers, like Vera Caspary. Some were members of the Communist Party, such as Shirley Graham Du Bois, whose husband was W.E.B. Du Bois. Vera Caspary was also a member. Some of these women were liberals. Some of them were blacklisted simply for their support of the New Deal and Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the depression. There was a wide range of politics within this group, representing positions from across the spectrum of American left. (...)

CAS: The anti-communist movement begins after World War I, born out of the fear that there might be a revolution in the United States, similar to the Bolshevik Revolution. During World War II, the attacks on progressives in the media lessen. There are other things going on. It wasn’t an opportune moment to invoke fears of communism and socialism. But they start to ramp up almost immediately after World War II. There’s a lot of concern about the growing power of the civil rights movement. And even though “communist” is the name they give their targets, a lot of the fears are fueled by white supremacy and the fear of civil rights.

In fairness, in the United States, the Communist Party was the only party to support a federal anti-lynching law. The Communist Party, whatever else you want to say about it, had views on race that were far more progressive than either of the two official parties. Meanwhile, the FBI has been gathering information on so-called communists for as long as it’s been in operation. (...)

You didn’t even have to belong to the Communist Party. They had this term “fellow traveler” that encompasses anyone who wasn’t willing to publicly support anti-communist principles in politics. They smeared people and called them in front of The House Un-American Activities Committee. They promoted rumors and gossip, all of it without factual backing. (...)

People learned to self-censor. People who remained in the industry realized that there were topics that had become associated with communism that you couldn’t talk about. Immigration is one. (...) Writing about race, writing about women’s liberation, writing about immigration, all became very controversial. While there were people who still manage to do some of this work, it was not easy to do it and it certainly wasn’t encouraged. Can I give you just one example that I love?

SK: Please do.

CAS: Okay. Do you know the BBC program “The Hour” (2011), which was about a BBC newsroom in the 1950s?

SK: Yeah.

CAS: If you look at that alongside “Mad Men,” I think you get a sense of the long-term effects. In “Mad Men,” what you have is a fantasy of the 1950s in which women aren’t part of the industry at all. They just accidentally happened into it. They’re kind of stupid, and get pregnant without even knowing it, until they give birth. But if you look at “The Hour,” it’s a really different depiction of the struggle faced by women in that industry. There were women in the industry. I think that you get a lot of historical representations that are warped by the anti-communist lens. (...)

Dang, I do need to read that Hustvedt. It was one of those books that I was SO HOT for and then by the time I got hold of a copy, I was busy with other reading and never picked it up. I loved the af Klint exhibition when it was in NYC—it was one of those shows that's an experience, and when you come out of it the world looks a bit different for a little while, though I'd be hard pressed to say exactly how or why. Have you seen the documentary on her, Beyond the Visible? It was very good.

Groundhog Day is one of those movies I can watch over and over again, no meta joke intended.

>30 lisapeet:

The coincidence of Guggenheim's architectural spiral and af Klint's spiral symbolism must have made a strong impression. Although it's not clear that they succeeded in laying out much more than a chronological progression of her work--as I understand it, they are still far from deciphering all her "meanings".

I haven't seen that documentary but I subscribe to a German art channel which I think has it (I seem to recall the title)--they do have something on af Klint anyway. It's in my several-hundred-items queue, of course... :)

The Groundhog Day strikes me as very rewatchable. Brilliant screenplay, nothing superfluous, no idling.

It was really striking in the Guggenheim, and I can't imagine a better venue for her work—especially the really large ones. I had the feeling the curators were leaving a lot of the associative work up to the viewer, though maybe that's charitable and they just didn't know what else to do with it other than hang it beautifully. But honestly, that was fine. There was enough explicatory text so you could engage with it however you liked, and I feel like I got a strong sense of what she was after from the show. Mostly I'm glad I caught it when it was here, which now feels like a million years ago.

Solutions and other problems, Allie Brosh, 2020

Years ago I saw a strange little amphibian face in someone's avatar icon on Tumblr and immediately felt drawn to it--it wasn't just a doodle, it had an expression that spoke to me, even mistaking the wedge on its head for a fin (it was hair). The Tumblr-er directed me to the artist's blog. Later Hyperbole and a half came out, with one of my favourite comic tales of all time, about the cake and the dinosaur. Probably the best childhood story I know--or best-told, at least.

This book is just as good, but even more sad. I was aghast to read about the tragedies that befell her. But here is the book, the ultimate proof of life and struggle. I felt guilty at times at the laughter and uplift that had cost someone's misery first, but this is her gift to others.



Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly, 2020

Definitely the third Guerrilla Girls book that will go to my budding artist (niece). A graphic overview of the GG feminist campaigns to break the white male monopoly in the art world--and wider consciousness--from the beginning in 1984 to our days. It's gratifying to note that from the very start the GGs were intersectional, scrupulously paying attention not just to sexism but racism and other forms of discrimination. Long may they growl!



Aubrey Beardsley: Decadence and Desire, Jan Marsh, 2020

Not the book you'll want if you wish to pore over Beardsley's graphics in detail, being rather small (19x17 cm), but a nice quick overview with two welcome improvements over the most common volumes--the colour reproductions of some of his lesser-known posters, advertisements, paintings, and a modern attitude to the traditionally fraught questions about his sexuality (who knows!), character (rather nasty, probably!), friendships (not many! if any!)

Then again, lifelong illness ending in death at 25 might sour even an angel...



Ô dingos, ô châteaux !, Jean-Patrick Manchette, OPD 1972

I'm reading in order through a Manchette omnibus, this is the third title (of twelve; two I had read before). A young woman with a past of mental problems is hired straight out of the sanatorium to take care of a boy. Mere days later she and the boy are kidnapped by an assassin with gastrointestinal problems, and his aides, a couple of not-too-bright thuggish brothers. After this, it's all spoilers...

I see the NYRB Classics line has issued this one; that will speak to many people. I became a Manchette fangirl with La position du tireur couché and every subsequent book reinforced the sympathy. But it's difficult to predict who'd fall for him or not. Fans of noir and hardboiled--maybe, but in my opinion he actually explodes this genre, most cynically and amusingly. Maybe Willeford has a touch of similar anarchist tendencies... but it doesn't get to the zany carnevalesque proportions of the "nothing is sacred" mayhem in Manchette.

Rule of thumb, one and only, is that everything that can go wrong will go wrong--but you won't be sure for which side until the very last.

Moving pictures

A better person would skip this one, but I gotta keep track: Fritz Lang's last American movie, the 1956 Beyond reasonable doubt, is awful. How does anyone know this was directed by Lang and not by three raccoons in his coat? The boring story predictably told has the most hare-brained premise ever: a critic of capital punishment persuades his son-in-law-to-be (totally unenthusiastic Dana Andrews) to get himself accused of a crime he didn't commit and sentenced to death--in order to show how easy it is to get an innocent man onto the death row. The two of them concoct fake evidence but also take photos proving they are doing this, the idea being that when the time comes they'd reveal their cunning plan.

Well this goes exactly as you'd expect. The hapless father-in-law-to-be dies in an accident and the evidence of the fake evidence disappears with him. Oh noes! Execution it is. The fiancée (Joan Fontaine, for some reason looking fifty) laments elegantly throughout and there is a last-minute saviouring and a last-minute twist. The twist is not bad, I'll give it that, but also not sufficient!

I discovered that one of the local TV channels will let me stream some stuff. Saw a few eps of "Maude" with Beatrice Arthur. Previously I only knew her from a Threepenny Opera recording, and maybe two and a half eps of Golden Girls. I like her! And this is dated but also not so much! Did you know people were making fun of white liberal hypocrisy in the 1970s? Like, with the black maid, Florida, and the tokenism etc.

I’m not familiar with Aubrey Beardsley, but that cover is gorgeous. Intriguing review. Enjoyed this whole post.

Beardsley died at 25? I didn't know that. When I was a kid my parents had a copy of Aubrey Beardsley's Erotic Universe on the shelves, which I checked out for the potential dirty stuff and ended up really liking because of its cartoony lines and black-and-white work.

>35 lisapeet:

Shocking, isn't it? He packed a lot in his last 6-7 years, but yeah, died a baby practically.

>34 dchaikin:

You may have seen some of his drawings and designs around, they are almost a cliché for some things, English aestheticism, Oscar Wilde... he also has so many imitators and epigones, people sometimes forget what a shooting star he was.

He had a unique gift for being beautiful, grotesque, perverse, and funny, all at the same time. A print from his most (in)famous set, the illustrations for Lysistrata (privately published):

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/679190

Nice view of the original book here:

https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2020/books-and-manuscripts-a-summer-misc...

He wasn’t shy. I think Aristophanes would be incredibly flattered.

Haha, no on shyness! Then again, it was meant just for the eyes of a very select set of 100 special gentlemen... :)

>33 LolaWalser: Thank you for reminding me about Allie Brosh's second book. Her Cake story is one of my favourites of all time because (even at 50) I can totally relate to it.

>39 rhian_of_oz:

Isn't it wonderful! She makes one recall truly what childhood is like.

RidgewayGirl is also reading the book, I'm sure she'll be more eloquent than I was about it.

I listened to this yesterday and am still thinking about it, so, for keeps:

SPECIAL: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in His Own Words (Democracy Now)

"While Dr. King is primarily remembered as a civil rights leader, he also championed the cause of the poor and organized the Poor People’s Campaign to address issues of economic justice. Dr. King was also a fierce critic of U.S. foreign policy and the Vietnam War. We play his “Beyond Vietnam” speech, which he delivered at New York City’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, as well as his last speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” that he gave on April 3, 1968, the night before he was assassinated."

If there are any fans or even occasional watchers of early film--from silent through WWII, say--this group would love to see you:

https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/22573/The-Silent-Screen-Early-Sound-Film

That's where I post in more detail (sometimes) about films from that period so I won't be repeating those posts here.

I had a great time yesterday bingeing on Criterion Collections "closet picks"--they invite over film people and let them choose stuff from their catalogue.

Just a few favourites:

Agnès Varda’s Closet Picks

Kim Cattrall's Closet Picks

And this guy I didn't know but he picked both Varda and Claire Denis and so few men choose women filmmakers that was just heartwarming:

Joachim Trier's DVD Picks

Oh, this saddens me so much...

Mira Furlan: Babylon 5 and Lost actress dies at 65

I didn't know her but knew many people who did, including my SIL and brother, and I'm not sure I know of another person loved by so many.

>43 LolaWalser: That's really sad. Sorry to read this.

Briefe an eine Katholikin (Letters to a Catholic {woman}), Kurt Tucholsky, written 1929-1931, first published (one letter) 1929; this selection 1970.

In 1929 Tucholsky published a Letter to a Catholic {woman} as a slim pamphlet in a red wrapper. As his correspondent notes in the Introduction, she had been very excited to see it on sale everywhere and discussed, as Tucholsky's articles were wont to be, by everyone. Tucholsky had published this letter with her permission but she wanted to remain anonymous--until she personally broke her anonymat to an acquaintance who irritated her by claiming Tucholsky was putting on a show and there was no "Catholic woman" in conversation with him.

At the beginning of this conversation lasting about 18 months or so, was Marierose Fuchs' critical article about the work of a number of popular cultural and journalistic figures, including Tucholsky. The article had been published in the Catholic periodical Germania, the official paper of the Deutsche Zentrumspartei (in the letters just "Zentrum"), in the Weimar period the leading party of the political (is there any other...) Catholicism.

Tucholsky replied to Fuchs personally, protesting some of what she said but also taking the opportunity to lay out his opinions on religion and politics in greater detail. They continued on to exchange letters and books, with the older Tucholsky falling into the posture of a mentor, not that there was ever any question of "converting" this good Catholic girl to his Communist-adjacent way of thinking.

Some details I wish to remember in particular: Fuchs (who btw was 72 when this book was first published in 1970) describing how anxious she was for the safety of Tucholsky's letters when she went rummaging in the wreckage after the war--she had buried them when the Nazis came to power--and how she cried when precisely the longest and most "beautiful" one turned up from the ruin missing pages--and how, rereading them after the war, she couldn't believe what she had found objectionable about Tucholsky's opinions as a young woman. Most important, her saying that he was right, had always been right.

Twice he urged her to read Kafka, and talked about having met him, in the most glowing terms.

From one of the last letters, February 21, 1931:

In life the fronts are never called: Catholicism and Bolshevism. They may be that, when one compares methods (there the two are again very similar)--but there is exactly that unreasonable self-overestimation that I so reproach the Church with. It can't compete even numerically. Believe me: already today there are countries filled with people who either belong to completely different Asian religions, or for whom the Church is nothing.

The fronts are called in the materialistic struggle: Bolshevism and Capitalism. Oh, yes, I know... "d' spirichual" {Tucholsky jokes in Berlin's idiom, "det Jeistige"}. Spare me the yarns: people want to eat, they want not to have tuberculosis... dear Fuchs, I have one objection against Christianity:

it has never helped anything.

What does the history of the Christian, the super-Christian, lands look like? Bloodcurdling. Then? Then it's nothing, serves nothing, helps nothing--after such a war you still want to talk about it? Comforting wounds... indeed. Who has so failed, must fall silent.

As Tucholsky went into exile, buffeted by ill winds between France, England, Sweden, the slight correspondence between two almost comically opposed people (in more than just the political sense) petered out. Four years later Tucholsky would kill himself, at 45.

There's a facsimile reproduction of a dedication he once wrote to Fuchs, its melancholy ringing so true for so many people uncertainly communicating from their "front" lines: "To Marierose Fuchs, who is to him so far and near..."

>44 rocketjk:

Tragic. But she left much beauty behind.

Ein ganzes Leben (A whole life), Robert Seethaler, 2014

Seethaler tells the story--the entire life--of one Andreas Egger, orphan, mistreated and exploited, given some breaks only to see them withdrawn, finding some joy only to lose it, leaving his alpine village for only the one trip in his life--eight years fighting and imprisonment in Russia--until almost the very end, when six months before death he climbs for the first time onto the local bus and goes sightseeing as far as the bus line extends and back.

If for some reason you wish to experience freezing to death in the mountains, all alone in the world, (but without actually doing so!), this is the book for you.

The descriptive passages about the mountain were my favourite. But what a bunch of stiff, loveless people. No savoir vivre at all.

Murderer's fen, Andre Garve, OPD 1962

A protagonist very much in the vein of Highsmith's Ripley, a charming, highly competent psychopath. Despite being engaged to a heiress who must make his whole fortune, while on holiday he cedes to temptation and seduces another English tourist, a beautiful and naive daughter of god-fearing parents. Since he carefully orchestrated the seduction so that no one else might suspect him, once back home he is VERY shook up to find the girl on his doorstep--and pregnant. Criminal shenanigans ensue. Well written.

I hadn't realized that you'd opened a thread until I said to myself, "who is this LW? I should check out her thread." Yay!

Regarding Allie Brosh, my favorite of her first book was the one that introduced me to her work - Dogs Don't Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving. At the time, we had two dogs -- an affable but spectacularly stupid greyhound and a pit bull mix who had been badly abused -- and the way she wrote of the mind of a dog really struck me as remarkably perceptive. This new book is, so far, more melancholic in tone and she's going deeper.

And I really liked the single book by Jean-Patrick Manchette that I've read. I should read another one.

>48 RidgewayGirl:

Hello!, yes, it is I :) Nice to see you.

the way she wrote of the mind of a dog really struck me as remarkably perceptive.

I haven't had a dog since childhood, but oh yes. And there's more about dogs in the new one! Also a very sad dog story... well, not that the dog knew... I raced through it probably too fast, but as the sad things began piling up I became anxious to see her well & content at the end... but, hmmm...

Manchette is so much wicked fun. If you can find the one with "prone gunman" in the title, that would be my next rec (with due consideration that, first, his type of madcap extreme violence isn't a turnoff.)

>48 RidgewayGirl: >49 LolaWalser: Which book is it that's about the mind of the dog?

>43 LolaWalser: I saw that yesterday before I went to bed. Did not help my mood at all :(

>47 LolaWalser: Seethaler's book sounds interesting. That's the same author who published a novel about Mahler earlier this year, right? Someone was recommending it to me at some point this summer (although I am not sure my German can handle it).

>43 LolaWalser: “stiff, loveless people” — Yes, that seems to sum it up. Interesting in a short book like that, but I don’t know where you can go with that sort of writing beyond that. I wasn’t hugely impressed by Seethaler’s Freud-book; I didn’t know he’d done Mahler as well (>51 AnnieMod:), but the reviews of the Mahler-book aren’t encouraging, so I won’t rush out to look for it.

>45 LolaWalser: Tucholsky is someone else I know embarrassingly little about — sounds interesting, though that book presumably isn’t the obvious place to start.

More Manchette is definitely on my list, somewhere ...

>47 LolaWalser: It looks like Robert Seethaler is having a moment on LT. I've just finished Le champ/Das Feld!

>50 dianeham: The book is Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh. You can find the story in question at Dogs Don't Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving.

>50 dianeham:

Hi, Diane--please see Rhian's link >54 rhian_of_oz:--I hope you like it! :) Btw, those "dog stories" are just some of the stories included, Brosh writes about various episodes from her life (and there's a great "cat story" in the latest book too.)

>51 AnnieMod:

Yes. I'm still getting messages from people who've met her, how nice and warm and unassuming she was, just a good person... (who had been treated shamefully in Croatia, but that's on us to remember and exact apologies for).

I'm not entirely enthused about Seethaler... this was effective, it grabbed me and moved me, but I couldn't help feeling manipulated at the same time, everything was falling into place predictably. I told myself "I bet the guy writes screenplays"--and what do you know, he does. The dying goatherd at the beginning who disappears up the mountain being treated like Chekov's gun in the first act just cemented that sense of... potted emotional spread. "Have a dose of life wisdom" with your tea.

That sounds rather negative but I don't mean it that way, I did like "the message"...

>52 thorold:

Yeah, I'm not sure I'd rush to read another of his, I'm thinking this may be the best he can do anyway. But possibly his films are worth seeing? Wouldn't know, what with keeping company with dead people so much...

I think you might be interested by Tucholsky but yes, don't start with this. I'm in the midst of reading about half a dozen of his books so all recommendations are provisional... of his fiction, Schloss Gripsholm is best known but my own preferences for political non-fiction would lead me to recommend first something like Insel-Bücherei's recent selection »Vorn die Ostsee, hinten die Friedrichstraße«: Ein Lesebuch, which is short and varied and contains examples of his light verse (it helps to remember this was a wildly popular form, what with the political cabaret, theatre etc.) and hard-hitting polemic. If more than just a taster is OK, I'd go for the political satire of Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.--I've almost finished it, along with another book about John Heartfield (Johann Herzfelde), "Dadamonteur", who illustrated it.

Tucholsky is one of those figures whose fascination grows with years--you keep wondering, why was no one listening? What if people had listened, really listened? Here is this guy who wrote, shouted, raved, protested, cried and wept before Nazism about Germany's capacity for Nazism.

Not that he was the only Cassandra either...

but all for naught.

>53 Dilara86:

Coming right over... :)

>22 LolaWalser: I recently watched the Miss Fisher movie, as well, and I was not impressed. The show is of much higher quality in terms of writing and plotting, and the movie was a big let down for me when held up next to it.

It was, I'll admit, a great deal of fun to watch, though, once I had let go of the high expectations set up by the series.

>56 Julie_in_the_Library:

You are probably right, I haven't seen the TV show since it aired (did buy the set though...) But I admit I don't recall it as anything other than playful fluff--with apologies to other fans; I don't consider this a failing for that type of entertainment. On the movie DVD Essie Davis describes Phryne as a kind of superhero, and surely she is, with her out-of-this-world skill set, charm, luck, wealth etc. A fantasy figure.

The plot was rather thin for a big screen movie, I agree. The visual side made up for it for me, but yeah... that's why I said, fans only. :)

Another thing I admired (as only the Ageing can :)) is that this was a couple of fifty-ish leads, albeit playing younger--good for them and everyone involved for having ventured and completed the story at that unromantic (for film, notoriously) age.

>57 LolaWalser: "Another thing I admired (as only the Ageing can :)) is that this was a couple of fifty-ish leads, albeit playing younger--good for them and everyone involved for having ventured and completed the story at that unromantic (for film, notoriously) age."

Honestly, as a woman about to turn 30, it was refreshing for me, too. The way that the media usually portrays older woman doesn't exactly pain a flattering picture of the path ahead, after all. ;)

>54 rhian_of_oz: thank you

Les vieux fourneaux: ceux qui restent, 2014 -- first volume of a series translated as "Old geezers"

My library has only the first three volumes and I'd prefer to reserve final commentary for at least that larger part of the work--when or if I get to it. So this is just by way of a few quick notes. This came up by way of an anti-rec (so to speak ;))--sometimes those are as interesting as positive recommendations--but the reason I did borrow it is that the library description mentioned anarchism, which interests me. However, it's a topic I'd probably prefer in another medium--it's just interesting to see it also in a comic strip form--so am not sure I'll continue.

Three old men, Pierre, Emile and Antoine, are friends from early childhood and variously involved in, or sympathetic to, the leftist struggle. Pierre is the anarcho-syndicalist who still engages in acts of social rebellion. Antoine's granddaughter joins the trio; hers is the "millennial" voice. She has a little speech directed at a bunch of old people, with which I'm much in agreement (my translation):

You are irresponsible, retrograde, bigots, you sacrificed the planet, starved the Third World! In eighty years you made disappear almost all the living species, you used up resources, devoured all the fish! Each year fifty billion chickens are raised in batteries and people are dying of hunger! Historically, you... You are the worst generation in the history of humanity!

The old guys reply with a #NotAllOldPeople... and it's true, no? Some have fought the good fight... but in the end they lost and we all lost because they lost.



Alice, curiouser and curiouser, 2020 (no touchstone), is a beautiful large book accompanying the exhibition last year at the V & A museum. Of particular interest to me was the portfolio of illustrations by Kristjana S. Williams, an illustrator I didn't know before. Her take is inspired by Max Ernst's collages. Another very interesting section was on performing Alice. The designs are far freer than in (commercial) illustrations, presumably because with the latter the expectations of the public tend to the familiar.

The Third Walpurgis Night, Karl Kraus, written 1932-33, OPD 1952

Kraus was a Viennese and Austrian living institution, a man of letters and all-around critic of cultural and political life. He wrote and published a journal, Die Fackel (The Torch), that was for 36 years a thorn in the side of bourgeois complacency and right wing politics. And yet this last great salvo of his against barbarity and inhumanity was at the last moment suppressed by him, although it was already set and ready to print, because he feared for the consequences its publishing could have on the Jews still in Germany. Kraus died in 1936; the book was first published in 1952.

It contains essays on individual Nazis and Nazi sympathisers, Goebbels, Heidegger, Gottfried Benn, on various acts of barbarism that were accumulating every day ever more, on the "satirist's dilemma"--all of this analysed through the travails imposed on the German language, which means on thought itself. (In the introduction the translators make a case such as you can expect in drawing parallels between Kraus' Austria and Trumps' America.)

From Headlong into Servitude: When Madmen Lead the Blind:

What use is the addled brain, that malfunctioning mechanism, faced with a miracle of nature that bedazzles and stupefies us--the big lie of Nazism, which blatantly shifts its shape by the hour yet is never discredited, even when contradicting itself! (...)

"How could it happen?" It could happen because a minority seized existing weapons with which to create new ones, and now as a majority it confronts the groups it vanquished as well as defenceless individuals.

Moving pictures

I mentioned a bunch of silent/early movies in the other group. Of the newer ones, I watched Nicholas Roeg's Bad timing from 1980. Roeg's movies are reliably beautiful-looking, even when the narratives are lacking, and this one is no exception (and with the background of Vienna). But the film as a whole is a failure to me, mainly for the casting of Art Garfunkel in the main role which would have been difficult enough for a real actor. There is no plot properly speaking, everything hinges on our buying into the obsessive sexual relationship between Garfunkel's psychiatrist character and 22-year old Theresa Russell's "mad hippy chick". To my eyes Garfunkel has zero charisma, which emptied their interactions of all charge.

Curiously, Harvey Keitel has a small role as a strange police inspector. I don't know how does one cast Garfunkel as the lead in a story like that when one had an actor like Keitel right there... would have been something else entirely.

The sexual politics of the film suck donkey balls but that, at least, you can say is of its time. Russell is shot naked from head to toe and back to front and back but Garfunkel (and thank god for that) isn't.

Denholm Elliott plays Russell's abandoned Czechoslovak husband. The couple of times he showed up it was like a hint at some other, better movie happening next door in Bratislava.

>60 LolaWalser: Denholm Elliott plays Russell's abandoned Czechoslovak husband. The couple of times he showed up it was like a hint at some other, better movie happening next door in Bratislava.
Ha ha nice

>61 baswood:

:)



The Vampire Cinema, David Pirie, 1977

Excellent book about movie vampires up to the date of publication, much better than what one might expect on average from this type of publisher and subject. Informative on the origins of the lore, Bram Stoker's watershed book, Universal's cycle with Bela Lugosi (et al.) and Hammer Studio's revival with Christopher Lee (et al.), and French, Italian, Spanish and Mexican vampire cinema with their own characteristic representations and features.
Many illustrations were new to me, which is quite remarkable at this point...

Vlad Țepeș enjoying dinner in the soothing view of his impaled enemies--a nearly contemporary woodblock print, from 1499:

La rete di protezione, Andrea Camilleri, 2017

This one had a great hook, better than the whole story turned out to be. A man who had been going through his late father's stuff brings to Montalbano some enigmatic home films, all shot on the same day and time on consecutive years and ceasing with the father's death. The films are all of the same thing, a piece of blank wall. What could it mean?



Berlin city and court, Jules Laforgue, written 1880s, first published in 1922

I'm so glad I got to this years after buying it (there's no telling any more how many of my precioussss I'll manage even to open). I bought it more for the curiosity value--Laforgue being remembered primarily for his highly influential poetry--but it turns out to justify other interests too. Laforgue was only twenty when some friends got him a sorely needed job and he found himself designated French reader to Empress Augusta in 1880. She was then, like her consort, in her eighties--and both would by a good few years outlive tubercular Laforgue, who never saw thirty.

The job left Laforgue a lot of free time which he used to write (at least two books of poetry), hang out in the one cafe that provided foreign newspapers, sight-see, and--introducing a French term if not the passtime--to flâner, stroll around the unprepossessing but burgeoning capital. The German Reich was then less than a decade old--Laforgue mentions running into its engineer Count Bismarck on numerous occasions. Indeed he seems to have run into everyone who was anyone, the Wilhelmine court being characterised by a strange simplicity and ease of access. The Emperor and Empress lived in the main residence on the ground floor with only six servants on hand, and Laforgue remarks it happened often that people would enter it and run straight into one or the other of the sovereigns.

The descriptions of the people, the customs, the balls etc. refer to various French opinions that are on occasion reinforced or overturned--who knew Germans were fiends for dancing?--and all together build an engaging, witty picture.

Moving pictures

I need to rush before I've been watching too much and increasingly remember too little. First two forgettables (but track must be tracked), Konga, 1961, one of the better? worse? who knows? King Kong Knockoffs with nothing more to recommend it than Michael Gough as the vainglorious mad scientist--he was a good actor with a bill-paying (one presumes) line in schlock movie villains. The film poster artist apparently didn't bother to see the movie, Konga is pictured chimp-handling a blonde dame but actually he only grabs Gough.

Next I saw Alice sweet Alice, 1976, a slasher with Catholic nuttery and an evil kid. If this is your jam, bring on the croissants!

And then, quality--two DEFA gems.

Der Fall Gleiwitz (The Gleiwitz case), 1961, deals with one of the infamous staged incidents perpetrated by the Nazis in order to create a pretext for invading Poland. A commando unit led by one Naujocks (the details come from his testimony at Nuremberg) attacked the German radio station and left a dead body camouflaged as a Polish sniper. This man was one of several victims chosen from the concentration camps Sachsenhausen, Dachau, Breslau, transported to the site of these actions, drugged and then killed to schedule on site. They were referred to in code as Konserve--canned goods.

The film is amazing from every point of view. The style is beautiful but completely in sync with the hard-hitting story. Dialogue is minimal, with sound and music masterfully used to carry the story as much as what we are told. On Kanopy there is an extra with the film's editor, Evelyn Carow, who points out how her cuts harmonise with the sound effects. She also says, and I'm glad for that confirmation, that they (the filmmakers) were hoping that the victim's lacerating cry, one of the last scenes, would be heard as a scream for all the screams that were yet to come after August 1939.

And then I saw Coming Out, 1989, which, in one of those "you can't make this up" twists, came out on the day the Wall fell, November 9. It was the first DEFA movie about homosexuality and to my mind the best such movie--early generation and mainstream--that I know. This is totally surprising and I was totally surprised by any number of things about this film.

My expectations were that, at best, it would contain the usual awkward and shy romance with maybe a smooch or two, all done in the usual apologetic-feeling fashion when it's straight people making a movie about gays for straights (er, um, sorry, we now must show you two men, oh dear oh dear, kissing--but it won't hurt, promise, lightning quick... there, done, all over now!)

Nothing like it--not only is there a proper sex scene with the central couple, the film is chock-full of gay goodness and for once you are watching something about gay people that doesn't seem to take place on a barren colony world in outer space. I'll enumerate... but first, it's not all ponies and rainbows.

At the start of the movie there are holiday fireworks but one of our young leads, the not-yet-nineteen Mathias, is having his stomach pumped in the hospital. When the kind doctor asks him later why he did it, Mathias is crying and only says he's gay, a homosexual. "That is no reason to cry", says the doctor.

The other lead, twenty-something Philipp, is a hip, sensitive teacher of German in high school. His newly acquired girlfriend Tania unwittingly sets off events when she invites over a friend who, it turns out, is Philipp's old schoolmate and they have some secrets. Philipp visits this man in order to make sure that he hadn't said anything about the old days to Tania--they were just boys, there was nothing to it--and finds him living with a man, quite happy and proud. That's the first thing to note, or maybe second after the kind doctor--there are gay male couples living together in this movie, there is life on this planet.

Well, Philipp messes up this visit and runs off into the night, increasingly confused about himself. Fortunately he finds a gay bar. Here again it's not like we may expect, some sordid hole with a few furtive people lugubriously glaring... the place is chock full with merrymaking guys, many wearing women's clothes it's true, but it IS the carnival. It's bright and fun and, here and there, nude, with much smooching etc. going on. Mathias sees Philipp and falls for him on the spot, but Philipp is busy getting drunk. At the end Mathias and Walter, an old man who wore a pink triangle in Sachsenhausen, escort Philipp home. Mathias and Philipp run into each other again in a huge overnight queue for concert tickets. The attraction is palpable but Philipp is reticent. Mathias invites him to his birthday party at the same gay bar. Will he go? Up until the last moment he doesn't know... but then leaves his girlfriend a note that he needs a few days to himself and not to call him.

The birthday party is another wonderful surprise. Mathias is there with his whole family--parents, sister and her boyfriend, cousins. No speechifying about allies etc., they are just there and accept Philipp like normal people normally would. Afterwards Mathias and Philipp go to Philipp's apartment and have sex and spend the night together. This is the best part of the movie, how this was done. The two guys have a good laugh before falling on each other--Mathias recites a bit of his grandmother's erotic poetry which cracks them up and breaks the ice... that laughter and tenderness are a moment of such reality and sweetness as I truly struggle to remember in any movie.

Worth noting too that both guys are shown completely nude although fleetingly--as far as I know East German cinema didn't go for nudity as much as some Eastern European cinema, and certainly I can't say I've noticed it anywhere as gratuitous.

After this, Philipp is still not completely ready to accept himself as a gay man. A colleague spooks him with the idea that Tania may be pregnant and his mother is worried about his "tendencies". He witnesses skinheads attacking an openly gay man and runs away. When Mathias comes to his door, he doesn't open.

However, they run into each other at the concert--only Tania is there and this time Mathias runs away.

Philipp is now free and goes off looking for Mathias but he's not showing up in the bar anymore. Eventually Philipp relieves his loneliness by picking up another young man. He is as sweet as Mathias but leaves leaves after sex with a casual "it was nice, bye". However, this is so great, that they included this incident, so right--Philipp isn't just "gay for Mathias", he is definitely a gay man who is gradually coming out, and first of course to himself.

Then he does see Mathias in the bar again... but with a new boyfriend, Lutz. Both Mathias and Philipp look very unhappy but we don't get the easy romantic happy end. Mathias dances off with Lutz and refuses to look at Philipp, who leaves.

The movie ends in Philipp's classroom. The rumours about his gayness have obviously reached other teachers. A bunch of them is sent to sit in on his class. Philipp watches them filing into the back bench, about to be put on trial. There is a long pause, when he says nothing, and then he smiles, says "Yes" and goes out. Onto his bike and into the city. He's come out and he's fine.

>63 LolaWalser:

I've been enjoying your reviews. Of the movie reviews, The Gleiwitz Case looks particularly fascinating. I was wondering whether you knew about this movie, which I just read about via this New Yorker piece:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/a-suppressed-masterwork-of-moroc...

>65 rocketjk:

No, I didn't know of that, thanks for the heads up. I've seen practically nothing of Arabic cinema, but documentaries like that one in particular would interest me very much.

>63 LolaWalser: I loved the hook in La rete di protezione too — the resolution was a bit of an anticlimax, but maybe any resolution would have been.

>64 LolaWalser: Oh dear, I’m going to have to look for Coming Out now, aren’t I?

>67 thorold:

If it's not too difficult to find, I'd love to hear what you thought. Mind you, it's not that there's anything original about the storyline or uniquely artistic or some such... it's really the fact of its date and provenance and how very like an ordinary romance it is that make it special. That homosexuality was treated so sympathetically and humanely at a time when AIDS made gays into pariahs (there's no mention of it), that these two guys are presented as just two ordinary people in love, that one is shown with full support of his family, that gay life is represented both by the partying and cruising in a bar (ETA: and later, in a park!) and domestically through a committed couple--it's all that together that makes it, as far as I know, really extraordinary.

I've been trying to think of any similar movie of that vintage or earlier but nothing really comparable is coming to mind... (can't find my Vito Russo at the moment...)--La cage aux folles? Arguably that was sympathetic, but it's also, well, a farce. Or the one with Rex Harrison and Richard Burton--I mean, props to good intentions but it's again a comedy about "characters" (and unlike this one, not acted by gay actors). There had of course been homosexuals in cinema for decades but, again, even with gay directors like Fassbinder I can't think of anything that wasn't angsty and melodramatic to the extreme, with "doomed" characters above all... there haven't been that many ordinary gay characters treated like normal people and with a familial and social network to boot. And a whole movie about them? The closest vibe to this I can recall is in Sunday Bloody Sunday, where Peter Finch and... Glenda Jackson is it?--amicably share the sexual attentions of Murray Head. But it feels more like something these two highly evolved people are able to do because they are unusual, cultured and quirky, not something that really exists on its own terms as "normal" in the great wide world.

>68 LolaWalser: The DVD's on its way...

The only one I remember particularly from that time with "normal" gay characters is My beautiful launderette. I'm sure there must be more. Jarman didn't treat anyone as normal, gay or straight...

Maybe things like Prick up your ears and Kiss of the spiderwoman? but they are set in fringe-cultures too. I suppose the obvious Wessie counterpart to Coming out might be Taxi zum Klo, but that's pre-AIDS.

Russo stops in the mid-80s. He also lists so many films with peripheral or stereotype gay characters that it's sometimes hard to see the wood for the trees.

>69 thorold:

I did think of both Launderette and Taxi, but IIRC (it's been decades since I saw either) the former has a sad end? and aren't the guys hiding their relationship?--while Taxi is, in my recollection at least, sort of underground--a "real" representation of gay life but... edgy, very much "outsidery". Anyway, I hope you like it. Oh--I'm reading Puig's book as it happens, but I didn't see the movie.

Had another insomniac evening and ended up reading a whole book, Faïza Guène's La Discrétion (2020). This showed up amazingly fast from a library request I made just the last week, which I was inspired to do (plus a bunch of other related titles) after reading Marc Weitzmann's article in the New York Review of Books: A Rising Tide of Violence in France. Not sure the link will work for everyone, you may have to register (which is free).

Weitzmann doesn't discuss the book or any such stuff per se, I just went looking for newest titles that seemed related to his subject. I also have Weitzmann's own latest book on request, Hate: The Rising Tide of Anti-Semitism in France (and What It Means for Us).

Guène's main character is a seventy year old Algerian woman, Yamina, who was brought to France as a thirty-something bride. The narrative alternates between the present in France and Yamina's early life in Algeria. Yamina and Brahim have four children, three daughters ranging in age from forty to mid-thirties, and a thirty-year old son. In what is described as a fairly rare occurrence for their environment, none of the children are "problematic". All, however, are struggling, burdened with their condition of children of immigrants, in particular of Muslim and Algerian roots. One way this struggle shows is in the difficulties they have in finding life partners.

The eldest daughter was married disastrously but briefly at seventeen; after that fiasco she became interested in feminism, women's rights. The daughters are torn between a "Western" consciousness of what they deserve in a relationship (which is also reinforced by the example of their unusually kind father), and the traditional Muslim notions about what makes a man desirable--"virility". But the way the latter is understood is paradoxically at the same time offputting, so the daughters are pretty much at an impasse. The sensitive Frenchman Thomas who breaks down and cries when he's dumped is seen as repulsive, but the swaggering Arab men are derided even more.

Son Omar, while raised as a "prince" at home, has his own problems reconciling that traditional exaltation of the male with the humiliation his low-paying stressful job (he's an Uber driver) imposes on him. He's never had a girlfriend.

This family fits to a T Weitzmann's sociological recapitulation of the problems of Franco-Algerians since Algeria won independence and the shift from the political to religious engagement. The parents correspond to an earlier wave that found in France jobs and certain freedom--a phase that would end in the early eighties. The children grow up between two countries, not feeling they belong anywhere. This is further complicated with economic problems, and the rise of Islamism in Algeria and elsewhere. Existential uncertainty created by alienation, racism, lack of prospects is for some resolved in religion--the more fundamentalist the interpretation, the more secure the refuge it brings. Others must exist in a state of tension and utilise "discretion".

Guène is often funny and Yamina is a beautiful character, as loveable as Driss Chraibi's mother.

The Montreal Massacre, ed. Louise Malette, 1991
Because they were women, Josée Boileau, 2020

In the afternoon of December 6, 1989, a 25-year-old man who twice failed to make the grade for Montreal's Polytechnique walked onto its campus carrying a rifle, knives and ammunition, made way to a classroom filled with students, ordered the men out, and killed the remaining women. He then wandered around killing and injuring more women--his deliberate target--but in the process also injuring four men.

He killed fourteen women and injured thirteen more, plus the four men. The full tally of the victims may be longer, if one could unambiguously connect the subsequent suicides of some of the survivors and victims' relations, and of course there is no easy "tallying" of the trauma and its effects on who knows how many.

The massacre lasted about twenty minutes and ended when the killer turned his gun on himself. The evidence for his motives was all there from the start--before going out on this killing spree he had written and sent various letters, as well as having one on himself. The letter included a hit list of nineteen prominent women he had planned to or would have liked to murder.

He addressed the women he had gathered as "feminists" and one told him they were not feminists, just girls who liked science. This, of course, made no difference.

The 1991 book collects statements, letters, articles written by women and some men in the aftermath of the massacre. Some had been published in Montreal's newspapers but many had been refused, especially those coming from feminists.

Here's what made the abominable even worse: after the massacre, there was another, collective type of wrong committed against women--that of denial of the nature and import of the event. And then, immediately, at the same time, yet another--monstrous as it is, masses of men with privileged access to the media jumped not just to excusing the killer but blaming the victims. The litany of the recorded, public outbursts of misogyny committed by these men literally over the news about a heap of female corpses simply beggars belief.

It's monstrous, but not new. This has been happening and still is happening--that women have to excuse and justify their existence in public space, that they are not seen as people like men are people, that a woman in any but the most menial job is seen as stealing some man's "rightful" spot, and that women, therefore, will be blamed for the evil done to them--Eve paying for Adam's sin, as one contributor wrote.

I'm grateful for the second book because without it I probably would never have finished the first (which I started reading years ago). Boileau was a journalist and had followed the events--the massacre and the atrocious media around it--from the start.

Her book gives an up-to-date recapitulation of events, the background of Quebec as regards women's rights and the feminist struggle there from the 1920s onward, a description of the media representations of women as they changed through the decades up to the massacre, some statistics since the massacre regarding women's enrollment and participation at the universities including the Polytechnique, and extended descriptions of the fourteen dead women illustrated with family photographs.

Year 2014 marked a watershed in that it was the first time the commemoration of the victims in Montreal acknowledged anti-feminism; it was the same year when several female journalists who were young beginners at the time (and inadvertently ended being sent to the site because that's who hangs around late at the office in wintertime) told their stories of how they were forced to "sanitize" the news and suppress the anti-feminist and misogynist motivation of the killer--as if his reported words to the victims and their very composition didn't speak loud enough! To say nothing of his letters--which, btw, were made public only a YEAR AFTER the massacre--and procured through an anonymous source!--where he literally spewed his hateful motivation black on white.

(Unbelievably, after all that, a male psychologist would still insist, with a peremptory manner, on air in a televised debate, that it's in no way clear that the killer was a misogynist.)

But there is little to celebrate. The killer didn't stop women from enrolling at the Polytechnique; their numbers slowly but steadily grow. But so very slowly. More professors now than then are female. More university principals are female--but so few, compared to men. That, however, is still some sort of "good" news.

The bad news, however, is that since the Montreal massacre murderous mass violence against women has been repeated in Canada--and in the worst instance since, the 2018 targeted killings of ten women in the streets of Toronto, we have seen the same obfuscation and denial of the killer's motives, at the official level. Last year's commemoration by Major Tory didn't deign to mention the victims were mostly women and MEANT to be ALL women (ten out of twelve, because killing someone with a van is less precise than one might wish); no, gendered violence is the one instance where women ARE taken to be adequately described as "people". And men were everywhere given the usual primacy--it was repeatedly, insistently, "men and women" who came to the aid of the victims, those "people".

Where do we go from here? The Montreal killer, it turns out (they don't tell you these things until thirty years later) had had wannabe followers from the start. Too many incidents to mention, from Quebec to Kingston, Toronto, Vancouver. Within months of the massacre and in years after.

We know what the advent of social media did for these types, gave them platform, conferred networks, organised them. But they don't get born and raised on Twitter.

Moving pictures

Old Boyfriends, 1979, directed by Joan Tewkesbury.

In recent years I've been trying to pay more attention to female filmmakers so I watched this, directed by a woman. And the direction is notably fine. But the story, written by two men, is ridiculous shit.

{lengthy bit deleted: on second thought, I don't care to remember in detail why I disliked this}

Next, My dinner with Andre, 1981. I'm glad I persevered past the first half hour because I got caught up in some themes but overall it's one of those things all too easy to criticise from the political and philosophical point of view. For one thing, I absolutely hate those bourgeois journeys of "self-discovery" in Tibet etc. {testiness deleted}

But I warmed up to it by the end, when the characters did seem to undergo a sort of catharsis.

Also saw the brilliant DEFA film Solo Sunny, 1980, directed by Konrad Wolf. His last movie, untypical for him and greatest commercial success, it's a story about a young singer's dreams and difficulties in love and work. Wonderful movie with an eternally young, beating heart.

>68 LolaWalser: etc. — Well, I saw Coming out, and liked it very much. Thanks! Don’t understand how I didn’t know about it, apparently it’s an established tradition to show it annually on the 9th of November, too.
Very nicely done, they seem to have found a good line to steer that allowed them to explore the difficulties Philipp has in accepting who he is, without going all “strange twilight world of the homosexual” about it. I loved the brief scene with the woman in the coffee bar who shows Mathias and Philipp a picture of her son, and the scene with the old guy who tells Philipp about his past as KZ-survivor and “Aktivist der ersten Stunde”. That could have been a terrible cliché, but somehow wasn’t. And lots more...

And of course it’s lovely to see all that period DDR detail filmed in its natural habitat, among the clouds of Trabi-exhaust. Gherkin jars, sagging chipboard furniture, square plastic alarm clocks, and all the rest of it. Plus the splendidly Kaiser-Wilhelm-era school building (must have been the same public-works architect as the office where my West Berlin colleagues worked...).

The DVD came with interviews with Mathias Freihof (still quite a hunk all these years later!) and Dagmar Manzel, I don’t know if you got those as well. Interesting that they both commented on how relaxed it was making films before the Wende, with weeks and weeks of shooting time, and how they shot enough for about six hours of story and edited it down. And how lucky they were that the film didn’t flop, as the Berlin public lost interest in culture completely for a couple of years after 1989. Apparently there were a lot of people in the party cultural committees who were very nervous about the film and tried to have it shut down, but Heiner Carow was in a strong enough position to be able to go over their heads and get approval from some unnamed high-up. The usual DDR problem about the contradiction between notionally very liberal laws and the repressed conservative prejudices of the people in charge.

>73 thorold:

Nooo, I didn't get to see any extras, I just streamed the movie from Kanopy. I'll have to get a DVD. Glad you liked it. You know, people do go on about the grey and grimy DDR and cheap this and that, but I guess I'm too inured by Syria, Egypt and my own brand of socialism--not to mention Cuba--to see what's the big deal. If there is anything more dismal than the council estates in England (and with all those obnoxious "stately homes" of the aristos to rub in the salt), I have not seen it.

The usual DDR problem about the contradiction between notionally very liberal laws and the repressed conservative prejudices of the people in charge.

Oh yes, the endless nannying of opinion is so freaking annoying. Half the movies I'm watching had run-ins with censors when they weren't simply shelved, and it's so pathetic in retrospect... I suppose though in a perverse way it's a testament to how important culture CAN be and once was--and I admit I'm commie enough to prefer that to the nihilism of the "dollar is all" commercialism. Almost. The actual examples of safeguarding are too stupid to countenance in reality, not to mention the damage to people's lives through that sort of bullshit.

>71 LolaWalser: thanks for the update on a truly terrible event and the aftermath. This one had passed me by - appalled by the support for the gunman on social media, which I suppose is still going on. However as you say it is the failure to recognise the killings for what they were at the time and since, that reflects the attitudes of society.

>75 baswood:

Yes, it seems many of us, especially outside Canada, had confusing or muted coverage of the event at the time. I was an almost-twenty uni student who read the newspapers but all I dimly recalled about it was that some mass shooting happened--egregious, but not especially notable for the wild American continent...

It does seem that more people, the general public, are finally recognising what them crazy feminist man-haters were pointing out from the start. If nothing else, the links between misogyny and propensity for fascism are only getting more obvious all the time. Just this morning I read in the New York Times about a "specimen" Trump supporter--The Misogynistic ‘Dating Coach’ Who Was Charged in the Capitol Riot. So, the readiness to talk about this is increasing, but the terrible thing is that it's not some belated intellectual tribute to feminist insight but simply a reflection of an increasing wave of fascism around the world--Sweden, Finland, Germany, France, India, Brazil etc., not just North America, have seen in the recent years far right attacks by misogynists.

The ADL has a good analysis--depressing reading, but necessary, I'd say:

When Women are the Enemy: The Intersection of Misogyny and White Supremacy

Lies sleeping, Ben Aaronovitch, 2018

These have all run together for me but it looks as if the next volume may be the last and answer the question of what happens with the hero's friend-turned-enemy, do they persist in villainy or get redeemed? At that time it may be more interesting to look at the motif of encroaching nationalism and the revival of English fascism as appearing in this series.

Le boys club, Martine Delvaux, 2020

Boileau's book above made me curious about francophone feminism in Canada and this was the most recent book to pop up in the library search. Delvaux is a professor of literature and a feministe militante, a phrase that is a tad less scary-sounding (or uncommon) in French than in English and means no more than a feminist activist.

Here she dissects aspects of male rule and male identity construction through the concept of the "boys' club", today most concretely and openly expressed in all-male gentlemen's clubs. Being private, these clubs are resistant to calls for gender desegregation such as we have seen addressed to public institutions like the army, schools etc. and thus remain examples of the patriarchal misogyny at its purest, in the West. The principles they are built on, the functions they fulfill are not, however, limited to them--they are only very easy to discern in that setting.

But they are present everywhere where men dominate, which is not far off from simply saying "present everywhere". Delvaux further analyses such fields like architecture (especially important as the shaper of the space our lives unfold in), the sports, the army, the media.

One minor detail intrigues me (but Delvaux doesn't comment on it)--that the phrase, as well as the best known examples still extant today, are English. It could be no more than the English is instantly recognisable (as a particular institution and concept) whereas a French translation would not be. Presumably no one imagines such "clubs"/networks of power didn't exist elsewhere.

Moving pictures

I picked this up thanks to Kim Cattrall's mention linked somewhere above.



Wanda, 1970, Barbara Loden

If you are even an average watcher of movies and telly, there is a character you have glimpsed thousands of times but never really seen. It's a woman--a wife, a mummy, a girlfriend, a ho, a salesgirl, a secretary, a cleaner, a druggie, a punchbag, third girl, a corpse. Nude or dead she may be in focus for a bit longer but her usual place is off centre, in the background or off the stage altogether.

Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern got their play in some man's imagination; these women/this woman never does.

Loden wrote, directed and starred in a movie about that woman. The title is that woman's name. The camera is almost never off her, from the moment she gets up in the morning, puts on the curlers in her hair and takes the bus to the courthouse to get divorced.

Following Wanda is like following a sparrow on its last day of life. Considering how many sparrows there are, it always surprised me that we don't see more of them dead. I remember one such and I actually happened on it as it was dying. Probably I wasn't paying attention. What we are told to look at is so limited. Who we are told to look at is so limited.

The year "Wanda" came out was the year everyone talked about "Patton".

We keep getting blinded, but we CAN see.

>77 LolaWalser: "Following Wanda is like following a sparrow on its last day of life. Considering how many sparrows there are, it always surprised me that we don't see more of them dead. I remember one such and I actually happened on it as it was dying. Probably I wasn't paying attention. What we are told to look at is so limited. Who we are told to look at is so limited.

The year "Wanda" came out was the year everyone talked about "Patton".

We keep getting blinded, but we CAN see."

Beautifully said. Thanks. I'll keep an eye out for that movie. Or, more likely, will have to go in search of it.

>78 rocketjk:

I went a bit stream-of-consciousness there, glad to see it still communicated! :)

Criterion put it out in 2019 so it should be available, in the libraries if nothing else. There are some interesting extras on it, for instance Loden on Dick Cavett's show, and a few of her other works. But she never got to make another feature film... well, she didn't have much longer to live either, sad to say...

>71 LolaWalser: coming in late but wanted to say I found this a very moving post. I have no memory of the 1989 event.

>80 dchaikin:

In retrospect, that something like that flew under the radar speaks for itself. (And not a unique case either.)

I'm still reading a lot but in bits and pieces; still can't make myself stick with one book for longer than five-ten pages, although at least I'm trying to pick natural break off points...

I wish I had been in better form for this one:

Le Baiser de la femme-araignée (Kiss of the Spider Woman), Manuel Puig, OPD 1976

Two men share a prison cell, the homosexual Molina imprisoned for "corruption of minors", and the revolutionary Valentin. They appear as polar opposites--Molina is ultra-effeminate and completely given to the typically "female" concerns with love and romance, while Valentin suppresses his emotions because only the combat for society matters, not the private life. Neither understands the other and yet gradually they become closer, so much so that each one ends up doing something "outside" his own character, for the sake of the other.

This is very much a study of homosexuality and gender where the political moment, Argentina's leaden, fascist seventies, only serves as a pretext to bring together in extended intimate dialogue people who would never be capable of it otherwise. Valentin seems to get the most out of the exchange, to have been nothing less than enlightened. One would like to think that Molina, in turn, was strengthened by Valentin's acceptance but this is less clear to me.

Puig's voluminous footnotes on the psychoanalitical and philosophical studies of homosexuality and gender are a pointer but also an obstacle. What is happening to the two men is outside "theory", which is dismally dated anyway.

Molina understands himself as a woman and refers to himself often in the female gender. He does not fall in love with homosexuals, only "real" men. It's interesting how at different times both characters express the more open, progressive view of the genders--for instance, Molina retorting that there is nothing wrong with being sensitive and gentle "like a woman" and that the world would be a better place if men were more "like women"; but later, it's Valentin who protests against Molina's notion that it's right, "womanly", to suffer in a relationship (including intercourse), that being humiliated is natural. Molina's influence makes Valentin gentler, and Valentin's makes Molina fight.

A beautiful book, one of the few where I feel a decision to read it again.

Moving pictures

Well, this is just to have it noted somewhere... saw the anime Kamisama kiss (touchstones go to manga, but let that be).



This was the most "romantic" and perhaps youth-oriented of the ones I saw so far* but still quite enjoyable. A suddenly homeless girl, Nanami, rescues a god from a dog and finds herself entrusted with said god's shrine and spirit familiars. The latter include the fox-man Tomoe who is not happy that the new god he must serve is a clueless human girl. Nanami is possibly the best female character I've encountered in anime so far (especially for a teen girl), very kind but with a steely resolve. The spirits and demons Nanami deals with are worth the occasional high school subplots.

I discovered anime relatively recently and have a hundred thoughts about it all. I'm even still puzzled by my very attraction to it, given how much I dislike certain things about it--the way human figures are drawn, that creepy mix of Disney-childishness and XXX "adults only"... I'm not happy with the all-too-frequent misogyny, or the weird Nazisoid sympathies that pop up (on the latter I tell myself I could be losing a lot in translation)... but when it's good, it can be splendid.

I'm specially attracted to the surrealist, science fiction and Japanese folk fantasy elements, the casual way queer themes are often included (although stereotyping is not unusual) and the often sumptuous graphics.

*In order of seeing: Death Note; Puella Magi Madoka Magica; Claymore; Psycho-Pass; Neon Genesis Evangelion; Citrus; The Saga of Tanya the Evil.

>81 LolaWalser: I've seen the movie of Kiss of the Spider Woman several times, but I really should read the book. I should probably watch the movie again, too, it's been a few decades. The movie is extraordinary.

Great review of Kiss of the Spider Woman, Lola. I somehow managed to miss the movie, so I should read the novel before I see it.

>81 LolaWalser: It's been a while since I read this, but I thought some (but not all?) of the footnotes were fiction and purposely used to pull the reader out of the story.

>82 RidgewayGirl: I agree about the Kiss of the Spider Woman movie. Excellent and very memorable. It has always been intriguing to me that the two actors, Raul Julia and William Hurt, switched roles for the stage production. Would love to have seen that.

>84 ELiz_M:

The notes are Puig's but the references, as far as I noticed, are all legitimate. As you say, they pull one out of the story--well, break the narrative flow in any case--and I'm not sure why he used them. The seventies were the time of first major gay rights activism in Spain (I think Puig lived there at the time?), maybe that has something to do with it? A need to educate readers, or even just demonstrate the topic belongs in public? I think it does confer a wider significance on the encounter, heralds something new in society, the personal as the political.

I will look around for what Puig may have said about this.

>82 RidgewayGirl:, >83 kidzdoc:, >85 rocketjk:

I must say I'm unlikely to see the movie now, because I loved the book so much. :) This is typical for me, but I'm also wondering in this case about the decision to film this, it seems so very the opposite of "filmable". So, okay, I may be curious on that account, how they went about it, but I'm certain to be disappointed.

But, I'll be very curious to hear what people who had seen the film first thought about the book, so, looking forward to that.

>86 LolaWalser: "I must say I'm unlikely to see the movie now, because I loved the book so much."

I know what you mean and often have the same instincts. I've found the best way to handle the situation when my curiosity overcomes my reluctance is to approach the movie as a different creature entirely, rather than as a filmed version of the book. In a way it's like putting an emotional barrier between the two experiences. Sort of the same way I approach film bios. I know I'm seeing a dramatization, with a greater or lessor amount of artistic license, not actual history.

Sometimes I don't want to see a movie because I don't want the actor who plays a crucial role replacing my own mental image of the character. (In one of the later of Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next books, Harry Potter complains about having to go around looking like Daniel Radcliffe all the time.)

>86 LolaWalser: I saw the film quite a long time before I read the book, and — although both are a long time ago now — I’m pretty sure I liked both very much and wasn’t disappointed second time around.

Both the book and the film are basically in the form of a two-handed stage-play with a few little bits added on, as far as I remember them, so the transition from book to film isn’t as radical as it is for the average Jane Austen adaptation.

>86 LolaWalser: I found this review in The Guardian that references the fictional footnote(s) as well as the reviewer's thoughts about their purpose:

"The novel is primarily written as dialogue, but also uses lengthy footnotes, official reports and stream-of-consciousness internal monologues. This experimental style rejects the use of a narrator, forcing the reader to take on this role. The dry and academic footnotes citing the latest psychological scholarship on homosexual behaviour (including one fictionalised report) are set in sharp contrast to the vibrant and complex character of Molina that they purport to explain. These footnotes have the effect of jolting readers out of the story so that they remain critically engaged."

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/apr/14/stage

>89 ELiz_M:

Thanks for the article. I think we are applying "fiction" or "fictional" a bit differently here? Puig's references, as far as I noticed*, are to real psychoanalytical and philosophical works by real psychologists etc. and his footnotes largely descriptive--they present the opinions of (and opinions about, occasionally) actually existing works by Freud, Unwin, Marcuse etc. I'm not familiar with all of these books or more than shallowly with any of them, but some theses, like Freud's explanation of the origin of homosexuality etc. are too famous to mistake.

So, the way I see it is that these footnotes are part of the fiction, but they are not fictional in the sense of being about invented stuff. IIRC, the first one begins with "author's note"--this voice, which gives us the footnotes, presents comments such as may really occur in a discussion about the psychoanalytical theories of homosexuality.

For an analogy, it's like discussions of philosophy that occur in Iris Murdoch's novels. Her fictional characters talk about real philosophers.

*It's a pity the article doesn't identify the one "fictionalised report"--is it something invented from full cloth or ascribed to a real person?--to be sure, the footnotes too take a more careful reading in the context of the story.

The article: "These footnotes have the effect of jolting readers out of the story so that they remain critically engaged."

They may have this effect but I'm not sure that's all they are for (or what being "critically" engaged is worth). I didn't comment on the feature that pops up first when people talk about this book, Molina's "sheherazading" in the evenings, telling Valentin stories of films. But to me the footnotes were primarily a counterpoint to this hypnotic--and deceptive--storytelling--not so much something to stumble over as to keep queerness visible. I don't remember exactly, but I think they disappear as the men draw closer, when something "queer" actually happens.

Well, this is a curious coincidence... I'm following the online programming of Filmarchiv Austria and they just put up a movie about male prisoners, Houchang Allahyari's 1990 Fleischwolf. (ETA: posted only on YouTube)

Teenagers are imprisoned with adult men; a gay teen helps out his straight cellmate; someone has a naff idea of getting a team of female prisoners to visit and stage a performance of Romeo & Juliet for the men--I'm betting the last really happened, you couldn't invent that stuff.

Allahyari was educated as a psychiatrist and worked for years as prison therapist.

The film will only be available through Feb 18. English subs are burnt in. (Warning: there's nudity, sex, sexual violence, blood...)

Nada ("nothing" in Spanish), Jean-Patrick Manchette, OPD 1972

Another excellent political noir by Manchette. A quintet of leftist desperadoes ranging in ideology from libertarian communism through various anarchist permutations undertakes to kidnap and ransom the American ambassador to France. The kidnapping succeeds, but the second part of the plan, as a previous reader of Manchette would know to expect, goes all Molotov-cocktail-shaped.

Manchette's own commentary from his intro to the book's first Spanish translation, in 1988:

...Nada limits itself to put on guard sincere partisans of direct action and armed combat, and to show how their activity, when it is separated from all offensive social movement, will be used by the State in the framework of what Italian leftists used to call "the strategy of tension".

Such a view is dated because it stupidly forgets to imagine direct manipulation of terrorism by the State's secret services, if necessary against its own subjects and even its own leaders, as we saw in Italy with the affair Moro and the so-called Red Brigades (as in France we did with "Action directe" and you in Spain with GRAPO, which your police don't even need anymore, when they can satisfy themselves with failing to evacuate a supermarket in which the ETA placed a bomb.)

Current readers, especially younger ones, may be startled to hear Manchette's characters decry the betrayal by and the rotting of liberal democracy (what, it wasn't Trump that killed it?); older ones need only think back to the revolts of 1968 and what incited them.

And note that nothing has been made better since--in fact, politically and economically we are globally spiralling into an ever-worse situation. And what are liberals offering? Band-aids of billionaire charity, if that. And the sheep are voting for their own slaughter, chuffed about how "democratic" the process is.

So yes one can sympathise with Manchette's quixotic anarchists. Silly they may be, but aware, and alive.

***

 

Alfred Lichtenstein probably wouldn't have cared to be seen forever mostly in uniform, but that's the image that survived the tumult of the century into which he had barely stepped before getting killed in 1914, at Somme. He was then 25, a Jewish middle-class son, with a fresh law diploma and a bunch of poems already published and esteemed.

The collection I read is presumably of all still extant--the last poems he had sent from the front to several friends; a good deal of what survived the WWI would get lost in the WWII.

Lichtenstein started out with many voices-- the uncertain beginner, now chirping now clowning--and found his home in an expressionist mode that produced visions of Trakl-like gloom and a pre-surrealist black humour. He had a literary alter-ego he had named Kuno Kohn, not a pseudonym but a heteronym, like Pessoa's, except that he didn't use him only to double his utterances, but as a scapegoat, an object of (personal) derision as well as pity.

Reading Lichtenstein's description of the grotesque Kohn--he is ugly, hunchbacked, has a beardless furrowed face and old eyes ringed with shadows--I had to think about Bruno Schulz's graphic representations of himself as a hunchbacked dwarf with a similarly stricken and anguished expression.

Both men projected an abject image of themselves that can't have been other than what the world reflected to them... as Jews.

If Lichtenstein appears less self-lacerating, maybe it's simply that he died at half the Schulz's age...

Another curiosity is the cycle of "soldier" poems Lichtenstein wrote in 1912-13, when he was just a recruit going through the obligatory military service. Time and again I had to remind myself that these predated war--so strong is his sense of imminent calamity and death.

I have to quote a little, just to give a taste of his music and (dominant) style, particularly where it so originally (IMO) mixes tragedy and black humour. E.g.:

Angst (11. April 1913)

Wald und Flur liegt tot in Schutt und Scherben.
Himmel klebt an Städten wie ein Gas.
Alle Menschen müssen sterben.
Glück und Glas, wie bald bricht das.

Stunden rinnen matt wie trübe Flüsse
Durch der Stuben parfümierten Sumpf.
Spürst du die Pistolenschüsse--
Ist der Kopf noch auf dem Rumpf.

(Forest and fields lie dead in rubble and shards.
The sky sticks to towns like a gas.
Everybody must die.
Joy and glass, they break so fast.

Hours flow dull like muddy rivers
Through the barracks' perfumed bog.
Do you feel the gunfire--
Is the head still on top.)

(I couldn't resist playing the poet a bit, trying to keep some rhyme. :))

From one of Kuno's poems:

Mein Sterben ist stumm
Und ohne Bilder...

Ohne Erlösung ---

My dying is mute and without pictures... without deliverance.

***

Moving pictures

From the Criterion set "When Horror Came To Shochiku", Genocide, 1968, directed by Kazui Nihonmatsu. Unusual for a largish presence of Western characters, American soldiers and one very disturbed Euro-babe. A swarm of insects intent on ridding the threat to life that nuclear-armed humans represent on Earth downs an American military plane carrying an H-bomb. Frankly the bugs have a point.

Also saw La esperanza, 1980, filmed by the Austrian Margarete Heinrich in Nicaragua shortly after the Sandinistas overthrew Somoza. I just learned of this filmmaker (died in 1994), one of the current online retrospectives at Filmarchiv Austria is dedicated to her. The trip to Nicaragua was partly supported by a feminist group and other leftist solidarity movements.

Heinrich's main focus are the campaigns for sanitation, hospitals, and adult literacy--at the time it was estimated that over 50 to even 80% of the population was illiterate. Clean water was almost unheard of, babies were dying like flies from parasites and starvation, and the US would still wage war on these barefoot people for decades, because the dollar is sacred and the interests of capitalists the only thing that matters in the world.

It was with a great relief that I turned to the epic of Gojira and Ebirah in Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster, 1966. A fair match gallantly fought.

>91 LolaWalser: (Warning: there's nudity, sex, sexual violence, blood...) Thats all too much for me.

Thanks for bringing John Patrick Manchette to our attention. It will be something I am sure I can pick up in my local bookshop.

Ah! the revolts in Paris 1968 I have been wondering for the last 50 years why they haven't happened again what's wrong with young people these days. I suppose the "save the planet movement" is the nearest thing, but far too polite and worthy. As for the Gilet Jaunes ...............................

Manchette has been published in English recently by the New York Review of Books Classics, if you can find them, or if you read e-books. He is spectacular--mind you, it helps that I find his political stance so sympathique. And more than just the political, he's disarmingly frank in how he wrote for money and to a formula, what worked and didn't etc. No airs.

As to revolt... well the youth did step up at various times in various places, from Latin America to China. But the West and East alike were anaesthetised for a while by the fall of the USSR, the "end of history", as that neoliberal dope peddled. Those were terrible years for leftist Cassandras (not that any have been great), you couldn't hear yourself speak for the orgiastic din of privatisations, the robber baron mayhem going on in broad daylight, the rape of the commons.

And now here we are, hoping teenagers will yet save the world. Or at least pay our pensions and wipe our bums.

I wish I could find the dismantling of the "democracy" racket satisfactory, but in the end it's nothing my grandparents' generation already didn't know: the rich and the powerful never reform out of their riches and power; revolutions cost blood.

Who is ready to bleed?

Ever the question.

>92 LolaWalser: Thanks for putting Alfred Lichtenstein on my radar. I'll see what my library has. 25 is much too young to die!

Yes, so very young. Hmm, it's as if a sub-theme were developing, with Beardsley and Laforgue...

on the sunny side of the street, I just received photos from my SIL's grandma's 100th birthday--but she ain't no poet! :)

>96 LolaWalser:
Yes, to cheer myself up, I'm thinking of making a list of authors who reached 100 (preferably still compos mentis)...

>97 Dilara86: You might find this list inspiring.
I don't know how many of them are or were still actively writing as they approached their centenary, though.

>98 spiphany:

Fascinating list, thanks. I read an interview with Ferlinghetti not that long ago...

>98 spiphany: >99 LolaWalser: I looked up "centenarian authors" straight after posting, found the list you linked to, and created a new LT list, to which you're welcome to contribute!

I don't know how that happened, but I finally found your thread only this week. I enjoyed catching up and will come more regularly now!

>101 raton-liseur:

Welcome anytime. :)

Following a Club Read mention, read two of Zeina Abirached's graphic novels, A game for swallows and I remember Beirut. Abirached was ten when the Lebanese civil war ended, so her whole childhood passed in its shadow. The child's POV admirably reflects the terrible absurdity of war but is of necessity limited. The more history you can bring to the story, the more you will get from these reminiscences.

For example, Abirached's entire milieu and references are Christian, there is no specific mention of Muslims at all. There is no mention of who is the enemy or why is the city at war.

***



Soviet Space Graphics: Cosmic Visions from the USSR, 2020,

collects hundreds of covers and illustrations from a spate of science magazines for youth and general public that flourished in the USSR. Science was wildly popular--I'd like to think on its own merits, but undeniably it was also thanks to the huge educational effort. And it is mostly science, not science fiction, that dominates these magazines, which is in itself remarkable.

There is a high-mindedness and idealism about these scientific dreams that recall some strains of Russian cosmism (and indeed, at least one prominent Russian space engineer, perhaps the greatest of all time, was a Tsiolkovsky-inspired cosmist). To Russians the space was naturally the domain of the infinitely curious, explorative human species; not, as in typical American science fiction, the next "Wild West" frontier for capitalists to subjugate and exploit and for men to wave their dicks about.

Where aliens are imagined, it's invariably as friends. Attention is paid even to gender balance, and from the earliest instances. Although male characters are more frequent, especially if there is only one human figure shown, girls and women occur almost as often in groups, and in the same situations as men, not subordinate.

It's worth noting that in Vasily Zhuravlev's film Cosmic journey from 1936 (begun in 1930) a woman ends up being sent to the moon instead of her boyfriend. And also that the Russian Valentina Tereshkova was not only the first woman in space, but to this day remains the only woman to have been sent on a solo space mission. In 1963.

I am deeply convinced that as a species we ought to approach space exploration from the idealistic and ethical POV such as the Soviets endorsed, not the mercenary, supremacist position of the capitalists.

To the Americans space became just another game to win, after they were shocked to find Communists making technological strides. For them planting the American flag on the Moon was a giant FU to the USSR--and too bad that there was no oil... But as for the "ideals" of the country that made this achievement, there will never be better comment than this:

Gil Scott-Heron - Whitey On the Moon

***

Que d'os!, Jean-Patrick Manchette, OPD 1976

The second and less successful novel about Eugène Tarpon, private investigator. Morgue pleine (No room at the morgue) was better. In this one Tarpon is entreated by a cop acquaintance to pretend-indulge some old biddy whose blind daughter, as she insists, had gone missing. No sooner does Tarpon lend a friendly ear to the old woman than it becomes clear something criminal and awful, with echoes of the WWII and French Nazi collaborators, is actually afoot.

The usual Manchette mayhem is scaled down, and given the presence of friends in Tarpon's life from the first book (a beautiful girl and an older Jewish man), I think these may be considered almost "cozies"--in his oeuvre. Mind you, horrific bodily injury still happens as casually as a howdyedo.

***

The diaries of Emilio Renzi, the formative years, Riccardo Piglia, 2017

This is the first volume of I think three, based on Piglia's real diaries but told somewhat obliquely through a figure of his alter ego Renzi. It's a treasure trove of bookish and cinematic pleasures, famous-writer mentions (Piglia was friends with Rodolfo Walsh, Humberto Costantini etc., met Borges, Cortázar, Puig and basically everyone), and complicated politics--this volume ends in 1967, with 27-year-old ex-anarchist Piglia a member of a small Communist group with Trotskyist flavour.

***

Il metodo Catalanotti, Andrea Camilleri, OPD 2018

The penultimate Montalbano? at least, I have only one more on request. The things I enjoy about Camilleri are there, and so are the things I don't enjoy; however, this time we get some unusual commentary on one aspect that I hated from the beginning, Montalbano's tortured long-distance relationship with Livia. So that's different.

The mystery may not be much but the victim is an interesting character, which is also a change from the usual.

Moving pictures

Had some sad news and medicated with binge-watching the 1960s Doktor Mabuse movies: Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse (1960); Im Stahlnetz des Dr. Mabuse (1961); Die unsichtbaren Krallen des Dr. Mabuse (1962); Scotland Yard jagt Dr. Mabuse (1963); Die Todesstrahlen des Dr. Mabuse (1964). (The 1000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse; In the Steel Trap of Dr. Mabuse; The Invisible Claws of Dr Mabuse; Scotland Yard hunts Dr. Mabuse; The Rays of Death of Dr Mabuse.)

They are spooky, they are ooky, they contain every single pulp fiction horror trope: mind control, unfathomable evil, hypnosis, telepathy, criminal masterminds, gangster syndicates, mad cripples, invisibility, deranged psychopaths, assassinations, murderous clowns, masters of disguise, killer prostheses, plans for world domination, sharks.

L'énigme du pendu (The puzzle of the hanged man), Christian Jacq, OPD 1988

I have no recollection of when or why I picked this up; I knew Jacq dimly as an author of many books related to Egypt and Egyptology but never read him. This is a mild mystery (in what I see is a series) involving a retired Scotland Yard inspector Higgins. A dead man is found hanging from a tree, a sinister chair with diabolical carvings nearby, the man's shoes perfectly waxed, and a Tarot card, representing the Hanged Man, in his pocket. The suspects include a vicar, a deacon, a blacksmith, the squire, butcher, baker...
I was amused by the improbable "English" last names such as Waking, Laxter, Herald, or "Bettina" for an English Rose. The village is called The Slaughterers and a contested property (best of all) is Evillodge.

***



Days of thrills and adventure, Alan Barbour, OPD 1970

I started watching an old serial, Jungle Girl (1941), when I remembered I had this book. Barbour's nostalgia for childhood pleasures no doubt speaks to many. I'm old enough to sympathise, but must note just how strongly this entertainment was aimed at boys, white at that.

American serials were made with modest means and even humbler ambition (Barbour reserves "artistic" compliments for some European stuff, Feuillade and Lang) but they were not for that devoid of artistry and skill--in particular that of the stuntmen. Great stills capture their daredevil feats in profusion.

Moving pictures

There was more fighting the doldrums with 60s German Krimis, most of which I'd seen before: Der Frosch mit der Maske (1959); Der Hexer (1932); The Trygon Factor (1966)--the bad YT copy with the English soundtrack, featuring undubbed Stewart Granger, Robert Morley, Susan Hampshire etc.--Tim Frazer jagt den geheimnisvollen Mr. X (1964), Der Todesrächer von Soho (1972).

Also saw Underworld (2003), because it came up on a DVD search for Bill Nighy. His vampire chieftain Viktor is the best thing about it.

Then I saw All things must pass (2015), a documentary about Tower Records, a now-defunct music store chain. Thing is, when I came to the US in 1992, in New Orleans, the local Tower in the French Quarter became my main refuge. It stayed open until midnight and so it became a habit to end the daily grad school grind with a visit to it (as often as not accompanied by another to the next-door bookstore). Where else could I go? I left a fortune there and made a couple great friends. When I moved to NYC, although there were many more other attractions competing for my free time, I used to visit the Tower at the Lincoln Center at least a few times every week. This location had a classical section so huge that opera had its own room. Move over, Dante, I've been to Paradise too.

In the docu, Elton John's laments for the store speak for me. It was so dreamy, the infinite browsing, the meeting, the surprising, the desiring, the learning, the missing and the finding...

And then, Houchang Allahyari's I Love Vienna (1991), a warm-hearted film about culture clash. Very devout Mohammad Ali arrives in Vienna from Iran with his sister and teenage son, and must deal with the pressure European mores place on conservative Muslim habits, especially the views on women.

Dalmatinske fritule -- Dalmatian fritters

Mum's version from yesterday:

>102 LolaWalser: I've no doubt you are right about the American approach to space exploration, but I think there were plenty of people who were committed to it for scientific reasons, not for the sake of capitalism or conquest. I know my father was one of them; he was an engineer who worked for the space "race". He worked on both the Apollo and earlier Gemini missions. I didn't know what his work was exactly until I was an adult, because it was all top secret. I know he was very proud of his work, and he was a very gifted engineer. When he was buried the Air Force overflew his funeral in respect. That made me proud. I remember the tears in his eyes when we landed on the moon. I know that people in charge, and people in industry were capitalists, but the scientists and engineers I knew were not.

>106 sallypursell:

Oh, for sure, scientists are pretty much the same everywhere.

***



The liberation of painting : modernism and anarchism in avant-guerre Paris, Patricia D. Leighten, 2013

Suffice it to mark a few things I found especially startling or need to explore further... For one thing, there were socially conscious and critical artists with a classical (academic) style--leftists, but square. :) People like Jules Adler, producing acres of realistically depicted human misery. His heart was in the right place, but his status was of a consecrated Salon painter.

So, it's not the theme--the bourgeois can happily contemplate the miseries of the working class till the cows come home--but the style of the avant-garde that is "offensive". This is key. Style, more than anything else, is what actually expresses something about the society, is its mirror. Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon didn't ruffle feathers because they were prosties, but because they were UGLY (that is, done ugly-ly) and worse, the "ugliness" was "African" in style, "barbaric". Leighten demonstrates a fascinating trend in French anarchist (meaning pacifist and human-universalist) press to lampoon the state's own acts of barbarism as if committed by the "savages". This was a time of great turmoil in France due to the Dreyfus affair and the scandals surrounding the atrocities committed by the French in Africa.

Artists like Picasso, exponents of anarchist anticolonialism, adopted "primitivist" motifs and styles and were doing much more than appropriating fetishistic power of these symbols--they were proclaiming "WE are the barbarians" as well as "if that's your civilisation, long live the barbarians".

Other anarchist painters: Vlaminck, Van Dongen, Signac, Juan Gris--in one phase, he even did satirical cartoons for anarchist newspapers--and, most interestingly, the astounding Frantisek Kupka, a Czech in Paris. Kupka was the most "complete" anarchist of them all, living breathing and working to anarchist principles of social activism, pacifism, environmentalism, feminism. He was also the first or maybe among the few first true abstract painters.

This is an illustration by Kees Van Dongen form 1905, "The White Peril", demonstrating the anarchist "trinity" of anticolonialism, anticlericalism and antimilitarism:



The drunken depraved Christ of the missionaries, carried to the heathen on the exploiters' ships, protected by cannons.

Histoire d'un ruisseau, (Story of a stream), Élisée Reclus, OPD 1869

What an utterly beautiful, humane, sweet book. If you like poetic nature writing, this is a must--not least because it may well be a first, at least by an actual scientist. Reclus was a geographer, pedagogue, and anarchist social activist and writer. He was imprisoned for taking part in the Paris Commune, then exiled. He died in Belgium. Kupka (from the post above) was a devoted friend and comrade and provided illustrations for Reclus' magnum opus, L'homme et la terre.

This short book follows a stream from its source to its various ends, describing features and episodes in its "life" with care and intelligence but above all love. And this love isn't just for nature, but extends to everything living. Every chapter encapsulates some insight of anarchist philosophy, to offer to people.

The last few sentences (my translation):

People mix with people like streams with streams and rivers with rivers; sooner or later, they will form a single nation, just like all the waters from one basin end with merging together in a single river. The time when all these human currents will join each other still hasn't come: different races and nations, still attached to native soil, don't see each other as sisters; but they are approaching each other more and more; every day they love each other more and, together, they are beginning to gaze toward a common ideal of justice and liberty. People, having become intelligent, will surely learn to associate in a free federation: humanity, until now divided in distinct currents, will become a single river, and, united in a single wave, we shall descend together to the great sea where all the lives are dissolved and renewed.

Moving pictures

More strangely comforting gruesomness (mostly).

Seen before: Twice-Told Tales (1963); The Raven (1963); Burke & Hare (1972). Ah, The raven. How sad is it that such a lineup--Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, Vincent Price (and a young Jack Nicholson)--was wasted because the screenplay is so bad. BORING.

The Masque of Red Death (1964), though, was great, rendered in oddly cheerful palette.

Is a brook a stream?

"Story of a brook"

It's just that "brook" sounds a little... exotic? Unused? When was the last time you uttered the word "brook", meaning such and such body of water?

Or even as in "I will not brook your insolence, young man! Leave these premises forthwith! Harrumph!"

Fine and regional distinctions. Brook, stream, creek, rivulet, torrent, burn...in different areas there may be half a dozen different names for various sizes of flowing water, and the names may overlap with different meanings in different areas. My Michigander father and New Jersey mother argue about it, occasionally...and then there's the British names I picked up from books...

Yes, I use brook now and then. Usually the noun; the verb is sufficiently obscure that I only use it when I'm trying to sound old-timey (as in your quote!).

Huh. OED says brook (n) is from Old High German and the root word meant "marsh, bog". (V trans is also Germanic and means use, make use of, digest (as in eating) or tolerate, the last "usually paired with the negative".).

>110 LolaWalser: >111 jjmcgaffey:

Yes, as an actual geographical name it seems to be regional: where I grew up in the southern half of Lancashire, "brook" was the most common term for anything smaller than a river, but a little further north or east as you got into the Lake District or the Dales, it was more likely to become "beck". The size-distinction for "river" and "brook" doesn't seem very well-defined, but I don't think you ever get a river flowing into a brook.

Cf. this Wikipedia entry for the River Croal, all of whose tributaries are brooks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Croal

In poetic use it definitely has associations of green fields and English pastoral, trout and kingfishers and all the rest, but in real life our "Middle Brook" had flowed past a dye works before it got to us, with visible results, and there are plenty more very urban, industrial brooks, like the mostly-canalised Sankey Brook.

But the standard reaction to the word is more like this:

Seated once by a brook, watching a child
Chiefly that paddled, I was thus beguiled.
Mellow the blackbird sang and sharp the thrush
Not far off in the oak and hazel brush,
Unseen. There was a scent like honeycomb
From mugwort dull. And down upon the dome
Of the stone the cart-horse kicks against so oft
A butterfly alighted.

(Edward Thomas)

(And why are there so many poets called Brook or Brooke or Brooks?)

When you mentioned Coatian words for "bridge" a few weeks ago I went off down a linguistic rabbit-hole trying to find out why the "brook" word-family and the "bridge" word-family in Germanic languages have so much overlap. But I don't think I wrote any of it down...

>111 jjmcgaffey:

Creek! Is another good one. "Story of a creek" hmm creek/stream, creek/stream...

But creek is creaky and stream is dreamy... I like "burn" but that has as many meanings as "stream".

>112 thorold:

Yes, it has to be smaller than a river, something that flows into a river but never vice versa. Speaking of, is it really that English has only "river" for both le fleuve and la rivière?

What a beautiful poem. Makes you think of the juxtaposition R. H. Blyth made between Zen and English nature poetry. I should grab that Edward Thomas I have about some jaunt in the countryside...

>113 LolaWalser: I just looked it up, apparently le fleuve is a river that flows directly into the sea? We might call that a tidal river (since the tide usually goes well up it) but yes, it's still called a river. The River Thames is one (got that on my brain since I've been reading about mudlarking, which depends on the tides). The Hudson River, the Potomac - oddly, in actual usage, I wouldn't have River as part of their names for any of these. The Thames, the Hudson, the Potomac. But I would definitely describe all of them as rivers.

We have "inlet", but that's more the sea flowing (tidally) into the land. It might have a stream (small water) flowing into it, but the mass of the water is seawater, not fresh water flowing to the sea.

>114 jjmcgaffey:

Yeah, I'm not sure what distinctions are made in French, I'd use mostly "fleuve" for anything larger than a "ruisseau". Heh, you just reminded me of the "Rivers of London" series...

Look, a larch! (And now for something completely different...)

Wonderful 6-minute footage from 1914 about mining marble in Carrara--what a job! (English captions under CC tab)

Industrie des marbres à Carrare

Starting with Moving pictures because scenes like that one from Teens in Space led me to a book, Designed in the USSR : 1950-1989.

If you have any interest in science fiction, get thee to Kanopy and check out Moscow-Cassiopeia (1973) and Teens in Space (1974) ASAP. Simply enthralling. Made for children/youth, yes, but on an amazingly high level. The movies are parts I and II of the same story. Earth receives distress signals from Alpha Cassiopeia. Since a ship can't reach it faster than in 27 years, it is decided to send six fourteen year olds, three boys and three girls.

The leader is young Viktor, precocious genius, and the rest of the team has various skills. In a well-used adventure trope, they turn out to have a stowaway, an inventive and mischievous boy who doesn't follow the rules. It's thanks to this wild card, who butt-dials the McGuffin when a scuffle lands him on the control panel, that instead of trudging through space at the speed of light they open a wormhole and reach their destination almost instantly. So they arrive while still teenage, although on Earth everyone has aged.

The design of the sets and costumes is fantastic and looks like nothing I've seen before, even in other Soviet sf. The space robots are some of the campiest and funniest, though, moving with a weird disco shuffle. The humanoid alien Agapit who accompanies the teens to the planet, is superb, gangly and uncanny. And, did these movies invent the holodeck?! The teens' ship is equipped with thousands of "interiors" they can choose to have projected in a special room and so rest from the monotony of the surroundings. There are their own Earth apartments, but also landscapes of all sorts etc.

The plot is simple, the messaging obvious, but there is something ineffable in addition, something I'm tempted to see as uniquely Russian--the infusion of heart, I don't know how to put it better. In-between other strands of the plot, for instance, there is from the beginning a shy and modest love story, or rather stories, with Viktor trying to find out which of the girls sent him a love note (it turns out to be one of those left on Earth, now aged out of reach), and another concerning Katya and her crush on reserved Misha--what I find poignant and poetic is how everything is shown in hints and visual clues. It's also supremely cinematic, just virtuoso skill. Homesickness and in fact the loss of home is acknowledged. There's a beautiful scene where this loneliness is confronted with song, melancholy and gorgeous, with the boys in a circular embrace.

There are other important points. Within the first few minutes of the film, as people are discussing the received message and the planned mission, someone--a girl--makes an objection: why expend so much effort on trying to save aliens when Earth's own species are dying out? And she's told that her objection is right, there is no easy answer to that, it's just that having opened this path, having gained the ability of space travel, it's impossible to refuse to help thinking beings in distress.

Since I habitually note gender dynamics... it's clear that equality is presupposed, and stressed in various ways among teens on the ship, but they forgot to add a single woman among the dozen scientists or so who brief the teens on their mission, and there's some damselling of the girls. By the time the destination was reached (in 2000), back on Earth it's a woman head of the institute who greets them, but this is probably more due to the necessities of the plot (the now-adult woman radio-astronomer was the girl who had a crush on Viktor).

There is an informality and openness to the interactions between everyone that is unimaginable in Western military-based sf. The teens reject violence (when they argue what to do with the stowaway), show how to decide by consensus, and that changing one's mind is a good skill to have. Politics get no mention.

Designed in the USSR : 1950-1989, 2018, edited by Virginia McLeod et al.

Most of the items showcased here are consumer goods, including a few that were destined to foreign markets and presumably unavailable or too expensive for the average citizen. I was most impressed to learn of those that earned design and other prizes in the West, including a car, because it's a cliché for Westerners, even a habitual tic, to deride everything Communist-made whether the criticism is merited or not. In particular it's interesting to note how much of Western criticism is aimed at features that are actually positive, such as durability and reliability--features that, of course, are antithetical to capitalism's rabid consumerism and doctrine of "planned obsolescence".

(I was reminded of my first trip to Cuba when I stayed in an apartment with a Russian-made air conditioner. I noted this in particular because the machine was so much better--super cool AND quiet--than the crappy sort I had to put up with in New Orleans and New York. I was surprised--I too was convinced that nothing the Soviets made could actually be BETTER than the American stuff--and air conditioners of all things?! Weird. But there you go. That thing had a manufacture date of 1960-something.)

On that point, other customs more environment-friendly included a prevalence of reusable packaging, glass, tin, wicker etc. and such simple things like string nets instead of plastic bags (something also common in Europe).

I loved everything with "space" design, even the vacuums... but the only thing I recognised was the Olympic mascot Misha. My brother and I were once given a bunch of toys with Misha from visiting Russians in Syria, who invited us to their ship (visiting ships was a major source of entertainment).



The art of the erotic, 2017, edited by Rowan Pelling

I have other tomes with and about sexy art, much of which is quite familiar, but this one is an unusually beautiful book on its own (just look at that cover--no cracks please!--and it opens) and the commentary is excellent.

Hopjoy was here, Colin Watson, OPD 1962

I'm inclined to look fondly on any text where you can encounter "roystering" (sic), but Watson tries much too hard, with talents too meagre, for a story that doesn't half deserve it. Spymasters and cops alike converge on a scene of a crime that seems to have involved the dissolution of a whole body in acid, possibly that of the secret agent Hopjoy.

It's all happening in some part of England with bad weather, strange rustics and busybody hysterical spinsters peeping behind chintz curtains.

In the Trenches: A Russian Woman Soldier’s Story of World War I, Tatiana L. Dubinskaya, OPD 1930/1936

Dubinskaya (1902-1990) was one of the uncommon but not-unheard-of Russian female soldiers in the WWI. What really set her apart was her age--she was fifteen when she ran off from home disguised as a boy and joined the army as a volunteer in early 1916. She was rumbled soon enough but nobody seemed to mind terribly and on she went with her regiment all the way to Galicia and trench warfare, taking part in the action now as an infantryman, now as messenger and aide-de-camp.

This edition combines two of her works, the autobiographical fiction In the trenches, first published in 1930, and the memoir Machine gunner from 1936. According to the military historian Lawrence Kaplan, who wrote the introduction and edited the text, the main difference between the two books, apart from names, is that the later one gives more emphasis to the revolution and the radicalisation of the characters.

I must admit I'm suspicious of Kaplan's interpretations, not least because the book seems to me to be edited very badly. The translation is atrocious, probably no better than what you'd get if you just ran it through an on online translator. Some names retain haphazardly Cyrillic letters--Vasya is printed "Vacya" and Ahmedov is "Axmedov", for instance--and there are many examples of mistaken words ("emerged" when what is meant is "immersed") and ungainly, obtuse phrasing that neither does justice to Russian nor flatters English.

On the other hand, the interest of the text can't be beat, so if this is your only choice...

Young Dubinskaya was clearly a firebrand and states directly that what led her was thirst for adventure and a head filled with dreams of glory. Once among the soldiers, she develops a liking for the camaraderie and simplicity of that life, among all the very many horrors and difficulties (and a considerable share of sexual harassment, chiefly from the officers). On that last point, if the narrative is truthful, she either escaped unscathed or managed to choose her partner(s)--and it does seem that female soldiers were actually less importuned than nurses.

Possibly the best moment is when, in the confusion after the Revolution, Russian and Austrian soldiers fraternise for a few days, visiting each other's trenches and making gifts of tea and chocolate. The officers are incensed but the infantry of both sides, drawn mainly from the peasants and urban poor, couldn't care less. Would there be wars if the poor could rule the earth?

An excerpt from 1916 showing the comparative destitution of the Russians, end of Chapter 9:

No one expected to get to the warm Austrian barracks so soon. In the morning troops from the Stavropolsky and Krimsky regiments occupied four lines of Austrian trenches comfortably and without any losses.
Chereshenko twirled his mustache and smiled, commenting: "This is a sight! It's electricity on the front lines! Just like in our nobleman's factory. As soon as you turn it on, it sparkles like in a theater; it's beautiful. Those Austrians! It's a shame to kill such smart people."
Chereshenko kept turning the switch, marveling at the Austrian masteries. He said: "Did you see how they carried the ammunition in? Look here. They brought them on these little wagons. Oh holy mother of God, look, guys, they have a hanging washstand."
Trofim walked over to the washstand. Right next to it there was a clean towel hanging.

>118 LolaWalser: Ha, I did not know that there were both a fiction book and a memoir. I had read... one of them (it was a long time ago and I really cannot recall which one it was). :)

And I am pretty sure that Пулеметчица is actually from 1936 and not 1963 despite what this book's copyright page says... (yep: http://elib.shpl.ru/ru/nodes/13734-dubinskaya-t-l-pulemetchitsa-iz-dnevnika-miro...

The publisher needs to be shamed for this edition :( University of Nebraska Press tends to be better than that.

>119 AnnieMod:

Oh, thanks for that link! It's a lot of talk about soldiering for me but I'd love to get a better grasp of her tone.

Yes, you are right about the Machine Gunner being published in 1936... another error!

>120 LolaWalser: Here is also В окопах https://www.prlib.ru/node/322695/source if you want to see her style in that one as well - I just quickly read through the first pages - they are way too close to remember which one I read but there is some difference in the style... (not that you cannot find it if you want but I had it open anyway ;)

>121 AnnieMod:

Very cool, thanks. Wow, that's a nice resource.

Omggg it's a black hole of book goodnesssss

I probably should not laugh as hard as I just did but... :) Both of them can be entertaining indeed. :)

Just finally catching up here. Enjoyed all these comments on movies and books, authors and artists and entire scifi themes I don’t otherwise know about. A little fascinated by “The White Peril” image from 1905 (>107 LolaWalser: ) and really enjoyed the movie on the Carrara marble (>116 LolaWalser: ). I was mostly intrigued by the people but also by their log rolling transport. Dubinskaya sounds like a pretty amazing look into WWI Russian military life.

Really interested in the last few books you've read. The USSR design book is fascinating - the western world has such total distrust of anything coming out of Russia / old USSR that we never get an objective view on stuff like this.

Dubinskaya's story sounds really interesting too, although it sounds like the edition is off-putting.

>124 AnnieMod:

If only my Russian were half as good as yours...

>125 dchaikin:

Yes, I marvelled at the transport too--I wonder how many poor sods running in front got squished to death--and did you notice they also employed children, there were at least two boys...? And all that stone pounding without masks or gloves!

>126 AlisonY:

The design exhibit back in 2012 apparently drew huge crowds because there are by now at least two generations of Russians for whom it's all more or less context-less, if not wholly unknown. Between Western/anti-Communist prejudice and Putin's shameless instrumentalisation of the past for his own purposes, the USSR "as it was" recedes ever faster out of grasp...

Possibly the most surprising thing I've learned from Dubinskaya's book--well, Kaplan's intro--was that it had been planned to construct an all-female combat force of 10 000 volunteers. The recruitment had already started when the Bolsheviks came to power; they stopped the proceedings because they wanted to ensure ideological suitability of the soldiers.

Another tidbit is that there are other (3 or 4) memoirs of the Russian women soldiers in English, all "White" Russian though. The most famous is that of Maria Bochkareva. English rights to Dubinskaya's book were bought immediately in 1930 but, in contrast to the "White" memoirs, not used.

The photo on the cover of the book was actually published in the New York Times in August 1917! (I don't suppose it shows Dubinskaya herself, but who knows...)

De la forêt (Of the forest), Bibhutibhushan Banerji, OPD 1938

I liked Pather Panchali so requested this, without knowing what an important classic it is both of Bengali literature and "ecological" writing. In the 1920s, as an educated young man of small means, Banerji had the luck to get a job of property manager for some rich friends who owned forest land in Bihar, a province north of Banerji's home city of Calcutta. His job was to find tenants who would clear the forest and cultivate the land so that the owners could tax them.

Unexpectedly and as passionately as in any romance, Banerji falls in love with the forest itself, discovering unique beauty in pristine wilderness. He who doubted that he could last a few days outside the big city now can't tear himself from the majestic jungle and the freedom of this new life, riding on horseback all around the country, being enthralled by vegetation and animals he hardly knew existed.

And then there are people. Some are wealthy, but the mass of the people he encounters are the poorest on earth, most having no possessions but the rags they wear. And yet this extreme poverty does not prevent the emergence of all kinds of character and whimsy, gift and desire. There is Dhaturiya, a boy who would be dancer and travels miles to learn dances and find the rare people who would pay to see them performed. No one ever lived for one's art like Dhaturiya. There's Yugalprasad, poor as a beetle, who loves flowers so much he seeds them around the forest and again travels miles to find seeds of the rare varieties. There's old Matuknath with a passion for teaching, who lectures in an empty hut. There is wild girl Manchi, too young second wife of an old man, who gets duped out of precious kilos of mustard seed for trifles that make her happy, a necklace of glass beads, a comb...

There is a family of herder kings of ancient lineage but as poor as anyone else, Rajgond people who were almost annihilated by the Aryas. Banerji learns to respect and admire them, contrary to the prejudice that sees them as savage.

But there is a fatal clash between Banerji's humanism and newly discovered love for nature, and his job. Once it's over, the forest is gone, the land parcelled out to people who will try to squeeze out of it wild millet and lentils to live on, the whole landscape slumified because the owners don't care what dismal hovels the tenants live in, whether they have schools and clinics--just beat out the tax due. I tried to find pictures of Bihar forests that would fit Banerji's description but it seems the actual places he knew are truly unrecognisable today.

There is a blog post by an Indian reader of the book with a photo that may be pertinent?

http://jaychatterjee.blogspot.com/2011/06/aranyak.html

Moving pictures

As I was reading this I got Louis Malle's 1969 documentary on Calcutta, from Phantom India. This is how most people on earth live and die. This is the "representative", "average" human. The working poor bent over dirt from which may or may not spring something green and nutritious, then used up old beggars dying in the streets. As long as there's that, there will be revolt.

>127 LolaWalser: I think I missed the kids, but did wonder about the guy getting a close look at someone else’s hammering of stone with no eye protection.

>128 LolaWalser: is it still a find if it’s a classic? Anyway new to me, fascinating about the book by Banerji. (documentary sounds interesting too)

>128 LolaWalser: This reminds me that I placed a hold for this book at the library last year, but it disappeared! They must have written it off. I think I'll buy it.

>129 dchaikin:

They don't have much in common thematically, but I suppose Banerji (died 1950) would have found Malle's Calcutta not very different from his own. The documentary is well worth seeing:

Calcutta (1969)

>130 Dilara86:

I'll have to get it too, I find the characters have got under my skin. It's a very re-readable book.

>128 LolaWalser: Thanks for this review. I've been hesitant about reading this book, so I'm happy to read your review. It might be the hint I needed. Bibhutibhushan Banerji wrote another famous book, Pather Panchali/The song of the road/La complainte du sentier. The French edition (by L'imaginaire, chez Gallimard) is available with a movie adaptation.

>132 raton-liseur:

Satyajit Ray's, I suppose? His Apu trilogy draws on Banerji's Pather Panchali--well, the first two movies, I think.

Yes, I recommend this without reservations, I feel these characters will stay with me forever.

>133 LolaWalser: Yes, but I see you already know all about it! It's an author I will probably discover soon, then. And maybe both in writting on on screen. Which one would you recommand first: De la forêt or Pather Panchali?

>134 raton-liseur:

I'm still feeling the influence of the "forest" so I'd say that one. The first person narration and the author's deeply felt love and sadness for the loss of nature make it (IMO) a little more special. But I don't think the order of reading would matter a great deal in itself.

***

Le roi des cons : Quand la langue française fait mal aux femmes, Florence Montreynaud, 2018

The literal English translation of the title would go "The king of cunts (when French language harms women)" and it shows one thing both languages (along with a number of others) have in common--that the worst insult is represented by a word designating female genitals. However, there are inter-national differences that make for specific difficulties when trying to combat linguistic spread of misogyny.

I have had British friends (there are also differences in usage between Brits and North Americans) assure me that "cunt" is a democratic insult, to which I invariably reply that the point isn't that it's applied to men as often as to women, but that the worst imaginable insult in English language--British or American English--is a word designating female genitals. Why is "cunt" the worst, and not "dick" or "prick"? Yeah, we know: because misogyny; because to be female, of female sex/gender, relating to women/femininity etc. is in itself, a priori, a shame, defect, failure, sin, crime etc.

In short, please don't anyone fool themselves thinking "cunt" (and its synonyms and derivations) is in any way a "neutral" insult. And yes, women use it too--because women are almost as often and almost as misogynist as men.

In French, the situation is a tad different but only in a, so to speak, quantitative sense--the usage of "con" is even more widespread and normalised than that of "cunt" in English because, unlike "cunt", it's come to mean, broadly, "stupid". This usage could be argued to be generally less vitriolic than the English "cunt" but, for one thing, the ground question of why precisely a word for female genitals has come to mean that and be such a widespread insult, remains the same; furthermore, there are variations on "con", especially when applied to women, that are every bit as degrading as the English usage.

That's a riff just on the title--Montreynaud discusses, in two pages per term or phrase, many misogynistic and sexist linguistic cases common in French (but quite often with parallels in English).

I was gratified, by the way, to see that she BEGINS with the very usage that has driven me up the wall innumerable times in the past, as in and specifically the sentence "Elle s'est fait violer", approximately "She got herself raped".

It's not unique to that verb or gender, in French you may see also "He got/gets/will get himself assassinated", especially when historical present/future tense is used: "Caesar will get himself assassinated one Ides of March..."

The same goes for common phrases involving any violence, domestic battery, assault etc. "elle s'est fait battre", she got herself beaten, "elle s'est fait harceler", she got herself harassed etc.

The worst is that French has perfectly serviceable passive mode that can describe the above situations without the ridiculous (no matter how "unintentional") victim blaming--it's perfectly possible and normal to say "elle a été violée" (she was raped), "il a été assassiné" (he was assassinated).

***



Chroniques de la haine ordinaire, Pierre Desproges, OPD 1987

By way of connecting this to the above... :)

Quand quarante personnes s'habillent comme un con, c'est l'Académie française. Quand mille personnes s'habillent comme un con, c'est l'armée française.

"When forty people dress like an idiot, it's the French academy. When a thousand people dress like an idiot, it's the French army."

Desproges (1939-1988) was a chance discovery for me some months ago when INA's YouTube channel put up some of his televised routines. At this mature age I'm incapable of falling in love as impetuously as once upon a time, but I did resonate at this encounter as with a kindred soul (his Wiki mentions off the bat black humour, non-conformism, the sense of absurd, so how could I not?) "Chronicles of ordinary hatred" was Desproges' radio show, five minutes of dissection or flight of fancy of some daily absurdity or irritation. I didn't get all his targets, tied as these vignettes often are to then-current affairs, and to a newbie I would recommend watching the shows first.

At this point I can't say a lot about what I find compelling about his humour but it's similar to what I feel reading or listening to Lenny Bruce. How much reality must hurt us for us to find it so funny, that funny, funny in THAT way.

Moving pictures

The Emperor's naked army marches on (1987)



I watched this based on a recommendation by a Japanese film lover on YouTube whom I follow, and he said only this: "You must watch this". Now, if that was enough for me, I hope it will be enough for others, because I'm not sure I could convince anyone to watch it without simultaneously ruining the experience.

It is better that you know less because--this is not the case always--there is a certain amount of work to go through in the movie, the people have to reach certain points when they can open up and talk, and if you know in advance what they will be talking about, you will not appreciate the significance and the cost of their lifelong struggle to avoid talking about it. You will keep waiting for the subject to show up,, when the theme of the film is also, even preeminently, their REFUSAL to talk about it.

This is a documentary that Hara made over five years, beginning in 1983 when its subject, Kenzo Okuzaki, was 62 years old. That's him in the middle in the capture above. Okuzaki was a WWII veteran. Some ten years after the war, in an episode that is not explained in the film, he killed a real estate broker, took a shot (with a slingshot) at emperor Hirohito, and distributed obscene pamphlets featuring the emperor. For these cumulative crimes he served 13 years and 9 months in prison. On release, he continued his one-man fight to discover what happened to his comrades in New Guinea and, specifically, to exact confessions from the officers and other personnel involved in the events that had traumatised Okuzaki for life.

Hara followed Okuzaki in his wanderings around Japan, visiting the survivors (some of whom had changed their names), confronting them as villains and murderers, and on occasion beating them up, with cameras rolling. At these times Okuzaki himself offers to call or calls the police--he sees violence as a legitimate tool for him to use, but one for which he takes responsibility.

It's tempting to see him as a madman, but I for one would adamantly refuse such a reading. Once you know the story, you understand there is no difference between being "mad", and tormented and exasperated beyond all endurance. Okuzaki, in fact, could easily be one of the more sane ones.

I didn't understand where this was going. My heart sank at the sight of numerous Japanese men crying. To have their traditionally stoical demeanor undermined to that point, in public... what that meant, was that everything was true. Moreover, Okuzaki himself wasn't solving a mystery, he was exacting confessions for the events he had known about, had not perhaps witnessed in every detail, like the central execution of two privates three days after the end of war, but knew why they had happened.

I'll complete the story in the spoiler tags, but if any of you think they may want to see this, please avoid the rest.

As far as can be established based on this film alone, an officer had two soldiers executed so that others could eat them. By this time cannibalism was well-established as a means of survival, with what seems an official knowledge and accompanying "rules" about who was permissible food. "Black pig" referred to Indonesian natives, "white pig" to Australian POWs. But Indonesians proved hard to catch and Australians were soon gone. That left only the other Japanese, beginning with the least popular lowest ranking soldiers.

The two men whose fate Okuzaki pursued were, according to one of the survivors (who apparently partook in the eating of them, while himself being threatened with the same) the least liked, "selfish" ones, but perhaps they were simply physically the weakest.

>136 LolaWalser: About the use of "se faire" + infinitive and "être" + past participle, I'd say it's the other way. "Se faire" means that someone *did something to you*, it implies that someone is responsible for the action that was done to you, whereas the passive form neutralises that: something just happened to you. Depending on context of course, the passive form is a lot more suspect - just like in English, when someone says "I'm sorry you were offended" rather than "I'm sorry I offended you", you know where they stand.

>137 Dilara86:

Well, Montreynaud disagrees, and I with her. The sentence can't read otherwise than that the subject of it acted so that it got something done to them-- the "se" refers to the subject, not anyone else. (This is perhaps easier to grasp on less "traumatic" examples, such as "il s'est fait couper les cheveux".)

I agree that the passive mode "hides" the perpetrator too, but the implication that someone else is responsible for the act is far clearer. There is no indication of any sort that "elle", the only visible subject/"actor", has contrived to "get herself" raped.

If you're interested, I can quote what she writes about this.

x + y. A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender, Eugenia Cheng, 2020

https://www.librarything.com/work/24849487

I'm sorry that I can't be as enthusiastic about this book as I'd like. I certainly see Cheng and myself as "on the same side" of the battle against misogyny, I sympathise with her troubles as a woman in a male-dominated field, I broadly agree with her opinions about whether, when, how etc. gender matters or not, and I share her desire for an egalitarian, just world.

So, what is the problem? I suppose the best I can hope for is that it's just a problem of mine and that others may yet profit from this book in ways that I did not.

For one thing, I was disappointed to see that the math didn't really matter, or that it mattered mostly insofar its choice for a career influenced Cheng's life, shaped her battles and so on. To be sure, mathematical thinking is also her preferred way of parsing arguments, and that's great, but it's not more relevant or necessarily more helpful to understanding the problems of societal misogyny than the ability to reason any one of us might have. My private issue is that I have been hoping for a long time now for a mathematical theory that would helps us understand immensely complex systems such as a single cell or human society. But we still have to wait for that.

Instead, Cheng's applications of mathematical terms and ideas really work more by analogy--for instance, to demonstrate what she means by "adding a dimension" to the conversation (about gender), where she shows a one-dimensional and then a two-dimensional graph, or when she discusses the need to consider variables such as gender and character traits separately, or where "identifying patterns" is illustrated by some nice but inconsequential diagrams. You don't really need math to grasp these arguments, is what I'm saying--and besides the arguments are nothing new--women (feminists or not) and even some men have been arguing for "decoupling" gender from character traits forever.

People have noticed since there were any people to notice anything that linguistic sleights of hand can be used to "prove" all sorts of nonsense. Regarding, for instance, "female" character traits, it's a classic move to define bunches of fine, desirable, praiseworthy traits as essentially, exclusively, definitionally masculine, such that women can't ever be said to possess them, by definition. If and when faced by a woman who seemingly, to the most jaundiced eye, possesses some of those "masculine" traits, the next classic move is to deny that that woman is "really" female.

Arguing against such tactics is really more the business of philosophy and linguistics, not math. And Cheng proves this point by venturing into the linguistic domain of (re)naming.

The only truly new contribution this book makes are two terms Cheng proposes as solutions to the "divisiveness" of debates about gender: ingressive and congressive. The first time these terms come up, she says this about them: ingressive is "about going into things" and congressive is "about bringing things together".

The second time these are expanded (to my eyes rather alarmingly arbitrarily replacing original "short form" vagueness with a "long form" vagueness):

ingressive: focusing on oneself over society and community, imposing on people more than taking others into account, emphasizing independence and individualism, more competitive and adversarial than collaborative, tending toward selective or single-track thought processes

congressive: focusing on society and community over self, taking others into account more than imposing on them, emphasizing interdependence and interconnectedness, more collaborative and cooperative than competitive, tending toward circumspect thought processes

You'll notice the contrasting ideas are familiar and more or less correspond to widespread received notions of "typically masculine" aggresive, self-centred behaviour, and "typically feminine" conciliatory, caring behaviour.

So there is a danger that once these terms lose their lustre of newness they'll just end up as another shorthand for "masculine" and "feminine".

It's not that I don't share Cheng's wish for a renewed, egalitarian language!--I very much do (not to mention that feminists have been sensitive to the issue of language for ages). But I don't see her proposal as the conceptual breakthrough that she seems to think it is. Moreover, she blatantly contradicts herself (and not just on this issue) when she writes "these are descriptive words rather than prescriptive ones" but then goes on for chapters arguing for the need to adopt "congressive" behaviours.

Another contradiction arises from stating desire to uncouple gender from character traits, but then falling into essentialising clichés, such as describing women in male-dominated fields as "emulating men". Cheng herself, as she writes, consciously "emulated men" in her career, until she couldn't stand the discomfort this caused her, upon which she abandoned classic academia for a more rewarding freelance career in which she gets to use her congressive tendencies, rather than having to put on ingressive acts.

This may have been true for her, and no doubt more than her (including some men) but I don't think we can assume it to be true for all women. In part this is a circular argument, but if we're to stop thinking in gendered terms, the idea that high-achieving women in male-dominated fields are "emulating men" (as opposed to behaving in certain ways that suits their personalities), has got to go too.

At the risk of subverting my own wish not to chase people away from the book, I do have to mention one thing that bothers me the most, Cheng's "power diagrams" that supposedly result from an application of category theory. She shows two of those diagrams, one concerning men, the other women (note that this includes transpeople, but leaves the non-binary out). I'm showing the one concerning women:



What bothers me is the lack of explanation of what this means. I saw this and thought, "charlatan!" Now, she does mention having discussed these examples in another book, but if she's reserving something in this book because it's supposedly explained elsewhere, that's a very bad (and unscientific) way of expounding.

In this book, what she says about the diagrams is that they represent "relationships" between the rich and the non-rich, male and non-male, cis-gendered and trans-gendered etc.

All those relationships combine into this diagram showing the relationships between people with different combinations of those particular types of privilege. The arrows just depict hypothetical loss of one type of privilege, without making any claims about the causes or consequences. ... This abstract structure doesn't explain where those relationships come from, how exactly they manifest themselves in practice, or how to address the situation if, as I do, you believe it needs addressing. But it does enable us to gain some clarity about what the issues are, to focus on the issues that are relevant to a given situation, to package some relationships into a single unit so that we can hold it in our brain more easily, and to move more smoothly between different situations looking for patterns.

This paragraph just stuns me. In fact, I could get a migraine analysing it. Look at the diagram, then look at that para, and back and forth as many times as you like. Is any idea coming to you? The diagram superficially seems to posit a certain hierarchy--the "rich white cis-women" occupy the top level, while the "poor non-white trans-women" occupy the bottom one. This nebulously jibes with what we know about power and privilege, and so automatically seems somehow "right--but how did we get to that picture mathematically? What does math have to do with it AT ALL? Graphically you could represent the same diagram with different elements in the top and bottom level, just by manipulating the "cube" topologically.

Next, what are "relationships" and why are they established only between some of the elements and not all of them? Why, for instance, is the element "poor white cis-woman" not relating to, for instance, "poor non-white trans-woman", or "rich white trans-woman"?

And how can one BEGIN to depict a "hypothetical loss of privilege" without some premises that would involve theorising about causes and consequences? "Privilege" itself is a term that presupposes conditions that cause disparities, with would-be consequences (for example, the hierarchical positioning of the elements).

In short, the last sentence in the para just makes me laugh--no, I do not think this gives us clarity about the issues (and how on earth could it, with everything that Cheng herself notes it doesn't do), I do not think it shows issue "relevant to the situation" (first, what situation?), I do not see how it "packages" some relationships (and again, I don't know WHAT these relationships are, either) into a "single unit", nor what is supposedly desirable about having issues packaged into a "single unit"--my kind of brain prefers keeping true to complexity by juggling at least six different things at the same time (before breakfast)--and I can't imagine how this is supposed to help us find patterns in different situations. I mean, one can FORCE patterns, and that's exactly what I'd say is going on with these "power diagrams".

I think I'm justified in saying that this part is objectively murky and confusing, although I could be uninformed and stupid about this. If so, I'd be grateful for education on the issue.

Argh, why is getting touchstones such a bother nowadays!

>139 LolaWalser: "This abstract structure doesn't explain"... "But it does enable us to gain some clarity"

Just looking at they start of these two sentences makes my brain hurt - that's the usual way to frame a "I have no clue what this is all about but I need to explain it so here we go with throwing things at you until either you give up or you figure it out because I cannot".

Sounds like a lost opportunity with this whole book, not just this pair of diagram and text :(

I had been eyeing this book - not because I am drawn to the feminist side of it that much but for the math application (being my field and all that). Sounds like it was just used to frame the usual babble... Oh well. One book less to read. :) Wonderful review though.

>140 LolaWalser: See https://www.librarything.com/topic/327209#7454259 - essentially - always refresh, they are looking at why it is needed...

>141 AnnieMod:

Thanks--I've tried a gajillion times--but it just won't do it! I've noticed this with other touchstones but none have been this stubborn.

Why are you resistant to feminism, Annie? Come out of the cold, coooome to the sisterhooood... we have cupcakes, and wushu movies... lipstick and skateboards... :)

Well, darn, it sounds as if you should be the one reviewing the book, regardless--it's possible that the necessity (in pop science publishing) of keeping things "simple" has, as it usually does, undermined some good ideas. There is a distracting double voice to the parts where she talks about math, with explanations about basics overlapping the questions of application. Imagine trying to follow a cookbook recipe overlaid with definitions of "sugar", chemical composition etc.

I'm afraid I've done her a disservice by not trying to find the positive. What she says about the need to redefine ideas of "success" and the worth of competition vs. collaboration is very good, and--as a purely practical matter--there is an appendix with examples of how she faces hostility in a "congressive" manner, while listing the "ingressive" and "passive" responses too--to a funny effect.

>142 LolaWalser: "Why are you resistant to feminism, Annie?"

It's complicated :) I am not - not in general terms. I have some issues with the more extreme cases and most of the literature tends to gravitate there. While they had been needed historically and probably still are (ok... not really probably, they are needed), they make me a bit weary. So I rarely gravitate towards books with a strong feminist leaning - a lot of them are almost laughably two-toned : Women - good, men - bad. Which does not mean that I won't pick a book that actually does not sound THAT two-toned or that interests me otherwise.

I've worked (and competed before that) in men dominated fields my whole life. I don't need a book to tell me what is wrong in that or how it needs to change. A lot of these books and sites and scholars are looking at numbers in isolation (or so it seems often) - which leads to disasters - you should not deny a woman the opportunity to grow into a role by dumping her into the role directly (way too many examples like that in my industry...). There is a difference between opportunities and closing a gender gap by pure numbers matching. Numbers and ratios are important but how we get there is as important. Anyway... :) That may be another topic we do not see eye to eye but that is ok :)

Oh, I realize that the book will have some good sides - no worries. And you are probably right, the pop-science part of it probably did not help much. But it also sounds a lot more babble than applied mathematics - and I was looking at it for the latter :) Probably not a very realistic expectations all things considered but... :)

>143 AnnieMod:

No worries, if you should want to discuss any of that ever, I'll always be interested.

And on Cheng too--if you do come across it, I'd love to hear your opinions about what she does with the mathematical examples.

Well dangnabit I'll try adding the touchstone in this post:

x + y. A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

I just read the review by overlycriticalelisa and it jibes with my impressions and about the rating I'd give it (if I gave anything but extreme ratings ;))

The Other Place has more complimentary reviews, be it noted

x + y. A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

24849487 :: x + y. A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!!!

eta: finally...

>144 LolaWalser: My library has it, I added it on the soon-ish list so... we will see. Amazon's reviews seem overwhelmingly positive as well - until you read some of them and see what they praise. :) People think differently about the same things and that's what makes it interesting sometimes. I will read this one in the next months - except for books on creationism and flat earth and what's not as science (sorry, these are not ideas, these are stupidity - I prefer my science fiction better written and with better ideas), I am open to ideas generally - even if I may disagree with some. :)

>146 AnnieMod:

I didn't read the reviews on Amazon, but looking at those for "The art of logic" on LT, it occurs to me that perhaps I should have mentioned a few other things... Just as one of the reviewers for that book hints, I too thought in many places that Cheng is ignoring the "social" side of the problem, the messy interplay of cultural, sociological, political, economic etc. factors that are involved in dictating and maintaining gender roles and discrimination.

Not that she doesn't know about it, of course, only that she side-steps it. But misogyny, or the institution of patriarchy, isn't a matter of people not thinking mathematically enough, of not understanding statistics etc.--certainly not predominantly. Which brings us to a question I started having immediately--who is she addressing? To go for an example that may appear extreme but actually reflects the constraints MOST women in the world live under more accurately than the situation in the West--what use would it be to go to the Taliban with "have you considered rethinking gender along more congressive lines"?

This is not a matter of stupidity, of not having thought things through, of not knowing math. It's just that in most of the world--hell, I'd say all of the world, but in some places it may be less apparent--those who are placed in the position of power like men as a class are in the position of power, do not for a moment want to lose it, but in fact aim to maintain the tradition and all the systems and institutions that put them on top at any cost.

And this brings me to another point that rubbed me the wrong way. I have to say Cheng doesn't make a BIG thing out of it, and there's no question that she adopts a feminist stance throughout... but, she does in several places bemoan the style different to her own, the more combative tone and, for instance, explicitly calls out the slogan "Smash the patriarchy!" as an example of language/attitude she'd prefer to see abandoned. She goes so far in being conciliatory toward the knee-jerk haters and distortioners of feminism as to give props to that "men are from Mars" drivel!

Two aspects of the problem here--one, narrow, regarding the "types" of feminism, which Cheng apparently would prefer to mean just the one thing and be expressed in just the one way--the radical, combative feminism that she turns her nose up on is the feminism that leads actual change in women's condition and the world. People can piss on the suffragettes today (as when they did not?), but those women were ready to die for the vote and some did. That's combat. Peasant women, women workers all over the world, went on strikes, joined guerrilla, took up arms, for their own freedom and that of others. That's combat.

Even pussy-hat protests are more combative, louder, less "ladylike"-conciliatory in any case, than Cheng's model of "congressive" behaviour. Which brings me to the broader aspect of the problem--perhaps we shouldn't want to (even if we could) dismiss and end all "ingressive" behaviour.

The problem is that Cheng doesn't seem to want to concede that there is any value to the "ingressive" instincts (at least she doesn't give any positive examples of such), and goes out of her way to smother them.

"Smash the patriarchy!", for instance, like any slogan is a "picker-upper" and motivational tool, a rallying cry. It doesn't necessarily entail literal "smashing" of anything--all the more so as "patriarchy" isn't some solid object one could "smash". Obviously Cheng knows this. Her aim with this is to shame and silence other feminists simultaneously as she tries to ingratiate herself with the anti-feminists. It's not that this makes me angry--I just see it as a doomed strategy. Again, people aren't anti-feminist because they don't get math and statistics--they are anti-feminist because, rightly or wrongly, they identify with the ruling class and its needs.

Finally, the book begins with the notion of "divisiveness", which is another thing Cheng wants to do away with. The "debate around gender" and the very term "feminism" , she says, are "divisive".

Yeah--and so what? They are divisive for the right reasons, because people who wish the status quo to continue and those who don't are at odds. There are a million such "divisive" problems, and they can't be defined out of existence nor the differences artificially bridged.

>147 LolaWalser: "Which brings us to a question I started having immediately--who is she addressing?"

See, that's my problem with a lot of what I call the babble books - they seem to try to address everyone and end up addressing noone.

As for the rest - there is a difference between "feminism is only combat all the time" and "combat is useful but there are other means as well in addition to it" :) I am in the latter camp in case my previous message did not make that clear. Sounds like she tried to sidestep way too many practical considerations and went into modeling in the imaginary - not that this is not useful sometimes but it tends to end up too removed from the real world. Which is kinda endemic in the soft feminism books in my experience - although I do not pick them up that often so that may not be as wide-spread as I believe it to be.

I am with you on divisive - if it is divisive, it most likely IS important. Sweeping it under the rug either by ignoring it or my artificially making things match does not make any of that better - it makes them even worse because it is window dressing and it alienates everyone at the end. So when the topic comes back, it is much worse than it was before...

The book is on its way to me this week - so more about it when I read it in a few weeks (there is stuff ahead of it :d)

Émaux et Camées, Théophile Gautier, OPD 1852; written and published individually from 1829 onward

Super-self-consciously beautiful poems about beautiful things and horrors, with little in-between. Gautier drank deeply of German Romanticism and assumed its dark motifs, but he's much sexier.

Contralto
...

Que tu me plais, ô timbre étrange !
Son double, homme et femme à la fois,
Contralto, bizarre mélange,
Hermaphrodite de la voix !
...

Nature charmante et bizarre
Que Dieu d'un double attrait para,
Toi qui pourrais, comme Gulnare,
Etre le Kaled d'un Lara,

Et dont la voix, dans sa caresse,
Réveillant le coeur endormi,
Mêle aux soupirs de la maîtresse
L'accent plus mâle de l'ami !

(How much you please me, o strange colour!
A double sound, man and woman in one,
Contralto, bizarre mixture,
Hermaphrodite of the voice! ...

A strange enchanting nature
God made twice bewitching
You who could, like Gulnar,
Become a Kaled to a Lara,

Whose voice, with its caress,
Awaking the sleeping heart,
Blends the sighs of the mistress
With the accent, more virile, of the lover!)

Gautier had a thing for operatic contraltos, crushing on one after another and marrying Ernesta Grisi--the poem is likely about her. His Mademoiselle de Maupin is also about a "hermaphrodite" character, a woman who cross-dresses and "cross-sings" too.

The Honjin Murders, Seishi Yokomizo, OPD 1973

Excellent locked-room mystery, especially rewarding (I imagine) for people who love poring over location plans and schedules. "Honjin" denoted an upper-class inn reserved for nobility, so the people who ran such establishments were seen as a cut above ordinary folk. Here the eldest son of one such traditional honjin family has decided, much against his relatives' wishes, to marry a girl from the "nouveaux riches". Tragedy strikes on the wedding night in seemingly impossible circumstances.

The central character could easily have been a subject of a psychological novel. Ghastly ghostly goings-on included.

Moving pictures

Gojiraaaaaa!



So, I'm officially a Godzilla fan now. Since the film with Ebirah the Lobster Monster, I saw Godzilla vs. Gigan (1972), Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971), Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1975) and, breaking away from the Showa era (the GOLDEN AGE), Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989).

Seeing Gojira stomp on the carcasses of his enemies is a balm to the soul.

Also seen: Houchang Allahyari's Geboren in Absurdistan (1999), another film on the theme of immigrants in Austria. Here the newly-borns of an Austrian and immigrant Turkish couple are accidentally swapped on birth. The Turkish couple, who had in the midst of their excitement forgotten to renew their papers, gets deported to Turkey. The Austrians learn of the swap and follow the other couple to the godforsaken village to re-swap the babies.

The coincidence-rich premise, of course, matters less than the moment when the two babies are lying side-by-side and the idiocy of prejudice clear to see.

Also seen (again!): thirteen (13!) of those German Edgar Wallace movies from the sixties. I have no excuse.

Also seen: Pete Walker's House of Mortal Sin (1974), with fabulous Sheila Keith and Anthony Sharp. Religion is mad-making and/or madmen make religion. Not for the faint of (macabre) humour...

>150 LolaWalser: Yep adding that one, at this point I have no reason to ever leave Japan.

>151 stretch:

as I just mistakenly posted in your thread: "ha and I feel like having sushi now"

It's been a year...

>152 LolaWalser: I think we are simatniously cross posting. Sushi is the one thing about Japan I don't seem to love.

>153 stretch:

That's actually not a problem from what more than one Japanese colleague told me, apparently ordinary Japanese people don't eat nearly as much fish as a Western sushi-lover might imagine and are more likely to go for a pork schnitzel or some such. (I do love fish though, in any form, there is even a Dalmatian version of "sashimi"--basically just eating freshly caught fish thinly sliced--some types more than other.)

The Witch, Thomas Middleton, written 1606-20?

Hecate. give me some Lizards-Braine : quickly Firestone
    wher's Grannam Stadlin, and all the rest o'th Sisters?
Firestone. all at hand forsooth.
Hec. give me Mar maritin : some Beare-breech : when.
Fir. heer's Beare-breech, and Lizards braine forsooth.
Hec. Into the vessell;
   and fetch three ownces of the red-haird-Girle
   I killed last midnight.

My copy of the play is a 1950 edition of the version in the 17th century manuscript, warts (haha) and all. The plot is worthy of a Mexican telenovela. There's a guy who was falsely reported to have died in battle, upon which his betrothed was re-trothed to another man; the first guy arrives on the day the other two are getting married and goes swiftly to the local druggist, pardon, witch, for a spell that would cause the second guy's impotence... which happens, so he has some space to maneuver either reconciliation or revenge with his ex (well, she's not ex to him, he firmly believes they are technically married). He dons a disguise and gets himself employed as a servant in the so far unconsummated couple's household.

And that's just the first six minutes. There are also a Duke and a Duchess, and really, when people talk of bad marriages, how often do they mean something like "the husband toasts gatherings drinking from a goblet made out of his wife's father's skull"? So the Duchess also gives her custom to the witch, with the general idea of offing the obnoxious spouse.

Other people with other problems, complicating everybody else's dire plans, rush the door for magic potions and whatnot. A toad is used to cast a love spell on a woman called Amoretta, but when the toad is transferred to another woman called Amoretta (WHAT are the chances??), so is the spell. I love reading plays but I'd also love to see on stage four characters handing the bespelled toad to each other like a hot potato.

My book's intro and notes deal only with the details of the manuscript, there's little about the play as literature. It was performed but either flopped or got banned, and the first publication would wait until 1778. It includes two "witchcraft" poems that would later be (partly) inserted into Shakespeare's Macbeth; it's not clear by whom.

It's a bad play but must be a hoot to stage and perform, so--bad play, great entertainment?

Here is an online version with modernised spelling (and possibly some other edits): The Witch.

***

Malentendu à Moscou (The misunderstanding in Moscow), Simone de Beauvoir, written 1966-67

This is the original version of a novella about a sixtyish French couple's trip to Moscow in 1966 that Beauvoir would rework and in reworked form include in La femme rompue (The woman destroyed, in English version). I haven't read the latter (yet), and am glad to read this version first for the reflection on things political that Beauvoir apparently left out later in order to emphasise the couple's intimate problems, ageing and loss of desire, specifically as it affected the woman.

André and Nicole are hardly veiled as Sartre and Beauvoir, except that they have a son, and André also has a daughter from an earlier liaison (in real life the character of Masha was actually one of Sartre's girlfriends). Sartre and Beauvoir, like the couple in the novella, did visit Moscow and elsewhere in the USSR several times, noting various changes and presumably musing on them along the same lines as the fictional couple. These aren't the main topic but I nevertheless found them very interesting and illuminating, especially the few instances where 30-something's Masha's reactions to their observations and questions are reported. Like all Westerners, they tend to see conspiracy and god-knows-what malicious design behind anything--if a route is suddenly closed to tourists, what does it mean? Masha says it doesn't mean anything; some bureaucratic absurdity, she knows the region and the roads and villages on them, there's nothing special about any of it... There are many such little things that appear laden with meaning to one but not to other.

Their disillusionment with the French left is accompanied with the deception they feel in the USSR; they won't live to see the socialist society they hoped for, but Masha, for instance, is impatient with their romanticism. She is a modern young woman dealing with practicalities of life in an imperfect but egalitarian and liberalising society in which, contrary to the West, technological development does not result in ever-greater social inequality.

Regarding women, Nicole/Beauvoir notes several times how different the Russian women are in their attitudes, compared to the French women: the former have no "complex of inferiority" vis-à-vis men, working side-by-side with them in professions little French girls (she reminisces) were still strictly forbidden--"because you are a girl".

That's one of the feminist themes; there is also Beauvoir's preoccupation with ageing, especially as it affects women and certainly did affect her, who seems to have started thinking about herself as an old woman when she was barely forty. This, however, is hardly idiosyncratic--that women, in general perception, become "invisible" much faster than men is still more the rule than not.

>139 LolaWalser:, >141 AnnieMod: Really interesting review, but I think the book would have really frustrated me if your quote from Cheng about having to "emulate men" in her male-dominated field is anything to go by. I know most of my sisterhood will shoot me for saying this, but I hold my hands up to being quite resistant to feminism. I'm the only female in our small tech company, and I'd say most of the guys are probably more feminist that I am!

Why? Mainly because I've never felt disadvantaged in my career because of my gender, even when I've worked in very male-dominated fields like tech and logistics. I've worked hard and I've progressed as I've wanted to and been paid as I should have, and the only point at which I hit a supposed glass ceiling was because there were no jobs available at the next level to move into in the company, regardless of what gender you were. I've had some terrific male line managers who really encouraged my career progression, and the guys in my work are really enjoyable to work alongside.

I've been asked several times to join the Women in Business and Lean In chapters in Belfast and I feel slightly guilty that I never accept, but only because there aren't many female leaders in tech. I'm very resistant to these types of organisations as I don't want to create an 'us' and 'them' - I've never experienced that division in my 26 years of working. The leader of one of these organisations told me in conversation that she hated a guy who is on our board as he'd never let her progress when she worked for him. By contrast, I've found him to be hugely supportive, which brings me to the big grouch I have with these types of feminist movements - sometimes they're just moaning shops for people who haven't progressed for reasons other than their gender. Yes, it's very hard going back to the workplace when you've had kids and want to work part-time, but no harder than I think it would be for a man wanting to go part-time. My career stalled for a time when my kids were small, but did I really expect to compete on an equal footing with my colleagues (male or female) who were working full time and could put more into the role than I could at that point?

I've never felt the need to 'emulate' men. I've just been me, and it seems to have worked out OK. Maybe that's where Cheng and some of her sisters are going wrong....

I'd love to see more women in tech, but I still need to be convinced that it's men that are stopping women from doing so. From what I've seen first hand it's been women who've been talking themselves out of tech, but I haven't fully figured out why to that one yet.

>156 AlisonY:

I don't have the book with me anymore so can't quote Cheng, but it would be unfair to leave the impression that this detail was more important than it was. She does say "emulating men" twice in the same context, talking about her own experience in the academia, but if I understood where she's going with that, I would suggest first that "male-identified" would be a better phrase to use. "Male-identified" is something that very many of us are, and that all of us are brought up to be--used to having male role models, used to seeing men everywhere and anywhere, used to seeing men in top positions, used to male authority, used to male privilege, used to the praise and validation of the so-called "masculine" traits, used to listening, observing, and submitting to male guidance, used to respecting men, used to deferring to men's judgement, used to reading male authors as "universal" authors and interpreting men as the "universal" subjects and so on ad infinitum. And all of this happens not neutrally vis-à-vis women, but deliberately and systematically at women's expense--which is why the resulting system of power and its institutions are patriarchal, not egalitarian.

The phrase may be confusing to people who haven't encountered it before and so would still need clarifying that it's not about what one thinks is one's gender! (different topic entirely)--but I would argue it's better than "emulating men" because instead of implying that women in math (or where have you) are individually consciously imitating men, it calls back to a structural feature of the patriarchy and the condition of many other women (to say nothing of the men). I.e. it's not just women in science who can be said to "emulate men", but pretty much any women visible for some reason in public life and fulfilling any function whatsoever--politicians, sportswomen, artists etc. Once upon a time all of that was exclusively or predominantly a male domain and as we know it DID often happen that women venturing in were accused of and derided as imitators and wannabes.

That said, I do think there's value in consciously taking note of what, how, why we are doing something, how we came by our behaviours. I wouldn't want to obfuscate with undue criticism what I think is most valuable and right about Cheng's discussion here, which is her plea to validate and admit different styles in research and academia, to recognise that behaviours other than those stereotypically ascribed to "real men" can be, not only just as successful, but sometimes even more successful than the traditional "masculine" style.

This is not some new idea and men actually know this very well--when need arises, men (smarter ones anyway) know to switch to "feminine" registers and behaviours. Or there would have been no trade, no diplomacy, no science or any sort of collaborative endeavour, and probably not very many men over the age of fifteen, anyway.

But what is lacking is recognition and acceptance. What is lacking is equal regard for men and women.

As to feminism... the way I see it, as long as there is discrimination against and oppression of women in any form anywhere, it is inevitable that there will be protest against that, and that protest is feminism. Branded and rebranded, defined and redefined a million times, somebody somewhere will always anew come to the idea that all people deserve equal regard, including the idea that women deserve the same regard as men.

What makes a feminist is always up for discussion, there is no central authority on the question. I take the simple approach hinted at by Rebecca West (possibly I'm paraphrasing): "I myself never knew what is a feminist, I only know that they call me a feminist any time I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat."

Relatively few women call themselves feminist, we know that, but I'd wager that the vast majority of women indeed wishes, at a minimum, not to be treated like doormats. And that, if not "feminism" by everyone's lights, is definitely the potential for it.

>157 LolaWalser: Enjoyed reading this. Perhaps by and large I've been very lucky in my line of work, and maybe academia is still stuck in old school mode to an extent. Tech tends to have younger people in senior positions, mostly with pretty progressive attitudes on this kind of thing.

Le Petit bleu de la côte ouest (A little blues from the West Coast), Jean-Patrick Manchette, OPD 1976

I'm running out of Manchette, only three or four left, how I'll miss his carnevalesque carnage... :(
In this one, Georges Gerfaut, unexceptional white collar dude in a good marriage with two daughters, lover of West Coast jazz, one evening on the way home stops to check out a car crashed off the highway. The driver is wounded but still alive and Gerfaut takes him to the hospital, where it turns out the man had been shot at. Gerfaut, eager for his evening whiskey and music, slinks off hoping to avoid the hassle of dealing with the police, unaware that from the moment he picked up the dying man he also picked up the attention of two killers who will hound him to death across a good deal of France.

The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas, 2017

For some reason I always feel apologetic, or that I OUGHT to feel apologetic when reading books for youngsters, but I'm very glad I don't let that nonsense stop me... all the time. This was a completely engrossing read I finished almost in one sitting, aching for Starr and her people and reliving all the fury that the murderous saga that is contemporary America's treatment of black people causes again and again. It's really excellent in how it simply and without fanfare or complicated theories explains how "ghettos" came to be, why gangs and drug dealing are a way of life for those denied decent opportunities. There are articles on it, sure, but they can't serve the gut punch to complacency like a good story can.

Moving pictures

Snagged a set of sci-fi movies from Toho, the makers of Gojira, and saw so far The H-Man (1959). Blobby green monsters turn out to be victims of a nuclear experiment; unfortunately the condition is transmissible and incurable. Can Earth be saved? Nailbiting to the end.

>156 AlisonY: I've been gradually working through Caroline Criado Perez's Invisible Women, which I feel makes a good case for the innumerable ways that society treats the "male" as default.

I mention it because it doesn't focus on the social aspects of gender that I think most people associate with feminism (being expected to fulfill certain roles or adopt certain behaviors, facing active sexism at work, etc.). It's not a book complaining about men thinking they're better than woman or actively working to oppress them.

Rather, it's about the unconscious and often unintentional structural consequences of the de facto privileging of men and men's bodies and men's activities. I have a few quibbles with the book -- in particular I don't think it gives enough emphasis to the ways that race and class interact with gender -- but it is an impressive compendium of the existence of gender inequality (or at least bias) in virtually all spheres of our lives.

>160 spiphany: I do agree with gender bias from that perspective. I think science is an area that really needs to step up on that front with so many drugs being tested mostly on men, for example.

>158 AlisonY:

Oh, I worried about going on and on... Personally, I'd say I've been fortunate too, overall, considering what some other people went through. But for me, the main insight I won over the years is that the situations in which women are rare do not arise spontaneously or reflect something about women's inherent ability.

>160 spiphany:

Missed the post; that book's been on my radar...

>161 AlisonY: For years I probably would have said that I don't consider myself a feminist either, for reasons that may be somewhat similar to yours. I think I would now, at least insofar as feminism is an essential part of social justice, and insofar as contemporary feminist theory offers valuable tools for identifying and fighting to change problems that affect everyone -- not just women.

For me I think it was in part recognizing things like the systematic bias talked about in "Invisible Women" which gradually changed my attitude towards feminism. Because discrimination and structural inequality feed into one another. Things like wages and work schedules and transit options reinforce gender roles by limiting options for certain groups, and gender roles in turn influence the assumptions of decision-makers about who is engaging in what activities and what their needs are. And all of this affects how we see people -- those in prestigious and well-paid jobs get more respect, and our brains tend to interpret that as being evidence that these people are better/smarter/more deserving. And so forth.

>163 LolaWalser: The book is fascinating for the sheer amount of information it collects in one place. It is also occasionally frustrating for exactly that reason -- there are a number of places where the author mentions something that I find really interesting or that I'd like to know more about its context, but very few of the studies are actually discussed in much depth.

I also am not crazy about the fact that many of the references (endnotes) consist only of a url, with no further information about the title or publication. Sometimes they are clearly scientific publications or government websites, sometimes they seem to be more journalistic sources. I imagine this was done for space reasons in a publication intended for a general audience, but it isn't good practice. An important part of assessing the credibility of a text's arguments is looking at what sources are being referenced, and a url doesn't allow one to check this at a glance. I suppose this might be easier in an e-book version.

>155 LolaWalser: I have not got to Thomas Middleton yet - I'm not expecting the best.

>164 spiphany:

Ha--I wouldn't normally highlight this but I just saw it in my subs and it's as if it showed up expressly on topic! I hope this isn't seen as whining, no one is claiming this is the worst or something; it's just striking how blatant the discrimination can be even today. It's so blatant it's comical. Seriously, that "weight room for women"... lol

The Real March Madness? NCAA’s Treatment of Female Athletes (Full Frontal with Samantha Bee)

>165 baswood:

It's been ages since I read anything of that vintage! (Excluding Shakes...) I thought it was fun--but complicated. Middleton may have gone overboard with that "unity of time and place" rule, everything seems to be happening at once to everyone.

A Royal Recluse : Memories of Ludwig II of Bavaria, Werner Bertram, OPD 1900

I saw recently Wilhelm Dieterle's silent film about Ludwig II and thought I'd learn more about the subject. This nicely illustrated hagiography, however, doesn't provide much more than a chronology of events. I couldn't find out anything about the writer except dates of birth and death (1837-1913), so, although the authorial voice presumes to relate Ludwig's purported feelings and thoughts, there is no indication how the author came by this knowledge, how close he may have been to the people and events. FWIW, Dieterle's film almost thirty years later is more honest (or open) in some respects but seems to embrace the same vision of the king as a tragically misunderstood figure, not the lunatic of legend.

***

Common Murder, Val McDermid, OPD 1989

Lindsay Gordon, investigative journalist, is covering a long-term women's protest of an American military base (I think based on the real-life Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp) when a local is murdered and suspicion falls on one of the women in the camp, who happens to be Lindsay's ex-girlfriend. I was impressed by how skillfully McDermid wove in some pretty stinging social commentary, especially by the end.

It would have been something to have read this book back when it came out, bursting as it is with lesbians and other right-on women, radicals and anti-nuclear protesters... Would have blown my lonely little mind. And they come across as real people, not paragons of virtue. (The procedural bickering among the women is worth the price of admission.) The story still reads well today, if you aren't stumped by such things like computer programmes on cassettes.

***



Helping verbs of the heart, Péter Esterházy, OPD 1988

Ostensibly this is a book about a mother's death and the eldest son's dealing with it, but since the son in question is a littérateur, it's also an exercise in being brilliantly obscure. The voice shifts from the son to the siblings to the mother herself--and then she seems to comment on the son's death---but as there are unreferenced quotations from dozens of works by other authors at the end of each fragment, there are also many other voices of "strangers", who nevertheless, we imagine, are commenting on the son's predicament. These authors, 44 in number (Esterházy lists them in his introduction), Apáti to Wittgenstein, are all male and in fact it's interesting, how this male chorus is employed to fill the absence of almost any trace of the actual dead woman.

If I were writing a fiction about this fiction, I'd imagine that the grieving Esterházy discovered he knew nothing about his mother, could not give life to the memory of his mother because, as his quotations show (one explicitly) he did not believe that women existed as full persons, people with lives as interesting and important as the men. When he writes about her, he is actually describing her corpse, in intimate, necrophiliac, but in the end empty detail.

Because the living woman was not that. But now he can never discover what it is she was. The rage in his grief comes from the confused intuition of this.

Of course, one could say that children never really see and know their parents as people. Could be. But do compare this to Woolf's description of Mrs. Ramsay in To the lighthouse, and, for those interested in books about a mother's death, Simone de Beauvoir's Une mort très douce.

***

25 : being a young man's candid recollections of his elders and betters, Beverley Nichols, OPD 1926

I bought this in a batch of several first edition memoirs of British writers, I wasn't familiar with the author, which, as it turned out, is no great loss. Seeing the title, I thought it might be something eccentric if not rambunctious; mostly it's boring. Nichols was a child of privilege, one of those curiously self-satisfied upper-class Anglos who drift through the whole world recognising only his own club members as people while the rest of humanity is seen as if swinging from the branches in a zoo. Here he writes obsequiously and tritely about meeting and occasionally travelling with or to dozens of important and /or famous people of the period, Churchill to Melba.

A 20th century cool millennial:



***

The dead side of the mike, Simon Brett, OPD 1980

This is the fifth book (sixth in the series) I've read featuring amateur sleuth Charles Paris, middle-aged actor with a barely mediocre career. I've a huge weakness for actors and all things theatrical and that's the main reason I like this series, but there are also a few other silly things that hooked me. For instance, so far every book featured a reference to Doctor Who, and now I must keep reading compulsively in order to see whether this holds as a rule--is a rule (or what?) Second, Charles' frequent reminiscences of the acting jobs he did are always accompanied by short excerpts from reviews, invariably hostile or damning with faint praise. This cracks me up no end, and also gives major colour to the character, who might be difficult to take without his modesty and self-deprecation. (Although fifty-one in this book--he ages through the series--and a chronically broke tenant of a bedsitter, Charles is still surprisingly successful with women half his age.)

I don't know how satisfying these may be to others as puzzles, I'm not demanding on that point, and they are not big on atmosphere or character either. I like the milieu, which changes from one to the next from theatre, television, amateur companies, or as in this one, the BBC. Props also to the literary references--So much blood took me to Thomas Hood, for instance.

He also tried to decide whether he should use his own persona for the call or assume another identity. He rather fancied using the accent he'd perfected for a revival of The Second Mrs. Tanqueray ("Effete and degenerate capitalist rubbish"--Time Out). Or maybe the Welsh he'd done in See How They Run in Darlington ("Presumably a comedy"--Yorkshire Post).

>167 LolaWalser: I also remember not being very excited about Beverley Nichols — I think the book is mostly famous for being one of the earliest Penguins. Did you notice the lovely review from W Somerset Maugham’s legacy library? He discovered to his glee that “chapter twenty-four is all about me”, and coincidentally, so was his review. Amongst other gems: “When I was young I read the first five books of Paradise Lost with a passionate interest, and, being unfortunately prevented from finishing it, I have never ceased wondering what happened.”

>167 LolaWalser: Nichols wrote some very Britishly amusing gardening books—I think I've read the first two of his Merry Hall trilogy. They are what they are, and if you're jonesing for reading about a very colonial garden-centric life in the middle of winter, they do the trick. But... it's been a while, so I'm not sure what I'd think now.

>168 thorold:

Yes, not much of "candid" recollections after all... and lol@Maugham.

Coincidentally, I just finished another book by one of that type, Geoffrey Madan's Notebooks. Well, it's a book of quotations, so it's a matter of an indirect demonstration of Madan's sensibility (and then also filtered by his own editors...) but even so I'd say the personality is both stronger and more interesting than Nichols', by far. Funnily enough both went to the same school; on which, Madan reporting Cyril Asquith's quip:

At the 'top of the tree' in every profession we find a sort of congested arboreal slum of Balliol men.

(Speaking of swinging through the trees, as I did above--I gasped. But more on that sort of stuff below...)

>169 lisapeet:

Gardening's not my thing, I'm afraid, but I note its role in his Wikipedia entry. Being a subject of Sellar & Yeatman's parody is quite an honour:

The three books were so popular that they led to humorous imitations, including Mon Repos (1934) by "Nicholas Bevel" (a parody by Muriel Hine) and Garden Rubbish (1936) by W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, a satire on garden writers, which included a Nichols-like figure named "Knatchbull Twee."

***

TWO synchronicity events in close succession today: a friend I hadn't heard from in years sent me a hello with a YT link to a Yoko Ono video... as I was playing a Yoko Ono CD. We have never ever talked about Yoko Ono nor is either of us notably a fan; I listen to a dozen CDs daily out of thousands and about 99% are NOT pop; the odds here were truly infinitesimal. And THEN, with the CD continuing to play, I was entering the date read for the last two yesterday's books, Alice in Wonderland and Through the looking glass, when Yoko Ono launched into a long refrain: CHESHIRE CAT CHESHIRE CAT CHESHIRE CAT CHESHIRE CAT you get the picture.

I borrowed the CD from the library yesterday on a whim without looking at songs (no point since I hardly ever listen to that type of music, tells me nothing).

***
Il cuoco dell'Alcyon, Andrea Camilleri, 2019 and

Come la penso, Andrea Camilleri, 2019

The latter is a collection of diverse types of writings (articles, reviews, speeches, interviews etc.) dating from cca 1997-2015, on a wide range of subjects--Camilleri's life, politics, Sicilian history, film, music, other writers, Italy etc. Just a few notes... Sicilian separatism, like almost every other separatism, coming in two "colours": the right wing push for sovereignty that's nothing but a capitalist takeover, to keep the majority enslaved to the rule of the aristocratic (or corporatist) minority; and, the oddball leftwing project such as the one nurtured after the war by Antonio Canepa, utopian anarchist, for whom Sicily was to be a communist land of equals.

The other thing... there's a story by Pirandello that Camilleri writes about as "very little known" but that was one of the watershed reads for me long long ago, as a teenager, and this story, it turns out, meant so much to Camilleri too, so obviously I felt like shouting me too! I know that story, Andrea, it's MEANT SO MUCH! only you and I, Andrea, in the whole wide world, have read and taken that story SO MUCH to heart! but there's TWO of us, at least!--and obviously that's impossible and useless.

The story is Rimedio: la geografia and the lesson is... that the material reality of the world, and the multiplicity of human lives, is a consolation and remedy for existential despair.

***



De dioses, hombrecitos y policías (On gods, little men and cops), Humberto Costantini, OPD 1975

Loved this book, a funny story about terrible things, such as state terrorism. In Buenos Aires in 1974 the military dictatorship is kidnapping, torturing and "disappearing" people in droves. Police and the army plus paramilitary forces jointly plot these crimes--but are they all that's behind it?

The denizens of Mount Olympus, it turns out, have their own interests in the game. Hermes, Athena and Aphrodite in particular take note of the nefarious plot to massacre on a certain day the innocent and harmless members of the poetry club "Polimnia". But once they find out Hades is behind it, they concede there's nothing they can do, as even gods can't go against Death. They decide to make the mortals' last hours on Earth especially pleasant and joyful, so the poetry meeting on the fateful day is filled with sudden declarations of love personal and universal.

The short chapters alternate the narration by the shy middle-aged sonneteer José María Pulicicchio, the Olympians, and police files.

ZIMMERMAN SARA PRECAKSSKY DE

Polish, 55 years, married, journalist

Known Communist activist. Fulfills her function occupying key posts in diverse cultural fields. Member of independent theatres, women's union, cooperative societies, literary studios, leagues for the protection of abandoned felines, subcommittees of culture, film clubs, neighbourhood libraries, painting exhibitions, poetry reviews, folklore circles and other organs of Marxist infiltration and propaganda.

***

Ended March by reading the Alice books, the Random House 1940s editions with Tenniel's illustrations hand-coloured by Fritz Kredel.

Moving pictures

Another English slasher by Pete Walker, The Comeback (1975); then Cat People (1982), directed by Paul Schrader and featuring, most memorably, Nastassia Kinski. Weak script and a wasted Malcolm McDowell but nice to see some of my old New Orleans haunts.

A DEFA movie for kids, Verflixtes Mißgeschick! (1988), but quite amusing, with very neat special effects. Based on a tale by the beloved Russian children's author Samuil Marshak. A malicious shapeshifting imp changes hands from one unfortunate to another, if and when they manage to get someone to take it from them without payment (Stevenson has a famous story on the same motif). Misfortune thus travels causing mayhem from a woodsman to a trader to the king and a simple soldier, who solves the problem once for all.

Carmen Maja Antoni in a terrific performance as Bad Luck:



And then one of my favourite British movies, The Small Back Room (1949) by the great duo of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. War is seen from an unusual angle, and Powell and Pressburger bring both humour and humanism to the characters.

La petite dernière, Fatima Daas, 2020

I'm sure there are people who will love this book and to whom it will speak volumes, so it's with feelings of guilt that I must admit it did very little for me. It's actually somewhat similar to what I experienced with a few books by Abdellah Taïa (although in his case there were also a couple I liked very much)--a feeling of being left short and thirsty, as well as fatigued by the style employed. Daas, like Taïa, writes in very short sentences and uses repetition a lot. The text is easily and quickly read and yet it tired me out. Try walking while stopping after every single step for a second--that's what it felt like.

Of course, this tentativeness, this halting, choppy style probably reflects something important--Daas' uncertainty (preferable to timidity?), seeking, or some such. It's her first book and she comes from an environment, as she underlines, that is not stereotypically seen as the cradle of literary artists. (The name is a pseudonym although I don't quite see the point given that, as I just saw when searching for the cover, her photographs are available.)

She was born in 1995 (the identically-named narrator is a few years older) to immigrant Algerian Muslim parents, the last of three girls--hence the special title. She grows up feeling that she should have been a son and this is murkily connected to her acting out in school (someone warns her mother that "Fatima thinks she can behave like boys do"), her preference for masculine habits and company, and--perhaps? even to her lesbianism.

The book is focussed on the clash between Islam (she is devout) and homosexuality. The space religion takes up in the book and Fatima's life is startling to a non-religious person (or maybe even some religious ones). Everything is littered with religious tasks and admonishments, like an internal cop in your head running everything you think and do through a checklist non-stop: is this haram, is this halal, 24/7.

The oddest thing, to me, is that Daas actually remarks that her household wasn't especially religious, and yet, just as two examples, she was being from childhood roused at dawn to perform the first prayer, her father controlled everything they watched on TV and would break off anything that hinted at the slightest contact between men and women, even hands touching (as in handshakes?)

I was reminded of something from a few years back, which I think illustrates the same gap in worldviews... In the wake of a study in Great Britain that showed that the Muslim majority held the most conservative views, misogynistic and homophobic, Twitter trended with a "what Muslims really think" hashtag, under which Muslim users posted various things that aimed to illustrate how ordinary they were. I only saw a bit of this as part of an article that was attacking the study, but one tweet couldn't help but make me smile with how incongruous it seemed. In it a young girl or woman wrote, as her "thought", "Would Idris Elba convert for me?"

I think it's obvious what struck me--that she didn't seem to notice how unusual it was, in the country in which she lived (and possibly/probably was born in, grew up in), for a girl with a crush on a boy to highlight, of all things, whether he's the right or wrong religion. This is not to say that there don't exist fervent believers in other faiths, or that nobody but Muslims care about the faith of their prospective spouses (at least when it comes to that of the person who matters, the owner of the future children, the husband). But it's unusual--for it to be voiced as that girl voiced it, and in context of "being like everyone else".

So Daas may say (believe, of course) that her household wasn't "especially" religious, and yet to me her novel is asphyxiated by religion, strait-jacketed with religion, as she goes off on quests to find imams who would accept and let her accept herself as a lesbian Muslim woman.

And I want to tell her, fuck religion. Why on earth would you let yourself be mortified time after time by this nonsense dickwads came up with to enslave us most securely.

But I know that's a non-starter, so... I feel for Daas' pain but I don't feel close to her.

Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc., Galen Strawson, 2018

I'm going to simplify (no doubt over-simplify) Strawson's arguments that recur in this collection; if you find anything in my summaries to be intriguing, please bear in mind that the real interest is in following his own painstaking argumentation.

The four essays on the self, narrativity, No Loss future, the unstoried life, intersect in the idea that people are psychologically of the types he calls endurant (the endurers) and transient (the transients). The former would have a strong sense of themselves as historic selves unified across past present future, the latter would not and would tend to feel constantly renewed (Strawson counts himself in the latter type, a transient).

There is some (but not deterministic) connection between these types and the tendency to "storify" one's life, to see one's life as a coherent narrative, and one's identity as a particular "character" one invents and performs. Presumably the "endurers" would more often tend to this Life-as-Narrative view than the transients, who would be more apt to understand their life as a series of more or less unlinked episodes. Strawson argues against what he calls the "narrativist" view--in short, life for him is always something that happens outside our scenarios. To impose a "story" on a life is an exercise in ultimate inauthenticity.

The idea of No Loss future also hinges on the endurer/transient division. Strawson argues that one cannot be said to lose a future, because future is something we never have by definition. So, death causes us no loss.

I really should have read this essay again but I'm in a hurry to get to the topic that interested me the most. However, I will note (I do intend to come back to this some time) that this essay nonplussed me in several ways, with Strawson not going where I thought the argument would lead and then me finally not understanding why he cared to make it at all in such artificially constrained manner. For one thing, he limits himself to a single type of dying, what he calls "IPU annihilation"--instant painless completely unforeseen annihilation--a person extinguished like a light. Clearly this makes for a philosophically "cleaner" situation, where we just think of death in terms of loss (or no loss) of future time. Except he also has to mention that he's thinking only from the POV of the deceased, not their relatives etc.

So at the core this looks to me no different from the ancient Stoic argument--yes, someone you loved has died, but looking at it from "their" POV, nothing has been lost because nothing can be sensed to have been lost, so instead of self-centredly grieving, find solace in that now impersonal, uninhabited space that is "their" non-grief.

And yet I think Strawson would have believed he's saying something new so I probably missed something and so should go back. But later.

There is an essay on free will and the debate on whether it exists or not which is to me frankly ridiculous and the argument I have least patience with in general. Long story short, I think there is no earthly reason why we should atomise "free will" when we are perfectly in agreement not to do so in regard to everything else. Do you look at a desk and see a mad swirl of quanta? Does it bother you that you do not? Does knowing that the object "desk" is at some level a mad swirl of quanta (as, for that matter, are you and everything else material around you) affect in any way your daily conduct of life? Would you claim that not seeing objects at this quantum level impedes your knowledge and use of them at higher levels of structure?

If no to all that, what's the problem with applying the same reasoning to "free will"? What's so special about it anyway, why don't we get in knots regarding all our thoughts, feelings, sensations, all the mental experiences we are conscious of but can't control--can't even observe on the molecular or that quantum level that doesn't phase us when we look at a desk?

From a scientist's point of view, just as for us "macro" beings it doesn't matter to perceive a desk on the "micro" level in order to be able to say that we see a desk, use a desk, know what a desk is etc., it ALSO doesn't matter that our experience of "free will" is on some level outside our observation and control.

Regarding "free will" the only question that REALLY matters is taking responsibility for one's actions on the "macro" level on which we interact with people and conduct our conscious lives.

Which brings me nicely to that topic that interests me the most, consciousness. Strawson devotes two essays to the topic and already for them alone it would be worth getting this book. They concern what Strawson calls The Silliest Claim, which is that consciousness doesn't exist. The most interesting thing about this, to me, who could be described as a sheltered scientist (as I think most scientists are, when it comes to philosophy), is that I'm hearing that finally--FINALLY--people outside exist who are seeing freaking physics for what it is, in "real-life" size, and not as the be-all and end-all and paragon and bloody ultimate model of science. Biologists knew for a long time (and plenty have written about it too, calling for and suggesting other paradigms) what damage the apotheosis of physics has done to science, the idea that "science" is something we know in terms of physics (and would know perfectly if only blasted quanta behaved like obedient little marbles of the mechanistic glories of the yore.)

Briefly, our physics is a science of structures and their relations but it doesn't characterise experience. And because physics doesn't characterise experience, some philosophers have decided that it makes more sense to say that experience (consciousness) doesn't exist, than that physics is limited; A science, not THE science. Bertrand Russell: "Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little." We don't know the limits of the physical. We don't know physics.

This isn't a movement to bring back vis vitalis or the supernatural. Strawson is a complete "naturalist" and materialist--everything that is, is natural and physical. Including consciousness. This can't be stressed enough. Nature is physical, brains are physical, minds are physical, consciousness is physical.

We know for certain that we exist and that we have experiences (are conscious). These are facts of concrete reality, what Strawson calls a real realism about experience, such as children have and people in a "pre-philosophical" stage (including philosophers before they became philosophers).

Music to my ears. Imagine a philosopher who accepts the taste of lemonade as a valid fact and possible starting point of concrete research instead of a figment of imagination, a philosophical object deconstructible into a nothingness that is deepest darkness.

It behooves me to mention that Strawson logically brings up and defends as philosophically valid the notion of panpsychism, which may sound weird to some. Rather than butcher that problem, which I know very superficially, I'd remind of the work of Christof Koch and others--a far cry from the ancient "soul-based" ideas...

***

Cinepoems and others, Benjamin Fondane, this compilation 2016

Fondane (1898-1944) was born Benjamin Wechsler in Romania but came to Paris to be a philosopher, poet and other sorts of artist. He was friends with Tzara, and with Cioran, who left a wonderful tribute to him. Being Jewish, he was taken to Drancy and from there deported to be murdered at Auschwitz.

A day will come, surely, when thirst will be quenched,
we will be beyond memory; death
will have finished the work of hatred,
I will be a clump of nettles under your feet,
--well then, know that I had a face
like you. Like you, a mouth that prayed.

(translation by Leonard Schwartz)

***



Fatale, Jean-Patrick Manchette, OPD 1977

Griffu, Jean-Patrick Manchette and Jacques Tardi, OPD 1996

I'm not sure I'll read at this time the two posthumous works (one unfinished) in this omnibus, so this is my last Manchette for now--a novel, and a comic drawn by Jacques Tardi.

I adored Fatale. A battered wife makes a great discovery one day--"on peut les tuer, les gros cons". Bastards can be killed. So she goes on to kill more, for profit and pleasure. It would have been even better if the female assassin had survived, but no biggie, the genre takes its payment. Manchette was a master to the last (I think we can suspend judgement about the publications he couldn't control).

The comic showcases more of Tardi's talent than Manchette's, which is a pity but inevitable in a comic strip form.

Moving pictures

Two DEFA movies from the 1950s, before the Wall came up, and people circulated more or less freely between the western and eastern parts of the city (as far as I could tell, signs alerted one when crossing from one part to another, and one needed valid passes in case one got stopped, but there were no checkpoints).

Berlin - Ecke Schönhauser (Berlin, corner Schönhauser) (1957) was one of the earliest films showcasing the new generation, teenagers with little personal memory of the war.

I like this shot of the youthful cast, although it excludes all but one girl:



The description on Kanopy:

They are East Berlin teenagers. They want to be free - to dance to rock'n'roll, trade forbidden western goods and get away from the constraints of their parents and the state. This classic 1950's teen cult film became a box-office hit and was greeted with suspicion by East German officials.

Ranked by film critics among Germany's 100 Most Important Films, this Kohlhaase-Klein collaboration makes an important contribution to the international youth film genre.

The even earlier Roman einer jungen Ehe (Story of a young marriage) (1952) was to me even more interesting, for the commentary (dramatisation, that is) of the fact that notorious Nazis and Nazi collaborators, here such as Veit Harlan, the director of the antisemitic propaganda movie Jud Süß, were acquitted by the Western powers and allowed to continue to work. The incident in the film in which Harlan's presence at a theatre premiere was loudly protested by the audience until he left, is true. In the film that event is used to show incipient schism between Berliners on the side of the capitalists vs. those under the Soviets, how erstwhile colleagues, friends, even families, are being pulled apart by the polarisation imposed by the Cold War.

That is also what is happening to the titular young couple. Both actors, they fall in love and marry, looking forward to the future. But as the wartime allies are increasingly pitted against each other on ideological grounds, so the left-leaning wife and her would-be apolitical husband experience tensions in their marriage. In short, her position is that one can't be apolitical in the circumstances, since everyone is forced to make choices that imply some political position. In their case, they are being offered material that is ever more sharply political, and simply ignoring that, while possible for the husband, goes against the wife's conscience.

Western propaganda against communists is heating up and people on both sides fear (or wish for) a renewal of war. In this pro-Communist film, the capitalist West is wholly the war-mongering side; the East only wants to build a workers' paradise. The wife does a few jobs for a leftist director in the Soviet sector and is increasingly leaning toward moving to that side, although not everyone welcomes her until she shows she can shift rubble with the rest of them. The film was produced in 1951 at peak Stalinism so the avenue that is being built is getting the name Stalinallee and the wife gives a rousing reading of the dedicatory poem at the grand opening. (Curiously, no pictures of Stalin were present.) This was a real street and the construction scenes in the film are from the actual site, which increases the fascination.

The name would be removed after Stalin's death and the process of de-Stalinisation began. In fact, it would be East Berlin that would see the first major protests against Soviet rule, in 1953--helpless against the Soviet tanks, as would prove true for Hungary and Czechoslovakia too, down the line.

***



Berlin: The Twenties, Rainer Metzger, OPD 2006

This Abrams edition earns five stars on the account of the graphic component of the book, which is simply superb, but the text is laborious and confounding in places, probably due to a very poor translation. Ideas get garbled; lots of vapid sentences ("The 'Golden Twenties' were an application."), and odd throwaway phrases (e.g. "the orthodox Modern", with no elucidation as to what it is or what the "unorthodox" Modern may be...)

Still, serviceable as a reference book for the range of names it introduces and great photographs.

>172 LolaWalser: I'm sure there are people who will love this book and to whom it will speak volumes

I might be one! It's gone into my wishlist anyway...

>174 LolaWalser: Roman einer jungen Ehe has been on my list for a while. I must get to it!

The dubious rehabilitation of Veit Harlan (and through him that of Gründgens) was one of the big themes in 1949: das lange deutsche Jahr. Bommarius talks about the audience of a Hamburg cinema refusing to allow the West-premiere of an earlier DEFA film, Ehe im Schatten, to start until Harlan, who claimed to have received complimentary tickets, was made to leave. I don’t know if that’s the same incident the film is referring to.

It was the Stalinallee construction workers who led the protests in June 1953, of course.

I finally managed to catch up with your thread. I won't intrude in conversations that have been close, but just want to let you know that I enjoyed your reviews and the variety of your reading.

>175 Dilara86:

Daas certainly deserves positive reception!

>176 thorold:

I suppose it's the same incident. I think Harlan's case is especially awful because it's been shown he went out of his way to make the antisemitism even worse; the implicated actors generally had less choice, once they decided to stay in Germany. (Although some, like Werner Kraus, the star of Caligari and so many other silent classics, apparently were convinced antisemites.)

There's a documentary about Harlan, Harlan - Im Schatten von Jud Süß, that gives interesting insight into the background of his life and choices. The Nazis loved him for a reason.

(A curiosity--after he got off free with the blessing of the Americans and the Brits, one of his assignments would be to make the first BRD movie about homosexuals, a remake of Anders als die anderen. By all accounts a smarmy failure--anyway, not something I will be seeking out.)

I've seen Ehe im Schatten, it's very good, very moving. No happy end...

>177 raton-liseur:

Thanks, and please don't worry about going back to something if you should wish to. I keep going back to the same themes anyway...

A bit random, but nice... dear, staunchly lefty Istrians. No flat-earthers there!

Yuri Gagarin bust unveiled in Pula

Oh, and this is great--a jaunty 1962 pop song from Yugoslavia, sung by the Slovenian Marjana Deržaj, about... an American communication satellite:

Telstar

Slovenian lyrics included. "Telstar, you fly around the world, you fly among the stars in the sky, fulfill the wish of the girl who's waiting, her boy has gone into the wide world and hasn't come back" etc. Madcap space-loving sixties!

After the lovedeath : sexual violence and the making of culture, Lawrence Kramer, OPD 1997

For anyone interested in current debates about "toxic masculinity" and gender in general, this offers great psychoanalysis-based insight. You don't have to "believe" in psychoanalysis! (a boon for me)--the point isn't whether psychoanalysis (or Freudianism etc.) is true, whether "the Oedipal complex" exists, but that the culture behaves as if it were true. The question isn't how much, say, Freud "discovered" vs. "invented", but how the scheme he proposed (e.g. the "Oedipal complex") is expressed and maintained.

Kramer illustrates his ideas through analyses of Tolstoy's The Kreutzer sonata, Tennyson's and Whitman's poetry, as well as personal memories of childhood dreams. I won't go into those examples and will note immediately what struck me as new and most interesting: Kramer's conclusion that we need new symbols as well as new concepts.

I have felt frustrated time and again by the psychoanalysts' as well as the general public's insistence on perpetuating traditional schemes and symbolism. These all serve the status quo of misogyny and patriarchy. There is, IMO, an original fault at the basis of all tradition, which is a propensity for binaries and essentialisation of binaries. There is a recognition of "two", male and female, essentialised respectively as superior and inferior, strong and weak, light and dark, good and bad etc. The various chatter that's supposed to overcome this essentialisation, for instance such as the claim that everyone is a "mix" of male and female "elements", only reinforces the sharply divided and hierarchically polarised scheme. Men and women are nowhere merely "different"; everywhere, but everywhere, men are considered better than women, above women, and, frequently, almost or wholly a different species to women.

Kramer is the first psychoanalytical writer I encounter who agrees that we need to sweep away this ubiquitous symbolic baggage. His ultimate goal is something he calls "gender synergy". I'll let a few quotations speak for him. The bolding is mine.

This book proposes that the forms of selfhood mandated as normal in modern Western culture both promote and rationalize violence against women. (...)

Masculine identity is always shadowed by disavowed reminders that it is borrowed, simulated, relative--more a costume than an essence. (...)

...our best hope for a humane gender system, an unsystematic system in which coercion has no place and improvisation is everyplace, lies in the critique of gender polarity and the practice of gender synergy. (...)

Homosexualities, arguably a product and certainly a vehicle of social resistance to gender polarity, offer models of gender synergy from which anyone, however disposed to feel or act on same-sex desire, can benefit. (...)

...sociologically inspired means for curing society of sexual violence--better masculine role models, disengagement of violence from sex and glamour in the media, the cultivation of sensitivity--will mostly prove straws in the wind. What has to be changed is the psychodynamics of gender. What has to be changed is the symbolic order itself. We need a new unconscious. (...)

How can such a thing happen? How can we foster it? Well, one enduring legacy of psychoanalysis, even for those who resist many of its tenets, is an awareness of the depth at which habits of fantasy shape the subject, or are even shaped into the subject. If we could change those habits, we might find sexual violence becoming harder to imagine, and so, in the long run, harder to commit. (...) If we could glide from one subject-position to another with some of Walt Whitman's eroticized fluidity and ecumenical curiosity, we might be less inclined to fortify and fetishize a single privileged or proper position. (...)

Note that I think (and I think Kramer would agree) that the so-called "unconscious" is the product of culture as much--and likely more--as that of "nature". We learn our biases, we absorb prejudice, we do not know how we might have felt or thought about anything if we had been brought up (developed) in a different way. And insofar habit forms the "unconscious"... circumstances form our habits.

I think "gender synergy" is possible, and absolutely necessary for humanity's optimal survival.

***

History of shit, Dominique Laporte, OPD 1978 (Histoire de la merde (Prologue)

Some years ago I read David Waltner-Toews' The Origin of Feces: What Excrement Tells Us about Evolution, Ecology, and a Sustainable Society. Well, this is nothing like that. Laporte's book is a philosophical demonstration that shit is gold and gold is shit, and, judging by the French title, only the beginning of a "history". I found some parts informative, and other parts too abstruse to judge. I came away with a dim sense that he had it in for Romans who not only imposed sewers on human habitations but introduced taxes on man's god-given right to eliminate bodily waste (Vespasian's tax on urinals, which prompted the famous remark that money don't smell); this, I think, is according to him the sign of the totalitarianism of the State--any State anywhere, regardless of political order.

Well I'm afraid that would make quite a few of us happy totalitarians, only too eager to see the products of our bodies' labour alienated from us ASAP, efficiently and totally.

However. I joke, I do appreciate the playfulness afforded by the philosophical imagination, as well as the basic accuracy of his vision. We do make soil with our soil, our bread-giving, life-giving dirt. This IS a basic productivity (and, Freud thought, one children still saw as a gift to confer on loved ones). The question of who gets to decide what we do with our shit does come with social and political complications.

Notes: as I'm reading currently something about Sade, I appreciated the reminder that saints as well as Sadean sinners ate excrement with joy (Marie Allacoque, nurse to the dying); also, grateful for the introduction to the anti-Malthusian Pierre Leroux, anarchist who saw man as "equipped by nature to reproduce his own subsistence":

"Do you in fact produce anything with all your riches?" Leroux demands of Malthus. "No, it is nature that produces everything, and when you get to the bottom of all your means of production, industry sends you back to agriculture, and in the end, to your manure."

It's too dark to take my own pictures, so let this illustrate Christian Bök's visual poetry in Crystallography:



Also read his Eunoia, a compendium of Oulipian poems and prose. One can't be too language-mad.

Also from Crystallography:

Glass represents
a poetic element

exiled
to a borderline

between
states of matter

breakable water

not yet frozen,

yet unpourable.

Moving pictures

Eating Raoul (1982), plus two shorts from the 1960s, Secret cinema and Naughty Nurse. Another from my on-going quest to catch up with the library's Criterion trove. Liked it very much. Fans of John Waters take note (probably have, ages ago)... Repressed married couple with a dream of opening a family restaurant in the countryside discovers they can raise money for it through murder and theft.



Then, Mulan (2020)--enjoyable enough. And then, Death Duel (1977), heralding imminent return to wu shu binges.

>182 LolaWalser: Wow. I haven't thought about Eating Raoul in decades. I remember it as subversively funny. I'm not surprised to read that it stands up well.

There's something timeless about it. Even visually, it could have been the sixties, the seventies... it's actually a little surprising it's from 1982. It looks back in some way.

I didn't know of the Roger Corman connection for both Bartel and Woronow (ETA: until I listened to the commentary), I haven't seen Corman's later movies. But that makes sense of the whole "aesthetic" too.

Shadows : the depiction of cast shadows in Western art, E. H. Gombrich, OPD 1995

Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl loses his shadow and with it his place in humanity. Without a shadow he is no-body. "What casts a shadow must be real", writes Gombrich. And real bodies must cast shadows. But painting didn't always like shadows, in fact, it eschewed them because they could confuse the eye: a shadow or a stain, a fold or a colour--it can be hard to tell. And isn't there something basic at odds in the inherent aim of a picture to show and the shadow's tendency to hide? Not until darkness started to be valued would shadows become more prominent in art.

Roman "unswept floor" trompe-l'oeil mosaic with cast shadows:



***

Brieve racconto di tutte le radici di tutte l'erbe e di tutti i frutti che crudi o cotti in Italia si mangiano (Short account of all the roots all the plants and all the fruit that raw or cooked are eaten in Italy), Giacomo Castelvetro, written 1614

Castelvetro was born in Modena in 1546 but somehow or other acquired Protestant faith and got exiled by the Inquisition at mere eleven years old. His life was one constant runaround between Switzerland, Germany, Scandinavia, England, and on a couple of occasions, Venice. He managed to stay in Venice for a good ten years before the Inquisition got to him again and he returned for the last few years to England, where he died in 1616.

There's something poignant about the man at the end of life sitting down in cold foreign land to record all the good Italian veggies and fruits he loved. Several times he explains that in Italy, small and warm, people prefer vegs to meat, especially beef, which they find downright irritating and heavy most of the year. His recipes are still our own--a little boiling in salt water here, a little roasting there... and cracked, not ground pepper, please!

After Christian Bök, more Canadians.



The inverted line, George A. Walker, OPD 2000

Walker is a printmaker and woodcutter and this book is a collection of his prints and illustrations accompanied by descriptions and explanations of how they came to be. I got it as the option cheaper than his Alice in Wonderland, since it contains some of that work, but there is much more that is interesting beyond that.

***

 

The Bull Calf and other poems, 1956; The Blue Propeller, 1955, both by Irving Layton

Some years ago I already wrote elsewhere on LT about my comical first encounter with Layton's poetry and--long story short--its astonishing misogyny. Lots of male writers hate women but those who hate them this vocally, whose misogyny is a major theme in their work, are actually not that many.

I don't know whether it's fair to focus on that, I still need to find someone to point out the good qualities of Layton's poetry. Try as I might, with best of my efforts I don't pick up on much that is thrilling here, to my ears this is not musical, nor is it insightful. But I'm far from being a skillful reader of poetry so I'm willing to accept there is value here that I'm not appreciating.

On his misogyny, however, there is not the slightest doubt about how crass, ugly and stupid it is--an excruciating embarrassment.

Back when, I related how I randomly opened Layton's book (and then books), chanced upon a woman-hating screed, and then had the same thing repeat several more times!--it was so persistent it became funny.

Well, here The blue propeller starts off thusly:

Defence enough

To guard her virtue
this woman
resorts
to needless stratagems
and evasions

She doesn't
realize
her face
is ample
defence.

And classic misogynistic motifs (recognisable also from Layton's other books) in a poem in the Bull Calf, Thoughts in the water:

Not of drowning. But of the female element
that swaddles my limbs thrashing.
I roll, a careless animal,
in the green ointment:
face down, my forehead bringing
intelligence into this featureless waste.

(...)

This confession in After the Chinese casts an interesting light at the marital life of the multiple-times-married poet:

When I was young I quarrelled with everyone. I put
Away my wife because she was fat and would not diet.

Etc. Layton is, at least for historical reasons, or at least because the textbooks say so, an important Canadian poet. More's the pity, eh?

Always entertaining and a nice link to Croatia week. I am not going to read the History of Shit or Irving Layton.

>181 LolaWalser: Lola, have you ever seen the book of the photographs of snowflakes made by that revered but possibly crazy photographer who made a career of inventing and using a method to do this? His name was Wilson Bentley, but he was called "Snowflake" Bentley for years.

>185 LolaWalser: That is quite reminiscent of Snow Crystals, by W. A. Bentley.

Bingo!

>187 baswood:

I am not going to read the History of Shit

Good decision!--it made me feel stupid and that's unforgivable in a topic like that. :) (The MIT edition is actually weirdly pleasant, bound in fake velvet and with many illustrations...)

>188 sallypursell:, >189 sallypursell:

Not sure I know that name, but I've seen some atlases of snowflakes around (and I think have an older photo book too). I've found some other of Bök's visual poems even more striking but this was available online.

***

L'origine de la violence, Fabrice Humbert, OPD 2009

Another recent-ish French book about the Holocaust that I find myself feeling negative about. Like Jardin's book, it too won a prize but I can't bear to look at reviews. Is it more than a coincidence that two such books by authors of similar age and background (men, not Jewish, privileged) should have appeared at around the same time? I mean, does it say something about certain preoccupations having caught up with non-Jewish Frenchmen of a certain age?

Humbert actually references the kidnapping, torture and murder of Ilan Halimi in 2006, a young Jewish man whose murderers, a motley crew but headed by Muslims, evinced casually antisemitism in such a pure state Hitler would have had nothing to teach them. This incident became just one of many in the antisemitic tide that is washing over France and has already caused--in just the last couple decades!!--almost as many French Jews to leave France as have been murdered by the Nazis. Do things like that make people more likely to think about the Holocaust, how it came to happen?

Whatever the impulse... as with Jardin's book, this is too little too late, although I will say Humbert reads less silly than the other guy. But it's still just bunches of clichés that are not helped by being capitalised (le Mal), and strained reaching for parallels all too shallow, like the comparisons of the violence in the concentrationary universe with that of schoolyard bullying. Not only is there something offensive in this rapprochement (all too easy--and lazy--for a teacher), that too is a well-worn cliché since at least Musil's Törless. So what's all this prize-praise about.

It's as if, the fewer Jews there are in France, there are going to be more prize-winning tragic books about them. One might wish for the opposite!

Moving pictures

Le chagrin et la pitié, 1969, Marcel Ophüls

The sight of Pétain and masses of French people giving the Nazi salute is one of the most humiliating, most tear-inducing sights I have seen in my life.

The documentary, made by the Germans and the Swiss, wouldn't be shown on French television until 1981. That too goes to show how late and slowly the French public would see addressed the problem of Vichy's collaboration (the first major book on the topic would be a translation of that by an American historian!) Claude Lanzmann's Shoah won't be released until 1985.

And no sooner does the past start entering into the public's consciousness than we see new champions of antisemitism established, promoting the same old promise of annihilation.

Chickens, Ogai Mori, OPD 1909?

My edition is just this one story published in the framework of a Japanese reader series, but in the original, unabridged form. A young military doctor (as Mori himself had been) sets up temporary residence in a ramshackle village and deals with the servant and chicken problem. I didn't approve. He forgave the ludicrously dishonest servants but coldly abandoned the chicken who had grown into a pet devoted to him.

Interestingly, Mori spent several years in the 1880s in Germany, which reminded me of Laforgue mentioning in passing a Chinese marquis in Berlin. We don't picture, unprompted, Asian people in European cities of the time and yet there was a growing number of students, diplomats, visitors...

Artificial condition, Martha Wells, OPD 2018

Second episode in the Murderbot saga I started sometime last year and just now remembered to continue. Fluffy but pleasant.



The Ugly American, Lederer & Burdick, OPD 1958

I was going to watch Hearts and Minds when I noticed this on the pile of pulp close to my Criterions and thought it might fit... well it does give a picture of a certain set of American delusions that played a role in Vietnam and elsewhere, first of all the conviction that Americans are--"essentially", "at bottom", "after all", "when all is said and done"--good guys.

That basic conviction is evident throughout this book which purports to criticise some individual "bad Americans". And so from the get-go the problems are falsely posed, with the Asians (Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians etc.) being either ignorant or perverse if they prefer communism--they can't be informed and sincere in thinking it might serve them better. The Soviets are both demonised and ridiculously overestimated as, rather than give any credit to the possible rightness of communist ideology in any matter, their success must needs be the case of superior Soviet talents and wiles.

In what I see as a trademark "American" POV, everything is reduced to the question of the efficiency of propaganda, and the fight is simply over which seller of ideology will succeed in pushing his wares on the customer. (The repulsiveness of the rhetoric of "winning" and "losing" a match with the Russians, with the rest of the planet hostages to the two players who matter, doesn't need belabouring.)

Furthermore, while the enemy's ideology is not just vilified but also (often justly) analytically criticised, the obvious glaring faults in one's own are roundly ignored. In the 1950s Americans were still institutionally practising racists and no amount of "diplomacy" could shroud this. Racism was the springboard of American imperialism as it was of the economy of the American democracy; it was the reason why it was possible not just to let Jews die but also use atomic weapons on the Japanese, bomb Southeast Asia for decades, invade South American countries, and the Middle East all the way to this hour.

And the authors shyly hint at the problem, but they do so through two Southern characters who, what a coincidence, are 100% not-racist, hearty fellows who don't see colour.

But of course Americans do see colour and that's why these two characters are introduced in episodes that explicitly say they are not racist and that's how we know there's a problem with racism. Also the little fact that Americans make a fuss about white men who work with their hands around non-whites because they lower the white man's status.

This is a specifically American (and European-imperialist) problem that the Soviets didn't have; not because Soviets as individuals were never racist, but simply because the essence of any communist ideology actually is the--supposed, asserted and prescribed--equality of all people regardless of race.

And this is why among other reasons a communist ideology may be attractive to the exploited--nothing to do with how charming or skilled this or that Communist evil mastermind may be.

One could go on about the oddly deformed vision of this book, but I'll mention just two more moments. One was a scene that truly revolted me, where obtuseness turned into something more sinister, a truly base lack of conscience. A "good guy" American, a boisterous Texan (one of the two 100% "not-racist" Southerners) is shown careening all around the foreign country, making friends and charming the pants off of all natives, coz he's such a genuine good-hearted aw shucks feller... learning their lingo and eating their food and singing their songs... and at one point a native tells him they are all poor, he surely want to be with the rich, and the Texan launches as if a sales pitch, as if he's bragging--"we have poor people in America!", he hangs out with poor people all the time... I mean he uses that like a coin to buy friendship while at the same time peddling the idea that the Americans want to save them from Communists, for capitalism. I so wished the native went on to ask him how come then that there are poor people in America and why isn't he solving their poverty!

The second moment is a single sentence almost at the very end of the book that shows a glimmer of better understanding. My emphasis:

The little things we do must be moral acts and they must be done in the real interest of the peoples whose friendship we need--not just in the interest of propaganda.

Moving pictures

More wushu: Iron Monkey (1977), Chen Kuan-tai (director and actor). No-good drunkard loses family to an evil general and takes a path to revenge via a gruelling training in a Shaolin temple. I love those martial-arts makeover tales.

More library Criterion (why would I watch my own stack!), Teorema (1968), Pasolini. Not for the first time, but liked it better now. There is an extra with Terence Stamp in 2007 talking about the filming; loved hearing about his boyhood crush on Mangano and meeting her in Via Frattina and the formidable Laura Betti striking fear in his breast because Pasolini would only direct him through her for some reason.

The Le streghe (The witches) (1967), anthology by Visconti, Bolognini, Pasolini, Rossi, De Sica; Silvana Mangano again in all five segments. Pasolini's surreal story the best, De Sica's also enjoyable, Visconti's disturbing (Helmut Berger's first appearance).

>191 LolaWalser: Enjoyed reading your thoughts on The Ugly American, but of course there are plenty of ugly Brits and ugly frenchies and ugly...........................

>192 baswood:

Oh I should have noted: the "ugly American" of the title is actually a super-positive character*!--I think the authors were being ironic. Presumably the phrase "ugly American" in its usual negative sense predates the book? And they decided to turn it upside down. Otherwise--if the phrase was popularised through this book--that's another irony.

*He's an honest, down-to-earth, politics-averse hands-on engineer, described as physically ugly.

On the generalisation, I agree: the 19/20th century imperialists were all alike in ugliness.

The Marquis de Sade and the avant-garde, Alyce Mahon, 2020

Sade's last will specified that his grave was to be unmarked and allowed to disappear in overgrowth, just as he wished for his name to be forgotten by the future generations. Well, there can't be very many testaments that went THAT wrong.

To begin with, his two prize prig sons gave him a Christian burial (oh the sting)--and not where he wished to lie. Then his remains were interfered with and his skull stolen "for science", with a number of mouldings made for less lofty goals of personal enrichment. (See Jacques Chessex' Le Dernier Crâne de M. de Sade for an entertaining fiction about these shenanigans.)

But the most striking reversal of both his will and expectations is the sheer influence his work has exerted on countless others in the 20th century and likely until the end of such culture as will continue to reflect, and reflect on, the 20th century.

One cannot speak of the 20th century without speaking of Sade, meaning that one cannot imagine a future without a consideration and a reckoning with him.

Mahon's book does a good job of cataloguing the directions and major figures that were shaped by Sadean "embodied politics" and, above all, by his total striving for freedom. Mind that I'm saying "total striving" and not "total freedom". As Mahon reminds the reader twice, at the beginning and at the end of her study, what we are dealing with is a writer and a philosopher who saw himself as such, and his work as the product of his creative imagination. Sade championed above all the freedom to express everything--but when it came to doing, he not only recognised limits but defended them. (His actions during the Revolution as well as his overwhelming passion for theatre amply prove that, if proof is needed.)

The story of the 20th century's (re)discovery of Sade begins with Apollinaire and his associates, mostly avant-garde artists and writers with the radical experience of the total madness of destruction that was the WWI. Sade's vision of terror will seem prescient, and only more so after the WWII. But that is just one theme Sade seems to prefigure--beside Death, there is Sex, and the conjunction of the two will endlessly fascinate the psychoanalitically inclined surrealists. Whether through surrealism or directly from the source, Sade marks such disparate trends and people like the author of The Story of O, Debord's Situationism, Jean Genet, Robbe-Grillet (and his wife Catherine who published books of Sadean "black eroticism" under the name Jeanne de Berg), visual artists like Man Ray, André Masson, Hans Bellmer, Unica Zürn, Leonor Fini, conceptualists and performers like Jean-Jacques Lebel and so on, by now truly countless.

Some of the prominent 19th century readers of Sade: Stendhal, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Maupassant, Rimbaud, Swinburne.

***



Khomeiny, Sade et moi, Abnousse Shalmani, 2014

As if on spec, I couldn't ask for a more amusing and touching example of Sade's potential liberating and energising influence on anyone than is provided by this book.

Shalmani was two years old when Khomeiny came to power in Iran and although a child she grew up acutely aware of the oppression of the hated "barbus", the beardos, and the "corbeaux", the ravens--her term for the women officials clad in black chadors. Even six year old girls were forced to wear hijabs. Shalmani's first acts of resistance involved getting starkers at the end of every school day and running thus to the awaiting transport, the point being to beat the screeching "ravens" on her trail to the car. "Showing her ass", as Shalmani writes, and specifically showing it to hated authority, was something the little girl came to feel was a necessity for her well-being and integrity.

And one might well ask with her, why wasn't this behaviour more widespread? What if all the little girls had ripped off the cloth prisons they had to wear and showed their honest little bums to the ravens? Would the beardos last as long as they did in power?

With such a debut it's not surprising to hear that when Shalmani's family moved to Paris a few years later, she took to liberty, reading, and liberation-through-reading with a voracious appetite. I can't say I share all her opinions on a number of subjects, but I found it interesting and entertaining that her inclination to freethinking was marked by the encounter with the 18th century libertine literature--much like my own, but not something I have met with or heard of often in women. In fact we read the same book, Thérèse Philosophe at about the same age (fourteen?) However, as I'm sharing that much, it's only fair to admit I was by no means looking for philosophy but pure porn--and that was easier at the time to find in books than elsewhere.

Shalmani doesn't mention sex as a motivating factor in seeking out this literature, which surprises me a little, but maybe that's taken for granted. Also, it would seem that I accumulated and read the rest of my libertine trove at a younger age--certainly when it comes to Sade, La philosophie dans le boudoir. So maybe I was just the more immature lust-crazed bunny, and she older, more intellectual? Or it could be the trauma. Shalmani was deeply scarred by the public abuse she saw meted out to women in Iran. She was six or seven or eight and she had heard innumerable times ordinary women being screamed at as "whores", including her mother. A "beardo" stopped them and then called her father and yelled at him to come pick up "his whore of a wife". Shalmani herself, all of eight or nine years old, on the way to Paris with her parents, gets discussed at the airport by a "raven" interrogating her mother like Gestapo--why are they going to the damned infidels, do they want the daughter to be a "whore"?

This "whore"-naming of women and Shalmani's furious reaction to it is a major motif in the book, it's clear this is her scar and the source of her defiant embrace of all the "whores", literal and figurative, from the "Grandes Horizontales" (famous courtesans) to the celebrities and pop stars who get the label for shaking their booties.

But then it's all women, isn't it, all are "whores" who don't flaunt their "modesty"... and even then. So Shalmani is right--"whore" is a word to be defended, to be embraced, to be embodied, because to the shitheads it means after all simply: woman.

This book won't appeal to the devout nor to those Westerners who think only conservative Muslims are "real" Muslims. (Shalmani is an atheist but recognises Muslim culture as one of the markers of her identity.) I find it as refreshing as it is rare nowadays, when puritans crow so loudly.

I'm twenty years old. I'm twenty and I already knew love with Louÿs {Pierre Louÿs} and discovered how revolutionary sex can be with Sade. I'm twenty and I know I am living the most beautiful years of my life. It's enough for me to think of Sade, to think about the dialogue between Madame de Saint-Ange and Eugénie, to know that nothing is lost. It's enough for me to think of Juliette to know that woman has a banner she carries up high. One day, Sade will be the only weapon available to dispel the darkness. Sade's violence isn't violent, it is born of imagination and faith. Faith in the human being who has become the centre of thought and is no longer a puppet of men hidden behind God. Violence is the repeated attempts at assassination of the woman's body across the world. Violence is cutting the clitorises of the little girls who love flesh and the big girls who love dick. Violence is forbidding learning to read to the little girl, and forbidding the young girl to choose whom she wants in her bed. Violence is what the beardos make our spirits endure, crushing them. One day, just like the French Revolution showed the door to her beardos, other revolutions will break out and silence the rest of them, and celebrate the word of Man.

Moving pictures



Confidence (Bizalom), István Szabó, 1980

I almost didn't watch this fearing it would be too romancey a "romance" with the background of the WWII as mere décor (hate that) and omg am I thrilled that I DID! Astonishingly good movie, deep, densely packed with themes, and a churn of emotions and suspense. Not sure about the very ending but still a masterpiece.

It starts with the woman in the picture on the way home when she's stopped by a stranger who tells her that her husband, a member of antifascist resistance, is on the run, her small daughter taken to safety in the countryside, and their house watched by the police/occupying Germans. The stranger instructs her to go to another contact, a doctor in a hospital, who would direct her further someplace safe.

Straight off we're both in a WWII resistance story and a Kafkian drama with unmoored identities and fluid environments. Who are we, where are we, what is true, what isn't...? The only solid thing here is danger. The danger is real.

The doctor gives the woman instructions with her new name and personal details (fortunately at least her first name--Katalin--and that of her daughter--Judit--happen to be the same). A nurse supplies her with a suitcase with some clothes, including a nurse's uniform (there just aren't many clothes to choose from, and she had so carry something). Katalin must go to a certain address, where she is to meet another stranger who will play the role of her husband as she will of his wife. This stranger's name--as fake as hers--is "Janos Biro", and henceforth she must remember to think of herself as Mrs. Janos Biro.

To the war and Kafkian psychodrama are added a Kammerspiel (a domestic chamber play) with tinges of horror. Katalin and Janos are supposed to be a couple of refugees from another town, renting a room and bathroom from an old peasant couple. The old people are probably all right, but their prospective daughter-in-law, whom we never meet, is according to Janos a semi-Nazi. In any case, we are treated to a programme of drill exercises remembering the fake names, relationships, data, while all traces of the old must be destroyed. Katalin's real husband's photo is burned, but she pleads to keep Judit's as that of their own fake child.

The atmosphere is of utmost tension, doubt, fear--breeding ground for psychosis. And, to cut to the chase, when the fake couple begins to acknowledge their attraction, it might be that love's saving grace appears in order to spare their sanity, to replace the grinding distrust with strengthening confidence.

Rather than romance I would call this a psychological exploration of love and intimacy, but that's not all the film nor all it's about. Not by far. Somehow or other Szabó succeeds not just to give a layered story about a relationship of two people, but to depict the monstrosity of the occupation, and, in what I think is the most powerful scene in the movie, to tell us about the destruction of the Jews. (Which, as Katalin shows, we all know is the case-limit for the destruction of the human.)

***

In a "something completely different" turn, also saw Lubitsch's last movie, Cluny Brown, 1946, an unlikely comedy with Jennifer Jones and Charles Boyer. It's Lubitsch so it has a lot to delight, but I'm not a fan of the acting styles employed here. Boyer at least we know is knowing, but Jones plays a naif too clueless to breathe. Some good commentary on the Brexitannian caste system and snobbery.

***

Moar wushu, for it does my soul good: The dance of the drunk mantis, Yuen Woo Ping, 1979

Simply superb choreography, filthy jokes, and an "old" lady (Linda Lin) who flawlessly beats up guys twice her size--sometimes nothing else will do.



***

DEFA

Simplon-Tunnel, Gottfried Kolditz, 1959

A story about the building of the tunnel between Italy and Switzerland in 1906 when the Italian workers clashed with German ones over striking and strike-breaking (the Italians were the poorest and most susceptible to blackmail by the bosses) and how gradually all came together--and against the bosses. This scene occurs to the first few bars of The Internationale:



Love it.

Details of interest: there is some anti-anarchist propaganda. The socialists show solidarity with others but the anarchists do not (dire slander!) and are supposedly chaotic (analogy of the house, which needs must have a roof). The Italians work for their families, the Germans work for Socialism.

Women employed in washing clothes (by hand of course, at the stream) lose their jobs and pitiful pay to washing machines.

There is a jolly travelling French ho (or a ho symbolically French, since the French are sexy) doing rounds of the building sites in a cart and with her piano accompanist/stage manager/factotum. It was interesting to see she performs a sort of rudimentary peep show, where she's just framed on a small elevated stage--although she's only partly obscured and it would be enough to get up and look around to see all of her, it's the framing that makes it exciting and erotic, and all the men are clustered in front of it.

Rosa, the Italian girl first with the German dude, but then when he's imprisoned and doesn't write for two years, marries the Italian guy (respectively centre right and left in the pic above), at one point shown actually not needing men at all, she could be self-sufficient.

Beautiful scenery. Italian anarchist asking, so where is the border?--picking up two rocks and asking if anyone can tell which is the Italian and which the Swiss rock. Point well made, my friend.

Happy 1 May, Labour Day, international Worker's Day!



The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, OPD 1848 (the 1998 Verso edition)

I have read Marx and Engels' Communist manifesto several times since high school, but it has never before touched me, dazzled me, as today. Everything that seemed abstract and difficult to comprehend, is today clear. As we are living through yet another crisis of late capitalism, the sheer bestiality of the ruling class which clings to its privilege at the cost of billions of lives (and that's only human lives) is on spectacle for the most willfully blind to see.

The mass of wage earners is sinking so the rich could scale to some pharaonic height on their corpses. The system is crashing so badly it, as the Manifesto predicted, has to feed the slaves instead of being fed by it--and that's IF the rulers decide we should be alive at all. Won't robots soon turn out to be better consumers too?

Precarious jobs between no jobs resulting in nothing but precarious existence, billions of people hanging on threads while a small group in power tells them they are free--free for what, free how? We are only free to vote to keep the rich around.

Anyone who feels they have a stake in human society ought to read this. Anyone who thinks they are a humanist, a good and moral person, anyone who gives charity but is pro-capitalist, ought to read this.

It's a brilliant book and it's everything you need to begin to understand what must be done if we love life, if we love life in everything living.

>194 LolaWalser: I have not read any Sade - perhaps it is too late....................... But it is not too late to read The Communist Manifesto, thanks for the reminder

>197 baswood:

I was thinking I'd like to make a thread for a group read somewhere, because I've studded the book with so many bookmarks that it's hard to pick just a few quotes. And since the text is out of copyright--and quite short!--I'm thinking one could have a great conversation about it start to finish.

The Verso edition I read this time (I have two more English-language editions, and I don't list several in other languages that are back home) has a valuable introduction by Eric Hobsbawm. I have one minor quibble with it, but it shows the way to putting the Manifesto in context and paying attention to the changes in language that have occurred since mid-1800s.

With all these caveats, it is still astonishing how fresh and current the ideas read--simply, Marx was right. He was right in 1848, and in 1871, and in 1905, and in 1917, and in 1945, and in 1968, and yes, still right in 1989.

A group read would be an interesting idea. I would be up for that.

>198 LolaWalser: me too.

>199 baswood:, >200 dianeham:

Cool! I'll set it up later today and link in a few places.

>199 baswood:, >200 dianeham:

The group read thread is live:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/331935#n7496997

Please comment as you see fit. I'll aim to post a new bit of text every day, but let me know if it's moving too slow or too fast.

>191 LolaWalser: Speaking as an American, "Ouch!" Lola, I was born in 1952, and I read this book some time in the late 1960's, when it was still relatively new. It was painful, and I probably ought to read it again some day. I would like to point out that this was written a long time ago. I can't be sure that we have changed, but of course, there is no "we". America is full of splinter cultures of every type. You have probably observed us carefully and observed our sedulous pride and obtuseness. I hope you know some Americans who are better than this

>203 sallypursell:

That book says more about American foreign policy than about any given American. Of course one can say NotAllAmericans about everything.

***

One of the gajillion little books I have around open to some page or other... and then yesterday it managed to hold my interest until the end.



The naked sun, Isaac Asimov, OPD 1957

Baley, a detective from postapocalypted Earth, is sent to investigate a murder on rich but weird Solaria, where people avoid not just physical contact but being in the same room with other humans, all the jobs of daily life reverting to armies of robots. The story is lumbered with Asimov's mechanical, literal-minded robots and the mystery hinges on a sort of puzzle he must've been bombarded with, i.e. how would you make a robot subvert Asimov's laws of robotics etc. It's not a very interesting story but some features of it couldn't but resonate with the current reading of the Communist manifesto.

There are only twenty thousand people, all of whom own an estate and robots. As the sole sociologist on the planet tells Baley, the problem of social justice was solved by getting rid of the bottom of the pyramid--only the richest 1% gets to live, supported by robot labour, and keeping the population static.

Does anyone doubt this scenario would appeal to the rich? Basically, get rid of the messy humanity altogether and hang out with your own "kind" only. What else are gated communities and exclusive spaces about anyway.

Another was a point about the tendency of robot labour to increase, which is also something M&E write about in the Manifesto (except it's not called "robots"). In short, once you enter certain developmental paths, you are committed to following them, by all the bourgeois logic. Once those washing machines entered the picture in the Simplon-Tunnel, there was no going back to the women washing clothes in the stream. Human labour was replaced by "robots", logically, naturally, inexorably. And you can shift those women from that position into other jobs but eventually you hit a wall, where there is no job that class of worker can perform better or cheaper than a "robot" can. And if you propose to educate them further, that inevitably means at least some culling, and then a lot of culling, as only a small minority can be expected to have sufficient talent to acquire skills unavailable to "robots" as the "robots" are improved.

(And don't those Italian women replaced by the washing machines somehow prefigure Italy's disappearing population, the ghost villages in particular?)

The robot-human ratio in any economy that has accepted robot labor tends continuously to increase despite any laws that are passed to prevent it.

***



Weimar culture: the outsider as insider, Peter Gay, 1966

Well-written but dated. Gay was a Freudian; I did not relish the conclusion that Weimar's young lions had the problem of being brought up by weak fathers and "too dominant" mothers.

***

Rogue protocol, Martha Wells, 2018

Next episode in the Murderbot's quest for a peaceful locker and uninterrupted media enjoyment.

***

Moving pictures

István Szabó's brilliant Confidence made me look for more of his European work and I saw Mephisto, 1981, with Klaus Maria Brandauer. Once you get over the clumsiness of the dubbed dialogue (Hungarian into German, as most of the actors were Hungarian--including the two leads from Confidence!), it's an excellent portrait of many who sold their soul to the devil even if they didn't especially like Nazism. The gradual weakening and loss of principle is accomplished in small but fatal steps. Ask not for whom the bell tolls...



***

Two DEFA movies. In Helke Misselwitz's Herzsprung, 1992, we see the disastrous effects of the fall of the DDR as they struck some townlet. Factories and daycare centres closing means people losing jobs, suicides, women going on the dole, aimless gangs of young men puffing themselves up with racism, antisemitism.

Gerhard Klein's Eine Berliner Romanze, 1956, while also presenting impoverished, struggling people, is in contrast almost idyllic. Description on Kanopy:

Mid-1950s Berlin, before the building of the Wall. Uschi, a salesgirl and aspiring fashion model from the East, is attracted to Hans, from the West. But she also loves the bright shop windows in his part of the city. The flashiness of this new world soon evaporates, however, when Hans loses his job.

Inspired by Italian neorealism and shot on location in East and West Berlin, this cross-border romance precisely depicts daily life in the divided city before the Wall. It is now considered one of the most accurate portrayals of the Cold War Berlin youth scene during the 1950s. The film's frank images of youthful dreams and longings found little support among East German officials, who thought it encouraged East German young people to search for adventure in West Germany.

On that documentary note, it was interesting to see again that people circulated freely and could use the money on both sides--the West side hotdog vender takes Uschi's East marks etc. Uschi enrolls into a model school on the West side. But Hans' pals tell him that "soon" it won't be possible to cross from one part of the city to another like that.

>191 LolaWalser: I enjoyed your review of the Ugly American. By coincidence, I recently read another, in the August 1959 edition of the Atlantic Magazine, by a journalist and diplomat, Thomas W. Wilson, Jr. called "How to Make a Movie Out of the Ugly American," written before the Marlon Brando movie, obviously. Wilson has a gleeful time pointing out the ways that the novel is absurd in the guise of giving advice to the assumed movie's screenwriters. Here's an example:

"The Ugly American, of course, is the earthy engineer who disappears into the sticks of an Asian country with his equally earthy wife and--despite the disapproval of his American superiors--makes a hit with the natives by inventing a bamboo pump operated by a bicycle pedal to raise irrigation water.

Right here I want to make a minor suggestion to the screen writers. It is this: try to find something else for the Ugly American to invent, because the Asians themselves seem to have invented pedal-operated pumps about ten centuries ago, though there is some historical evidence to suggest that they stole the idea from ancient Egyptians. As for the use of bamboo . . . it doesn't work very well and only works at all on shallow wells. And all the bright engineers--Asians and Americans alike--are trying to help the villagers out there to put down deep wells in place of shallow wells which are unsanitary and have other drawbacks."

Wilson provides several other examples. The column is actually pretty funny. Wilson spends a small amount of time pointing out some positives in American practice that the authors of the novel ignore, but overall we can understand that, not only does the book reflect the highly objectionable qualities of American policies and racism attitudes, as per your review, but as per Wilson, it's also evidently full of idiotic inaccuracies. Unfortunately, I can't find a digital version online.

Of course, Wilson himself can be assumed more or less a participant/proponent of the entire American foreign policy enterprise, so there is more than a little irony in reading his objections to The Ugly American.

>204 LolaWalser: Oh, Lola, I was half joking. I read it too young, and all I could think of was the scalding shame of realizing the truth of a lot of this, and how much I hated being included in this, no matter how merited. In addition, I think I missed the foreign policy intent. Please forgive my over-personal interpretation. Clearly, I remember it so poorly I should read it again.

>206 sallypursell:

Well, it's certainly very markedly a Cold War artefact, which is interesting and possibly entertaining in its own way, but I must say I wouldn't recommend it on purely a literary basis, if you have many better books competing for your time. In any case, should you get to it, I'll be interested in hearing your take.

>205 rocketjk:

Oh, lol, I had no idea there was a movie--and with Brando! Thanks for the info. Yeah, there were probably quite a few inaccuracies of various kinds... I know very little about the prelude to Vietnam but the descriptions of what went down with the French sounded, to put it mildly, skewed.

As for the "win their hearts" strategies, yeah, lots of cringey stuff--one story involved that hearty engineer's wife noticing the natives were busting their spines using very short brushes to sweep the ground, although not far from the village there were suitable plants with long stalks... so this uniquely enterprising, lateral-thinking American saves the poor wretches who never put the two and two together. :)

The wheel pump thing was interesting because there too we actually get into a vicinity of a valuable insight. But it's not that no one in the village thought of the mechanism and the American had to invent it. It's that the villagers couldn't afford such mechanisms because they took out of circulation their bikes, which they needed for work and everything else. They could not afford multiple bikes. And because they couldn't afford them, they didn't have them--and the capitalists, no matter what "good" people they may have been individually, were not going to provide these extra bikes. In the scenario, it would have been "for nothing", as the pumps were for private, household use.

The same logic prevents the US from having universal health care--since personal health is, well, personal and does not compute directly into profit for some specific capitalist, it is assumed there is no profit to it at all.

Biology of human aging, A. P. Spence, 1995

Read as aid in preparation of colloquia on human physiology. A basic, eminently readable account of our decay.

***

La freccia azzurra (The blue arrow), Gianni Rodari, 1980. An "accidental" read while searching for something else. A likeable story about a bunch of toys determined to give themselves to the poor children. Dated in attitudes.

***



Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art, 2019, Barbican (London), Belvedere (Vienna)

In my constant dwelling in the first few decades of the 20th century I've hit upon a reading phase dedicated to the cabaret. This recent book got precedence as a library borrow. Each chapter describes a famous venue in a different city and what's particularly nice about this book, is that space is given to some non-European institutions, for example the Mbari clubs in 1960s Nigeria, Mexico City's 1920s/30s El Café de Nadie, and the club Rasht 29 in Tehran in the 1960s. One could quibble about the definition of "cabaret" that includes all of those, but it seems to me only the Rasht 29 differs significantly in type, as it was basically a meeting place for the upper class shopping for art, patronised by the very rich, the foreign collectors, and moreover "protected" by the Shah's own sister. Ordinary Iranians could not just walk in nor would they be welcome independent of politics.

https://www.bidoun.org/articles/rasht-29

Moving pictures

Two films from Africa: Samba Traoré, 1993, from Burkina Faso's Idrissa Ouedraogo, and the Senegalese cult film Touki Bouki, 1973, directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty. The former follows a poor man who decided after ten years of toil that he'd never make enough money to go back and marry his girl and so decides to hold up a gas station with a mate. They escape with more money than they knew existed, and Samba Traoré marries and soon becomes expectant father, but there's no helping it, his crime and the cops are finding him out.

Touki Bouki is a wild ride (on a motorcycle adorned with the skull of a bull and a Dogon cross) and a joy to watch... oh, except, must mention this, it opens with a scene of halal butchery of a bull which, even edited to be short, is one of the worst things I've ever seen on screen. Fuck whomever invented that shit. And yes I'm being hypocritical, what with meat eating (but never halal or kosher), so fuck me too. I sense another attempt at veganism coming.

That out of the way (there's also a goat slaughtered but not so in your face), the two leads are brilliant and their quest to reach the mythical Paris of the chansons relatable, I guess.



***

Comfort (re)viewing: Yojimbo, 1961, and Sanjuro, 1962, about an itinerant samurai who time and again helps the helpless (however much he may grumble about it).

>208 LolaWalser: Love those 2 samurai movies. There’s an associative history on Yojimbo, I think. Going to look it up.

Found it on imdb.com

Sergio Leone was inspired by this film and made the famous "spaghetti western" A Fistful of Dollars (1964) with a similar plot. However, because Leone did not officially get permission to remake this film, which was copyrighted, Akira Kurosawa sued him and delayed the release for three years. Leone paid him a sum plus 15% of the profits. Interestingly enough, Kurosawa himself stated that he based his movie on The Glass Key (1942), an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's novel, without officially crediting either source.

>209 dianeham:

Curious, I knew about the inspiration for Leone and others (The Magnificent Seven; Star Wars...) but that Kurosawa himself here drew on The Glass Key of all things!--I love Veronica Lake/Alan Ladd movies and must admit I struggle to see a similarity. This will make me rewatch The Glass Key--no chore! :)

The Cold, cold ground, Adrian McKinty, 2012

The first of the novels about detective Sean Duffy in 1981 in Belfast. Are the two gruesome murders of gay men and an apparent suicide of a young woman connected to each other and the sectarian war in the streets?
Pretty much everything I know about the Irish civil war comes from this now, so... I hope the picture is more accurate than not. Granted, I must wonder how much even the natives understand of some "Big Why" of their long schisms, given the profusion of sects, factions, groups, militaries, paramilitaries, local and foreign influences etc. all of whom seem to commit pretty much the same sort of bomb-happy, mafia-inflected violence in an eternal tit-for-tat.

Not the sort of book I read often, the inspiration was the news, but I think I'll continue at least with the next installment.

***

Frère d'âme (Soul Brother), David Diop, 2018

Alfa Ndiaye, a young Senegalese soldier fighting in the French army in the WWI, tells the story of how he lost his mind after his best friend and comrade, Mademba, was killed. Alfa feels guilty for this death, doubly so: first because his humorous disparagement of Mademba may have pushed the latter into a reckless show of courage, and then because, once his friend was dying of a horrific wound, Alfa couldn't bring himself to finish him off and spare him some agony--despite Mademba's begging. Alfa's guilt and the combat trauma gradually erode his sanity, he becomes more and more monstrous, and is forced to retire to a hospital for evaluation and treatment.

I liked the beginning as it was psychologically spot on and promising, but I felt let down by the follow up. The setting is presumably unusual and thus well worth any number of stories, but I wish I could say this one was accompanied by some originality of insight too.

***

The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness, Walter Benjamin, this compilation 2016

This is a collection of diverse types of writing, including fiction, feuilletons, book reviews, articles, criticism, some of it published in Benjamin's lifetime and some not. Some are fragments that read almost like prose poetry:

Of all those songs, the one I loved the most was a Christmas song that filled me, as only music can, with solace for a sorrow not yet experienced but only sensed now for the first time.

But I must admit that possibly my favourite sentence isn't Benjamin's--although he gets the credit for picking up on it--but an 11-year-old girl's who was set the task of composing sentences from a few set words.

Lips - Bendy - Dice - Rope - Lemon

Her lips were so rosy, like bendy roses, when one infected them while playing with dice or during a tug of war with a rope, but her gaze was bitter like the peel of a lemon.

The selections are gently prefaced by Paul Klee's graphics in greytone, giving the whole a sense of melancholy, faded dreaminess.

Town Bloody Hall (1979/2020), D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus

Aaargh, I won't be able to do this beauty justice! There's just too much to say and it's all a bit of a mess.

*plunge!*

In 1970 Kate Millett published Sexual Politics in which she analysed, among other things, misogyny in the works of Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence, Norman Mailer. Mailer replied with an article in the Harper's magazine (and eventually a book, The prisoner of sex). Someone thought it would be a good fundraiser to have a public debate between prominent feminists and Mailer. Mailer enthusiastically jumped on the idea (might have even suggested it?), because there is nothing on earth that could have tickled that asshole's ego more pleasurably than basking in attention while bossing around and shutting up and questioning and demeaning women, in particular the brainy sort that flocked to such an event. I mention this because I noticed that as late as 2015, dudebro nitwits (see article on Literary Hub) were churning out apologia for Mailer and presenting him as an unwitting victim of feminist persecution, trembling in his tiny shoes under the Amazon onslaught.

No. Mailer was DELIGHTED by the opportunity and his relish is evident in the film Chris Hegedus edited from the raw footage (that her partner Pennebaker wasn't sure could be formed into anything good. But it's splendid in many ways.)

Mailer hoped Millett would come, but she refused, as did several other big feminist names he had attacked. The panel ended up including the then-head of NOW, Jill Ceballos (who comes across as a truly nice person, modestly acknowledging her "mainstream" feminist group and their methods were considered "square" and despised by the radicals), Diana Trilling, way outdated and more anti than pro-feminism by any standard; Germaine Greer, fresh author of The female eunuch and quite the babe (that profile! omg!); and--the starriest, wackiest but in a way most relevant panelist as far as I'm concerned--then-lesbian-separatist Jill Johnston.

The audience included people like Susan Sontag, Adrienne Rich, Cynthia Ozick, Elizabeth Hardwick, Betty Friedan... (all these except Rich are heard in the movie, asking questions).

The proceedings are indescribable without drowning in detail. So, I will only urge anyone who cares about history of feminism or American social history or cultural history in general, or any of the writers mentioned, to do oneself the favour of finding this--and preferably in this edition, which includes some superb extras--in particular, a commentary by Hegedus and Greer, recorded in 2004, and the whole infamous episode of the Dick Cavett show from December 15, 1971, with Gore Vidal, Janet Flanner, and Norman Mailer. The last I'm tempted to discuss in a dedicated post... but where would I begin... Just read, say, Mailer on hysterical, unstable women (the "womb" is crazymaking)--and then watch him here. Grotesque, but also funny.

Just one remark I can't help making... after all the cringing and disbelief you start feeling from the start, after Gregory Corso has, barely seconds into Cebollas' opening 10-minute segment, got up and left furiously bleating "all of humanity not half of humanity", after Greer has effectively summed up the essential by pointing out male artists are all about ego, after Mailer has already offered to pull out his dick for all to see, after he has yelled at a woman in the public "hey cunty, shut up!", after other such bonkers interventions and nasty putdowns (of Sontag, Friedan, Hardwick...), there comes a supremely glorious moment... when Cynthia Ozick asks her question. She skewers the bastard with humour, elegance, and a deadly, terminating jab. And for once the pathologically self-consciously self-promoting clown and attention whore loses his shit-eating grin and pose. Light goes out of those beady badger eyes.

And there'll be a price to pay--he discards any pretence of interest in the next questions and uses their time to retort to Ozick.

Let's just say it catapulted her to the top of my "must read everything by this person" list.

***

The prisoner of sex, Mailer, 1971--I'm not a fan of Greer's and I was getting bored with her boredom, during the commentary, which ended up being half "oh, shut up, Norman", but BOY do I understand her!

That this tedious twaddle was ever taken seriously by anyone is the biggest "mystery"; not "the womb" by far...

The womb was a damnable disadvantage in the struggle with the men, a cranky fouled-up bag of horrors for any woman who would stand equal to man on modern jobs, for technology was the domain of number, of machines and electronic circuits, of plastic surfaces, static, vibrations, and contemporary noise.

And yet this buffoon went around simply proclaiming himself an intellectual giant, the greatest champion, "pugilist", of American letters--and people bought that.

There's a low-res copy of the film on YouTube, and no guarantees for how long it may stay up... But if you can't find the Criterion edition, don't deprive yourself of this piece of history:

Town Bloody Hall (C.Hegedus, D.A.Pennebaker -1971)

Aha! This too! Just bizarre...

Gore Vidal vs Norman Mailer | The Dick Cavett Show

>212 LolaWalser: HOW did I not know about this? I was just reminiscing to someone about how wildly I cheered for Billie Jean King in her Battle of the Sexes against Bobby Riggs when I was 10, a little proto-feminist reading my mom's Ms. magazines... so really, how? But now I do, and thank you. Cynthia Ozick. Elizabeth Hardwick! Beady badger eyes, heh. I'm all in.

>215 lisapeet:

Isn't that amazing! That the event isn't better known, I mean... maybe this Criterion edition (it's from last year) will resurrect it. It's such a time-capsule--there's a wonderful bit in an extra from Pennebaker, in 2004, where he says how those people and the Zeitgeist are captured as if in amber. Just so.

As Greer says in the commentary at one point, it was a dodgy proposition, and it's not surprising so many invited woman refused to participate under those conditions--to have Mailer moderate (ha!) his own skirmish with the feminists, to give him not just a central role, but also let him function as the driver of the discussion. The women panelists spoke for ten minutes, then he'd pose a question to each, and start from the beginning to hear their answers. The audience would supposedly chip in after his comments on the answers. But it goes haywire from the start, when Mailer tells Cebollas that she was boring, to go sit down, and he doesn't ask her anything (IIRC), and basically it's clear he thinks this whole thing is about him and everybody should be talking about him.

So in a way the thing was a flop--but that's beside the point when you see the film--it's those captured interactions exactly as they are, that are of interest today, that inform.

What a time. As the write-up on the DVD notes, this was before women could apply for credit cards or insurance etc., way before marital rape was recognised--just a whole list of mind-boggling things.

And then you get Mailer--who stabbed a wife almost to death nine years before and got only three months probation for that--telling the audience filled with women that women are guilty of inciting men to violence because that violence--the violence men inflict on women--victimises men. Words simply aren't adequate...

He treated Hardwick with such patronising contempt (of course you don't understand me, Elizabeth), told Friedan she was a fool, basically; dismissed Sontag, minimised Lucy Komisar (new name to me but should be known to older generations)--oh, right, it was when she protested that violence against women is serious that he said that about men being really the victims.

OK, you know what's the saddest, when I'm typing this out now?--that this shite sounds like he'd fit with the current Breitbart/incel dudebro brigade like the glass slipper on Cinderella.

Fifty years ago - Have we moved on any? I have not seen the film and if I sat down next to Lynn to watch it she would get very very angry indeed.

Very excited to watch this! Thanks for the YouTube link.

Bas, I hope you would, too.

>218 RidgewayGirl:, >217 baswood:

Just don't expect some fancy academic debate... it all goes barroom brawl very quickly. :)

Actually, it would be fun to watch in the spirit of a Eurovision party--gather friends, snacks, booze... karaoke...

I finally found your thread and have scanned through it and will enjoy a closer more careful read. I was just thinking of rereading the Communist Manifesto in our current circumstances. And you've made me think again of saying more of the films I watch, though they may have dipped in interest a little as my film club is kaput until at least next year. I did read the post on Sade. It caught my eye as a recent talk on philosophy led me to look for the first time since I was a student at the writers and books forbidden by the Catholic Church - boy they don't like free thinking philosophers do they, it's a list of some of the greats, especially French thinkers. And there was Sade - except, and this tickled me, he is one of the few {ed correction from only one} who was subsequently taken off the banned list which leads me to wonder who his lawyer was and also, maybe sadly not funnily given many reputations, how maybe he was some edgy reading for a few priests. But given his vulgar (i.e. popular, but for a reason) reputation I do find it amusing, when I think Kant, Pascal, Spinoza and more remain banned.

>219 LolaWalser: Watched part of it, and will save the rest for when there isn't enough rage in my life or when I need my blood pressure to go up. Intelligent women speaking and a posturing idiot derailing them. Imani Gandy has a recurring thing on twitter where she relegates men to the barge and Mailer deserves to be packed into the middle, surrounded by dudes wearing conflicting Axe body sprays.

>220 tonikat:

hi!, welcome to my flea-bitten shaggy St. Bernard of a thread... As Dorothy Parker didn't say, this is not a thread to tap on lightly, it should be clubbed with great force. )8D

I thought the ILP was out of commission?! But then I'm not up on Vatican Shenanigans... There wasn't much out in print of Sade's until the 1950s, and his publisher (Jean-Jacques Pauvert) was prosecuted in a famous trial which saw as defence witnesses Cocteau, Bataille and Breton, among others (Simone de Beauvoir would publish Must we burn Sade? around this time too). I expect by the mid-20th century the church was less sanguine about coming out on the side of repression... although it has been argued that Sade is so hectic in his anti-theist rants, he inadvertently proves a believer. :)

>221 RidgewayGirl:

lol

Now there's an image!

Mailer was weird. He kept trying to pick up fights with guys--actual fisticuffs--and yet he wasn't a particularly imposing specimen. I read somewhere they record over twenty public physical fights of his. Once he was walking out his dogs late at night--poodles. Some boys hanging around told him his dogs were gay. Now, what would a normal person do? That's right--nothing. Possibly, you'd laugh it off--I know I'd find it very amusing to agree that my poodles were, indeed, gay. Seriously, how insane would you have to be to be REALLY disturbed by that?

But Mailer was really disturbed. So he went to them, picked up a fight and got beat up so badly he nearly lost his eyesight, if not life.

That Dick Cavett segment I linked above?--he had actually on that occasion head-butted Vidal before taping started. And then on yet another later occasion, he knocked Vidal down to the ground. Said Vidal: "Once again, words fail Norman Mailer."

>222 LolaWalser: aha yes i had forgotten it has been done away with, and have read more of the wiki page, though they said still has a moral force. I've not read Sade, from what I've read of him am not sure I would.

How did I go almost half a year and not make the connection that LW was you? If I hadn't seen the link on baswood's thread, I would have missed it completely! Anyway, really enjoying reading all these reviews, references to new to me authors, as well as your Moving Pictures. I have a Criterion subscription for this year, and it could take up my entire waking moments.

Just a few comments since I am so far behind:

- completely agree with you about Art Garfunkel vs Harvey Keitel. Garfunkel was definitely the weakest link in the film - you/one /I just wanted to shake him

Having lived by water all my life except for three dismal years, terminology for water is important in conversations relating to it
- my Francophone friends insist on making a distinction between une rivière and un fleuve, the former does not flow into the sea, the latter does, so the magnificent Saguenay is une rivière flowing into le grand fleuve, the St Lawrence. Woe betide me if a confuse the two terms!
- a brook to me is a much gentler slower flowing body of water than a stream, which has the sound of motion

>212 LolaWalser: Forces of nature all around

Off to find my copy of The Communist Manifesto!

>224 SassyLassy: "- completely agree with you about Art Garfunkel vs Harvey Keitel. Garfunkel was definitely the weakest link in the film - you/one /I just wanted to shake him"

I never understood the insistence on casting Garfunkel in movies. I haven't seen Bad Timing, but he was similarly useless, in my opinion, in Carnal Knowledge. He wasn't even good in his relatively small role in Catch-22. Guess he had a good agent, is all I can figure, or there was some sort of fascination with the idea of a music star in the movies.

>221 RidgewayGirl: "Intelligent women speaking and a posturing idiot derailing them."

And I'll bet at the end of the show Mailer came away thinking how smart and witty he'd come off. He was a bully taking his self-perceived macho role into waters that were way over his head. But as you said, LW, that was indicative of the times. The supposedly liberal macho posturers were still taking their own primacy for granted* but they didn't realize how thin the ice was growing under their feet.

* Well, obviously, the 60s don't have a corner on this market. But perhaps that era was the last gasp of the times (in America, anyway) when so-called liberal male celebrities and/or faux intellectuals like Mailer thought it clever (or even wanted) to ridicule feminist concerns, and could do so with impunity. (I'm sure there are many examples of the same phenomenon occurring over the intervening years. Maybe that late 60s/early 70s era seems unique to me because it was the time that I was first becoming aware of these issues, and paying attention to these sorts of media events, as I turned 15 in 1970.) But what I'm getting at is that even 10 years later, I doubt that a guy like Mailer would have had the weight to pull off setting up an event like that one, or that the women who took part would have even given the idea of attending a conversation "moderated" by Mailer 30 seconds of consideration.

As to Mailer's pugilistic tactics, I remember reading a column he himself wrote. Evidently some back and forth in the press between Mailer and Sylvester Stallone had taken place, and Mailer had gotten word that Stallone was threatening bodily harm. Finally, they ran into each other at an event of some sort, and Mailer approached Stallone, saying, "I hear you want to knock my block off." Stallone, according to Mailer, said, "I assure you, Norman, that I don't go around knocking people's blocks off." Mailer attributed this to Stallone's "graciousness" and reported that he'd responded in kind. He didn't seem to realize the way in which he'd been told off.

Mailer actually ran for Mayor of NYC in 1969. (Well, he got wiped out in the Democratic primary). His main platform was that New York City should become the 51st state. Mailer's campaign manager, Joe Flaherty wrote a memoir about the campaign called, you'll not be shocked to learn, Managing Mailer. In it he tells of Mailer's inability to focus on issues and one particular event where he was to speak to a room full of important donors and potential donors/supporters but instead went off on drunken rant.

In doing a google search on another matter I coincidentally came across this New Yorker piece by Richard Brody occasioned by the publishing of a Mailer biography. It's not a review of the biography, per se, but more an opinion piece about Mailer. Brody felt Mailer missed the boat as a novelist by refusing to write about his own Jewish/Brooklyn upbringing (his own life, in other words) and instead going out in what Brody termed "a bender of masculinity:"

The late nineteen-fifties, the time after Mailer’s third novel, should have been Mailer’s time. Instead, he frittered it away on a sort of bender of masculinity: bullfighting and boxing and street-brawling, drinking and marijuana and amphetamines, journalistic dustups and sexual adventures, theatre and plumbing and carpentry—a mad pursuit of so-called experience to take the place of where his life actually was.

But also, there's this from earlier in Brody's piece, which relates to Mailer's seemingly obsessive and absurd pugilism:

J. Michael Lennon’s new biography, “Norman Mailer: A Double Life” (which Louis Menand reviews in the magazine this week), offers a remarkable view of Mailer’s youth. The grandson of a rabbi who struggled in business, the son of a picaresque bookkeeper and an adoring mother, he was a brilliant student and precocious writer. He was also something of a spoiled and fearful child—by his own account, a “physical coward.”

So: compensating. All-in-all, Brody's view is that Mailer substituted toxic masculinity and a frenetic, no hands on the steering wheel celebrity for the substance his talent could have made good use of.

Bottom line, the guy, who could have been a contender, basically misguided himself into becoming a buffoon. Obviously, he had plenty of enablers.

Brody's piece is here (there might be a paywall, though). It makes good reading for anyone with a interest in Mailer's writing career and/or celebrity, and the out-of-tune nature of both:
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-novel-that-norman-mailer-didnt-w...

Finally, here is a hilarious account of a face-off between Mailer and another of your favorites, Philip Roth, in a publisher's office over Mailer's objection to a fictional portrayal of Mailer's assasination in the novel written by a friend of Roth's. This is taken from Ira Nadel's recent memoir of his friendship with Roth. The incident in question begins about halfway through the piece. You can do a Control F search for "An incident from this period confirms"
https://lithub.com/when-philip-roth-switched-publishers-drama-ensued/

Sorry, that's a lot about Norman Mailer! I've been enjoying your movie and book reviews. Cheers!

>223 tonikat:

There are excellent reasons to read Sade, but it's not easy to tell which ones apply to whom. In any case, should you ever develop a curiosity (ETA: about "le divin marquis", natch), trust that there's no shortage of guides.

>224 SassyLassy:

Hi! Thanks so much for the little river/brook/stream disquisition, that's very useful. Reclus most definitely writes about a "stream", then. And I should have known that Canadians, of all people, with all these bodies of water everywhere, would have had the rivière/fleuve distinction nailed!

>225 rocketjk:

Thanks for that. I'm out of The New Yorker credits for the month but I read the Lithub piece. As far as I can judge, a lot seems spot on and I get the same sense of surprise--that this guy was a fake and impostor. If Mailer were half the radical he pretended to be, he'd have welcomed being written into such a scene. And if he had half the brains he bragged he had, he'd also have had a sense of humour to help him deal with the fear of ridicule. But no--he could dish it, but couldn't take it.

But, seriously, with apologies for "self-quoting" a post, I urge anyone with an interest to watch the Dick Cavett segment because it says so much about the man, directly:

Gore Vidal vs Norman Mailer | The Dick Cavett Show

You can see him pulling the same trick as with Roth and Lelchuk in the Lithub story, that hyper-aggressive intro, and I'm thinking Roth must've got some pointers on how to handle him off that earlier encounter with Vidal.

To think a patient like that can live in the Capital of Therapy and never get any! :)

>226 LolaWalser: I can't see it, he seems to go against too much (eta for me, from what I've read of him, but without judging too much).

I'm getting very behind with everything, and already I can't dispose of everything in one mega-post, so, piecemeal. Last book read first, because currently you can download the e-book for free, Ten myths about Israel by Ilan Pappé, here:

https://www.versobooks.com/books/2430-ten-myths-about-israel

I read it after it first came out (2017?/18?) so this time it didn't take long. I'll just say that the reservations I had before about some of his statements have disappeared in the light of the recent events.

***



Jean le Bleu, Jean Giono, OPD 1932

So far the most attractive book of Giono's I've read, with the charm typical for childhood memoirs. The period spanned is from the turn of the century up to 1914, the year young Jean was conscripted to wage war, the place the hinterland of Provence. His father (of Italian, Piemontese extraction) was a shoemaker in a small town with many aspects of a village and at a certain age Jean was also sent to live an even more rural life with a shepherding family, to "man up". The book's chapters are composed of many vignettes describing the region and the characters, embedded or drifting through, especially men looking for work. It was a difficult time and poverty was omnipresent. One harsh winter decimates the population of the town through starvation and disease.

Giono, like his father, was very sympathetic to anarchism and this is still very much in evidence at the time the book was published, in particular in this segment, addressed to one of his friends killed in the war:

What would you have me do with this France which, it seems, you like me helped preserve? What would you have us do with it, we who have lost all our friends? Ah! If it were necessary to defend rivers, hills, mountains, skies, winds, rains, I'd say: "All right, that's our job. Let's fight, all our life's joy is here." No, we defended the false name of all that. Me, when I see a river I say "river", when I see a tree, I say "tree"; I never say "France". That doesn't exist.

Ah! How I'd give away all of that false name just so that one of those who died could live, the most simple, the most humble. Nothing can counterbalance the heart of a man. They are always there talking about God! It's God who flicked his finger against the scales of blood at the moment the child fell from his mother's opening. They are always there talking about God, and yet the only good thing God worked, the only thing God made, the life he himself, despite your imbecile sciences with spectacles, alone made, that life you crush at will in abominable mortars of mud and snot, with the blessings of all your churches. Lovely logic!

There is no glory in being French. There is only one glory: being alive.

A few in-betweeners:

The best science fiction stories 1951, Bleiler and Dikty, OPD 1951

Lots of big names of the "golden age" science fiction, which, considering the dreckish quality of that literature isn't saying much. I started this years ago so hurray for getting to the finish line... I liked Cyril Kornbluth's The Mindworm, but can't say why without spoiling it, so...

Two Ed McBains, He who hesitates and The heckler. Years ago I read a couple of McBain's early 87th Precinct books, more out of curiosity about the period and the setting (I was told his city is basically Chicago?) and, while I found them interesting in some ways, by the second book I couldn't take any more of the sexism.

I was just about to remove the remaining volumes when I started reading He who hesitates which, unusually for McBain, leaves the narration to a non-cop, in fact someone who, for reasons that are only gradually revealed, intends to give himself up to the cops--so presumably a criminal. The story is marred by racism (or informative about period racism, for the archaeologically-minded), in that puzzling way where you know this was probably seen as progressive at the time--a white man hooks up with a "colored" girl, so brave... of him. I liked the structure and the rhythm of the story (which also has the virtue of being quite short, more a novella than novel).

Buoyed by that positive result, I read (at random) another one, but The heckler left me where I was all those years earlier, fed up for the duration with the sexism, laid on with a trowel in this case. Some of it is admittedly hilarious (unwittingly), as in the scene of the main villain's seduction of a waitress, which I defy anyone to read without bursting into hahas; but some just petty and vile and depressing, as when the valiant cop hero Steve Carella bristles at the idea of interrogating an old woman, because he "hates old women", you see, although he "doesn't know why, unless it's got something to do with their not being young anymore."

I only finished it for the reference (which occurs early so it's not a spoiler) to Sherlock Holmes and The red-headed league. It's not difficult to see the Deaf Man was projected to be the 87th Precinct's Moriarty.

Intriguing, but now I have another few years' pause to go through first.

Moving pictures

Someone asked me if I'd seen some of the Indian action movies, specifically those featuring Indian traditional martial arts, and I hadn't. Searching in the library I found only a few suitably tagged, but I gather there are more, only it's difficult to tell which (a whole lot are catalogued only in Tamil or Telugu or Hindi etc.)

The first I saw was Junglee, 2019, tagged "kalaripayattu" (a Hindu art?), with the star Vidyut Jamwal. There are several great fighting scenes, but, unlike the Chinese wushu movies I love so much, there is also much more plot... and singing. It reminded me why, back in the mists of time, I bounced off Bollywood--it's like every movie has to be EVERYTHING--drama, love story, picaresque, action, musical, comedy, tragedy--and they go on FOREVER, and there is SINGING and DANCING revue numbers--a lot of.

So I was intermittently a tad bored, but, there were also elephants (warning, there is also horrific massacre of elephants--I trust all CGI, but looked damn real). I can't find any images from the best sequences, this is a weird angle but that's what the primary position looks like... frontally:



The second one, Pattas, 2020, tag "adimurai" (a Tamil art?), I enjoyed even more although it was longer. The musical numbers were actually interesting independently of the story, shot in some surreal style and featuring lots of curvy girls, far cry from Hollywood's bleached anorexics... Everybody grinning, everybody having a whale of a time. And then, speaking of whaling, the leading lady got to shine too, beating up a bunch of corrupt cops, coz she's a martial artist too.



See that scene here! PATTAS - Sneha Fight Scene | Dhanush | Durai Senthil Kumar | Vivek-Mervin | Sathya Jyothi Films

That perfect little kick she delivers to the cop's spine at the end, to help him un-choke, just kills me.

 

Kurt Tucholsky's "picture book" Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, OPD 1929, was graphically designed or "mounted" by John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld), inventor of photomontage and one of the most important, most influential graphic designers of the 20th century. As well as one of the original Dadaists (with the "title" of Dadamonteur) and a Surrealist avant la lettre, too.

I've mentioned Tucholsky a few times above, and Mark (thorold) reviewed this title already so there's not much to add. It was one of the last "heart's shrieks" Tucholsky would manage before he fled Nazism, an outpouring of rage, grief, and satirist's bile, fabulously supported by Heartfield's gimlet-precise images. The photographs were contributed by many photographers and most are reproduced plain, but the "constructions" are Heartfield's material.

Tucholsky's essays take off the themes of the photos, and Heartfield's photomontages express Tucholsky's mood, is how I see it.

The themes are the ills of the unloved, short-lived, star-crossed Weimar Republic, some her own but most, in retrospect, inherited from the Wilhelmine past--including the old guard that would bow to Hitler, and the myriad social and cultural traits--such as antisemitism--that predisposed the society to savagery.

Berliner Redensart (A Berlin saying), one of Heartfield's compositions used in Tucholsky's book:



Helmut Herzfeld was born to an activist couple in 1891. His mother was a textile worker agitating for unionisation when she met his father, a writer with anarchist sympathies. Helmut was the first of four children but the family was so poor the parents eventually abandoned them to public charity. They never reunited but oddly enough, Helmut's first paying job involved designing the look of a book of his father's selected works.

In 1916 Helmut Herzfeld showed his colours and mad courage, when in the midst of a war as jingoistic as the WWI he formally changed his name to "John Heartfield", in order, as he said, to protest the nationalism and anti-British sentiment of his country. The trigger was the infamous Gott strafe England, a refrain from a song that sounded from every corner in those days.

Two years later he and his younger brother Wieland joined the KPD, receiving their cards from no other than Rosa Luxemburg herself. The Heartfield/Herzfeld brothers started a leftist publishing house, the legendary Malik Verlag, famous for its George Grosz portfolios and John Heartfield's pioneering cover designs, including the wraparound photo cover and montages.

Heartfield also contributed over eight years 240 full-page montages to the Communist illustrated weekly Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ), just a prodigious amount of work, especially considering his unparalleled pains-taking: every detail could take many hours if not days of work to perfect, and everything had to be real. For one photo of a man in a barrel of mustard, that much mustard had to be found to fill the barrel.

Unsurprisingly, when the Nazis came to power Heartfield fled, at first to Prague, and when the Nazis caught up with him there too (he was number five on their list of prey), in December 1938 he managed to get to London.

But the Brits didn't care for German Communists much more than the Nazis did, and he was interned as an "enemy alien" in conditions so terrible that his health was broken in six weeks and he was released to be hospitalised.

He and his third wife, another German refugee he met in England, would spend about twelve years there, but eventually go to the DDR (where Brecht, among others, helped them settle). The entire time they were in England, even in peacetime, they were under surveillance by the MI5, the MI6, and the civil police--their phone tapped, the mail opened, interviews staged out of the blue etc.

Heartfield was small and fierce. In 1929 he saw a newsreel of the massacre of the workers that May Day parade. Some Nazi ape triple his size was guffawing the whole time. You swine, shouted Heartfield, you swine! The ape waited for him at the exit and asked him what did he call him. You are a swine, a swine, a swine... Heartfield kept going as the other one was pummeling him into a bloody mess. If the crowd hadn't intervened, Heartfield might have died then and there.

In Prague he got a small tortoise and carried it everywhere with him because he worried that otherwise the tortoise would be lonely. This was the man who as an eight year old took care of his siblings for days until all the food had gone and he then had to walk from the cottage in the mountain to the village in the valley to ask for help... and you bet that he worried, about the six year old Wieland and the two babies.

Two iconic cover images..."Blood and iron", the old (Bismarck's) slogan in the "new" Reich; and the dove of peace run through with the fascist bayonet "Where capital lives, peace cannot live".

>230 LolaWalser: Extremely interesting. I'd never heard of Heartfield. Thanks for that.

>232 rocketjk:

You are welcome, I'm glad. I've noticed a significant surge in works on Heartfield in the Anglo-world in recent years. I've read three other monographs on him just from the last 3-4 years, but I think this one is the best--oops, failed to touchstone it:

John Heartfield : Laughter is a devastating weapon, David King and Ernst Volland, 2015

For one thing, it is the most generous in reproducing his work, in full page views too. It also contains unusual material I haven't come across elsewhere, such as some transcripts of Heartfield's interviews (or interrogations) with officials both British and German, official documents and letters exchanged about him--you get to see how frail is all security, how a life depends on some bureaucrat's stamping a paper or not. So many people died for want of nothing more than a stamp.

The book accompanied the exhibit at Tate Modern in 2015; some interesting images and links here:

https://www.johnheartfield.com/John-Heartfield-Exhibition/about-john-heartfield-...

>233 LolaWalser: Thanks! I will have a look at those images as soon as I can do them justice. I was wondering whether you knew of a good biography (in English) of Hans Fallada? You may recall my admiration for (and horrified fascination with) his novel Every Man Dies Alone about life in Berlin during the Nazi era. The short bio provided in my edition sharpened my appetite to learn more about him. I guess I could go the wikipedia route and check the footnotes for books on him, but I was wondering whether you had anything to recommend.

A beautiful German copy of Little Man, What Now? (Kleiner mann, großer mann alles vertaugd) came through my bookstore one day and I couldn't help bringing it home. (I was never going to sell it, anyway.) It is a 4th printing - July 1940! Obviously, I can't read it, but I have also seen plenty of English translations. One day I'll pick one up and read it.

p.s. I just ordered the King book on Heartfield.

>234 rocketjk:

I'm sorry, I can't help with Fallada, no idea about his bios. I have reservations about him and his work, so, although I've read a few of his novels, I'm in a kind of "avoidant" stance toward him ever since I looked up some criticism of him. It's a murky picture. I think a lot of hype has been generated about him in the American press with the agenda of making him into an anti-Nazi hero liberals could love (meaning first of all not-Communist, of course) when there is significant scholarly evidence that he had a lot in common with the Nazis. Whatever they harassed him about were not his views on Jews, to put it that way. Equally concerning are his views on the countryside, the purity of the farmland people (a bit funny coming from an urban barfly) etc.--that I actually saw referenced relatively recently in connection with the renewal of German ecofascism (German press, though).

>235 rocketjk:

I hope you like it! I'd love to hear your opinions on it.

>236 LolaWalser: Re: Fallada . . . Well, actually that does help. The intro in my (relatively recent) edition of Every Man Dies Alone says that he ended the war stuck away in an insane asylum, which was one of the places the Nazis would stick people and leave them to die when they didn't quite want to imprison them or send them off to a camp. What the niceties of these gradations were I've never quite understood. So, anyway, he'd run afoul of them in some way, and he simply somehow outlasted them and came out post-war broken physically but still alive, with enough strength left to write one or two novels. That intro also said that there were times during the Nazi regime that they were burning his books and other times that he was in favor. But, to your point regarding his views on Jews, I don't recall there being any mention of the issue in Every Man Dies Alone (a novel about repression in Berlin during the war), so it would seem that whatever he was mad at the Nazis about, that issue wasn't high on his list. Anyway, all you've done is make me more interested! I'll let you know if I find anything of interest to read about him, bio-wise.

Looking forward to the Heartfield. I will certainly report here on LT.

Cheers!

>237 rocketjk:

He was a volatile alcoholic (no pun intended) known to the police for several incidents in which he tried to kill someone. People were being committed to the sanatoriums for much less. Nevertheless, Goebbels specifically wrote about the use they made of him.

As for what is and isn't in your recent edition, like I said--American publishers and the sort of mindset they cater to have an agenda to paint Fallada like some sort of anti-Nazi hero because he was not a leftist, let alone a Communist. It's neither new nor surprising.

I have access to German material on Fallada, so I'm not wanting for information, but thanks for the offer--you take care of your needs first. :)

>238 LolaWalser: "As for what is and isn't in your recent edition, like I said--American publishers and the sort of mindset they cater to have an agenda. . . "

I have no doubt about that, to be sure. I was reporting what I'd read there, but with your proviso on that subject squarely in mind.

>239 rocketjk:

No prob.

***



Il mare d'oro; Gli scorpioni del deserto; Corto Maltese: la jeunesse, all by Hugo Pratt

I'm not even going to try for moderation, "objectivity", understatement. Corto Maltese is the best comic strip/BD/GN ever, and Hugo Pratt the greatest comic strip/BD/GN artist ever, and if anyone doesn't agree, that's OK because the issue is so beyond discussion, for once I feel a Buddha-like serenity at the mere thought of polemic. I shake a flower at naysayers! I point to the moon! Pffft! :)

What can I say, I fell in love and forever, when young, fifteen or so, and I don't remember which one was the first album I read, but I do remember the beautiful shock and enchantment that set in with La Ballade de la mer salée (The ballad of the salty sea)--that's right, in French translation (bought it myself in Paris), although most of the remaining albums I'd go on to buy in the original Italian.

Corto is the epitome of romantic adventure, the rise and downfall of all us dreamers. He charms, of course, but more than his person, it's really his life, his song, his melancholy, his ships and desert treks, his labyrinths and Venetian gardens, his treasure hunts and pursuits of myth, his run-ins with pirates, mad monks, freemasons, charlatans, poets, drunkards, magnificent women--every one of them eccentric yet real, larger than life yet authentic--it's all that that seduces, the variegated turmoil around the one fixed centre, the calm eye of the storm, where Corto dreams.

I was lucky to catch the first exhibition dedicated to Pratt and Corto, in 2006 in Rome (Corto Maltese, letteratura disegnata); there was another ten years later, and now there is a statue of Corto in Angouleme, the site of an important international comic strip festival:



All of those were rereads, except for the last album collected in The desert scorpions, dating from 1992. Pratt died after a long illness in 1995 and it's evident that he had little strength left by 1992--the scenario is complete but many panels are left in the sketching stage. The desert scorpions wasn't a Corto Maltese saga but was set in 1941 in Africa, with colonialist powers at war and the numerous and various indigenous soldiers and non-aligned tribes. The central figure we follow is a Polish officer, Koinsky, who escaped occupied Poland and joined the British forces in Africa (most of the action taking place in Libya and Egypt and heading toward the Red Sea).

Pratt wasn't just a superb graphic artist, he had a perfect ear and an enormous talent for invention. A military story may a priori seem a boring proposition to some, but this is one such as you never saw, teeming with vivid bizarre characters, madness, humour.

Another Corto, from Favola di Venezia, telling a story to the cats:



"In the garden of Eden there was everything, liver, kidneys, ground meat, little red fish and saucers of milk. Only one thing couldn't be eaten, the Fishbone of the Forbidden Fish, which grew..."

Enjoyed reading your thoughts on Jean le Bleu and everything else you have written of course.

Indian movies are certainly different from most other movie genre's, whenever I catch one I am always reminded of the British film starring Cliff Richard "Summer Holiday" - what a great film.

>241 baswood:

I'm not familiar with that, I'll keep it in mind. The Indian movies sent me looking for various info and I was surprised to learn (on Wikipedia) that they had a huge vogue in the USSR--that was their primary foreign market! So I borrowed one of those old top-grossing hits, called Awara, but have yet to watch it.

I'm entering a busy cycle and not sure I'll be able to keep track of stuff in the same detail as before. Let's see if I can be more concise.

Dreamers of Decadence (Symbolist Painters of the 1890s), Philippe Jullian, OPD 1969 covers many major and minor artists of the strange period that married the twilight of the 19th century to the dawn of the 20th--all ominous shades, pale colours, nightmares and terrors, issues of abandonment, and revulsion at the New Age. A great deal of it is fearfully kitschy and nowadays looks like nothing more than the cheesy images on the covers of pulp fantasy. It takes effort to try to see them as they first appeared to the scandalised visitors of the Salons, before the world got over-saturated with images and sex and violence and, well, everything. But at their best, the decadent is a welcome corrosive for bourgeois complacency and pretend-good taste.



Jan Toorop, Fatalisme, 1893

***

The Bridal March & One Day, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, OPD 1870s

Bjørnson is one of the great classics of Norwegian literature and an early Nobel prize winner who used to be widely read even outside Scandinavia. This is the first time I read something of his although I knew of him for ages from biographies of Ibsen--he stuck in my mind as one of the rare notables of his time who stood up for Dreyfus.

I wish I knew how these two novellas resonated in their time. To me they both seem rather quiet, unexceptional works. In the first one, folksy legend/magical realism mixes with a multi-generational story of marriage and inheritance. A superstition about a piece of music, the bridal march composed and played specifically for one family, seems to have ruined the life of one bride who belatedly understands it was her own failings and not some curse that dogged her. The second one concerns a romantic young woman and her loss of illusions, such that she realises she had been truly happy for only one day.

And now that I wrote this down, I see there is more to them than I realised as I was reading them. Cool work, Bjørnson.

Hmm, must try harder for "concise"...

>242 LolaWalser: Jan Toorop and his daughter Charley Toorop are still big names here in The Hague. Jan especially seems to have known everyone and painted in every conceivable style. I’m sure there’s a great historical novel about him somewhere that I haven’t read yet…

>240 LolaWalser: Huh... I've been a big graphic novel/comic strip reader in my life, but never came across Hugo Pratt. I like the style a lot—it reminds me a bit of early Heavy Metal strips, which I was into in my very early teens. And I see there are translations, so I'll keep an eye out now. Thanks for putting that on my radar.

>243 thorold:

I only knew the name and a few images; would love to flesh out that whole environment of Nederlandisch/Dutch/Flemish/Belgian decadence. By the way, do you run into a lot of Art Nouveau architecture where you live?

>244 lisapeet:

I'd love to hear what you thought! If you can borrow The ballad of the salty sea, that ought to be enough to tell if you'd like him or not.

Yes, I know, what a pity European comics are so little known in the US (the first Corto Maltese story appeared cca 1966/7). "Heavy Metal" seems to be (or was) the only American publication that carried them (at least, the only one I could find in the 1990s) and even that, I dimly recall, was because of a connection to a French publication. I used to wonder about the difference (the whole thing is probably obsolete with the demise of the print media now)--it would appear that in the US the Marvel/DC model totally dominated; in Europe there were many more. A particular contrast was the existence and popularity of comics "revue" magazines similar to "Heavy Metal"--usually one or more complete stories plus episodes and single strips or panels, by various authors.

In Italy one of the most prestigious was actually called "Corto Maltese"--not to be confused with Pratt's albums, the magazine published all sorts of comics and authors and related journalism.

This is the cover of the fist number--I think I still have it (if only I had thought to preserve them all, but who knew...)

>245 LolaWalser: There’s not as much really extravagant stuff as in Brussels, but there are quite a few nice Jugendstil shopfronts and town-houses around in the centre of The Hague and the fin-de-siècle bourgeois suburbs. My immediate neighbourhood is a century too young for that, though.

The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud, Kuniko Tsurita, this compilation 2020

Coincidentally, more "comics"--often an odd word to apply and probably never more than in Tsurita's case. Kuniko Tsurita was one of the super-rare Japanese women who published comics, or manga, starting in the 1960s when she was just eighteen years old. She died barely twenty years later, of lupus, and many of her later comics reflect her terrible battle with the increasingly debilitating illness. They are fantastic, the best of her work judging by this volume.

This edition carries an extremely valuable essay translated from Japanese but also expanded by the translator for the non-Japanese audience. I do wish that a figure like Tsurita would be discussed by women and feminists, though, because as much good will as these dudes have, I feel they barely hinted at all the complexities and significance of her work and character.

Tsurita began drawing comics in school and submitted her first work while still a schoolgirl. She was rebuffed, possibly with reason at that early stage, but in the future there were numerous such refusals and other obstacles from the entirely male comics industry. The misogyny and the sexism ruling in Japanese society comes across as singularly appalling, much worse than in the West. The essay mentions by name three other women comics artists of the times, all of whom drew commercial, strongly convention-bound "comics for girls". But even that field was dominated by men. Women artists of Tsurita's unconventional, "alternative", "auteur" bend were not just unheard of but weren't supposed to exist.

So it's nice to hear that such a great name like Tezuka praised Tsurita. However, even his publication offered her scant support and she published, when she managed to, almost exclusively in the one "alternative manga" venue, Garo, where she would be for decades the only woman artist they published. And she would get the honour of having her work on the title page only twice.

Tsurita was a deeply philosophical, well-read person (not a given in the industry!) and her metaphysical comics breathe with the Zeitgeist of existentialists and the dread of nuclear war. She was also a feminist, as much through the force of her being something, being some way that women weren't supposed to be, as through conscious thought. Visually she drew on sources of inspiration as varied as Bosch, Italian mannerism, Beardsley and the Symbolists. We owe her much more recognition and reflection.

***



Kommunismus: kleine Geschichte, wie es endlich anders wird, Bini Adamczak, 2017

The English edition of this excellent book has the title, also chosen by some other translations, of "Communism for kids". This has apparently caused some confusion--it's actually not a children's book (but do feel free to gift it to as many ten year olds as you can find :)), despite Adamczak's simple language and hilarious cartoons.

There are some interesting variations of the German title between editions but my copy goes, approximately, "Communism, a little tale about how {things} will {could} finally change".

Adamczak first explains, in wonderfully transparent language, what capitalism is and what happens under capitalism--in "fancy" language, commodification, alienation etc. Her introductory analogy for communism posits it as a medicine for capitalism's ills, and her following scenarios of communist "therapy" bring up the various problems that can arise (or have arisen, in historical examples).

I particularly liked the epilogue in which Adamczak muses on the "meta" problems of "Communist desire", from the point of view of the dead end in which we find ourselves--destroyed by capitalism but brainwashed (this is my word) out of even daring to imagine the solution because the one real solution is systematically represented as a historical and moral failure. Not daring, as she puts it, to desire communism--to desire that things finally change.

But communism was invented many times, imagined and reimagined. It has to be--WE are not the same people through the times. So let us hope, let us want, let us desire to cure capitalism's ills, if we care for anyone and anything.

P.S.

For those who can follow spoken German, the (ETA: oops!) entire first half of the German version is available free on soundcloud:

https://soundcloud.com/kpoe_bildungsverein/was-war-das

>246 thorold:

I missed the opportunity to see Horta's houses in Brussels, always wanted to make up for that.

>248 LolaWalser: Just saw this: https://artnouveau.urban.brussels/ — Brussels is launching a new “Art Nouveau Pass”, and 2023 will be the year of Art Nouveau.

>240 LolaWalser: >245 LolaWalser: I am doing a brief Zoom session on Italian graphic novels on Monday, so I will see if these come up. (At least I hope I am doing it, as it has been postponed twice already). I also hope that my Italian is going to be good enough to understand what is being said!

>249 thorold:

Terrific! I totally ought to be able to do Brussels (and more) in 2023. Thanks for the heads-up.

>250 SandDune:

Sounds great, I'll have to hear how that went. The world of Italian comics is vast and I haven't kept up with the news of the last decade or so, but if history comes up, it's difficult to imagine any survey would miss Pratt.

On to summing up some stuff--I feel so tired but if I don't jot down something, I'll never do it:

Dispatched mostly short stuff I can read while commuting--Gwen Raverat's memoir Period piece, OPD 1962--she was one of the Bloomsbury satellites but to me originally interesting as a Darwin; gives a picture of the cosy life in the university circle of Cambridge cca 19th/20th century.

***

Susan Blackmore's Consciousness : a very short introduction, just as a refresher because I took up Christof Koch's latest (hmm--no, the one before the latest?)--anyway, not recommended unless you really don't know the first thing about the subject.

***

Une si longue lettre (So long a letter), Mariama Bâ, OPD 1979

Was inspired to read this thanks to a recent four-episode series on France Culture about francophone Afrofeminism, of which this is one of the foundational texts. (Link to the FC: Je suis noire et je n’aime pas Beyoncé, une histoire des féminismes noirs francophones)

The narrator of the book is a Senegalese Muslim woman in her fifties who after decades of marriage and twelve children found herself abandoned in favour of a second, much younger wife (actually one of her daughters' best friend). She doesn't even get a hint that this is going to happen, on the same day of her husband's new wedding she receives the visit of the imam and a few relatives simply informing her and reminding her of her duties as a good Muslim wife. She never speaks to her husband again.

Her disappointment and grief mark the beginning of her feminist consciousness. The book is very much a feminist tract rather than a conventional novel (which perhaps explains some of the low ratings).

***



Fugue for a darkening island, Christopher Priest, OPD 1972

Priest's second novel was apparently inspired by the growing racial tensions in the UK, fomented by right-wing nationalist anti-immigrant agitation in particular. So it's easy to see that it might still be interesting in the age of Brexit and the concomitant fascism; unfortunately, it's very much of the 1960/70s in some aspects that make full engagement with its agenda difficult.

The premise posits a nuclear catastrophe in Africa that results in two million refugees landing in the UK. The right-wing makes it impossible for a peaceful integration to take place and after a while the "Afrims" organise into armed units and a sort of racial civil war takes place.

Only after I've read this did I find out Priest actually rewrote it for a 2011 re-publication. While I won't be going out of my way to read that new version (nor do I know much about what are the differences), just the fact of that gesture is interesting and possibly speaks volumes about various things--how societies/mentalities/opinions etc. change, how our views on racism changed etc.

I suppose that back in 1971 Priest meant to be "on the side of the angels" and yet today the original of the would-be antiracist book reads at best awkwardly. However, I don't think it's the terms used (a few occurrences of Negro and nigger, the latter employed by villains) that are the only problem, but that the very premise is off, and in ways I can't see compensated for except with a most drastic rewrite (and yet, if I understood what was done in the new version correctly, Priest didn't undertake any such drastic changes).

So, a curiosity more than anything else, possibly at least as interesting for the fact of a 21st century "update" as for the original story and, to me, most interesting as the testament to how old and tenacious is the British fear of immigrants, invasion etc.

***

Not dead, only resting, Simon Brett, OPD 1984. The next Charles Paris mystery in my stash sees the improvident Thespian on the way to paint apartments for extra cash. The job uncovers a grisly murder of a beautiful young man and a disturbing absence of his lover. The police easily decides that the missing lover is the culprit, but another gay couple asks Charles to look into the affair as they don't believe that version of events. Much hobnobbing with theatrical folk, the Doctor Who reference is there, as are the acid reviews.

Oh, since Google clearly spies on me, this came up in YouTube recs: Play - Paris - So Much Blood - Bill Nighy

Mind you, these are adaptations that will obviously spoil the books.

***

Living with Charlotte Perriand, Laffanour, 2021

Perriand (1903-1999) was an interior designer and architect who designed some of the most beautiful bookcases and tables I have ever seen. She worked with Le Corbusier, was profoundly inspired by Japanese aesthetics (and would, circular fashion, herself inspire Japanese designers), and adhered to a leftist, humanist vision of habitations and objects that enhance and beautify and generally make people's lives better.

Another one of those women I go "why did no one tell me before about her..."

It's Time to Rediscover Charlotte Perriand

***

Le consentement, Vanessa Springora, 2020

When she was thirteen years old Springora became the prey of the openly paedo/ephebophile Gabriel Matzneff; by the time she was fourteen they were having sexual relations and he, a fifty-year old man, wove a whole fiction of their grand love affair. In reality she was just one of his victims and she would herself become aware of his preying on other girls, as well as his numerous abuses of even younger boys on his travels abroad--all meticulously described in his journals.

When she was fifteen Springora began to extricate herself from the trap--but how difficult it was, not just without adequate help you might suppose would have existed (the period was late eighties), but with all the forces ranged against her! And yet people did exist who saw Matzneff for what he was and detested him--but no one did anything. Because?

There is no other way to reply: because the entire French society, or specifically what "is" society in the environment in which Matzneff operated, the literary/intellectual/bourgeois sphere, actually gave Matzneff not just permission but encouragement. I'm sure Springora's mother has come in for a great deal of belated reproach and abuse; after all, how could she accept this man as her daughter's "lover", sit at the table with them, watch them together? (Not only did she accept him, when Vanessa told her about the breakup, the mother pitied him.) But how could she not accept him when the "brightest", the most cultured of the media in the most civilised country on earth accepted him and flaunted him and his paedo obsessions like some rarefied piquant gift to the millions of viewers and readers, year after year? When the police repeatedly called on him for interviews, only to apologise because of course celebrities get slandered in anonymous letters? When the "romantic" myth of love between old men and young girls is propagated as a matter of course in film, books, customs, and has been since forever?

I've been thinking about this shit since I picked up a book of his when I was twenty (at the time when Springora would be seeking psychiatric help in the aftermath of the abuse), and I posted over the years about it even before the scandal finally erupted, and feel there is simultaneously nothing and too much left to say.

I wonder if Springora herself realises all the implications, everything that has happened and was done to her. How can we, after all, judge from the centre of our ignorance and immaturity that we are ignorant and immature, not responsible, above all not responsible for the damage done to us? How long does it take even to understand how much insidious evil has been done under the cruelly profaned name of love?

This particular creep was rewarded by a significant literary prize as late as 2013, for a book a couple dissenting voices called "the apology of rape".

Matzneff has escaped to Italy; he's supposed to show in French court in September.

Moving pictures

Have been enjoying Claude Chabrol's "Inspector Lavardin" movies with Jean Poiret in the main role. This led me to the info that Poiret had written--and starred in--the original La cage aux folles (later remade by Mike Nichols and Elaine May as "The Birdcage").

Was lucky to find on Madelen what exists of the filmed theatrical production with Poiret and his longtime comic partner Michel Serrault, only about 65 minutes, but really makes me regret the 1970s movie replaced Poiret with Ugo Tognazzi (for some stupid reason the French didn't bother securing the movie rights, which were bought by the Italians, and so a French-Italian coproduction forced the use of an Italian lead).

Poiret and Serrault

>252 LolaWalser: The Chabrol films came up on Mubi recently as well: I saw Poulet au vinaigre a few weeks ago, haven’t watched the second one yet. Fun!

>253 thorold:

Ha, what a coincidence! I actually thought of you--your recent reading of Pennac's series--because Lavardin is as over-the-top as his crazy police inspectors, no?! :)

I must say I didn't appreciate Chabrol sufficiently before. The set I'm watching has four movies, the two for cinema (Poulet au vinaigre; Inspecteur Lavardin), and two made for TV--but with very high production values (L'escargot noir (very enjoyable!); Maux croisés). There are two remaining, not directed by Chabrol.

When we leave each other, Henrik Nordbrandt, this selection 2013

Nordbrandt left Denmark as a young man for a life of constant travel and his poetry reflects this motion, mostly around the Mediterranean basin. While not deeply philosophical, it does confront one powerfully with the seeker's eternal conundrum that in order to find something, we must lose something else.

***

The sun worshiper (sic), István Gáll, OPD 1970

In the 1960s Budapest a married couple deals with the wartime traumas as the wife, Jewish, suffers nightmares in which "Germans and dogs" are coming for her to take her to the camp, and the husband relives the nerve-rending chaos of postwar politics. They are people who struggle by night but adore the daylight all the more for it. Excellent novella and a surprising work (if we adopt the conventional view of socialist Hungary) to have been not only published but awarded prestigious prizes.

***



The Nobbie stories for children and adults, C. L. R. James, this collection 2012

In 1953 James was forced to leave the United States thanks to McCarthyism and went to England. From there he sent his wife and son letters including the stories based on private mythology that encompassed folk tales and Melville, Michelangelo and Marx. "Nobbie" James must've been one precocious five-year-old to follow these tales in detail! Some of the recurrent characters are the good and bad avatars of the boy, a surreal menagerie, "Nicholas the Worker" etc. I thought they were too complicated to be really engaging but apparently at least one kid loved them...

***



Bibliomanie, Gustave Flaubert, OPD 1837

This was Flaubert's first published work, when he was all of fifteen years old. It's based on a true story about a book-mad ex-monk whose passion for books led him to become an arsonist and possible murderer. Unfortunately the character seems to have been an ordinary monomaniac who might have focussed with the same zeal on any number of collectibles, from fossils to bottlecaps, although one might suppose that religiosity had something to do with directing him to choose books.

Still, it resonated nicely with the documentary I saw around the same time, Booksellers--here's the trailer: The Booksellers (2020) | Documentary | D.W. Young |.

It was filmed in 2019 around the antiquarian book fair in NYC, features Fran Lebowitz (love her), the three sisters who own Argosy Books etc. Highly recommended.

***

Black sisters, speak out, Awa Thiam, OPD 1978 as La parole aux négresses; English translation 1986

This is the second book after Une si longue lettre I picked up after listening to the programme on francophone Afrofeminism (linked in >251 LolaWalser:).

The first part, Voices of Black Women, collects direct statements about their life experiences from a number of African women (and features also a rather depressing "round table" of men and women in which virtually only men speak); the second part addresses the "trials and tribulations" of Black African women--FMG, polygamy, sexual initiation, and skin whitening; the third discusses "feminism and revolution" and is particularly interesting for contrasting the situation of women in the West, by implication white (nowadays that would be more complex) and the "Black African" women and demonstrating at length that "intersectional" views of women's problems were strongly present long before Crenshaw popularised the term.

But it's not just race that is a "complicating" factor for Afrofeminism. Overall (Thiam does generalise a lot to "Africa" and "Black Africa" when she's not citing specific countries), the first problem is development, i.e. lack of it; poverty in combination with social factors such as tribalism and religious fanaticism. The countries she is talking about are still* predominantly rural (with women--not men!--bearing the brunt of labour, while being remunerated less) and the communities sustained by kin networks. In such conditions it's immensely difficult for individuals to go against the collective. So if the collective is bent on oppressing women, the easiest way to behave is the one that sustains and propagates oppression.

It's not necessarily the lack of information, but the lack of opportunity, of space, of freedom to behave differently, that are the problem.

Despite its age, I think the book can still be recommended for the clear exposition of specifically Black/African problems women face, and the conflicts that arise not just vis-à-vis male oppressors, but white colonialist mindset.

*I looked at some data about Guinea--literacy rates, as a simple yet powerful indicator of development and social position. Unesco data from 2018 for females 15 yo and older is only 27.7%--males of the same age group are at 54.4%. However, in the group aged 65 and older--the group that would encompass today many of Thiam's original Guinean interlocutors--female literacy is at a mere 9.6% (male 33.8%). Mali, another country Thiam mentions specifically, has even worse numbers--25.7% literacy for females 15 and older (46.2% male); 6.9% for females 65 yo and older (26.7% male).

http://uis.unesco.org/en/country/ml

The birds, Tarjei Vesaas, OPD 1957

The ice palace is still my favourite (and one of the best-loved books, ever) but this came close. Mattis is "simple", incapable of earning a livelihood on his own and thus at 37 still in care of his slightly older sister Hege. But seeing the world through Mattis's eyes actually reveals a beauty and a mystery that is invisible to the "clever" people. Mattis's sensibility to the natural world and his idiosyncratic reading of relations in it are as human and as spiritual as those expressed by the conventions of the majority.

It is also a gift that can't be transmitted. It is also a curse, to the daily organisation of life. Mattis can't explain his experience to the clever ones, and they can't understand it. To them Mattis seems empty, devoid of something.

But no one who experiences is empty...

>256 LolaWalser: You've reminded me that I've not read anything more from Vesaas after The Birds, which I did enjoy. If there's better to come with The Ice Palace - great!

>257 AlisonY:

I hope you'll like it if you get to it--if not, I'll just have to stick my fingers into my ears and go "lalalala..."; that's how proprietary I feel about it. :)

Well, this thread officially lost its plot with the backlog of stuff I simply don't have the time to go over. I'm thinking maybe I'll just do a "Greatest Hits" kind of thing from now on.

>258 LolaWalser: this thread officially lost its plot with the backlog of stuff ...

Sitting in the same boat - it's discouraging. Keep posting though - it's always interesting!

Oh, hi, thanks, Sassy! Nice to hear. :) Unfortunately I'm one of those tiresome obsessives who tend to "all or nothing", once I lose track going forward feels like having a pebble in the shoe... I'll try to psych myself into being less compulsive. :)

>255 LolaWalser:

I'll add my thumbs up for the documentary The Booksellers !

>255 LolaWalser: I've had The Booksellers in my meager video queue for ages. One of these days I'll have time to sit down and watch it, because I miss those old NYC booksellers (even though I only came in on the tail end of them).

>261 librorumamans:, >262 lisapeet:

Yes, it's a real treat for book people, could have been twice the length as far as I'm concerned--or a soap. Two hundred episodes about mad people buying and selling books... tell me it wouldn't be a ratings hit. :)

Remember that sequence in the old lady's apartment, the one who was selling her library, with the huge bookcases all the way up to the ceiling? Rewound it three times to pick out some titles, what a fantastic collection.

I miss those old NYC booksellers (even though I only came in on the tail end of them).

It's been a great sorrow watching the bookshops in NYC disappear, and the period I was there was really just the beginning (1997-2002). Now when I look at some books, bookmarks etc., it's dozens of vanished places. Tompkins Square Books, the Gotham Book Mart (that was a shock... I squeezed in one last visit in 2006), a whole string of them in Mercer St., then those across from The Strand, St. Mark's books, the Coliseum Books, Oscar Wilde, and so on and on...

>263 LolaWalser: I saw it at the cinema so couldn't pause or rewind, but I do remember making noises during various scenes :-). I just looked it up and my local library has it so I think I may watch it again.

>264 rhian_of_oz:

Hi! Yeah, I borrowed it from the library and was 300th+ in queue--if I weren't so desperately short of space I'd want a copy of my own for sure. But there comes a material limit to the greediest of the greedies...

I'm skipping over 19 books. Highest recommendation for Mercè Rodoreda's The time of the doves--even in translation the beauty of the language and the marvellous storytelling comes through. Ooops, on that account a note I saw somewhere and concur with (based on examples)--if looking for an English version, the new translation titled "In Diamond Square" is NOT RECOMMENDED.

Also, a quick nod to The Flapper Queens: Women Cartoonists Of The Jazz Age, edited by comic artist Trina Robbins--it's thought-provoking to see that women too were drawing "comics" from the earliest times (of syndicalised comic strips), but of course with a variety of barriers and extra obstacles to deal with--limitation of themes, venues, styles, etc. The comics are still entertaining and largely feminist-y in a way--as has been noted often, "the Jazz Age" was actually more progressive than the postwar decades...

As for film, I'm behind by at least three dozen...

Mentioning only the two DEFA gems:

Verwirrung der Liebe (Love's Confusion) (1959), directed by Slatan Dudow (most famous work the pre-war collaboration with Brecht, Kuhle Wampe).

This is a colourful almost-musical about a guy who can't decide which of the two girls he likes better until literally at "the altar" (registrar's, actually). Everybody is remarkably friendly and casual about love, and swimming nude with people one has just met--definitely not your Hollywood movie of the same vintage and genre...

Next, a stone-cold masterpiece, Till Eulenspiegel (1975), directed by Rainer Simon. Till is Winfried Glatzeder, a wonderful gangly actor with a unique, medieval face. There's a sequence when he paints a "fresco" in the church with a pal--and a donkey--that is one of the most hilarious, orgiastic scenes I've seen. Beautiful cinematography in a gorgeous landscape--this is one I wish I could see in a proper cinema.

 

Aha --Kanopy. Thank you! Shall watch.

>266 librorumamans:

Yes, both were on Kanopy--what an amazing thing it is that they offer these films, I'd say that's their most brilliant collection... everything else is available on various other outlets, but hundred+ movies from East Germany?! We're in luck.

(If you haven't seen it, I recommend checking out "Coming Out" which I wrote about somewhere above.)

I presume you know the legend of Till Eulenspiegel, perhaps you read Charles de Coster? Used to be one of my childhood faves, I was thrilled by the subversive, anarchic energy and humour of the character. Warning, though, there is a strong anti-clerical streak to it, in case such things bother you. Nothing that wasn't present in Coster or the medieval precedents--think Rabelais, Carmina Burana etc.

Kanopy offers so much more to my interests than other streamers, but I wasn't really aware of the DEFA archive. Thanks for pointing it out.

Apart from Richard Strauss's tone poem, the legend of Till Eulenspiegel isn't part of my world. Judging from TPL, Charles de Coster doesn't have a large profile in English. Anti-clericalism doesn't bother me in the least, but it's good that you pointed that out since this is a public list.

Shall also have a look at "Coming Out".

August was a month of desperate attempts of distraction from reality. I've logged 20+ items read and while it seems a number, a lot of it was undemanding stuff. I've talked about some in other places so don't feel like repeating that.

A few mentions: the comic Le chat du rabbin (2002) by Joann Sfar--I've read two of the eight (or more?) books in the series and am waiting for the fourth (the library doesn't seem to have the third, dammit), so it may be too early for final judgements, but so far so very likeable. The cat in question is rather a dudebro (as is Sfar himself) but it's less of a problem in a, well, cat... especially a cat who can talk, read, and thinks of himself as a good Jew. The setting is pre-WWII Algeria, multi-ethnic and still religiously diversified.

Fruit of knowledge: the vulva vs. the patriarchy (2018) by Liv Strömquist illustrates the prejudice and ignorance around women's bodies and women in general. I know that nowadays there seem to be many (or maybe just more) works of this type but Strömquist's recurrent questioning not just of the historical prejudice but her own formulations (what else might I see, how might I be expressing myself, if I had been brought up in a society without gender prejudice?) is particularly eye-opening. This would be one of the books that if I could, I'd see placed in the hands of every young person, regardless of gender.

Arseniy Kotov's Soviet Cities: Labour, Life & Leisure (2020) is refreshingly different to every other photobook on ex-Communist countries. The impulse here is to document what the Soviets had built, both where it's still in use and where it's on the brink of destruction. Kotov photographs interesting buildings and "uninteresting" residential quarters as equally significant testaments of the style and effort of past times, of, as he calls it, "a lost civilization".

On the viewing front, again too many to mention all. Special shoutout to, first, Larisa Shepitko's The ascent (1977). This is a grand movie--beautiful, beautifully shot, beautifully acted, made with an insane "Method" approach (the conditions were Arctic and the extras got frostbite but carried on without complaining as their fingers turned black and blue--Shepitko first realised this on watching the rushes).

I'm conflicted on her use of religious metaphors here because it would seem to flatter both a stereotypical view of Russians as god-mad fools, and the highly damaging view of communism as religion. (Tarkovsky who, en passant, actually WAS religious--Shepitko wasn't--felt that she had overdone the Jesusy imagery too.) But I can also see where this can be FELT to be right, that the hanged partisan is a martyr no less than Jesus and no less to an idea of love too.

But on that point, going to something I've long had a bee in my bonnet about--what's the big deal with Jesus's martyrdom anyway? Loads of people--mostly WOMEN--have suffered worse physical and spiritual torment and betrayals and still do everyday. Of course, we worship dick so the Redeemer needs must be a dickhead, regardless of what zillions of women go through.

But it really annoys when this is translated from myth to history, as in the movie. Because it's not just the partisan who is hanged, but also an old man, an adult woman, and a Jewish girl. All of these individuals suffer the same fate, and the Jewish girl, it is implied, had been tortured and raped. Why doesn't she, this innocent child, get "the ascent", why isn't her spirit the one transmitted to the onlookers? Why are we all focussing on the blond-Jesus partisan?

And the adult woman--how isn't her sacrifice greater than his? She had been arrested for giving him shelter, and dragged away leaving three small children in her snow-bound cottage to fend for themselves. When given the opportunity to buy her freedom by giving the Germans information, she is momentarily tempted (so was Jesus on the cross), but then refuses. She refuses to give away the names of the people who have sheltered the Jewish girl. She actually has a trading card--the partisan doesn't--and she refuses to use it. She accepts to die despite knowing this means her children will die too. But we don't get a spotlight on her agony--none of that matters as much when it's "just" women suffering.

I could go on, but.

Also a shoutout to Parasite (2019). What must exist for the rich scum to exist--a whole underworld of underclass misery. See this movie. And join the revolution!

Finally, just a note about anime. First completed series since Kamisama kiss, Samurai Champloo (2004). It was made by the same guy who did Cowboy Bebop but I didn't know this, all the better as I didn't warm up to CB. This, otoh, won me over immediately, by style and story. Despite some (usual) reservations about the treatment/inexistence of female characters--at least I can say it's definitely not the worst I've seen in anime so far.

Two skilled swordsmen, the irrepressible rogue Mugen and the taciturn Jin join a fifteen-year old girl, Fuu, in her quest to find "the samurai who smells of sunflowers". The only dud episode with no redeeming features was the baseball one, IMO.

>269 LolaWalser: I'm not a big movie watcher - I think much of that is down to my husband and I having wayyyy different tastes in films, so usually I give in to a book instead - but I absolutely loved Parasite. What a mad, crazy film. Definitely one I'll watch again, as although the plot's spoiled for me now I think it's the kind of film that you spot things you missed first time around.

>270 AlisonY: Agreed, Parasite would definitely bear re-watching.

>269 LolaWalser: Well if Tarkovsky thinks you're overdoing Jesus imagery, that would be something to consider. Or would have been. Though that also sounds like something I'd like to watch, even for its over-the-topness.

>269 LolaWalser: Noting the Kotov. Have many of the buildings still in use changed their function from their initial purpose, or have they remained as intended? I think he's right about the idea of a "lost civilization", there and in many other state built conglomerations of buildings.

Now have a Leonard Cohen earworm for the day - "an old woman gave us shelter; she died without a whisper" I see Criterion has this film, so will look for it on the subscription collection.

>195 LolaWalser: I finally got around to watching DEFA's Simplon Tunnel last night (the dark evenings are back). A bit crude in places — some of the underground stuff wasn't very convincing, and the background mountains seemed to have been taken from a postcard — but still rather lovely. Especially the glorious homosocial moment at the end when Erich and Antonio look deep into each other's eyes with undiluted lustinternational socialist fraternity, completely forgetting about the girl they've been fighting over.

I couldn't help feeling that there was a kind of Doris-Day-Western idiom going on in the mining camp and bar scenes. But maybe that was just the fifties hairstyles, which no-one would have noticed at the time.

Ayyy, I didn't realise how long I've neglected this thread, sorry for belated replies.

>270 AlisonY:, >271 lisapeet:

Thirding the re-watchability of Parasite. It repays in-depth viewing.

>271 lisapeet:, >272 SassyLassy:

Despite criticism, it's absolutely something one ought to see, and if you can get the latest Criterion release (I have the film in a previous two-fer of Shepitko's work they issued without extras; the new release adds lots of extras), all the better. Another interesting thing is that she was married to Elem Klimov, himself a renowned director, and there's a film of his, Come and See, that is the most shattering WWII movie I know of. It deals with the events on the Eastern Front, in Byelorussia (incidentally, also the site of The Ascent) and trust me, you don't know WWII until you've taken in that side of it.

Speaking of the extras, it was heartwarming to see how happy they were together until her tragically early death, it's very rare IME to come across Russians, especially men, so openly devoted to their partners. There was a bit of Hollywood glamour to their marriage. I didn't care for the son, though. But he was a kid when she died so hardly knew her.

>273 thorold:

Ha, it's faded a bit, but I recall the scenery was gorgeous. I have seen six more DEFA films since the last mention, and all deserve at least a few sentences... even if I just copy from Kanopy. In the order in which I watched them, which creates a bit of a thematic and stylistic jumble as I time-hop back and forth.

Zeit der Störche (Time of the storks), 1971, is a love story featuring again the actor Winfried Glatzeder, who is currently my fave male actor from the DDR--a wholly unoriginal preference I'm sure. There's just no mistaking that marionette face and frame for anyone else. I had seen him first in the fabulous Die Legende von Paul und Paula but didn't memorise the name until his Till Eulenspiegel. Glatzeder plays again an unconventional character, unsuited to the over-regimentation of life in his earnest socialist country, who goes after what he wants when and as it pleases him. Heidemarie Wenzel plays the woman who chooses this "bad boy" over her safe placid boyfriend.



Die Verfehlung (The mistake), 1991, was one of the first movies after "die Wende" (the turnabout) openly critical of the fallen regime, and one of the last whose production had begun in the DDR. The director Heiner Carow was a big name (he also directed the above-mentioned Coming Out and the super-successful The legend of Paul and Paula). The film is set in 1988 and the lead is the stupendous Angelica Domröse ("Paula" in "The Legend..."), who plays a working class woman in a small village who falls in love with a visitor from West Germany. Their happiness is ruined when the jealous village mayor reports the West German to the police on some bogus charge and they deport him. At the same time the woman's sons are threatened, with serious consequences.

Der Frühling braucht Zeit (The spring takes time), 1965, sounded sort of boring in the description so I kept postponing it, but it turned out to be excellent in such unique ways it's now one of my faves. I mean, this hardly promises breathtaking adventure, does it:

Was it an act of sabotage or willful negligence? The non-party engineer Heinz Solter is suddenly arrested and accused of approving a defective pipeline that caused a half million loss to his company. At first, the case seems clear-cut for the state prosecutor, but when he probes deeper, he discovers that Solter had acted against his better judgment due to the pressure from his career-driven and authoritarian boss.

Well forget about the plot, it's all in how it's done. So much more is packed in the pictures than in the words, as in the scene of a party blazing with self-involved piggishness and petty-mindedness of the apparatchiks. Shortly after the release it was banned.



Fünf Patronenhülsen, 1960, takes us back to the trend of heroic Communist epics. From Kanopy:

During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), five International Brigade soldiers of different nationalities are given a crucial assignment as their commander lies dying: they are to smuggle top-secret information across enemy lines. Shot mainly in Bulgaria and starring Academy nominee Armin Mueller-Stahl (The Flight, Shine, Jacob the Liar) and Manfred Krug (Trace of Stones), this film was the young Frank Beyer's stylistic tour de force.

The plot is based on scriptwriter Walter Gorrish's own experience in the International Brigades. Ernst Busch, a famous singer and actor (Kuhle Wampe, 1932), who also joined the International Brigades, sings the "Song of the Lincoln Battalion," which became the anthem for veterans of the Battle of Jarama in 1937, particularly those from the Lincoln Battalion, founded by American volunteers.

Very thirsty-making movie. ETA: I mean literally, as this rag-tag bunch crawls through a desert-like landscape gasping for water.

Continuing with the DEFA retrospective... Next I saw a darling teenage hit from 1978, Sieben Sommersprossen (Seven freckles).

From Kanopy:

Caroline and Robert knew each other from when they were children. Years later, they meet again at summer camp and fall in love. But being alone together is made difficult by the rigorous daily routine at the camp. In addition, the other teenagers detest the fact that Caroline and Robert are always together. Petty jealousies emerge and the head counselor becomes concerned about the moral standards of the camp. Only a student-teacher understands them, and suggests putting on a performance of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet with them in the leading roles... Zschoche's poetic and sensitive summer camp story about first love and sexual awakening struck a cord with East German teenagers. The film was shown in sold-out cinemas and became a box office success.

There's a lot of children and therefore bad acting in this movie but the leads are solid and the whole is just so fresh and wholesome and real, it deserves every praise. Oh, right--I suppose it would be shocking to some, especially Anglo, that the teenage couple is shown frolicking about completely nude, there is talk about contraceptive pills--which are actually shown, as are two fourteen-year-old girls taking them--teenage lust is addressed etc. All the more reason to see it.



And the latest seen, Die Architekten (The Architects), 1990, victim, as its director Peter Kahane tells in the accompanying interview, of the very changes it was aiming to usher, since barely anyone took notice of it in the tumult of the times. And it does feel as a rather lost and pointless work, a failure really but perhaps interesting in some ways, maybe just as an expression of the reigning confusion. The architects of the title are a group of young-ish and non-conforming professionals who are unexpectedly given a chance to propose a design for a development in the growing suburbs. Their late-thirties chief sees this as his last chance to create something, but neglects to notice the strain his zeal for work puts on his marriage. The unconventional team wins the first prize for the design, but nevertheless get foiled and undermined by the directives from above that chip away at all the facets of their work that was innovative and challenging. The chief loses wife and daughter as the wife finds a new partner and decides to leave for the West.

The team in the short time of hope, surveying the terrain to be developed:



----------------

And as for the books. I'm still in a bad reading mood, although I recorded 18 reads. But not inspired to talk about them somehow, except I feel the need to shoutout for Edouard Louis's latest, a short essay about his mother, Combats et métamorphoses d'une femme. There's at least one man on the planet who doesn't profoundly hate women and that's something I suppose.

>276 LolaWalser:

Isn't it wonderful to see how Édouard's mother blossoms once she gains independence and gets away from the village!

>277 librorumamans:

Yes, there was an almost cinematic dénouement to her story--from abused village housewife to a made-over big city dweller, with a new boyfriend and visits from Catherine Deneuve... but I'm mainly impressed by Louis's feeling for women, that he's able to empathise with them as human beings like himself. That's actually not common even for gay men. Maybe his generation and younger are different, or maybe it's just him.

---------------------

Kara Walker: A Black Hole Is Everything a Star Longs to Be, 2021, is already fetching silly prices, but at least borrow it for a mind-blowing view of three decades of Walker's work--including many previously unseen drawings, poems, meditations that fed the creation of her most famous pieces. The array of emotions that burst forth from this compilation almost explains the complex response her work elicits.

>278 LolaWalser:

He's an impressive guy. A couple of months before the end of the olden days I was able to see a staging of History of violence by the German company schaubühne at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn that was followed by a lengthy Q&A with Louis and the German director, moderated by the AD of the local theatre. Even in a second language, Louis' articulateness, insights, reflectiveness were well beyond what one usually gets in a Q&A. Also interesting to me was that in person he is loquacious although his books are very ... disciplined? I came away thinking that this was someone I would really like to be able to hang out with.

>279 librorumamans:

Sounds like a great experience. I listened on the internet to a conversation about the novel with Louis, by chance (it had come up following this link https://www.franceculture.fr/theatre/histoire-de-la-violence-ou-comment-le-theat... but haven't otherwise sought to hear him. It's good to hear that he leaves a good impression in person too. I hope the rich friends don't spoil him.

I had many thoughts about Histoire de la violence but didn't write about it because they kept generating, without end in sight. I think the first is his best book by far and am a little afraid to see the latest ones are each one thinner than the previous yet keep coming. I think there is a real, unfeigned sincerity in him, which could preserve him from the triviality so many French writers sink into, but I fear what the demand to "perform" could do to it.

October memo. Special mentions for Doctor Glas, OPD 1905, a modernist gem, and Pascal Quignard's Terrasse à Rome, OPD 2000. Both books have an isolated figure as the central character, a sort of outcast unmoored from the mainstream of life.



Mamba's daughters, Du Bose Heyward, OPD 1929

Heyward writes very sympathetically about three black women, old Mamba, her daughter Hagar and granddaughter Lissa as they navigate the American society of the first two decades of the 20th century. The story still reads fast and exciting--how Mamba, illiterate and grotesque but fuelled by desperation and indomitable will lays siege first to one (poor) then second (rich) white family in Charleston; how Hagar, childlike in mind but stronger than men in body, works herself to death for Lissa, a child of rape; how Lissa, the beautiful light-coloured princess of the two poor women, enters a different life thanks to their sacrifices.

Presumably Heyward's white audience was tested to the limit already by as much criticism as he musters because there is an odd absence of white villains where it would make most narrative sense for them to occur (Hagar's rape, the concession owners etc.) Instead, there is the villainous "mulatto". And even the "good" white characters take for granted utter segregation of the races outside that much contact as occurs when receiving service. At least, down South. The closing scene in New York City shyly hints that this might change, although Heyward chooses to show an all-black milieu of intellectuals and artists.

A young white man, Saint, muses about the situation around him and whether he can "afford" to testify in favour of a black man:

In town, both numbers and power rested securely with the white, and so he could afford to appear in court for a negro, could educate him, give him a chance in business, indulge his own benign paternalism. Out in the agricultural region, staying on upon the same soil that had enslaved their grandfathers, they were held to the old code of behaviour by a tradition of servitude, reinforced in many cases by an actual affection to their landlords. There they were safe. Only here in the industrial belt, thronged as it was by the rag-tag and bob-tail of the race, ten, twenty, a hundred of them to a single white, the grip could not be allowed to slacken. White supremacy must remain absolute.

Moving pictures

Something tells me I'd do better to keep this for myself, but when have I put prudence ahead of truth... No doubt the most curious, formidable and baffling of the October lot of picture-seeing was finishing the complete set of the Carry-On movies. It took me almost a year since I first came across them, and I must admit that Carry On Emannuelle defeated me--gave up after six minutes--nor did I manage to keep my eyes on the screen for the painful duration of Carry On England (also, there is no Carry On Columbus in the box, for which I understand gratitude is due).

I wish I had something startlingly insightful to say on the topic, but I don't. I get that they are not (or were not) beloved because they are good; they are good because they are (or were) beloved. There's something comfy and soothing about a troupe of actors performing variations on a theme. One thing I can't understand for the life of me is Sidney James' popularity... but I guess it's one of those things for which you just "had to be there". Well, that's me enriched with info on Brit pop culture, if nothing else.

Besides oodles of even older movies that will be posted in the Silent group, I saw two more excellent DEFAs. Frank Beyer's Jakob der Lügner (1974) is about a man living in a Jewish ghetto during the Nazi occupation who one day overhears a piece of news about Russians supposedly getting closer. This cheers up his desperate inmates so much that he starts pretending he's got a radio, inventing good news as occasion demands.

The second one was Affaire Blum from 1948, based on a real incident in 1926 when a Jewish businessman was falsely accused of murder and almost executed. The case had been beyond flimsy but stoked by fervent determination of the prosecutors and several other high officials involved to find a Jew guilty. It's considered significant as indication of how widespread and toxic antisemitism was even before the Nazis had formally come to power.

The scapegoat:

The Carry on Films - British humour of the 60's at its best/worse. Sidney James was admired for his working class guile, cunning and ability to (for the most part) come out on top. - perhaps something more than a "cheekie chappie", but he was that too. He got better as he got more wrinkled, which of course you would have been able to observe from seeing so many of the films. I hope you watched them in date order for the full effect.

I think the appeal of Carry On was the way it combined the professionalism of radio and TV comedy with what seemed at the time like very daringly uncensored jokes about sex, of a sort you could previously only get away with in live stand-up. Nowadays 90% of that comes over as misogynistic and/or homophobic, and the other 10% (Barbara Windsor’s bra flying off) as puerile. So the thing that was its main selling-point is the part of it that has dated most, and it’s really only the ritual, reenactment side of it that survives. As Bas says, a lot of that was class-humour and the music-hall/working-men’s-club circuit tradition.

>282 baswood:, >283 thorold:

The first I've seen was Carry On Up the Khyber Pass, selected at random from a bunch of about a dozen that I found online... then after, when I read up on them and learned they've done a parody of a Hammer horror, of course I had to see that but of course that one wasn't online. The box set was marginally more expensive than just Carry On Screaming, so I Carried On (and on...) -- in chronological order, yes. :)

While it's easy to point out the sexism, racism etc. I have to say that they didn't strike me as the worst ever. To me (but I know this was not the general take), what looks the worst today is James' leering at young girls. On gays, I hardly know what to say, I was astounded by the characters Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey played--was that negative or positive? I guess throwing them at women (usually to no success) was negative but otoh, the fact that such flamboyantly gay performances were showcased over and over must have meant some kind of... acceptance? I don't understand that aspect at all tbh.

Speaking of class, I was miffed by the dissing of the unions in Carry On At Your Convenience and glad to read it was the only one that flopped. Strange that anyone thought their chosen audience would have been on board with that.

The ones I enjoyed the most, as far as I can recall the differences, in no special order: Khyber; Screaming; Cabby; Cleo; Abroad; Don't Lose Your Head... the one with Elke Sommer as the Russian archaeologist... there were good bits throughout, oh, and of course I liked recognising visiting actors.

By the way, in the course of reading up on them I discovered that TV Tropes contain "Awful British Sex Comedy"--but, whew, the Carry Ons miss being included in them (presumably "Emmannuelle" came the closest).

My sense is that Kenneth Williams was a sort of self-parody. It's mostly through Just A Minute that I'm familiar with him, where he was a queen and, like a queen, very sharp and witty. It seemed that Clement Freud could hardly stand him, partly because Freud was there to win and Williams was there to have fun.

I miss that era of the show. That generation were so articulate, informed, sharp as they come, and funny, often hilariously so (well, Clement Freud not so much).

Back to the Carry Ons.

I think I have seen all the Carry ons and yes Kenneth Williams was the star when he appeared. They are great films to dip in and out.

>285 librorumamans:, >286 baswood:

Since the post I saw on YT a movie about Williams, starring Michael Sheen. Quite moving, but in the end one is none the wiser as to what his problem was. How could someone so in-your-face at the same time be terminally repressed...And wow, the Joe Orton story--it's mad that I've seen his plays and never knew how he died.

November, December, let's bury them--I read books, I saw movies from East Germany and also the silent kind, and no doubt I shall continue in just the same vein after-tomorrow and longer.

Today I heard this episode from a series on Algerian women (originally transmitted in 2012):

Des femmes trahies par leur révolution (Women betrayed by their revolution)

Wassyla Tamzali talks about the women in the Algerian resistance movement and how they were mistreated by their own comrades. At one point she tells of going to see (as a girl) a frank Yugoslav movie about women partisans in the WWII and notes an uncle's cryptic remark that all guerrillas are the same, which only later, after she had met Algerian women resisters, made sense to her. I wonder which movie that was...

>287 LolaWalser:

Alan Bennett wrote the screenplay for Prick Up Your Ears, directed by Stephen Frears, based on Orton's bio. I saw it years ago, probably at Inside Out. Good flick, as I recall. That's how I learned that he was murdered.