Haydninvienna (Richard) hopes to solve some mysteries

I though the old thread was long enough, it’s now July (and belatedly Happy Birthdays, Canada and the United States of America), and I finally thought of a title.

The new title was partly suggested by the number of murder mysteries I seem to be reading (including three “Dr Siri” mysteries that I haven’t posted about yet), and partly by a sentence in the Introduction to a book that I’ve just started: This Is Your Brain on Music. Dr Levitin (who is a neurologist and was formerly a record producer) says in his introduction: “But one mystery has not been solved: the mystery of the human brain and how it gives rise to thoughts and feelings, hopes and desires, love, and the experience of beauty, not to mention dance, visual art, literature, and music.” You may have noticed that science and music are major interests of mine.

Just to get the “Dr Siri” mysteries out of the way, I read the first two in the series: The Coroner’s Lunch and Thirty-Three Teeth; and a later one, The Merry Misogynist. For those who don’t already know him, you should make his acquaintance if you like “cosy mysteries” with a twist. The twist is that Dr Siri Paiboun is the State Coroner of Laos under the Pathet Lao regime, and he is the unwilling reincarnation of a powerful Hmong shaman of a millennium or so ago. Being the only western-trained doctor who hasn’t left the country, he has been press-ganged into becoming the Coroner, and has to investigate suspicious deaths with minimal equipment and a staff of two, a partly qualified nurse and a man of all work who has Down’s syndrome. The communist regime is neither particularly competent nor particularly honest, but there are a policeman and a civil servant that Siri comes to trust. I love those stories, although some of them get surprisingly dark given the general tone. Siri, Nurse Dtui and Mr Geung are great characters and Siri plays off the variously incompetent or corrupt officialdom of Laos beautifully. Did I mention that he is seventy-three years old and spent most of his life as a doctor in the jungle patching up wounded revolutionaries? He reckons that most of the bad things that could happen to him have already happened, so no worries, right? Some people object to the intrusion of the spirits into Dr Siri’s investigations, and I have to admit that the spirit messages sometimes look like a deus ex machina, but it doesn’t bother me much—the books are fun anyway.

I mentioned This Is Your Brain on Music above. This was fascinating. Lots of information about what happens when you listen to music, and what evolutionary forces might have produced the human instinct for rhythms and melody.

Next was The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly of Cool Tools and Wired. All about how the future will be wonderful. I rather lost touch with it at a reference to “the kind of intelligent book club discussion as now happens on the book sharing site Goodreads”. Doesn’t read too many Goodreads reviews, does he? Also I’m not sure that he understands what a “book” is. He is of course right that the phone book is called a “book”, and it’s desirable to have an up to date one, but I don’t want an up to date Shakespeare. Kelly doesn’t clearly distinguish them. (Is a phone book a book? Is a hamburger a sandwich? Depends—but you need to recognise that.) He also foresees a time when all e-texts might accrue annotations and comments by anyone who felt like it! Just imagine if the text of a Shakespeare play got encrusted with the sort of rubbish that passes for commentary on YouTube!

All of this future-boosterism is reminiscent of the discussion that I remember in Australia before the introduction of FM radio. Most of its advocates appeared to assume that once the FM transmitting licences were granted, the airwaves would automatically fill with beautiful stereo music. Mostly didn’t happen. Remember Sturgeon’s Law: ninety percent of everything is crap.

Ok, rant over. Not sure that I’ll persevere with Mr Kelly.

Happy new thread!

>1 haydninvienna: The mysteries sound fun.

We are now in a hotel in Torremolinos, Spain, for a few days of escape from English weather. There’s a fellow outside playing “Besame Mucho” on a saxophone, reminding me of (I think) Alan Sherman’s version, which included the line “Each time you kiss me I wind up with holes in my neck”.

ETA found it: “Bela Lugosi”: https://youtube.com/shorts/gnlsf3mewaA?feature=share

>5 haydninvienna: Have a good time!

>6 Karlstar: Thanks Jim. I liked Torremolinos, which was apparently where the boom in holiday tourism to Spain started. A lot of it is looking a bit shabby now. But it was pretty hot, and Málaga airport coming back was a zoo. Heathrow though, despite the horror stories, seemed pretty normal.

And of course it’s now just as hot in England as it was in Spain.

In my last thread I mentioned A Nest of Ninnies by Ashbery and Schuyler (https://www.librarything.com/topic/338151#7871705). The Oxfordshire library service having now produced a copy, I have actually read it. Six word review (apologies to @Meredy, and I’m not intending to copy her): too clever for its own good. That’s two hours of my life I won’t get back. I’m wondering if a couple of apparent printers’ literals—for example, “principle” where “principal” would have been right—were intentional, in line with Ashbery’s assertion that the last word in the book (“foehn”) was intended to send readers to the dictionary.

Just to add to the pile-on of uber-cleverness, A Nest of Ninnies is also the title of a comic novel written by one Robert Armin, who was an actor in Shakespeare’s company, and for whom the part of Feste was probably written. No doubt Ashbery and Schuyler knew of it.

Back to the mysteries: Hangman’s Holiday by Dorothy L Sayers. This is a collection of short stories, some featuring Lord Peter Wimsey and some not. Some of the “not” feature Montague Egg, traveller in wines and spirits, who I wish Sayers had written more about. Best of them, in my opinion: “Maher-Shalal-Hashbaz”, featuring Montague Egg. Maher et cetera is a ginger tomcat who, with the little girl who is his human, meet Mr Egg in London, and they all get caught up in a very curious adventure involving an old man with a weak heart who is terrified of cats. And there’s “The Man Who Knew How”, about a man with an allegedly undetectable method of murder and another man who becomes obsessed by him. The man who knew how is a crime reporter, and is consequently often at the scene of a crime. The method was a joke, but the obsessed man becomes so obsessed that he kills the other. Then, of course, he finds out the truth.

And an irrelevancy: can we please have virtual ginger beer added to the Pub’s virtual offerings? Preferably the real stuff that came from a ginger beer plant and explodes if looked at wrong? It’s taken me this late in life and this hot English summer to discover that a ginger beer shandy is a damn fine drink on a hot afternoon.

>10 haydninvienna:
Some time ago, 1990 if my memory serves me well, I was introduced to brandy with ginger beer. It works very well.

>11 pgmcc: that sounds interesting! I was recently introduced to ginger beer with a slug of my friend's home-made apple moonshine. also works very well :)

>11 pgmcc: >12 Darth-Heather: Brandy & dry (ginger ale) was a standard pub drink in the old country.

>12 Darth-Heather: That sounds interesting too. The equivalent here would be ginger beer and Potín (pronounced Potcheen), Irish moonshine; traditionaly made with a potato base. Usually drunk straight with severe health warnings.

>13 haydninvienna:
You're way ahead of us.

I invented, so I thought, a new drink for my wife. She likes whiskey and she likes Cidona. Richard, I am sure you came across Cidona during your time in Ireland. For those unfamiliar with the drink, it is a fizzy drink made with apple juice and is only found in Ireland. I combined my wife's liking of Cidona with her liking of whiskey by combining Cidona and whiskey. She loves it.

A couple of days later I did a Google search to see if anyone else had come up with this concoction. Apparently a pub in Dublin thought it up in 2016 and was promoting it as a speciality drink in their premises.

>13 haydninvienna: Roughly occupying the same niche that "Klippies and Coke" does here? ("Klippies" being the familiar form of the name Klipdrift, a local very unpretentious brand of brandy.)

>15 pgmcc: Here we have Appletiser, which fits your definition of Cidona, though I might have described it as sparkling rather than fizzy. It has stablemates called Grapetiser and Peartiser -- no prize for guessing the fruit flavours.

>16 hfglen:
I might have described it as sparkling rather than fizzy.

You are obviously more sophisticated than I am. :-)

A company here describes one of their products as "Pear Cider", rather than "Perry". Someone recently explained to me that they are adding pear to cider and calling it pear cider. I do not know if this was its original composition or if they started adding the pear to the cider when someone pointed out that perry was the name for alcohol made from pears. Marketing people do not appear to care how they mangle the language or how they confuse people. They probably thought that very few people know about perry and it would be simpler to mangle the meaning by calling the drink pear cider. Alternatively, the marketing people may not have been aware of perry themselves. I can tell that my system's spell-checker has never heard of perry.

In line with the theme of mixing alcohol with national soft drinks, I suppose whisky with Irn Bru would be the Scottish contribution. I find my teeth tingling at the thought. That is tingling in not a nice way.

>17 pgmcc: The one time that I tried Irn Bru I dumped most of it. Just nasty. I’ve tried “pear cider” too, labelled Magners at that. But of course the most famous perry is Babycham.

>18 haydninvienna: Snowballs, anyone? The sort of thing one drank when one was a teenager and didn't know any better - even though I was drinking wine on special occasions by then...

>15 pgmcc: Back when I was playing with cocktails, mixing and naming them, I discovered that there are no new cocktails, and if you do make a new one by chance, someone has already used the name you wanted to, even if your recipe is better. Same with pies.

A question; does your ginger beer have an alcohol content? Because here we can buy it from a company named Fever Tree, no alcohol,
but it tastes yucky IMO. I love their tonic water though.

>20 MrsLee: Ginger beer here would be considered a soft drink. It also happens to have no alcohol.

I say no alcohol in the context of any soft drink having no alcohol, not juice drinks that are considered soft drinks in Ireland.*

Some years ago I was involved in the installation of computer systems in a soft drink concentrate manufacturing plant. (In fact, I was involved in systems work for several such factories as we have a few in Ireland.) The computer system included bills of material (basically the recipe and other materials used in the manufacture of the product structured to reflect the stages in the manufacturing process) and various quality control reports. One of the reports was the alcohol content of batches of concentrate. Apparently the majority of soft drink concentrates contain tiny amounts of alcohol. The proportion is a fraction of a percent but it has to be recorded for various reasons, some of them being duty related. In that context the ginger beer is likely to contain some alcohol but it would be in trace amounts.

*I may have told this joke before, but it is relevant to the comments above.

The Managing Directors of Coors, Budweiser and Guinness were attending an international beer conference. At the afternoon break the Managing Director of Coors goes to the bar and orders a Coors. While he is sipping his Coors the Managing Director of Budweiser goes to the bar and orders a Bud. As the Managing Directors of Coors and Budweiser are enjoying their drinks the Managing Director of Guinness approaches the bar and orders a Coca Cola. When his drink arrives he takes a sip and greets his fellow Managing Directors. The Managing Directors of Coors and Budweiser look at one another and the Managing Director of Coors turns to the Managing Director of Guinness and says, "Hi. We see you are drinking Coca Cola. We thought you would prefer to drink your company's drink"

"Well," says the Managing Director of Guinness, "when I saw that you two were drinking soft drinks I thought I would join you."

>20 MrsLee: >21 pgmcc: I’ve never seen anything commercially labelled “ginger beer” in Oz, Ireland, the UK or (for obvious reasons) Qatar that had any significant alcohol content, but I imagine the home brew stuff could get at least as strong as Guinness. To my great sadness, “Bundaberg” ginger beer, which hails from the Australian state of my birth and is available here, is just another mix of carbonated water, sugar and flavourings despite all the waffle on the label about being naturally brewed.

Fever-tree is available here also, but I’ve never tried their ginger beer.

Ginger can be bad or can be good. To me, most supermarket ginger beer is fairly tasteless - I suppose because it is marketed to children (as in 'lashings of ginger beer' AKA an offence against the Trades Description Act). R Whites is the best mass market brand in the UK in my opinion.

I used to like the Schweppes Canada Club (?) - at least that tasted of ginger. A lot of places round here serve it with a slice of fresh ginger.

>20 MrsLee: Oh noes! You must be mistaken. LOL Fever Tree Ginger Beer is the best! You do have to turn it upside down and gently swirl it a bit before opening, because all the good stuff settles with time. Their Tonic is also amazing.

>25 Karlstar: Yes, the mass market ginger ale here is sugar water, with Schweppes being the only vaguely palatable brand.

>24 clamairy: Completely agree, with the exception of Vernors, which has slightly more ginger flavor and a lot more fizz. To me ginger beer sometimes tastes moldy and sometimes good, I guess just depends on the brand.

>24 clamairy: My mom loved it. Helped her not to get car sick. I prefer the tonic! I love ginger in every other form I've tried though.

One of the delights of going away in May was finding that the Park Shops in some rest camps and picnic sites now sell "home-made"(small craft manufacturer) ginger beer. Each site has its own name on the label, interestingly. I suspect the alcohol content is dependent on the length of time between manufacture and consumption.

>25 Karlstar: I will keep an eye out for the Vernors. Costco had an imported Australian ginger beer called Bundaberg a while back that was decent, but sweeter than Fever Tree.

>28 clamairy: See #23. I find Bundaberg ginger beer too sweet. Incidentally, my mother was born in Bundaberg, which is a smallish city about 360 km (220 or so miles) north of Brisbane. It's a sugar-growing area, and the most famous potable product of the city is rum. And you are not allowed to call a mixture of Bundaberg ginger beer and Bundy rum a Dark 'N' Stormy, because a litigious Bermudan rum distiller has trademarked the name.

Ha! Just looked at the Bundaberg Rum website. It includes a recipe for "A take on the traditional Dark and Stormy using the iconic Bundaberg Rum Original" (recommending Bundaberg ginger beer as the mixer). Note the spelling.

>29 haydninvienna: Yeah, it's very sweet. I was actually adding a little seltzer to it. LOL

Ahh, name/brand copyrighting is a torturous thing.

@Tokengingerkid tells me that she and her partner Eddie have read Legends and Lattes and enjoyed it, so I may pinch her copy.

Been a bit quiet lately …
Here’s Lord Peter Views the Body, another collection of short stories. This one has a nicely perceptive introduction by Christopher Fowler:

The plots are delicious, of course, but Sayers is ultimately lifted by something that P G Wodehouse had in spades: a sense of joyfulness in her prose. Only Wimsey would nickname somebody “Gherkins”. … Only Wimsey would get involved in a lengthy discussion about the years of vintage wines or the rules of poker. No one else’s mysteries are so wide-ranging in their subject matter.
Too much modern crime fiction dwells in degradation and pain. Sayers acknowledges tragedy but has grander schemes in mind—to entertain and enlighten with suspense, subtlety and a sense of humour.

>32 haydninvienna:
I always come away from a Sayers novel with a light heart and feeling of wellbeing.

>33 pgmcc: I just thought it interesting that Fowler should have written that because it pretty well matched what Douglas Adams said about PGW.

I notice that in the short stories DLS is more likely to let her imagination run free. In the last story in Lord Peter Views …, for example she has Wimsey going deep under cover to bust a criminal gang. The first story, “The Abominable History of the Man with Copper Fingers”, has haunted me for many years, and I wouldn’t exactly call it cheerful.

That’s two DLS short story collections I’ve read recently, but there must be other stories. I mentioned one recently in which Lord Peter saves the reputation of a bobby who has apparently witnessed a serious crime only to find the crime scene vanish.

>32 haydninvienna: Love that description, and completely agree.
Lol, the story about the man with the copper fingers was the first one my mom read by Sayers. She put the book down and it was many years before I could convince her to read another, she was so horrified. I thought it was pretty cool, although chilling.

>32 haydninvienna: It's her sense of humor that stands out for me. Sometimes it is just so unexpected and thus doubly humorous.

The things you find. We have to move house in the foreseeable future and I'm going through the hoard, tossing out things I no longer want. But I found Five Billion Vodka Bottles to the Moon, by Iosif Shklovskii! Way back when, I said (here) that I no longer had it. And, in a chapter headed "My Contribution to the Criticism of the Cult of Personality", he does indeed describe (in general terms, but not leaving it open to doubt) his terrible crime: "... an unprecedented act of blasphemy at the door to the room where little Soso (that is, Stalin) had first seen the light of day eighty-two years before".

I used to be interested in scale modelling (well, I still am, but time passes) and I had a stack of plastic kits (including a couple of rather rare ones (Airfix TSR-2, if anyone recognises it?)) that I'm never likely to build. Not wanting to simply discard them, I googled for a local modelling club, found one, emailed the secretary, and offered him the lot. He picked them up yesterday afternoon, and I added the modelling books that I had. He left with a large armful and a huge smile. I received profuse expressions of gratitude and a promise of pictures if the members actually build them.

>37 haydninvienna:
It can be hard giving away things you have had for a long time. It must be nice to know the things you are giving away are going to people who will appreciate them.

>38 pgmcc: Yes, but harder still if you know they will wind up in a landfill covered with old socks and last week's fish and chip wrappers. Knowing that they had a chance made it a lot easier.

We've been trying to strip back the print library and usually end up taking boxes to Oxfam (although I have a small box going to the convention next weekend along with the large cartons of RPGs). The market for print books is non-existent at the moment.

I'd rather like to dispose of the collection of board games in the attic - but I suspect I need to go through Ebay or BoardGameGeek and frankly I don't have the time to handle things. Maybe when I retire in a year's time (if I'm allowed to!)

>37 haydninvienna: I had to look up TSR-2, thanks! :)

>41 Karlstar: Your Union Jack must be at the cleaners then. (Yes, I know your flag has Stars and Stripes on it.) TSR-2, like the Canadian CF-105 Arrow, was one of those winged would-be warriors that never made it, but were touted as world-beaters in their time, and then cancelled once the bills started to come in (and in the case of the Arrow, possibly as a result of none-too-subtle pressure from a southern neighbour). TSR-2 still has a following in this country, and Airfix reissued their kit of it about 15 years ago. The available supply was snapped up quickly and it doesn’t seem to be available now. Someone at the club will get lucky.

It’s two-thirty on a Thursday afternoon and I’m exhausted. I started the day by carrying 7 boxes of CDs down a flight of stairs. My study is to be painted soon and needs to be cleared as much as possible. Then Mrs H prevailed upon me to clear out The Cupboard Under the Stairs aka the Harry Potter cupboard (dramatic chords). This cupboard is basically a bolt-hole for miscellaneous rubbish, and the accumulation had got too much for her. Surprisingly, emptying it didn’t take too long but I now have 2 full wheelie-bins—ours and that from the house next door, which luckily is vacant.

Then she decided that the time had come to cull her books. She reads a lot, mostly thrillers, and usually doesn’t keep them. But there are a few shelves of hers in the library and she started looking through them and deciding whether to keep or discard each one. It didn’t go as expected. Instead of tossing out the lot, she kept finding books that she couldn’t remember reading and deciding to keep them. I’d say that out of 60 or so books we looked at, she kept 20. The up-side is that she now has reading matter for a few weeks—possibly longer if the rate of “keep” rather than “toss” continues. Long and short, I created an LT account for her so I could keep track.

ETA something I found in the Harry Potter cupboard: a keffiyeh, with its agal. Mrs H probably bought it on one of her trips to Doha. Actually, there were 2 keffiyeh: the white one that’s normal day wear for Qatari men, and a red and white check one, which I understand to be used as a sign that the wearer has completed the Hajj. I don’t intend to wear either, but neither of us wants to toss them.

>42 haydninvienna: Oooo, cleaning days! We love to do that, but frequently just end up shuffling things from one place to another. I would like to paint and update the flooring in my livingroom, but then I look at all the things that must be moved and can't imagine where to move them to and decide to read a book instead.

>42 haydninvienna: It is good to know that beautiful planes like that (and the not so beautiful ones) are still preserved in museums somewhere. Gives us somewhere to visit!

>44 Karlstar: So far as I and Wikipedia know, the only remaining TSR-2 is in the RAF Museum at Duxford near Cambridge. There are no complete CF-105s but there are some bits—there is a front fuselage in the Canadian Air and Space Museum in Ottawa. I’ve seen both.

>46 Karlstar: Thanks Richard, I'll add the Canadian Air and Space Museum to my list for a visit someday. I think next up is most likely the USAF museum in Dayton, Ohio and the Wright Brothers museum.

>46 Karlstar: Not seen them, unfortunately. You might add the Western Canada Aviation Museum in Winnipeg to the list.

Back to reading, and no mystery this time—The Code of the Woosters by you know who. Nothing new to be said about it. It’s as perfect as ever.

Spink-Bottle!!!

>49 Bookmarque: I have seen the assertion in print that the scene in which Gussie Fink-Nottle gives out the prizes at Market Snodsbury Grammar School is the funniest scene in all of English literature. I must go and find Right Ho, Jeeves and read it again.

As a change from sitting and sweating, I went into Oxford this afternoon to the main county library. One of the books I picked up was Risotto by Maxine Clark. Do you have any idea how many books there are titled “Risotto”? But I love risotto. I’ve been making it for many years and think I can do a decent one. Inspiration: Simple Flavours, by Geoff Slattery, which I have somewhere. But in the Clark book, the first recipe is for a plain risotto and the second is essentially a suggestion that you should add a large dash of homemade pesto to your risotto. I’ve been making pesto for years too. How come I never thought of doing this?

Right Ho, Jeeves, Cocktail Time and Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, all by P G Wodehouse. The second and third date from 1958 and 1963 respectively, so are late-ish Wodehouse. It was interesting to see how different PGW’s style was between the two—in Cocktail Time he seems to handle the sentences rather less gracefully and sometimes slips into polysyllabic humour; in Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves the magic is there just like old times even though most of the plot is recycled. It evidently isn’t just ageing that makes Cocktail Time read like a self-parody. But of course the Jeeves stories are written in first person, as by Bertie*. Perhaps PGW had internalised the Wooster manner so completely by then that he could, so to speak, do it on automatic pilot?

*I think there’s one Jeeves story that’s narrated in first person by Jeeves. Interesting that there’s only one.

Right Ho, Jeeves is an old favorite of mine. Possibly the first Wodehouse I ever encountered and boy was I tickled. Even with my intense nerdly love of Monty Python, some of the English humour eluded me, but over time and more Wodehouse, I came to understand and love it. There is an audiobook done in the early days of Books on Tape which became Recorded Books I think, that was done by Alexander Spencer and to me he is Bertie Wooster. All the other narrators may be more famous and have done more with other books, but Spencer's timing and inflection are just spot on in my opinion. Every now and then I look for it again to see if it's been digitized, but it hasn't. The only copy I have now is a version I digitized myself from cassette tapes. It was worth the trouble.

I must read some P.G.Wodehouse. My wife has most of the Jeeves stories, so I have no excuse. My childhood involved watching Jeeves with Dennis Price in the role and Ian Carmichael as Bertie Wooster. I have also watched the later version with Stephen Fry as Jeeves and Hugh Laurie as Bertie. I much preferred the original, but also enjoyed the Fry & Laurie version.

It is a while since I read any Lord Peter Wimsey stories. I believe I am about halfway through them at this stage.

By the way, @haydninvienna, I was catching up on your previous thread and saw your comments on The City and The City. It is the only Miéville I have read. I enjoyed it a lot. I found the intermingled cities interesting.

>53 pgmcc: I have read a few Miéville titles now and I have enjoyed most of them, (Iron Council, not so much). Miéville, in some ways, reminds me of Neal Stephenson. Not in the writing style nor in the content of their stories but in the sheer wealth of ideas splashed across the pages of their novels. They both gleefully fill their stories with concept after concept after concept. I think that is why I usually enjoy books from both authors, (Seveneves notwithstanding).

I really need to make time to view the BBC mini-series for The City & The City. The reviews are mostly positive. I see it's available for streaming here in the states on FreeVee.

>54 ScoLgo: I didn’t know there was a mini-series! It’s available here on Prime video, but I don’t feel like paying for it when I’ve already read the book.

>53 pgmcc: I remember the Price/Carmichael series. Probably stuck closer to the text than the Fry/Laurie version.

>55 haydninvienna: Agreed! There is too much included content with streaming services for me to pay for specific shows. If it's not included, I simply watch something else. That said, does Amazon not offer the FreeVee* option at your locale?

* Formerly known as IMDB TV; lots of Amazon content available for free streaming - but you are forced to watch ads, (in truth, I successfully ignore adverts with ruthless application of the mute button ;).

>55 haydninvienna:
I liked that Ian Carmichael played both Bertie Wooster and Lord Peter Wimsey.

>51 haydninvienna: I have a volume on my shelf named Nothing but Wodehouse. You have tipped the scales to that being my next read. Well, my next read when I feel up to reading, instead of listening, to books again.

Ok. Wodehouse/Wooster-files will get this. My husband and I still crack up to this day whenever we say it as an aside about a man in shorts -

Footerbags!?!?!

Back on the vintage biplanes: although it's a grey day here, there's a bit of aviating going on. A little while ago I heard the familiar bleat of a Gipsy engine but since I was working I didn't go to look, assuming it was the usual Tiger Moth. Just now looked at FlightRadar24 and it turned out to have been a Hornet Moth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Hornet_Moth), a biplane made by de Havilland as a possible successor to the Tiger for the RAF. Different from the Tiger in having a fully enclosed cabin. A fairly rare bird: only 174 were built, but according to Wikipedia they are prized by vintage aircraft enthusiasts and there are a few still on the UK register.

And another rare bird: a Leopard Moth.

>60 haydninvienna: The first Airfix model I ever made was a Tiger Moth.

>59 Bookmarque: For those not Wooster fans, there’s a character in several of the Bertie/Jeeves stories called Roderick Spode, who, when he first appears in the 1930s, is the leader of a group of fascists called the Saviours of Britain, who wear black football shorts (“footer bags”, in Bertie-speak). They had intended to wear black shirts, but all the black shirts were gone by then and they had to make do with shorts. He first appears in The Code of the Woosters, which is worth reading for that alone.

>60 haydninvienna: I've seen a Tiger Moth live, I used to live right down the road from the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome. A great museum and a great collection of old planes.

https://oldrhinebeck.org/category/collection/page/4/

>63 Karlstar:
That would be impressive.

>64 pgmcc: They do a great airshow once a week during the summer, weather permitting, trying to fly some of their oldest planes, or at least get them off the ground a little.

>53 pgmcc: I've not read any Wodehouse, but I was charmed by Faith Sullivan's Goodnight, Mr. Wodehouse, historical fiction about a woman who finds inspiration and guidance in Wodehouse's stories. The publisher's description says that the book "celebrates the strength and resourcefulness of independent women, the importance of community, and the transformative power of reading."

>66 libraryperilous: That sounds like another good reason to read Wodehouse.

>58 MrsLee: Edited by Ogden Nash, apparently. I see that Edna St Vincent Millay’s legacy library also has a copy. Not outrageously expensive on Amazon.

>68 haydninvienna: Another reason I want to read it soon. I enjoy Ogden Nash also.

In her Cookbookers thread just now, @MrsLee mentioned that membrillo (quince paste) is excellent with cheese. It is. I recently had Samin Nosrat's book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat from the library and was impressed enough to buy a copy. Presumptuous of me since I don't cook hardly at all, but the exercise of thinking about some of the classic combinations in terms of a balance of salt, fat and acid is interesting. I've never examined the idea of a PBJ sandwich till now, but it's an interesting concept in terms of salt, fat and acid (at least if the jam/jelly isn't too sweet). But membrillo and a nice rich cheese is a perfect combination — salt and fat from the cheese and acid from the membrillo. Makes you realise too why the idea of membrillo and cream cheese doesn't sound so good. Acid, sure, but not enough salt and probably not enough fat. Also, the texture would be all wrong. Ms Nosrat doesn't explicitly go into textures much, but she does do quite a bit with Maillard reactions and crisp crusts under Heat, and of course that's texture.

Can I put a plug in here for the idea of a Vegemite sandwich as a perfect balance of salt and fat?

>70 haydninvienna: Did you see my mention of a buckwheat pancake split in half, inside toasted, coated lightly with butter, then spread with peanut butter, jelly, and a layer of crispy bacon? It fits your definition perfectly, and was indeed delicious. I believe the buckwheat added a hint of bitter which was an enhancement.

>71 MrsLee: Yes I did, and I agree that it sounds delicious. Buckwheat isn’t so common here, but I’ve encountered it from time to time and enjoyed it.

>70 haydninvienna: "a Vegemite sandwich". Unfortunately, I met Vegemite in Melbourne some years ago. No it is not like Marmite, but Rincewind's concoction in The Last Continent is wickedly accurate. I know there are two schools of thought about Marmite: I belong to the school that says it's edible and sometimes even desirable.

>71 MrsLee: "Shchi i kasha / -- pisha nasha" (my Russian teacher at Kew) -- "cabbage soup and buckwheat porridge \are\ our staple diet". Kasha can be quite good; have you tried making it?

>73 hfglen: I have never seen buckwheat groats, only the flour. Maybe another trip to the mill is in order, it looks delicious.

The solution of another mystery, sort of. In the past I’ve had some things to say about Style: The Art of Writing Well by F L Lucas. I had a copy in my “professional library”, or so I thought, but I looked for it several times without success, sighed, and ordered another copy, reflecting as I did so that the first copy would now reappear. And of course it did. I found that the reason I hadn’t been able to find it was that the cover is white and I had assumed that the spine was also white. It isn’t. It’s dark red. I had been looking for a book with a white spine and skipping straight over the copy that was there all the time.

And of course the new copy has now arrived so I now have two. Actually at least 3, because I still have at least one copy of an earlier edition.

>75 haydninvienna: I empathize. Been there, done that. Now you have a gift copy!

>75 haydninvienna:
Your post reminded me that I bought a copy of that style book by Lucas when you mentioned it some time ago. On seeing your post I thought, “Oh! Where is that book?” I was a bit panicky until a few moments ago when I located it safe and sound in a bookcase in The Reading Room, in the company of my books on writing and grammar. Phew!

My white-covered book also has a red spine.

Poking around in the bookshelves and found The Pedant in the Kitchen by Julian Barnes. Barnes, apart from being a novelist, is a part-time cook, one of those who didn’t learn at his mother’s knee but had to learn the hard way. He has quite a lot of good stuff to say about the whole culture of foodie magazines and celebrity cookbooks, but his best suggestion is that the home kitchen needs a big sign saying THIS IS NOT A RESTAURANT.

The story about “losing” the Lucas book prompted me to go looking for another book that I had a good deal of trouble obtaining: Simple Flavours by Geoff Slattery. Slattery began as a sportswriter on a Melbourne newspaper, and then opened a restaurant. He did actually learn to cook (to some extent) from his mother, but to her food was fuel except for puddings, which she excelled at. Anyway, the restaurant mostly succeeded, and then he wrote the book and set up a company to publish it. The company succeeded as well, and now publishes reprints of Australian classics as well as food books. Slattery has one major piece of advice in common with Samin Nosrat: taste, taste, taste. Slattery even recommends that if you’re going to cook a quince and you’ve never tried one, try a bit of it raw first. I know they’re hard and very sour raw, but maybe he has a point.

Not solving a mystery but doing a semi-random walk across the net, I came upon the concept of an anti-library. Apparently the source is The Black Swan*, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in reference to Umberto Eco’s spectacular library. So we need not apologise for buying more books than we will ever read: we are building an anti-library: https://nesslabs.com/antilibrary.

*which I have, and have read, years ago, but don’t remember this bit.

>79 haydninvienna: I have it, and I didn't even know! I think LT is a wonderful tool in the box of our antilibrary. It helps us keep track of that which we do not know.

>79 haydninvienna: and >80 MrsLee: I applaud the concept of the antilibrary but currently find myself in a place where I keep re-considering books previously read. Under such a circumstance, it seems unlikely I will ever manage to properly read through what I already own.

I applaud as well his recommendation that you note down the titles of books that an author makes reference to. I think everyone should be taking notes from what we read; it is a weapon against the teflon non-stick brain that condition that arises when you spend too much time in front of a screen.

At the Bicester library yesterday afternoon I found Future Crimes: Mysteries and Detection through Time and Space, an anthology of SFF crime stories edited by Mike Ashley. There’s a story, “Mirror Image”, by Isaac Asimov, involving R. Daneel Olivaw and Lije Bailey. It’s “detection”, I suppose, in that no actual crime is involved (plagiarism is not a crime, not yet anyway), but Bailey solves a logic puzzle. There’s a number of murder stories, including ones by Anthony Boucher, John Brunner, E C Tubb, Miriam Allen deFord and P D James, all of them at least readable. And a story by Eric Frank Russell, “Legwork”, about the police of Earth taking down a would-be alien invader by old-fashioned police work.

I also picked up Sabine Hossenfelder’s recent book Existential Physics, but haven’t got to that yet. I am somewhat familiar with her writing from her essays in the online magazine Quanta, which I read pretty regularly.

Here’s another minor mystery. I’ve been curious about Colin Greenland’s* novel Take Back Plenty for some time, ever since encountering this: https://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/?p=5343#comment-909138. So I bought a copy of the kindle version and I’ve now read it. The mystery is, why the venom directed at it on Goodreads? The book won both of the major British SF awards, and one of the other contenders for the Arthur C Clarke Award was Iain M Banks’ Use of Weapons, so the award committee can’t have thought there was nothing else around, as one Goodreads reviewer thought. Admittedly, the pattern of ratings all the way from one to five is pretty common on Goodreads. The form is a bit unusual—stretches of ordinary narration with occasional interpolated conversations between Tabitha Jute and her ship, the Alice Liddell, and other interpolations by a third person who is apparently close to omniscient (we find out near the end who or what that was). But the book tells a perfectly satisfactory adventure story, with a beginning, a middle and an end, and promise of more to come with only minor loose ends. So what’s the problem? Admitted that if you don’t actually finish the book you never find out what the third person was, but that’s your problem not the book’s. I can think of some possible reasons for the non-love, but don’t care to dig into that.

In short, I think I’ll buy and read the 2 sequels.

*Greenland is Susannah Clarke’s partner, and was somewhat responsible for her becoming a writer. He has published 9 novels and some non-fiction.

>83 haydninvienna:
Colin was Susannah's creative writing instructor.

Susannah was the Guest of Honour at the Phoenix Convention in Dublin the year Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell was published. It was my job to pick them up at the airport and bring them to the convention hotel. They proved very nice people; something I am happy to report I can say about the majority of writers I have met.

I first met Colin when he was giving a talk entitled, "The Science Fiction Sentence". His talk as an amusing look at sentences that could only make sense in the context of a science fiction story. "Beam me up, Scotty." would be a typical example, but it is not one he used. I cannot remember the examples he used. This was in the mid-1990s.

I have had a copy of Take Back Plenty since that time and I still have not read it despite many resolutions that I will read it soon. Your comment may be the one that realises the fulfilment of that resolution.

>83 haydninvienna: Good review, thanks, I'll add that one to my future reading list.

>84 pgmcc: And speaking of "sentences that could only make sense in the context of a science fiction story", perhaps "... conversations between Tabitha Jute and her ship..." would be another example. Go ahead and read it, both of you: I'm not promising you will like it, but I did.

I read Take back plenty earlier this year and loved it! The sequels are not supposed to be as good, but I found copies of them both in an Oxfam bookshop and bought them anyway. So I shall read them.

Back in #82 I mentioned Sabine Hossenfelder’s new book Existential Physics. I finally got around to reading it. Some really big-time mysteries here: Life, the Universe, Everything. The book is a discussion on Ms Hossenfelder’s views about what physics has to say about (for example) whether we have free will, does the universe think, and could we create a universe? There are people who equate quantum mechanics with (for example) Buddhist philosophy (which, as Steven Weinberg* said of The Dancing Wu Li Masters, was rather like coming back to a familiar neighbourhood and finding that all the houses had been painted purple). Sabine Hossenfelder would probably agree with Weinberg.

*Nobel Prize in Physics, 1979; one of the founders of the Standard Model of particle physics. Wrote a couple of terrific books on physics and cosmology: The First Three Minutes and Dreams of a Final Theory.

Not reading much at present, but Mrs H and I have been watching reruns of Antiques Road Trip (which, if you don’t know it, is a competition between two experts to make the largest profit on a buying trip, after selling their purchases at auction. They start with £200 each and the profits go to charity). We find it weirdly compelling, mainly in the sense of “You mean people will pay money for that?!”. I’ve just seen an episode where one of our heroes bought a silver spoon for £20 and sold it at auction for £200.

ETA we have had an interesting day. I’ve had a Covid “seasonal booster”, and it’s raining. And we had the blokes who are going to paint a couple of rooms for us and do a few other small jobs round to check what kit they will need to bring. And one of the rooms to be painted is my study, so I’ve moved all my work gear into another room. That involved carrying iMac, monitor, desk and professional library down a set of stairs that doubles back on itself. But I did it.

>89 haydninvienna:

I agree, it is weirdly compelling, especially for the reason you state.

Well done on the lifting. Be careful.

Re my Covid jab: it was Moderna, I was warned it might give me a sore arm, and it did. No other obvious side effects.

>89 haydninvienna: That's a lot of stuff to move! We just had our nephews here to move a couch, coffee table and a few chairs around in preparation for a new couch.

One of the minor consequences of moving the study: I'm sitting here at the desk and I have a clear view of the top of a Billy bookcase. As you know, the side panel of a Billy bookcase has a row of holes along the font and back edges, to hold the shelf pins. I've just noticed that the row near the front edge of the panel goes further up than does the row up the back (I think there's 3 extra holes). The mystery is, why? Do they foresee the need to put in an upper shelf that slopes from front to back?

>93 haydninvienna:
The extra holes are for attaching hinges for doors. I have doors on several of our Billys.

>93 haydninvienna: That’s that one solved then. Now I feel mildly embarrassed for being puzzled. But then I’ve never put doors on a Billy despite having now owned them in 3 different countries.

>94 pgmcc: >95 haydninvienna: A quick online search turned up the info that Billy bookcases manufactured in 2014 or earlier do not have the extra holes for mounting doors. Mine are from the early oughts so that tracks, as they do not have that feature.

>95 haydninvienna:
No need to be embarrassed; think of all those people who have Billy bookcases since 2014 but never noticed the extra holes.

>96 ScoLgo: And in fact I bought my other ones before 2014, so that makes sense too.

Saturday morning and I read A Night in the Lonesome October. Nothing more to be said about it but it’s still fun in its own macabre way, and I still don’t know who Crazy Jill represents.

Part way through a library book, The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, published by the British Library as a companion to its Crime Classics series. The book is a short history of the detective novel between 1900 and 1950, the so-called Golden Age. It gives short summaries, without spoilers, of 100 (plus a couple of bonus ones) books from the period, and of course mentions many more. No doubt it would make a good companion to Snobbery with Violence, which has been discussed in the Pub recently. I had at least heard of most of the authors mentioned, but there were a few new to me. Of course most of the authors mentioned were British or American, the only exceptions I can remember being E W Hornung, who was Australian, and Ngaio Marsh, who was a New Zealander. It would make a pretty decent reading list.

ETA I should have said above that the only writers mentioned so far were British or American. I’ve now finished the book and there’s a chapter at the end about authors who were not British or American, and on the second page it mentions Bauduin Groller (Austria-Hungary) and Friedrich Glauser (Switzerland). I’ve actually read one book by each of them.

EATA Today has turned out to be a DNBR day. Two Way Murder by E C R Lorac. A decent Golden Age mystery, mentioned in The Story of Classic Crime … as “yet unpublished” in 2017, but published in the British Library series in 2021 after the unpublished manuscript turned up. It was apparently the last novel “Lorac” (real name Edith Caroline Rivett) completed, and it is not known why it was not published posthumously along with a couple of others after she died in 1958. The manuscript was edited for publication by Martin Walker, the author of The Story of Classic Crime … . I’m not entirely sure about the idea of having two police inspectors involved, one of whom, a rather unimaginative by-the-book operator, gets more or less discarded about a third in, to leave the way clear for his more imaginative fellow officer; plus there’s a detecting housekeeper and a barrister (I was waiting for the number one suspect to try to get the barrister to appear for him, which the barrister as a potential witness could not have done). One minor quibble: on p 20 there is the slightly puzzling “visitors to Fordings (the village where the novel is set) had patronised the Dansant”. The topic is a ballroom called the Prince’s Hall. I wonder if “the Dansant” is a misreading for “thé dansant” (French for “tea dancing”)? During the Blitz, when it was dangerous to be out at night, dance halls often operated during the afternoon, as thé dansant.

Rainy Friday afternoon and I’ve just read Karel Čapek’s short play R U R. As is well known, this play is the source of the English word robot (although Adam Roberts notes in his introduction that Karel Čapek credited the invention of the word to his brother Josef). Roberts discusses the word at some length—apparently robata was a labour obligation of the Bohemian peasants to their landlord, and its maximum period had been legally fixed in 1800 at 3 months—so perhaps a robot was a worker but only for a limited period. Which is what happens, in more ways than one. Lots going on in this short play, taking in Taylor’s scientific management, corporate greed and the theory of shareholder value. Another iteration of the Frankenstein myth, as Roberts says.

Pity that the Czech language is so opaque to a foreigner. Quite a lot of Čapek’s large output has been translated, but mostly the publication seems to have been by small, obscure publishers. R U R and War with the Newts are in SF Masterworks as a combined volume though.

I got a bit derailed. Started reading War with the Newts but for some reason got thinking about Adam Roberts (whose By the Pricking of her Thumb I read and enjoyed a while ago). I bought the kindle version of his The Da Vinci Cod.

ETA good grief. I’ve never read The Da Vinci Code, but was it really as bad as this?

>101 haydninvienna: Yes. It was always as bad as that. A romp, definitely not to be taken overly seriously.

>102 jillmwo: I did realise it was a parody, yes!

Off the mysteries for a while. My latest kindle read was Is It Just Me or is Everything Sh*t (see what I did there?). I’m not sure whether it counts as humour or not. A lot of it is indeed funny, but pretty blackly so.

I bought How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World by Francis Wheen, but haven’t read it yet. Funny: I’m sure I can remember reading this when it first came out, but I couldn’t find it in my LT catalogue. Maybe I read a library copy.

These two were prompted by an essay in the Sydney Morning Herald, “How phonies and self-promoters came to rule the world”, from May 2019, which I came upon somewhere on line.

I have also ordered Fellow Travellers of the Right. The British national mythology has the nation tamely submitting to Hitler until Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940, and then uniting under his leadership. The reality was a good deal more nuanced. A while back I read Ten Days that Saved the West by John Costello and more recently Appeasing Hitler by Tim Bouverie, which showed me that there was more to the pro-Hitler side that just Mosley and the Blackshirts. In fact, there were all shades of opinion from “not our problem” through to appeasement and downright adulation (Unity Mitford and possibly Mrs Wallis Simpson). The pro-Hitler faction never quite disappeared, but probably went underground, particularly after the declaration of war, when it became treasonous to speak favourably of Hitler.

My other order, which should be here tomorrow, is The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle. I picked this out of a Five Books list of “Best Business Books of 2022”, which I was reading idly this morning. It has, shall we say, a certain relevance to the current political situation in this country. I’ll say no more than that.

In Bicester this afternoon and went into the British Heart Foundation shop, as I often do, and found and bought 3 more of Christopher Fry’s plays: A Sleep of Prisoners, Ring Around the Moon* and The Lady’s Not for Burning, which I now have 3 copies of. OK, it’s pastiche if you like, but it’s such gorgeous pastiche.
I also bought a copy of the Oxford Standard Authors edition of the Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The shop also had volume 1 of a recent edition of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary—but only volume 1. I asked. If they had had both volumes I would have bought them.

*There doesn’t seem to be a touchstone for Fry’s adaptation of this Jean Anouilh farce.

Now reading The Doppelgänger Gambit by Lee Killough, yet another semi-obscure author I tracked down because of a cover on Good Show Sir. It's about a somewhat mismatched pair of cop partners investigating a murder in Topeka somewhen about the end of this century. Not a whodunit because we know everything about who did it, why, and how—the interest is in the investigation and the dynamics between Detective Janna Brill and her unorthodox new partner “Mama” Maxwell—and how they go about busting what seems to be an absolutely airtight alibi. Good enough, but the “mismatched partners” theme has been flogged pretty hard. At least neither of them are only weeks or days before retirement.

Best news so far today: Mark Vanhoenacker, author of the excellent Skyfaring (praised by @hfglen and yours truly) has a new book out: Imagine a City. I wonder if the title was a hat-tip to Italo Calvino’s wonderful Invisible Cities.

There’s been some discussion in @pgmcc’s current thread about “beautiful writing”. I wanted to use a passage from a book by Christopher Lloyd* as an example—the passage is actually mostly a quotation but Lloyd praises the author, W H Hudson, as “one of our great stylists”. I disagree—I think the style is overheated even for its time (Hudson died in 1922). The passage from Lloyd’s book, including the quotation, is as follows:

As to their autumn contribution, I best like W. H. Hudson’s description of birch leaves on a large expanse of lawn. ‘One day in early November the south-west wind blew and carried thousands of small yellow heart-shaped leaves over the green expanse, making it beautiful to look at. By and by the gardener came with his abhorred brushwood broom and swept that lovely novel appearance away, to my great disgust. Then the blessed wind blew again and roared all night, swaying the trees and tossing out fresh clouds on clouds of the brilliant little leaves all over the monotonous sheet of green, and lo! in the morning it was beautiful once more. And I stood and admired it, and it was like walking on a velvet green carpet embroidered with heart-shaped golden leaves. Naturally, when I saw the gardener coming on with his broom, I cried out aloud and brought the lady of the house on the scene, and she graciously ordered him off.’ Hudson was one of our great stylists.

Lloyd doesn’t give the source among Hudson’s many books, and I haven’t found the passage in a quick search among the ones available on Project Gutenberg. The passage that Lloyd quotes is to my mind the wrong sort of beautiful writing—it’s far too pleased with itself. “Abhorred” seems to have been a favourite word with Hudson—it turns up in his works quite a few times. Favourite unusual words are something of a sign of self-conscious writing, I think.

That’s it really. I dislike “fine writing” for the sake of fine writing, but really adore poetic writing if it’s actually doing something worthwhile. I remember a passage from Cathrynne M Valente’s The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland to the effect that September liked words that rode into battle with all their colours flying. I don’t unless there is a real battle to be won. The Valente book itself isn’t a bad example of beautiful writing that actually works. This Is How You Lose the Time War is another (sorry, Peter).

I’m not talking about style either. For “style”, I endorse every word in F L Lucas’s book Style: The Art of Writing Well (yet another book I have multiple copies of). That reminds me of what Dr Johnson is supposed to have said of a certain comedy:

‘It has not wit enough to keep it sweet’. This was easy; he therefore produced a more round sentence: ‘It has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction’.

I can’t provide a citation for this—it might be in Boswell’s Life or in Mrs Piozzi’s Anecdotes, or even in one of the other contemporary reminiscences—but I think the quotation is pretty accurate. Point is that Johnson’s “more round” sentence is fine writing in the wrong way, by my definition. His first sentence said everything necessary.

Nor am I talking about correctness. You might have noticed how many sentence fragments and other grammatical sins I commit. Quite deliberately. I often don’t even care much if other writers are not writing standard English, whatever that is, as long as it works on its own terms**. I might not write something as they do, but it’s their book or poem or whatever, not mine, and I can choose to read it or not.

*Since I’ve just twitted Lloyd with not giving a source, the Lloyd book is The Well-Tempered Garden; the quotation is on p329 in the 2015 edition.

**Best example I can think of quickly is The Palm Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuloa, which I described once as being like a long, very weird dream. The unorthodox language works.

To change the subject with a jerk—something not to read if you are at all nervous about flying: the Australian Transport Safety Bureau has just released its report on an incident that happened to a Qantas A380 which had just taken off from Singapore on a flight to Sydney on 4 November 2012. As the aircraft was climbing through 7,000 feet, a small oil line in its no 2 engine failed, spraying a fine mist of oil into the engine resulting in a fire, which in turn caused a catastrophic failure of a turbine wheel that the engine nacelle could not contain. The fragments of the burst turbine wheel caused severe damage to the aircraft’s structure and its electrical, hydraulic and electronic systems. The structural damage created a fuel leak from the left wing tanks. Fortunately the aircraft remained controllable and the crew managed to return safely to Changi Airport and bring the damaged aircraft to a safe stop within the limits of Changi’s very long main runway. Then it was found that the No 1 engine (outboard of the one that had failed) could not be shut down because of the damage to the aircraft’s systems—not comfortable with the damaged wing still leaking fuel—so the passengers were disembarked through a single door on the aircraft’s right side so that they could be counted. Eventually the airport fire crew shut the No 1 engine down by drowning it with foam.

FlightRadar24’s blog calls the report “gripping”. I wouldn’t quite go that far, but the description of the failure and the crew’s response to it certainly holds your attention. It’s kind of reassuring to read though: despite the damage to the aircraft, it remained controllable and a very experienced Qantas crew landed it safely without anybody being hurt.

All of this resulted from a seemingly minor manufacturing problem: a small oil line was supposed to be counterbored at one end to fit over another part. For complex reasons the counterbore was slightly off centre so that at one place the pipe wall was thinner than it should have been. That was enough, after repeated cycles of hot and cold during operation, to cause metal fatigue to break the pipe.

The report is here: https://www.atsb.gov.au/media/4173625/ao-2010-089_final.pdf.

>99 haydninvienna: After reading the end, I wondered if Jill existed only to enable the ending and didn't represent a literary character?

>108 haydninvienna: That is definitely a gripping tale. Yikes. Ultimately, was the failed fuel line put down to failure of the part or maintenance?

>107 haydninvienna: A good example. I can see what you mean, while it is an enjoyable paragraph, in my opinion it could have been improved by being a bit less over the top. It reminds me of one of my favorite verses from 'Forever Autumn' by The Moody Blues, a much more minimal approach:

Through autumn's golden gown we used to kick our way
You always loved this time of year.
Those fallen leaves lie undisturbed now
Cause you're not here

I assume people notice all of my grammatical errors and kindly do not mention them.

>109 Karlstar: I had a long post typed (I thought) answering the second question—short answer, a manufacturing fault—but it seems to have disappeared down the electronic drain. Oh well.

>110 Karlstar: Poetry shows how to do it, yes. I’ve quoted Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” more than once. Read the last dozen or so lines to watch a great poet blow our minds with beautiful words, and it looks so simple! But it isn’t, is it? The last line is six words of pure triple-distilled magic. Six ordinary words.

>107 haydninvienna: That example may be a bit overblown, but I feel his pain, and the abhorred broom I understand very well. When our gardener was still alive I had to fight with him every year to get him to leave my fallen leaves alone. He had a leaf blower and didn't understand my love of the golden carpet crunching under my feet.

>107 haydninvienna:
One of the Howdunit contributors suggested the best style was invisible, i.e. a style that does not interrupt the reader as they read. They discussed natural rhythm in text as being important when trying not to disturb the reading of a book.

I remember attending a week long writers’ holiday in 2003. During a casual discussion about the works of Iain Banks, one of the younger aspiring authors stated that they liked Iain Banks’s books, but that unlike Banks they intended to write something literary.

The conversation petered out at that stage.

>108 haydninvienna:
Yes, not for the faint hearted.

>110 Karlstar:
You have managed to ear-worm me…cause you’re not here…cause you’re not here…

>99 haydninvienna:
You are very skilful at aiming your shots. That one was executed with surgical precision. I have a few of the British Library’s crime Classics series, including Two Way Murder, a BB from @jillmwo I believe, and you have me intrigued with The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books. You may as well have put that BB in an envelope and posted directly to my address. I see it is by Martin Edwards, the president of The Detection Club who thought up and edited Howdunit, the book I am currently reading and enjoying.

>112 MrsLee:; >107 haydninvienna:; >110 Karlstar:

Purely by coincidence the cartoon below popped up on my facebook just after I was posting on this thread. I thought it is so appropriate I had to share it with you guys. It shows some compassion for the poor gardner.

>112 MrsLee: Our very small garden has no deciduous trees but there are plenty around us and one corner of our handkerchief of lawn has leaves all over it. The fellow who mows for us raked them up last week but they won't get raked again for a while. It's not actually that pretty because the leaves just lie in a drift in the corner and eventually will kill the grass.

>113 pgmcc: I agree about the "invisible" style. I also agree that the conversation was right in fading after the would-be author expressed a desire to be "literary". They might do well to ponder how Dashiell Hammett was once regarded as strictly pulp and is now literature. Is Hemingway literature or not?

>115 pgmcc: Sorry?

>117 pgmcc: That's a good one and very timely. I feel just like that guy.

>119 Karlstar:

Sorry? I do not think so. Nor do you need to be. I like that song.

and very timely. Scarily so!

>113 pgmcc: So he was intending to out-do Banks? That's a fool's errand if I ever heard one.

>121 Karlstar: He? (Peter didn’t specify) may not have been aware that Iain Banks is also Iain M Banks; or perhaps thought that Iain M Banks still wasn’t literary enough.

Back to the mysteries: The Evidence by Christopher Priest. The sub-genre of “SFF mystery” is a surprisingly large one, and this is one of several I’ve read this year (The City and the City; By the Pricking of Her Thumb; a Holmes pastiche by Fred Saberhagen; I mentioned The Doppelgänger Gambit by Lee Killough in #105, and I’ve also read her Spider Play; and probably others). This is the first book by Priest that I’ve read, and I note that one of the LT reviews says you shouldn’t start on Priest with it.

It would be a fairly standard whodunit except for being set in what looks to be an alternate version of Earth, and what Priest calls “mutability”: that is that things change, so that events can sort of retrospectively not happen. Mutability happens in some places and apparently not in others. There’s bent coppers, a financial crash, a reference to an old financial product called a tontine (yes, I do know what a tontine is), and lots of reflections on the craft of writing crime novels—Priest’s hero is a novelist. Magic too. I’ve not read The Prestige, but have of course seen the film.

>122 haydninvienna:
I have read and enjoyed The Prestige. It is quite different from the film in several ways, and Priest was quite happy with how the film was produced. I was lucky enough to attend a session he gave at the 2005 Worldcon in Glasgow at which he talked about many things, but The Prestige was the main topic of discussion as the film was in production at the time. Priest was used as a consultant on the film and said he was happy with how the film was being put together.

It was also in that discussion that he compared an author's work as being the same as that of an illusionist with the commonality between the two occupations being misdirection.

I thought I had read more than one Priest book, but I can not identify the other ones I have read. I know I like his work and I have assembled quite a collection of his novels, but do not have The Evidence.

>123 pgmcc: it’s new, I think—published last year IIRC. While reading “Todd Fremde’s” reflections on writing, I wondered if Priest would fit in among the group who were quoted in Howdunit.

>124 haydninvienna:
The Priest works I am familiar with are more SF. I must get back to reading his books. I will have to read a few of the ones I have before I can justify getting The Evidence.

Near Bicester there is a village called Chesterton, which has the Red Cow pub, and the pub has a coffee shop which we go to reasonably often. Chesterton also has a little free library which I’ve been meaning to visit, and I finally managed it today. Dropped off a small box of books that Mrs H has finished with, collected her a few by Jo Nesbo, and picked up Why Buildings Fall Down, on the cover of which is a review quote that says “The reader is sure to find the disaster that suits his or her taste”. How can I resist?

>126 haydninvienna:
It would be impossible to resist with a recommendation like that.

>126 haydninvienna: That sounds like a good one. So many books, so much time spent at work.

>127 pgmcc: >128 Karlstar: Surprisingly, it was rather meh. Short book, quick read, and I knew a bit about many of the building collapses anyway. Still, free book!

>122 haydninvienna: I also have a taste for sci-fi mysteries, especially the locked room ones that take place on spaceships.

You mentioned The Lady's Not for Burning on another thread, so I popped over here to read your notes. I'm intrigued.

>130 libraryperilous: I would dearly love to find The Lady’s Not for Burning on DVD in a full, complete professional production, but I don’t think such a thing exists. The nearest I’ve found is a made for TV version from the mid-80s with Kenneth Branagh, but it isn’t quite complete. There are several amateur or semi-pro versions on YouTube, but the audio from all of them seems to have been recorded in a railway tunnel. There’s also a very early professional version (audio only) with Alec Guinness and Richard Burton, but I cut that off very quickly. With profuse apologies to the shades of those two great actors, it’s just rant. Branagh on television at least gave Fry’s blank verse its proper music. You can get a brief sample here: https://youtu.be/jv16gY2BPao, but the best bits come later in the play.

The other day, more or less at random, I picked up the Selected Poetry of Alexander Pope, and I’ve been dipping into it. In the fourth book of The Dunciad I found this:

But soon, ah soon rebellion will commence,
If music meanly borrows aid from sense:
Strong in new arms, lo! giant Handel stands,
Like bold Briareus, with a hundred hands;
To stir, to rouse, to shake the soul he comes
And Jove's own thunders follow Mars's drums.
‘Arrest him, Empress; or you sleep no more'
She heard, and drove him to th' Hibernian shore.

Handel left London for Dublin in 1741, and in Dublin wrote Messiah. The fourth book of The Dunciad was published in 1742. Pope’s point must have been that Handel was driven out of London by the followers of the Empress Dulness, for fear that otherwise they would never sleep. Interesting to get a comment on a current event in an old poem.

And I’m not even going to try not to quote the conclusion of the poem, describing the coming of the goddess Dulness:

In vain, in vain ,—the all-composing hour
Resistless falls: the Muse obeys the power.
She comes! she comes! the sable throne behold
Of Night primeval, and of Chaos old!
Before her, Fancy's gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying rainbows die away.
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.
As one by one, at dread Medea's strain,
The sickening stars fade off th'ethereal plain;
As Argus' eyes by Hermes' wand oppressed,
Closed one by one to everlasting rest;
Thus at her felt approach, and secret might,
Art after Art goes out, and all is Night.
See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled,
Mountains of casuistry heaped o'er her head!
Philosophy, that leaned on heaven before,
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.
Physic of Metaphysic begs defence,
And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense!
See Mystery to Mathematics fly!
In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.
Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,
And unawares Morality expires.
Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine;
Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread empire, CHAOS! is restored;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And universal darkness buries all.

I adore the last two lines, and it all has a certain current relevance, don’t you think?

ETA I inserted the long quotations with a nifty app on my iPhone called Microsoft Lens. It can capture text and OCR it, and it can also take photos in the ordinary way. I capture the image of the text from the page, the app converts the image to actual text, and then I copy that text to the iPad or the Mac using the shared clipboard. Like all OCR-Ed text, some cleaning up may be needed, but it’s still very much better than transcribing it manually. The app also works beautifully for printed recipes.

Not a Microsoft shareholder (I wish), but this app really is one of the best things Microsoft makes.

>132 haydninvienna:
Very current.

>132 haydninvienna: Thanks for the tip on that app, that's handy!

Interesting how books lead you to other books in ways you might not have expected. A while back I mentioned Griffiths’ Fellow Travellers of the Right. There’s quite a bit in it about King Edward VIII and the “abdication crisis”, and the German views of both (TL/DR: Edward greatly overrated his influence on foreign policy, and so did the Nazis) and I remember a comment in one of Susan Hill’s books about what a weak, ineffectual ass Edward was. Griffiths mentions a biography of him by Frances Donaldson. In checking to see whether the Oxfordshire library service has it (they do), I noticed that she also did a book on the Marconi scandal of 1912—another matter I’m interested in. So I’ve put in reservations for both.

Re the Marconi scandal: anyone who has read much of G K Chesterton’s essays has probably come upon this. It would now be called insider trading. A number of government ministers, knowing beforehand of the Government’s intention to issue a big contract to the British Marconi company, bought and sold shares in its American subsidiary and made significant profits. G K’s brother Cecil, as an editor, made various allegations against the ministers and was sued for libel. Insider trading law is very much an expert’s field, and what constitutes insider trading apparently differs somewhat between US and UK law, but I’m fairly sure that today, if the same set of allegations were made, there would be at least a basis for a prosecution.

>135 haydninvienna: I have for some time been under the impression that although Wallis Simpson was a generally revolting specimen of what one may loosely call "humanity", she did do the world the inestimable service of removing Edward VIII from the centre of action and making way for George VI.

>136 hfglen: I remember a comment somewhere to the effect that the British people owed Mrs Simpson a great debt of gratitude because she had saved them from being ruled by an idiot.

Library again this afternoon, and got How to Be a Politician (no touchstone yet), by Vince Cable (former Liberal Democrat leader and member of the Cabinet under David Cameron). Surprisingly interesting and amusing, and makes a nice counterpart to Why We Get the Wrong Politicians, which I read some time ago. Politics though so I’ll say no more about it.

ETA I’m apparently the first LTer to catalogue this book.

Just a minor laff while in Bicester: there’s a shop there called Carthage Butchery, which seems to stock Turkish and Arabic stuff. I went in there in search of “Cape Bon” brand harissa, which I used to buy in Doha. It would singe the fuzz on your upper lip, unlike the pallid versions in the supermarkets here. (I use it very cautiously.) They actually had it! As I paid, I said to the guy that it was the real stuff, and got a big grin in reply.

Many of you have seen this image by now. Who else thought something like "wow--Kubrick got it right 50-odd years ago"?

>139 haydninvienna:
I hadn’t thought of that, but you are spot on.

Reading Frances Donaldson’s biography of King Edward VIII (Edward VIII: The Road to Abdication). On p 62 I find this:

One of the oddest things about him - until one remembers the isolation of his youth - is that he was singularly uninformed about all those shibboleths which go to make up what has been so conveniently and compactly labelled by the single letter 'U'. The Prince was in some ways surprisingly 'non-u', most noticeably in the clothes he wore. It was not merely that the upper classes agreed with his father in disliking the loudness of his tweeds and the cut of his clothes: the Prince wore his top hat on the side of his head out hunting, suede shoes or brown and white brogues, things even schoolboys at Eton or Harrow knew were done only by cads.

Remember Bertie Wooster and the white mess jacket, and Jeeves’s comment that the Prince of Wales was permitted certain sartorial liberties that were not extended to lesser mortals?

ETA DNF. At p66 I was getting a bit tired of being told repeatedly what a wonderful human being he was, and on looking at the index I see that there is next to nothing about his and Mrs Simpson’s relationship with the Nazis. He might or might not have been pro-German or pro-Nazi, but I’m not going to get chapter and verse from Lady Donaldson. Back to the library with it.

OMG that makes so much sense! I remember Jeeves kicking off about the jacket (and Bertie's insistence that the women were all over him when he wore it at Cannes, but that they probably thought he was a waiter), but I didn't know the connection to the PoW comment. Funny.

So maybe you can enlighten me about the single letter U and how one can be non-u.

>143 Bookmarque: You asked! "U" stands for "upper". It was invented in 1954 by Professor Alan Ross of the University of Birmingham in a technical article about class differences in language, but was rapidly picked up by, among others, Nancy Mitford (who, as the eldest daughter of the second son of a Baron, was distinctly U herself). The bit of Ross's article that caught the imagination was that the U and non-U words for many things were different — "lavatory" or "loo" is U, "toilet" is non-U; "napkin" is U, "serviette" is non-U. Counterintuitively, if there are "common" and "fancy" words for something, the common term is more likely to be the U one.

As ever, Wikipedia knows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English. The article mentions a book, Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry Into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy, which was supposedly edited by Mitford, although she apparently disclaimed any part of it other than her own contribution. I think I'll have to get a copy of this: it contains essays by Mitford, Evelyn Waugh, Professor Ross himself and "Strix" (Peter Fleming, who was Ian Fleming's elder brother, and whom I've mentioned in the GD before), and a poem by John Betjeman suggesting that the use of fish-knives is non-U. Wikipedia in its article on the book quotes from a New York Times review:

...Her argument, a set-piece even today among literary parlor games, was that the more elegant euphemism used for any word is usually the non-upper-class thing to say—or, in Miss Mitford's words, simply non-U. Thus: It is very non-U to say "dentures"; "false teeth" will do. Ill is non-U; sick is U. The non-U person resides at his home. The U person lives in his house. And so forth.

It appears then that "plain English" is U, the other kind is non-U.

>143 Bookmarque: Glad you asked.
>144 haydninvienna: Glad you answered!

Ok, that's what I thought it was in a broad sense, but had no idea how it was parsed exactly. Funny that it's the opposite of what one would expect in terms of word usage. Now if someone could just tell me what a grandee is, lol.

Quiet in the Pub today.

After the book on King Edward VIII, I also finished Lady Donaldson’s book about The Marconi Scandal. This affair seems to be regarded as forgotten, but as I said above, if you read G K Chesterton’s essays, you will be reminded of it from time to time. This book seems still to be the only general one on the affair, although there is some scholarly writing, as noted below.

Briefly, the story went like this. In early 1912, the British Government proposed to establish a chain of “wireless” stations to provide quick communication with the Empire. The process was administered by the Postmaster-General, Herbert Samuel. It was widely believed that the only company capable of doing the job was the Marconi company, and the company and the government entered into contractual negotiations. A contract was signed, but for some reason not made clear, one clause dealing with Marconi’s patents was not made public. This omission became important later, because there were allegations that the contract was unduly favourable to the company, and the omission was taken as evidence that there was something to hide.

Marconi had companies in the USA and other countries. I don’t recall that Lady Donaldson makes their relationship to the British company clear (that is, whether they were subsidiaries or just had Marconi himself in common) and it may not matter. The scandal happened because the US Marconi company needed more capital and made a share issue. Some of the shares were obtained, through the company’s managing director Godfrey Isaacs, by Herbert Samuel, by the Attorney-General Sir Rufus Isaacs (Godfrey’s brother) and by Lloyd George, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer. It was relevant to the following events that Samuel and the Isaacs brothers were Jewish.

Hilaire Belloc and Cecil Chesterton (G K’s brother) began a campaign against the “scandal”. Much of the writing on the affair now seems to concentrate on whether their motives were anti-Semitic or not; I’m more interested in the legal aspects. In particular, were it to happen now, could the Isaacs brothers, Samuel and Lloyd George be prosecuted for insider trading? The concept doesn’t seem to have been invented in 1912. Also, what about corruption in office? There was a House of Commons inquiry, which reported on party lines, and none of the three suffered anything worse than embarrassment.

ETA that the academic writing seems to be mostly about how far Belloc and Cecil Chesterton were motivated by anti-Semitism. See Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marconi_scandal) if you’re curious.

The third of the books in this little group of library requests was The Appeasers, by Martin Gilbert and Richard Gott. This was about the British Government’s foreign policy towards Germany between 1933 and 1939. They do not, shall we say, leave you in any doubt about the ineptness of Chamberlain and (most of) his government, who persisted in the belief that Hitler could be dealt with on a basis of reasonableness, in the face of contrary advice from the professional diplomats in the Foreign Office, even at the expense of throwing their allies and smaller countries like Czechoslovakia into the crocodile’s jaws.

After this lot, I think I’ll have to go back to whodunits for a while.

>147 haydninvienna:
Speaking of insider trading, have you read Nicholas Nickleby, in particular, chapter two? I found it hilarious, and a perfect description of a share scam around a start-up company. It is so up-to-date it is easy to imagine the same antics to be taking place in modern start-ups.

The start-up on question is the United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company.

>144 haydninvienna: That's actually fascinating. I had no idea. Now I am tempted to hunt down the Mitford book. Or at least add it to my wish list.

>149 jillmwo: I found a copy on eBay for a vaguely reasonable price. It should be here tomorrow.

Another call at the Chesterton little free library produced another stack of thrillers for Mrs H, and copies of Dulcie Domum’s Bad Housekeeping (meh), John Keats: Selected Letters and Poems and The Causes of the English Revolution. I remember the last title from doing a unit called Government and Society in the Early Modern West at Macquarie University in 1980, but never read the book. Now I have, and it proved surprisingly interesting. Briefly, in Professor James’s view, it wasn’t all nascent democracy and battles of religion, but had a lot to do with a corrupt and incompetent government, basically bankrupt after Henry VIII and his wars, followed by the unpopular and incompetent James VI/I and the even less popular, equally incompetent and blindingly arrogant Charles I. There seems to be a theme here—the failures (in various ways) of English and British government.

>148 pgmcc: Never read Nicholas Nickleby, but you get a good many jabs at the promoters of paper-money schemes in Thomas Love Peacock’s novels. Everything old is new again—now instead of paper money it’s cryptocurrency.

I picked up an interesting article (https://psyche.co/ideas/there-is-an-unseen-smuggling-operation-between-fiction-and-reality) from Mozilla’s Pocket service. Basically, the boundary between our reality and fiction is somewhat porous and either can influence the other.

>152 haydninvienna:
That article looks fascinating. I will save it for later. Thank you for sharing.

Back in the “remarkable foods” thread i mentioned (https://www.librarything.com/topic/345568#7977437) a book called But the Crackling is Superb, edited by Nicholas and Giana Kurti. Nicholas Kurti’s day job was as a Professor of Physics at Oxford, but he was an enthusiastic amateur chef, and he seems to have been one of the early practitioners of what is now called molecular gastronomy. He persuaded the Royal Society to publish a small collection of essays by fellow members about food (interpreted rather freely) and this is it. There’s a few recipes in there, including one for making fudge by Anthony Hewish of pulsar fame, but also an essay by Nigel Pirie about leaf protein as a food (hasn’t caught on yet, it seems). Unfortunately there’s nothing in it about the inverted baked Alaska. There are a couple of long excerpts from the voluminous writings of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, who investigated the insulating properties of egg white foam and set the whole baked Alaska thing going.

Verdict: a curiosity. The world didn’t desperately need it, and neither did I, but it was fun in places.

Wow. What a way to start a morning: "Physicists Create a Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer" here: https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-create-a-wormhole-using-a-quantum-comp....

Unfortunately, "To be clear, unlike an ordinary hologram, the wormhole isn’t something we can see. While it can be considered “a filament of real space-time,” according to co-author Daniel Jafferis of Harvard University, lead developer of the wormhole teleportation protocol, it’s not part of the same reality that we and the Sycamore computer inhabit." Oh.

>154 haydninvienna:
One of my brothers started making baked Alaska in the 1970s. We enjoyed it. My mother was a bit taken aback the first time he made it as she thought eighteen egg whites sounded like a lot of egg white.

E.T.A. The first time he made it was during one of the Loyalist strikes that had cut electricity supply for several days. We had a gas oven, so baking was something my brother could do without electricity, i.e. when he couldn't watch TV. He also used that enforced non-TV time to try his hand at woodwork and constructed a couple of crude, but handy bedside units.

>155 haydninvienna: I read about this in the NY Times, and at first I thought "Well, it's just a simulation." But then I kept reading and realized it was a bit more than that.

>149 jillmwo: >150 haydninvienna: The copy of Noblesse Oblige arrived this morning. A “slim volume”, the first edition from 1956. No dust jacket, but that’s OK. The spine says “edited by Nancy Mitford”, but there’s no attribution to an editor in the front matter, so far as I can see. Mitford is listed as a contributor, along with Professor Alan S C Ross, Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Sykes, “Strix” (Peter Fleming) and John Betjeman. The first essay is an abbreviated version of Ross’s article that started it all, and so the “U” and “non-U” abbreviations appear in a footnote (itself almost a page long) beginning on the first page of the text.

Naturally, since I’m a minor fan of Peter Fleming, I read his short essay, “Posh Lingo”, first. Interesting: he goes into the variations of U-speech within U-communities, such as schools and regiments in the British Army. He also discusses briefly how U-usage varies according to whether the person spoken to is U or non-U: what would now be called speech register, I think.

The book is 114 pages long, and each essay starts on a recto page, with a separate recto page before it bearing the title. One could say that the page count has been stretched a bit. Not sure that the book was worth £15, but it’s a bit of literary history for the kind of people who read Professor C Northcote Parkinson’s book Parkinson’s Law* and Gamesmanship by Stephen Potter.

*A perfectly real book, which I have read, although I don’t now own a copy.

>158 haydninvienna:
I do not have a copy of Parkinson's Law, but do have a copy of The Law, which, as far as I recall the blurb, is a kind of "Best of" collection. I certainly enjoyed its articles.

>159 pgmcc: The essay i best remember is the one on how to search for employees. Parkinson’s method was to craft a notice that produced exactly one applicant, who would infallibly be the right person for the job.

>160 haydninvienna:
:-)

There are three that stick in my mind. One was in relation to the amount of management time devoted to investment decisions being inversely proportional to the amount of money involved. This was summarised in the example of the multi-million pound project being passed by The Board simply by nods of the head without any real debate, while the £500 to be spent on a new bicycle shed caused much discussion and conflict, and took several hours to resolve. He explained this phenomenon by stating that individual board members could visualise £500 but that the millions involved in the major investment were too big for them to picture, and hence not very tangible.

A second article was about being Number 2 and how to knobble Number 1 so that you become Number 1. He rounded it off with some advice on how to manage your Number 2 once you are Number 1 so that they cannot do to you what you did to your predecessor.

The third article dealt with organisations that were very successful in their cramped office space until they started thinking about a new head office. His hypothesis was that management took its eyes of the business while attention was focused on the wonderful new offices that would be the new headquarters. I must dig up my copy of this book, and this article in particular. Did I mention that the organisation I work for is planning to move into some spanking new, state-of-the-art offices in early 2023? Just saying.

>161 pgmcc: I remember the one about organisations’ headquarters. Oddly, the Qatar Financial Centre Regulatory Authority, for which I consult, has been planning for years to move offices to a spiffy new building at Msheireb Downtown (in a new development that was partly being built by Carillion!) but hasn’t managed it yet.

Msheireb Downtown is a development in central Doha that certainly has some nice apartments in it (I would have been living in one had I not left Doha). Carillion apparently tendered for the development job as part of their growth strategy, and it seems that they didn’t understand the local culture as well as they thought; and apparently Msheireb was part of the reason for Carillion’s collapse.

Pocket sent me a story (https://www.wired.com/story/mars-hiberators-guide-to-the-galaxy/) about hibernation research—apparently significant progress is being made. But the author of the article foresees uses other than space travel:

As for myself, what I find most alluring about hibernation is its potential to offer a brief holiday from the constant din of my own thoughts. In a time of exhausting overstimulation, anxiety, and dread, I find myself wondering what it would be like to switch off for a week or two.

Given the recent "U" and "Non-U" discussion above, I thought it "U" to inform tell you of a coincidence. One of the contributors to Howdunit, Bertie Denham, or to give him his full title, Bertram Stanley Mitford Bowyer, 2nd Baron Denham, KBE, mentions in his contribution, that:

"...one of my Christian names is Mitford, reflecting the fact that my mother was a first cousin of Nancy Mitford."

His contribution was about writing to relax. His writing was an escape from his busy work as Chief Whip, a role he insists, was ...a highly pressured job, since in politics you never know what is going to happen next. A whip needs to be available seven days a week and can be called upon at very short notice to deliver (or at least, try to deliver) the necessary votes."

Had a Teams discussion with my general manager this morning. They are keeping me on as a consultant next year. Yay! But for only half the maximum hours per month (80 instead of 160)! Boo (somewhat mutedly, because I doubt if I’ve managed to make 80 hours per month average all year, so it may not make much difference).

>165 haydninvienna:
Congratulations and commiserations. :-)

I plan to retire in February. 77 days, 1 hour, 47 minutes, and 5 seconds, according to the countdown my brorter-in-law sent me.

>166 pgmcc: It's not like you're counting or anything , is it.

>166 pgmcc: >167 hfglen: I wonder if Peter is keeping a spreadsheet or something …

77 days is a nice number. I can now clearly state the number of weeks. That will focus some minds. :-)

>163 haydninvienna: But would you know you were resting when you came out of hibernation? Would it have the mentally restful effect?

>165 haydninvienna: It sounds like you are not upset by the reduction in hours?

>170 Karlstar: Fair point, but getting beyond the dumpster fire of the last couple of years would suit me OK.

No, I’m not greatly disturbed by the reduction in hours. I worked out today that this year I’ve worked a monthly average of slightly over 66 hours, so the practical effect will probably be nil.

I have just discovered that there is or recently was a farmer in Cambridgeshire raising crocodiles. He suggested that the meat would be a good substitute for cod for the fish and chip shops. I’ve eaten crocodile meat and I wouldn’t pass up a tasty plate of croc and chips.

>172 haydninvienna: Agreed! Although, come to think of it I may have eaten alligator. Tasty and tender!

>172 haydninvienna: There are or were at least two here in Kwazulu-Natal, and at least one more on the shores of Lake Kariba. As I recall, the major products were tourists and fancy (and insanely expensive) leather goods.

>174 hfglen: I’ve visited a croc farm in Darwin. Interesting altho’ not entirely pleasant—the baby ones are the embodiment of evil, even more so than the mature crocs. The products are mostly leather as you say, but the meat ends up on restaurant tables.

ETA I remember the keepers telling us tourists that there was a poultry farm nearby, and the superannuated egg layers from there tended to end up as croc food. Win-win of sorts, I suppose.

This morning I was watching our bird feeding table from our kitchen window and it occurred to me to wonder why some birds hop and others walk. First thought was that it’s just a matter of size—small birds like robins, sparrows and tits hop, bigger birds like doves and pigeons walk (wood pigeons, which are fairly big birds, have an adorable pompous waddle), and the ones in the middle might do either. Starlings tend to walk, but blackbirds, which tend to be slightly bigger, hop. The small birds, like robins and tits, may not even bother to hop—they tend to fly even the equivalent of a hop or two.

A Matter of Death and Life by Simon R Green. This was a library copy. It’s a heist story, with supernatural stuff. I’ve only encountered this author before by means of covers on Good Show Sir. It started promisingly enough—he does the noir mannerisms quite well—but got old rather quickly, and I don’t think I’ll finish it.

I note that Clam recently suggested that you shouldn’t bother with anything rated below 3.5 on LT. Should have been a warning. This book is rated 3, on the basis of only 10 copies.

Had a little book-buying binge this morning. First, bought 2 of Matt Parker’s (the maths one) books for @tokengingerkid’s mathematician partner, then 2 for me: Imagine a City by Mark Vanhoenacker and The 99% Invisible City by Roman Mars. Later today, as a result of an article sent from Pocket*, I ordered yet another copy of Invisible Cities**. Only then did I realise that all three had “city” in the title, and I wonder if Mark Vanhoenacker’s title is a hat-tip to Calvino’s one. I’ve told before how, in my first couple of weeks in Dublin, I missed Invisible Cities so much that I had to go to Hodges Figgis and buy another copy. Now I will have three copies.

* https://www.newyorker.com/culture/2022-in-review/the-year-in-rereading?utm_sourc... Notice the last title on the list, and hoping the link works for you.

**In preparation for the impending house move, most of my books are in storage. Awkward.

ETA if memory serves, the Mars book was a BB from @MrsLee.

>178 haydninvienna:
Thank you for posting the list. You can, via the list, mark up at least one BB. The Artful Dickens: The Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist.

Now, I am getting back to the list. I may be back to report more BBs from your post, and its sub-posts.

By the way, the image on the cover of Anna Karenina is the same image on my copy of The Moonstone. I have also seen it on the cover of Madame Bovary.

>178 haydninvienna: Don't think it was me, but it looks intriguing.

>180 pgmcc: Busty women are appropriate anywhere I suppose. :/

>178 haydninvienna: I thought that was a useful piece from the New Yorker and like >179 pgmcc: I noted the book on Dickens as an excellent possibility for future reading.

>172 haydninvienna: I have also tasted alligator, but it was in spicy chili (with rattlesnake!) so any taste was drowned in the spices. Can anyone who has tried both gator and croc tell me if one is tastier?

>181 MrsLee: The most probable source, it seems, was this long post from @Julie_In_the_Library: https://www.librarything.com/topic/337952#7760060.

I've hesitated about posting this, because the situation is still somewhat unclear, but — Mrs H is in hospital after a suspected heart attack. I took her into the A&E (ER for USians) at Horton General Hospital in Banbury on Sunday and she has been there ever since, having multiple tests done and images taken. There are suspicions of a cardiac artery blockage. She is not enjoying it, but the Horton staff seem very competent and caring and I've become best buddies with the ward sister. Today she has been taken to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford for an angiogram, and will be there basically all day and unconscious for at least some of it. If the angiogram shows a blockage, then we will have some decisions to make.

Incidentally, visiting the Horton from Bicester is awkward. I'm not driving so it's either train or taxi. At the moment there are rolling strikes on the railways. Sigh. Although I think the railway union has a good case for the strikes, it's still a pain.

Because Mrs H is not visitable today I took the day off and went to Oxford myself, to the main county library. On my walk between the bus stop and the library, I passed Waterstones, and of course went in, intending to buy a copy of the Everyman Montaigne, if they had it. They didn't, but I spotted Dante's Divine Comedy: A Journey Without End and picked it up to see what it had to say about the various modern translations, especially Dorothy Sayers's and Clive James's. (Apparently there have been more than 50 translations of the Inferno published since 1900. Sayers' translation has outsold all the other translations together except for Henry Cary's, apparently.) I found this titbit:

In 2013, James published his version of the entire poem with the name CLIVE JAMES blown up to the size of Dante's on the cover. Unlike Sayers and Carson, James chose not to work within Dante's tercets; instead, he smoothly rendered the interlocking three-line chains into rhymed quatrains. Shakespeare wrote in quatrains, but they are not in the end sympathetic to Dante's Trinitarian theology. By attempting terza rima, Carson and Sayers kept faith with a Dantescan spirit of trinity as mirrored in the poem's overall tripartite design; James is unable, or does not want to do this.
Like many translators, James fills out his Divine Comedy with antiquarianisms ('whereat', 'doth', 'aught else', 'yonder'), which give the impression that Dante wrote in an Italian that sounded two centuries old to his first readers, when he really did not. In this version, worn phrases cling to the dense pentameter lines ('cheek by jowl', 'dubious privilege', 'vaulting pride'); but rather than work with the grain of Dante's speech, these serve to recall the brilliant tongue of James the journalist and television personality. In his introduction, James upbraids* Sayers for perceived deficiencies in her Penguin Classic: Sayers had 'simultaneously loaded her text with cliché and pumped it full of wind'. Yet James is no less guilty of expanding the poem. In lieu of footnotes he interpolates explanatory material not found in the original. (Minos is a 'connoisseur of turpitude'; the dolce stil novo poet Forese Donati is Dante's 'fellow sonneteer'.) Dante never stoops to this sort of explication. Cumulatively, James's additions make for a Divine Comedy a third longer than the original. This is all the more unfortunate in a writer such as Dante, for whom accuracy, precision and concision were sovereign virtues.

*I have the James version, and have read it. The assertion that the Sayers translation was full of rubbish is actually attributed to James's wife Pru Shaw. The assertion about the size of James's name on the cover is spot on. James was a brilliant bloke in many ways, but now I always remember somebody's jibe to the effect that every word he wrote was intended to remind you that he had read everything.

The library visit yielded:
The Inhabited Island by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
The Rain-Soaked Bride by Guy Adams**
International Night by Mark Kurlansky
The Atlas of Forgotten Places by Travis Elborough
Period Piece by Gwen Raverat***
The Day It Finally Happens by Mark Pearl****

**I started reading this in the library. How many agencies are there now to deal with supernatural threats to the government and people of the United Kingdom? There's Daniel O'Malley's Chequey, Garth Nix's booksellers, Christopher Fowler's Peculiar Crimes Unit and who knows how many others? Here's another one: the Clown Service, also known as Section 37. The book begins well, with a Clown Service operative rescuing three women from Russian gangsters in a luxurious hotel suite in St Petersburg. Corpses and debris all over. Then a series of mysterious deaths of people who are, it appears, officers of the diplomatic service. The writer seems to know his stuff in terms of technique: for the second mysterious death we get the interior monologue of the victim's long-suffering wife in the few minutes before he has a really odd road accident in the middle of nowhere. The interior monologue is completely convincing. I'll let you know how it all turns out.

*** Gwen Raverat was a granddaughter of Charles Darwin. The book is about her upbringing in Cambridge in the late 19th century.

****This may be going on my "it isn't all bad" shelf, or it may not.

>185 haydninvienna: Keeping your wife and family in my thoughts. Here's hoping for her speedy recovery.

>185 haydninvienna:
I wish Mrs H a speedy recovery. I hope the prognosis is good. I will be thinking of you and your wife.

Oh boy that sounds serious, but that she's in good hands and can recover. Strength to you both.

>185 haydninvienna: Adding my good wishes and prayers for your wife and yourself at this uncertain time.

As for Dante, I will stand by my Dorothy L. Sayers translation as it is the only one I have ever been able to finish, and finish with enjoyment. Perhaps Pru Shaw knew everything about everything and is competent to judge rubbish, but I needed every bit of help Sayers offered.

>185 haydninvienna: Oh no! I will be holding both of you in the light.
I'm glad you were able to seek solace in a bookshop. Best of luck with all of her tests.

>185 haydninvienna: More good wishes!

>185 haydninvienna: Worrisome, I'm sure, but getting the tests done is the best first step you can take. Best wishes to you both for making it through the next few weeks and for a speedy return to a more usual form of normalcy. (((Hugs)))

Thanks all. I’m having a good time (for some value of “good”) talking to doctors and nurses about Mrs H’s unusual medical history (too long for here and no reason to burden you with it anyway). The ward sister and I are now best buddies. Anyway, I’m not long back from the hospital and all is quiet at the moment.

>193 haydninvienna:
Get what rest you can. I am sure the next few days will be hectic between tests, concern and travelling to and from the hospital.

>185 haydninvienna: I hope she recovers quickly and fully.

>185 haydninvienna: Sending healing wishes to your wife. There's never a good time to be in hospital, and this is worse than most, but it sounds as though she's being well looked after. I hope the tests show something with a clear course of treatment.

Period piece is a great read. I hope you enjoy it.

Once again, thanks all. No clear resolution yet.

We have another mystery. Mrs H is home again, but we still don’t know exactly what happened. The original reason we went to the A&E was major pain in her left arm. She had had a fall a few days before (nothing broken and no injury apart from bruises) and we thought that that was the cause, but the A&E staff did an ECG and noticed some changes from one that was on file from some years ago. She has a history of odd things happening cardiac-wise, and the last one was ultimately diagnosed as pericarditis (inflammation of the sheath around the heart). So more heart problems suspected. She was supposed to have an angiogram done, but refused it at the last moment. Anyway, she has been assessed by the staff physiotherapist as to her mobility issues, and we will be going back to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford fairly soon to get a different cardiac imaging procedure done. And we have to see her GP as soon as possible.

She did come home with a splendid case of laryngitis though. No idea where she got it from, although I woke up in the small hours this morning with a sore throat and of course leaped to the conclusion that I’d picked up a Covid infection. Fortunately I still have some tests, and even more fortunately the result was reassuringly negative. Of course it’s that time of the year, and hospitals are where all the sick people are.

High praise for the staff at Horton General Hospital, btw. There are 2 major NHS hospitals in Oxfordshire—the John Radcliffe in Oxford and the Horton in Banbury. Mrs H has spent significant time in both of them for various things.

>198 haydninvienna: Glad to hear you didn't get Covid. Hope the alternative isn't too nasty. I'm holding you and Mrs H in the light.

>198 haydninvienna: Good to hear that she is back home, hopefully they will come up with a benign explanation soon.

>198 haydninvienna: What @Karlstar said. Wishing Mrs H a rapid, complete and happy recovery.

>198 haydninvienna: As everyone has already said, glad to hear she's back home with you; take it one day at a time and crossing my thumbs here that you'll soon know more.

>199 Jim53: >200 Karlstar: >201 hfglen: >202 jillmwo: Thanks, everybody. So far so good. The laryngitis is the most immediate problem, but it will pass.

>203 haydninvienna: Wishing you both well and healthy again soon.

Today's mystery: where is everybody? It's gone awful quiet in the Pub.

>205 haydninvienna:
My excuse for a low profile is a combination of:

- Very busy at work despite being so close to the winter break
- Sales people wanting support to close off deals before year-end
- Surprise project stemming from a project I completed in 2015
- Legal case in progress from same project I completed in 2015
- Attempts to tie up loose ends and prepare neat hand-over packs for my various activities before I retire in February (61 days 7 hours 30 minutes and 50 seconds for those interested)
- Daughter & family visiting from the US
- Limited amount of progress on reading because of the points above

I'm here! Last 2 days of work for the year and I am exhausted.

>206 pgmcc: Good luck accomplishing the work tasks! I hope you have plenty of free time to enjoy with your daughter and her family.

>206 pgmcc: Best wishes for getting it all done. Not going to ask about the lawsuit. And best wishes to you and yours for a happy and stress-free holiday.

>207 Sakerfalcon: I know about the pre-Christmas mania. I don't have a pre-Christmas rush (my big rush was pre-World Cup). But I've just been to the pharmacy to pick up some essential prescription drugs for Mrs H. The queue ran twice around the shop and out into the carpark. But I have to add that every one, customers and staff, was amazingly cheerful and polite.

Best wishes for Festivus (today!) for anyone who celebrates it.

>208 haydninvienna: let the Feats of Strength commence!

I have been missing the time I used to spend in the Pub and hope to rejoin the festivities soon :) I finally finished my Geostatistics course, which turned out to be a bit of a dud. We learned mostly how to apply statistical calculations to maps in ArcGIS, but very little about statistics as a topic. So it was mostly a software course when I wanted a math course. In spite of that it was a tremendous amount of work and I'm glad to be done with it. Oh well, one more class down, only 1 year left!

Work has been a disaster with the loss of our long-time Director of Operations; I now have his workload on top of my own, so it's a struggle. I do not like supervising humans; they make everything more difficult than it needs to be. Honestly, it's not that hard to just show up on time, and do your work all day, then leave.

Apparently I have moved on to the Airing of Grievances already :D

>209 Darth-Heather: I think I’ve already moved on to the Feats of Strength: I’ve just assembled an IKEA lamp. Not something I was expecting to be doing.

Oh, and the Airing of Grievances: I’ve just been flipping through Atlas of Forgotten Places by Travis Elborough. In an article on the abandoned Grand Hotel de la Forêt, I learn that Napoleon, in his exile on Saint Helena, “dreamed of breathing in the scent of marquis”. Now would that be unwashed body, or expensive perfume? The native scrubland of Corsica, which is clearly what is meant, is the maquis. Nothing to do with titles of nobility.

And Festivus is tomorrow, not today. Oh dear.

>212 haydninvienna: Hahaha... not to worry! My Festivus Pole isn't up yet anyway.

I could possibly be giving the impression of being a bit scatterbrained at the moment, couldn’t I? Between Festivus, Christmas and Mrs H’s health issues, there’s a fair bit going on at Chez Haydninvienna.

>214 haydninvienna: It is that time of year. How's Mrs. H?

>215 Karlstar: As to Mrs H’s health issues—not the best. She has had mobility problems for years (from old injuries, related to her former equestrian pursuits), and the possible heart issues aren’t new either. But the worst is that her memory is failing. She was very firmly told by a nice young hospital doctor that she shouldn’t be driving. At present I’m not driving either (because I haven’t driven for about seven years and I think I need a refresher, although I still have a drivers licence), so I shudder to think how much I’ve spent on taxis between hospital visits and Christmas shopping. We have a referral to the memory unit at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, and I very much hope they’re quick, but of course it’s not a good time of year for stuff like that. Thinks: is there ever a good time of year for it?

Something about these final days just prior to the Big Event triggers an airing of grievances across the board. Hope Mrs. H is feeling better @haydninvienna and that any Festivus pole gets erected smoothly and without fuss.

>216 haydninvienna:
I am thinking of you and Mrs. H. I hope things go well for you both.

>218 pgmcc: Thanks Peter. At the moment it’s going OK.

>216 haydninvienna: I hope you get her appt. soon and it goes well.

>220 Karlstar: Thanks Jim.

Yeah, this time of year is the pits to be having any kind of urgent health issue. I know first hand from 2020 and hope your situation goes more smoothly and there are no ambulance rides in a snow storm. Aging isn't for the weak!

>222 Bookmarque: Thanks mate. Aging might not be for the weak but it’s still generally better than the alternative.

I should perhaps mention that one anxiety that I’m trying not to worry about is, what happens if I get sick or injured? I’m 7 years older than Mrs H but fortunately I’m still in decent health. If that were to change we’d have a much worse problem.

>223 haydninvienna: Worrisome indeed. You are taking steps to find out where you are, when you know that then you can make plans for the future. May you have strength and courage for the path before you.

Ah, the joys of Christmas Eve (which also happens to be or wedding anniversary).

In Bicester this morning with Mrs H to meet my daughter Laura (mentioned in the Pub before) and her boyfriend/partner Jonny. First time Mrs H has met Jonny: they seemed to get on all right.

Then Mrs H wanted to Get Her Nails Done. While that was happening, I went into Cole's Bookshop just for a browse, and serendipitously found The Fire of Joy, Clive James's last book, published posthumously; and On Consolation by Michael Ignatieff.

Ignatieff, who was Leader of the Opposition in Canada for a while, gave the keynote address at a conference of the Commonwealth Law Association, to which I went, in Vancouver in 1996. I thought that address was worth the price of the ticket on its own. His topic was whether bodies like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa serve any useful purpose. His answer: yes, because they diminish the range of plausible lies.

Clive James is or was in some ways a troubling human being. His fulsome appreciation of his wife Pru Shaw, while carrying on a long-running clandestine affair with a former model, and hitting on other women as well, doesn't sit well with me; and there's the quirk that he wants you to know that he has read everything; but goodness me the man could write! I doubt if he ever wrote a dull sentence. The Fire of Joy is a selection of 80 poems to learn by heart and read aloud, with commentary on each, and a final short essay by his daughter Claerwen. Clive James being Clive James, there's a few unexpected choices in here, including a satirical parody by Osbert Lancaster and a chunk of "Lepanto"* by G K Chesterton. I've been dipping into this on the way home, and the commentaries are an absolute delight. Some of the poems are pretty good too.

Minor personal reminiscence: James explains his title, The Fire of Joy, as being the name of a military ceremonial practice ("le feu de joie") in which a mass of troops each fires a single shot skyward in succession, so that the individual reports merge into a continuous sound. He mentions that he saw and heard this for the second time "at the parade ground in Ingleburn, New South Wales, in 1958". I think that parade ground has been built over now, but I've paraded on it too.

*Given his emphasis on rhythm in speaking verse aloud, i wish he had chosen Chesterton's poem in answer to F E Smith's overblown rhetoric on the Welsh Disestablishment Bill (context: The Liberal government of 1911 presented a Bill to disestablish the Welsh part of the Church of England, and Smith, a member of the Tory opposition, disapproved, saying that the Bill had "shocked the conscience of every Christian community in Europe"):

Antichrist, or the Reunion of Christendom: An Ode
by G. K. Chesterton
Are they clinging to their crosses,
F. E. Smith,
Where the Breton boat-fleet tosses,
Are they, Smith?
Do they, fasting, trembling, bleeding,
Wait the news from this our city?
Groaning "That's the Second Reading!"
Hissing "There is still Committee!"
If the voice of Cecil falters,
If McKenna's point has pith,
Do they tremble for their altars?
Do they, Smith?

Russian peasants round their pope
Huddled, Smith,
Hear about it all, I hope,
Don't they, Smith?
In the mountain hamlets clothing
Peaks beyond Caucasian pales,
Where Establishment means nothing
And they never heard of Wales,
Do they read it all in Hansard --
With a crib to read it with --
"Welsh Tithes: Dr. Clifford answered."
Really, Smith?

In the lands where Christians were,
F. E. Smith,
In the little lands laid bare,
Smith, O Smith!
Where the Turkish bands are busy
And the Tory name is blessed
Since they hailed the Cross of Dizzy
On the banners from the West!
Men don't think it half so hard if
Islam burns their kin and kith,
Since a curate lives in Cardiff
Saved by Smith.

It would greatly, I must own,
Soothe me, Smith!
If you left this theme alone,
Holy Smith!
For your legal cause or civil
You fight well and get your fee;
For your God or dream or devil
You will answer, not to me.
Talk about the pews and steeples
And the cash that goes therewith!
But the souls of Christian peoples...
Chuck it, Smith!

Whatever your views on the disestablishment of the Church of England in Wales (now as dead an issue as an issue can be), it's impossible not to admire Chesterton's verbal dexterity.
After all that, I scored some books from Laura and Jonny too:
Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis by Kingsley Amis
The Secret Life of Books by Tom Mole
The Bookseller's Tale by Martin Latham
The Reconstruction of Nations by Timothy Snyder.

A very good haul. The first and third on that list have figured in my roamings in L-Space before.

>224 MrsLee: Thank you. As you will have seen above, today was pretty good.

Just been spending money sending funds to kids overseas. It’s difficult to know what they want, and shipping is expensive, so I just send them money. Usually I get it done a bit earlier than Christmas Eve though.

And for all Pub denizens that celebrate it, a Merry Christmas. If you don’t celebrate Christmas but have a different celebration, best wishes to you for that too.

Finished the first of the present reads: Kingsley Amis’s Everyday Drinking. This is an omnibus of three books, the first of which I already have: On Drink. The second is a collection of Amis’s newspaper articles on drink and drinking, and the third is a series of quizzes. Fun to read, and never short of an opinion. The book has an introduction by Christopher Hitchens, another writer who was well acquainted with the demon drink.

Gotta read A Christmas Carol for Christmas. @MrsLee noted the passage in the Ghost of Christmas Present’s homily about decreasing the surplus population, similar to a warning by Gandalf. I only noticed that Fezziwig, who is visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past, shares a name (IIRC) with a character in The Princess Bride.

ETA Nope, “Fezzik”, not “Fezziwig”.

>227 haydninvienna: Close though!

>225 haydninvienna: All the blessings of the season (however you may celebrate it) to you and yours!!!

And that sounds like a great haul of books that you managed to get away with up there in #225. (For the record, I go back and forth on Chesterton but I enjoyed that one.)

>229 jillmwo: Thank you! To you and yours also.

Chesterton for me is another problematic writer. His politics are not my politics, his religious faith is not my religious faith, and some of his opinions bother me (like the idea that because knighthood was a Christian institution, knighthoods should not be conferred on people not of that faith—as if Christianity had anything to do with twentieth-century knighthood). But once again, the man could write! His poetry is mostly forgettable except for the satirical verse, such as the Ode I quoted, but there’s the best of the Father Brown stories and The Man Who Was Thursday.

Another tiny coincidence: Chesterton’s poem “Lepanto”, which I mentioned in #225 as one of Clive James’s excerpts, is also mentioned in On Drink—recommended as reading matter to deal with your “metaphysical hangover” after a heavy night.

>230 haydninvienna: I try (not always successfully) to separate the writer and the book.

>231 mysterymax: Of course. The very fact that I bought and read Clive James’s book (to add to several others of his that I own) probably means that I’m doing that. Similarly with Chesterton. FWIW, I doubt if I would have liked C S Lewis much as a person, but I have copies of pretty well all of his books and continue to read them. OTOH, separating the writer and the book isn’t always possible—Mein Kampf, anyone?

It's getting on to the end of another dismal year, and I see that I've read 98 books in 2022. Maybe I can squeeze a couple more in before the last moment of 31 December. (And think of a thread title.)

Just to show how erratic my reading can be, this morning I picked up the copy of Rūmī: Poet and Mystic, which I bought on a whim in the British Heart Foundation shop a couple of weeks ago. (I'd like to know more about how this copy came to be there. It's stamped "Thomas & Thomas, Booksellers, Karachi" and has a scrawled signature that looks like "Arthur Townsley, Karachi, 1966". Some of the pages haven't been separated.) The selection and translation are by Reynold A Nicholson, who was apparently a major figure in the studies of Persian literature. On the showing of the translations, he does not seem to me to have been much of a poet. For example:

THE TRUTH WITHIN US
'Twas a fair orchard, full of trees and fruit
And vines and greenery. A Sufi there
Sat with eyes closed, his head upon his knee,
Sunk deep in meditation mystical.
"Why," asked another, "dost thou not behold
These Signs of God the Merciful displayed
Around thee, which He bids us contemplate?"
"The signs," he answered, "I behold within;
Without is naught but symbols of the Signs."

What is all beauty in the world? The image,
Like quivering boughs reflected in a stream,
Of that eternal Orchard which abides
Unwithered in the hearts of Perfect Men.

I found the archaisms ("dost though", "thee") awkward and unnecessary, since the lines would scan perfectly well if the modern English equivalents were used. Maybe it's just the habit of using archaisms in prayer. Having said which, I thought the last four lines were good:

What is all beauty in the world? The image,
Like quivering boughs reflected in a stream,
Of that eternal Orchard which abides
Unwithered in the hearts of Perfect Men.

Like Plato's image of the prisoners in the cave seeing shadows, or St Paul reminding us that now we see through a glass, darkly.

Both Rūmī and Omar Khayyam are mentioned in Clive James's book (#225). Looking, as you do, at the Wikipedia article about the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, I discover that there's a body of opinion that considers the whole thing to be a forgery, but that in any event there is no possibility of constructing a canon of authentic verses. Everybody knows about the Fitzgerald version and many people know about Robert Graves's supposedly better translation*, supposedly based on an early authentic manuscript, which turned out to be a forgery. But there are lots of other translations. Apparently the poet Richard le Gallienne 'produced a verse translation, subtitled "a paraphrase from several literal translations", in 1897.' On the small evidence of the few quatrains quoted in the Wikipedia article, this one might be worth looking for. Lots of modern POD editions of it on Amazon, and a few real copies on AbeBooks.

*Clive James didn't like it much as poetry, forged source or not. I knew about this one from my teenage years, because one of the libraries in Brisbane had a copy, although I didn't know about the forgery aspect.

Rather than look at the deleted spam post, here (following Hugh's excellent example) is a picture:

>235 haydninvienna: That is a lovely picture.

It puts me in mind of Edward Lear's paintings.

>235 haydninvienna: Nice!

>236 MrsLee: >237 Karlstar: it’s a sulphur-crested cockatoo, a common bird around Canberra. I miss them. Not my picture, unfortunately.

And I’ve just managed to hit 100 books for the year by finishing Period Piece, Gwen Raverat’s memoir of her Cambridge childhood. Somewhat rambling but utterly charming. She was a grand-daughter of Charles Darwin, and writes with great affection and a sharp, clear eye about her distinguished family (connected with the Wedgwood family and even Ralph Vaughan Williams) and the other notables in and around Cambridge in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

>238 haydninvienna: Yes, Period Piece was charming, wasn't it? And congratulations on a full century of books in 2022!!!

>238 haydninvienna: Thanks, I should have been able to identify it, but could not.

Had to share this: https://thisisindexed.com/2022/12/oh-the-places-youll-go/.

>241 haydninvienna: Perfect.

>241 haydninvienna: Ha! As @pgmcc notes, that's perfect.

Last book purchase for the year (except two coming from Amazon): a copy of the first edition of John Betjeman’s verse memoir Summoned by Bells (first edition, but I have no idea whether it’s worth anything—I doubt it). I bought this on a whim in the same way as the Rūmī mentioned above, and from the same place. On p 109 Betjeman has just been sent down from Oxford after having failed Divinity. His tutor told him he would have got only a Third anyway (Betjeman wasn’t conspicuous for his industry).

The tutor, not named, was C S Lewis. They didn’t like each other.

>244 haydninvienna: Zombie attacks?? Is that maybe the wrong touchstone?

>245 Karlstar: Gives the right result for me. I don’t see any zombies.

Best of luck to you with everything you have on your plate. You have my sympathies. Enjoy the books you snagged while those nails were being "done."

>247 clamairy: Thank you ! At the moment all seems pretty OK. One day at a time, you know?

My last read of 2022 (so far) was an essay by Italo Calvino, "Why Read the Classics?". It's the first essay in a collection also titled Why Read the Classics?. In it he offers 14 answers to the question in the title. For example: "5. A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers". And:

... reading a great work for the first time when one is fully adult is an extraordinary pleasure, one which is very different (though it is impossible to say whether more or less pleasurable) from reading it in one’s youth.
....
2. The classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them. For the fact is that the reading we do when young can often be of little value because we are impatient, cannot concentrate, lack expertise in how to read, or because we lack experience of life. ... When we reread the book in our maturity, we then rediscover these constants which by now form part of our inner mechanisms though we have forgotten where they came from.

I've been noticing how wide is the reading of some of us. I've read a lot over my mumble-mumble years, but it's probably about time I made an attempt to get outside some of the classics that I've not read, and to re-read some that I have. Also, I'm going to have to limit my book-buying, at least until we move house and I can (once again) unpack everything. Most of the English-language classics are available from Project Gutenberg, and are therefore disposable.

So what counts as a classic? Shakespeare. The standard canon of English poetry, not just lyric poetry but including Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Johnson's essays and Rasselas. Dickens. Thomas Hardy (might skip him, except for Middlemarch — too gloomy). The Bronte sisters. Thackeray. Not going to start on the Greek and Roman classics until I have my library unpacked again: I have modern translations of the 3 big epic poems and don't want to take a chance with "Chapman's Homer" and so on. Goethe. Maybe Zola and Balzac (now there's an undertaking!). Montaigne (the Complete Works is one of the 2 books on its way from Amazon). And then there's Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Manzoni, Cervantes ... And I haven't even started thinking about non-European classics.

That's more than a lifetime's worth in itself. Then I have to think about modern works that count as classics, including SFF classics.

I also have a copy of Classics for Pleasure by Michael Dirda on its way. I'm not sure that his "classics" are the same as mine though.

Now I'm going to see if I have a short book to finish the year with, and think up a title for the new thread for 2023.

ETA I just realised that I hadn't thought about American classics, and there's a copy of Moby Dick on the shelf behind me. Of course, it doesn't qualify as a short book.

>249 haydninvienna:
I like your post. It widens the definition of a classic, and initiates the concept of personal classics.

>250 pgmcc: Thanks Peter. Credit doesn’t go to me but to Calvino. But it occurs to me that C S Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism might contain the idea of a “personal classic” too.

And it’s now tomorrow in New Zealand and almost tomorrow in Sydney, so happy new year, everybody!

>249 haydninvienna: I wonder if we might count as classics those books -- like LOTR -- that fuel some personal warmth in our hearts/brains when we sit down again to re-read them. I never think of LOTR as a comfort read, but in some ways, that's what it felt like when I picked it up again. There was that physical internal response of settling in with someone I already knew. At the same time, I am looking at Tolkien and seeing far more just in the first third of it than I remember from previous readings. There is a very real comfort in the book's familiarity even as I come across the aspects that cause the brain to spark and tingle with new ideas. Like you, I anticipate doing a "bunch" of re-reads in 2023.

As an aside, i'm thoroughly fuzzy when it comes to international datelines and time zones, >252 haydninvienna:. You're not already in 2023, are you?

>251 haydninvienna:
I have C.S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism. I think it was a BB from you. Yes, I have not read it yet, but your reminding me of it increases the probability of its being read soon.

>253 jillmwo:
One Tuesday afternoon I was sitting in Dublin having a text conversation with my boss who was on a beach in Florida in Tuesday morning. At the same time I was having an on-line LiveJournal conversation with a friend in The Philippines who was in Wednesday morning.

My mind was a little wobbly.

HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYONE!

>253 jillmwo: Still about 8 hours to go here.

I wouldn’t object to calling LOTR a classic (I do, actually, although I didn’t mention it in #249). Nor would Calvino, I think. In fact: “ 1. The classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying: ‘I’m rereading …’, never ‘I’m reading …’*; and “ 4. A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.”

>255 pgmcc: Yes, it does rather do your head in, doesn’t it? For me and you, it’s Saturday afternoon; for anyone in the GD west of you, it’s still Saturday morning; and for my sons and stepdaughter, it’s Sunday morning in a different year.

And the complete Montaigne has just arrived.

*ETA Is there anyone left who hasn’t read LOTR?

>249 haydninvienna: Wanted to say that I really enjoyed reading that post.

>257 MrsLee: Why, thank you!

I’m reading more of the essays in Calvino’s book; many of them are about French or Italian classics but there is one about Our Mutual Friend which is worth your time. Calvino writes wit approval of G K Chesterton as a critic of Dickens, incidentally.

>246 haydninvienna: This is the blurb from Summoned by Bells here on LT:

"Zombie Attack! When brain-gobbling zombies invade, a sleep­over at Zack Clarke's house quickly turns into a Level-3 creep-over. The undead have infested the streets, filling the air with deathly moans and the stench of rotting flesh. Meet the Zombie Chasers: Zack: His house is a wreck, his … "

I think they have messed up something.

>249 haydninvienna: It sure seems that way to me, I definitely get something different out of 'classics' than I did earlier in life. I have some Shakespeare to get to this year.

>256 haydninvienna: Sadly, yes, there are still people who haven't read LOTR. I know, your question was not a serious one.

Happy New Year to you!

>259 Karlstar: I see the same blurb. Maybe the people who do combining here on LT could fix it?

Never mind, got it now. I assume that since the “work description” isn’t part of Common Knowledge, I can’t just delete that paragraph.

I reported it in the Bug Collectors group. Hopefully my description is enough for someone to make sense of what needs to be done.

I’ve now flagged it as a dud description.