Haydninvienna, 2024/3: the mimicking of known successes

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

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

Happy New Thread!

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

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

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

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

>1 haydninvienna: Happy New Thread.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

>14 haydninvienna: Good news.

>14 haydninvienna:
Excellent news.

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

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

Yay! Seriously good news there.

>14 haydninvienna: That's wonderful news!

Thanks once again for all the good wishes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm making grand or grandiose plans again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Underworld, by Don DeLillo (827 pp.)

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

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

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

Sacred Games, by Vikram Chandra (928 pp.)

1Q84, by Haruki Murakami (928 pp.)

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


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

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

>34 haydninvienna:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

>52 haydninvienna:
Enjoy your lunch and your Christmas.

>52 haydninvienna: And likewise to you!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original here.

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

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

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

Happy new year, all! On the family chat I wondered which of the past 10 years hadn't been pretty well a dumpster fire, and the only suggestion so far was my elder son's suggestion that 2024 was the "year of the Zig" (i e Xavier, our grandson). and so, I might add, of our granddaughter Alena. I'm open to suggestions as to other candidates.

Happy New Year!

At this stage you will be well into 2025. I am 17 minutes into the year.

>58 haydninvienna: and >59 pgmcc: Still a couple of hours away for me. But Happy New Year to you!!

>58 haydninvienna: Happy New Year! :)

Thanks to the apparent reference to Leigh Hunt described in #57, I've take a slight turn from Bleak House and am now reading Young Romantics by Daisy Hay. This is a kind of group biography of the circle of young poets, painters and musicians that gathered around Hunt. At various times the group included Shelley and his menàge, Keats, Byron, Thomas Love Peacock, the painter Benjamin Haydon, the musician Vincent Novello (founder of the music publishing house that still exists) and some others now not so famous. I still can't see the resemblance between Leigh Hunt and Dickens's character Harold Skimpole, except that Hunt was notorious for losing manuscripts and was perpetually in need of money.

In a way, the most interesting thing about the book is the description along the way of the state of Great Britain during the Regency. Wikipedia says that "The Regency era of British history is commonly understood as the years between c. 1795 and 1837, although the official regency for which it is named only spanned the years 1811 to 1820.". Shelley died in 1822, Byron in 1824. Hunt was editor of the radical newspaper The Examiner from 1808 to 1828. All of them suffered to some extent from official repression and censorship and incurred public obloquy because of their novel views on morality. Britain in the Regency was a much more repressive, and unctuously censorious, place than you would gather from reading Georgette Heyer.

And for the idea of Shelley as an ineffectual angel:

As I lay asleep in Italy
There came a voice from over the Sea,
And with great power it forth led me
To walk in the visions of Poesy.

I met Murder on the way—
He had a mask like Castlereagh—
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.

First three stanzas of Shelley's poem "The Mask of Anarchy", written to commemorate the Peterloo Massacre in 1819. Castlereagh was Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs at the time, and had been one of the leading lights in the re-drawing of the map of Europe after the fall of Napoleon.

Belated Happy New Year!

Just finished The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe, which is a volume of parodies and pastiches of the Nero Wolfe stories. As you might expect, a rather mixed bag. Best, I thought, were "As dark as Christmas gets", by Lawrence Block, and "Plot it yourselves", originally written in French by Thomas Narcejac.

>62 haydninvienna:. Britain in the Regency was a much more repressive, and unctuously censorious, place than you would gather from reading Georgette Heyer.. Undoubtedly true, but publishers generally warn authors of fiction about first satisfying the buying customer and then worrying about getting the historical details down.

I'm thinking of declaring library bankruptcy. You know how, when people's email gets overwhelming, they declare "email bankruptcy", delete everything and start again? I've hit a reading slump such that I can't even finish the book I started. Maybe I should return everything I have out of the libraries and start afresh.

Having said which, this afternoon I've been reading The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes, edited by Mike Ashley, a collection of short stories. Best so far: "The Next Big Thing", by Peter Garrett — the murder of a fantasy writer investigated by a clinical psychologist. Lots of in-jokes, like the mention of a science fiction writer named Lionel Fanthorpe (any of my old mates from GSS will get this — @GSSex-noob, are you there?). (Actually, that's not quite fair: Fanthorpe is a real person (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Fanthorpe) who really has written a lot of books, even though most of them don't seem to have won any awards.)

>66 haydninvienna: Sounds like that might be a plan.

Well, I did it. returned everything, read or not, except for a couple of ebooks and Mrs H's unread James Pattersons. I picked up a few new choices, one of which was Monkeys with Typewriters by Scarlett Thomas (author of The End of Mr Y, another book which I never finished). And in the Introduction I found this:

However suspicious of language we might (rightly) be, we still love writers.

Why? Why do we love them more than random word generators, or immortals with nothing better to do than randomly strike typewriter keys for all eternity? Why would no one in their right mind want to read a computer generated novel, even if it were possible to create one? I realised that we love our favourite writers because they are human, and they have made an effort to communicate something important to us. In knowing they are human we understand that they feel just as much as we do. We know that they understand what it means to want something you can't have, to love the wrong person, to be misunderstood, in pain, embarrassed and alone. Writers are important to us because they look at the world and see something interesting, and they manage to write it down in a way that makes our brief lives more substantial. We know that writers appreciate beauty, whatever we think that is, just as we do, because they are human. Humans are not able to sit around writing randomly until the end of time. We are fragile, finite and afraid. We suffer.

Well, now I must go seek out this author! Monkeys with Typewriters sounds as if it might be quite good if that quote is any kind of indicator.

BTW, while it's kind of you to provide us with this kind of thing, may I just say that I didn't NEED to be hit with a new book recommendation this am. I have book deliveries in the chute due to arrive at my door at any point between now and Jan 30. The number of books stuffed into odd corners of this house never seems to diminish.

Glad you're finding your way out of a slump!!

>69 jillmwo:
Richard was just trying to get the recommendation in before your birthday tomorrow.

>68 haydninvienna: That is exactly what I experienced with my latest read. An author who related her thoughts and experiences in a way that helped me understand my own. It is a gift to both the writer and the reader.

>68 haydninvienna: & >69 jillmwo:
Apropos Monkeys and Typewriters: you may find the clip below amusing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTsCkBPRq4M

The ventriloquist is Nina Conti, the daughter of the actor John Conti.

>72 pgmcc: Thanks for that, Peter. She's good, isn't she?

One of the ebooks I referred to was The Seven Basic Plots* by Christopher Booker. I've been dipping into it, and read the 2 chapters on Comedy last night. Didn't expect to get an analysis of The Marriage of Figaro** but there it is. By the time I'd finished the chapters, it had become apparent that Booker's analysis is based on C C Jung's depth-psychology. Well, sure. But if we break up, say, The Lord of the Rings, as Booker does, into archetypes, what have we learned? Does it add anything to life to know that Gandalf is an expression of Jung's Wise Old Man archetype? TBF, I have a lot of the book still unread, and the only real thing I've learned is that I don't much like ebooks. Fortunately the Logan library system has Booker's book in dead-tree form.

I'm reasonably familiar with Jung's system, having read Experiment in Depth*** and some of Jung's own smaller works many years ago. Worth noting that there are authors who operate out of a Jungian world-view — best example I can think of now is Robertson Davies.

Booker does note though how close together comedy and tragedy might be. His example: if Othello had ended with the revelation of Iago's plot and the reformation of Iago, it could have been a comedy.

*How many basic plots are there, exactly? I thought that there were 36. I vaguely remember an essay in Of Worlds Beyond which asserted there were 3.

**My absolute favourite opera. If you don't know it, and you can stand opera at all, run, do not walk, to any way you can get to a performance. There's several complete performances on YouTube. The overture never fails to make me smile, but you want the whole opera, not just the overture. (I cherish the memory of a performance by the Metropolitan Opera that was broadcast years ago on TV in Australia. Talk about the Dream Team! Bryn Terfel as Figaro, Cecilia Bartoli as Susanna and Renee Fleming as the Countess, looking so impossibly beautiful that you couldn't understand why Count Almaviva didn't just grovel at her feet. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be available anywhere now.)

***Fascinating: written by P W (Percival William) Martin, who may or may not be the P W Martin who wrote The Flaw in the Price System (not surprisingly, no copies on LT) — same names, same dates. Either way, there's almost nothing about him or them on the net: no Wikipedia in particular. Not the "P W Martin" who writes "fascinating tales with a kinky twist in the horror, fantasy and superhero genres".

>69 jillmwo: Oops, sorrynotsorry. I don't yet know if Monkeys with Typewriters is any good, but as you see it starts promisingly. I did say that I never finished The End of Mr Y, and I have PopCo somewhere but haven't read it. And happy birthday!

I finished Monkeys with typewriters. I liked it a lot. Scarlett Thomas isn't too impressed with Christopher Booker, and she has her own set of basic plots — eight this time. But I find her exposition a good deal more convincing than Booker's. I also liked Thomas's tone: chatty-ish and informal, like a good lecture. This is how the book originated: Thomas teaches creative writing at the University of Kent, and actually makes me believe that an MA in Creative Writing might leave you knowing something worth knowing.

>74 haydninvienna:
You might find The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr and Into The Woods by John Yorke interesting.

The first book uses psychology to explain storytelling. The second analyses well known stories from books and films to describe a five act structure the author believes is present in all the stories he has come across*, even three act plays. I found both books enjoyable and very informative.

*He does not insist that this structure is present in every story, only that in his career he has never come across a story that did not have this structure. His career is in creative writing education. He was also in charge of drama for channel four and spent many years writing for soap operas.

>75 pgmcc: I actually have Into the Woods and even read it (it was a BB from you, I think). I think Yorke's analysis and Scarlett Thomas's might be able to live together. The name Will Storr made me wonder: is he a relative of Anthony Storr, a psychologist who wrote many books (including books on both Freud and Jung)?

I don't regard "seven (or however many) basic plots" as a fact, but as something like a map. That is, a statement like "there are seven basic plots" is a true statement only if you add something like "in my system". This leaves it open for some other person to propose a different number of basic plots and for both of them to be right within their respective systems. One system may be more useful than the other for a particular purpose, just as a wall map of Australia and a street directory of Brisbane might both be correct within their own limits, but I wouldn't use the wall map to find the pub at which I hope to have lunch. Always remember that the map is not the territory.

>68 haydninvienna: That's a great quote, thanks.

>73 haydninvienna: I went to college with Renee Flemming! I actually remember seeing her in the cafeteria. Sadly I never saw her singing back then, though. She was part of the Crane Music School, so we had no classes together.

>78 clamairy: We've seen her perform live once, In Oxford, in the Sheldonian Theatre (possibly the world's most uncomfortable concert venue), performing Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs. Quite wonderful.

Little Snippets Along the Way department: In the library I picked up a book called The Irrationals, by Julian Havil, not realising that it was full of equations. (I'm interested in irrational numbers, sure, but my mathematical capabilities are very limited). However, in the Introduction is this:

Indeed, the great mathematician and poet Omar Khayyam (1048–1122 C E) went so far as to derive a cubic equation from geometrical considerations, solving it through a series of ever-better rational approximations (using continued fractions), and noting that "it cannot be solved by plane geometry".

So that's what he was really doing with the jug of wine beneath the bough.

Books on books, and books on writing, are a guilty pleasure of mine ("guilty" because they don't inspire me to actually do anything). In the local library I picked up Murder Your Darlings by Roy Peter Clark (the title is a quotation from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch). It's 32 short essays, each one a brief summary of one or two or three books on the art and craft of writing in the broadest sense, starting with Strunk & White and William Zinsser and including Aristotle's Poetics, Stephen King, Quintilian, Rudolf Flesch, E M Forster and a good many others I'd not heard of. Each essay begins with a "toolbox", which is Clark's take-away from the books described, and ends with a few short exercises. A quote on the back of the jacket refers to Clark's "folksy and gentle voice", but it's actually a much better book than that quote or the subtitle suggests. The advice may pr may not be folksy and gentle, but it's good advice. And I have now been introduced to a number of writers that I'd not heard of, who seem to be worth following up (and have already placed one book, On the Origin of Stories by Brian Boyd, on hold). And on p 307 I found this:

Both philosophy and literary art are ways of thinking, ways of clarifying our understanding of the world and human experience.

>76 haydninvienna:
I do not know about there being an Anthony Storr connection, but Will Storr’s book relies heavily on the opinions and findings of psychologists, so I would not surprised, especially as I do not believe it is a very common name.

>80 haydninvienna:
This looks very interesting. I feel I am a fish in a barrel.

>80 haydninvienna:
After reading your comment about Anthony Storr I read an article about him. A quote from the article is below. I believe it matches the idea expressed in the quote in your post.

“I just felt the need to explain to myself what the hell I thought I was doing," he said. "For me, that is the motive for writing anything. I get intrigued by a puzzle, and writing a book is the best way to solve it."

Storr died in 2001 at the age of 80. He had three daughters so Will Storr could be a grandson.

>83 pgmcc: Eyhh??? That would have required that either one of the daughters married someone called Storr or that young Will was born out of wedlock.

>84 hfglen:
Correct. That’s what I get for posting while I am half asleep.

>80 haydninvienna: I went and investigated Murder Your Darlings. I am reigning in my purchasing at the moment (or at least trying to do so) but this is definitely on the list for when I feel I may again splurge. It sounds interesting although it seems unlikely that I will have read many of the names he draws from -- Quintillian, Flesch, Artistotle.

>86 jillmwo:
...for when I feel I may again splurge.

Well, it is 15:49 here at the moment. I give you to 19:00 hrs Irish time.

>87 pgmcc: I'm snorting a little bit at your lack of faith.

>88 jillmwo:
It is not a lack of faith. It is a strong belief in your bibliophilia.

Reading Curious English Words and Phrases by Max Cryer. Just what it says on the tin: a compendium of "curious words and phrases" with explanations and derivations. In the little essay for the Australian expression "ratbag"*:

At a conference in Toronto where on-the-spot translations were being provided, an Australian's reference to some politicians as "a pack of ratbags" caused total bewilderment among the translators, who told the various delegates that the politicians were "a lot of bags in which rats were being carried".

PLEASE PLEASE CAN SOMEONE AUTHENTICATE THIS. I would so love to see a citation.

*Cryer's meaning: "an ill-disposed or worthless person, possibly with near-criminal tendencies". More generally, an idiot ; a person who talks wildly or foolishly.

A recent experience makes me slightly more hopeful for the world.

Mrs H has a disability parking permit, which is usually fixed to the inside of the car windscreen with a suction cup. This afternoon, in the course of a generally sh**ty day, I noticed that it wasn't there. Of course, most of the time we don't notice it. But I uttered a few curses and after we got home I printed an application for a replacement and planned to go to the Transport office at Mt Gravatt, a few km away, and apply for a replacement. (No fee and not much bother, but still ...). Coming back from the shop just now, I stopped to look in our mail box, and inside was a Queensland Government brown envelope stamped "Calamvale Police Station". Guess what was inside? Plus a police business card on which someone had written "Handed in 11:10 24 January 2025".

Here's the best bit. Although the police station is quite near our house, it's in a side street which we haven't been in for quite some time. Therefore, someone had to have gone out of their way to go to the police and hand it in. Wish I knew who, so I could thank them.

>91 haydninvienna:
Lovely story.

Wow that is nice. Restores some faith in humanity which I think we all need these days.

>91 haydninvienna: That is so nice. I agree with >93 Bookmarque:, it restores some faith in humanity.

>91 haydninvienna: Very good to hear!

>91 haydninvienna:. Now that's splendid. Good to know that there are still kind strangers in this world.

>91 haydninvienna: An act of random kindness. :) They do still happen, then! Great story.

Since you'll never know who did it, just thank them by paying it forward. I guess that's all any of us can do.

>97 terriks: Agreed.

Picked up A Poem for Every Night of the Year at the library this morning, and found this:

Property for Sale
by Rachel Rooney
Two houses up for sale.
One stick, one straw.
Both self-assembly.
See pig next door.

Also a couple of clerihews (both by E C Bentley) I haven't seen before:

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Lived upon venison.
Not cheap, I fear
Because venison's deer.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Whose very name connotes Art
Thought flutes untunable and otophagic
Till he made one that was magic.

>98 haydninvienna: These are great! A fun read.

>98 haydninvienna: My uncle who lectured in English long ago, made one that bears repeating on a long-forgotten local politician:

So D.F. Malan
Is now Dr. the Hon.
In a courtesy title
The meaning's not vital.

>100 hfglen: Likewise, to quote Dr Johnson, "In lapidary inscriptions a man is not on oath".

>98 haydninvienna:. I absolutely love Rachel Rooney's Property for Sale. Chortling.

>91 haydninvienna: That's a lovely story :)

I have a paper copy of Booker's The Seven Basic Plots on the floor by the chair but got distracted by a couple of other books.

Up in #80 I mentioned On the Origin of Stories by Brian Boyd. It isn't quite what I expected. Only after reading quite a bit did I pick up the point of the title — it's a reference to On the Origin of Species, and the subtitle contains the word "evolution". Duh! It's a theory of literature (and art generally, and play) as an evolutionary adaption. It's also a determined attack on literary Theory (the death of the author etc). Point is though, an evolutionary approach makes space for literary criticism in the old-fashioned (pre-Theory) sense, and Boyd demonstrates this by giving a very detailed critical analysis of two works: The Odyssey and Horton Hears a Who!.

I'm not going to recommend this book: it simply wasn't what I expected. No doubt it is an excellent book in its own way, but it's very detailed, and it tells me more than I needed to know, really. I skipped first few chapters, about evolution as an idea, because I'm reasonably familiar with it. Having some time ago read Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel C Dennett, I should have seen the Boyd book coming. Boyd's bibliography includes Dennett's book, incidentally.

And in #73, I mentioned Robertson Davies and his Jungian world-view. I may be putting ideas into Davies's head by asserting that he had such a view, but his novel The Manticore (second volume in his Deptford Trilogy) is an account of a Jungian analysis. David Staunton QC, a successful criminal barrister in Toronto, has always had a problematic relationship with his very wealthy father. Then one night Staunton père is dragged out of Toronto harbour drowned in his car — it seems that he drove the car over the dock and into the water at speed. But in his mouth there is a stone, a chunk of "pink Ontario granite about the size and shape of a hen's egg". David has been drinking heavily for quite some time, and after an embarrassing incident at a theatre one night he takes a flight to Zürich and begins the analysis.

I first read Davies's novels many years ago, but have held off re-reading them until now. I have all 11 novels, and can actually put my hand on 10 of them right now. Davies's novels I do recommend.

Not entirely surprisingly, having just read The Manticore, I am now reading the first book, in the Deptford Trilogy, Fifth Business. I liked this sentence: "It was characteristic of Boy (Staunton père, see above) throughout his life that he was always the quintessence of something that somebody else had recognised and defined."

Now finished the third in the Deptford Trilogy, World of Wonders. I'll be digesting these three novels for some time, I think. As to reading long books, the copy I've been reading has all three in a single volume, 825 pages. I read the whole lot in three days, and I kind of want to start at the beginning of Fifth Business and read the whole lot through again.

ETA If I can read an 800-odd-page trilogy in three days, why aren't I reading some other long books?

EATA I could have sworn that I actually owned all three of the trilogies, but I can't find the Deptford Trilogy in my catalogue, even among the few books I have listed as "missing". The library copy that I was reading justifies the statement that I have all 11 as of now, but I've now ordered a copy so that I will actually own them.

>106 haydninvienna:. 825 pages in three days? Even given your familiarity with the material, that's still impressive engagement.

>107 jillmwo: I'm now debating whether I should re-start the Deptford Trilogy or go upstairs and take the Cornish Trilogy down and read it. One strike against the latter is that in the first volume, The Rebel Angels, there's a murder committed with what David Langford called "inventive nastiness" (although apparently it wasn't Robertson Davies who did the inventing — apparently the relevant method had been used to murder a notable English scholar and critic); anyway I remember being pretty squicked out by it the first time I read the book.

Second, I'm still processing. The concept of "eating" another person (in a psychic or spiritual sense) gets a considerable run. Most of the characters are either eaters or eaten; the only ones I'm sure are neither are the "fifth business" himself, Dunstan Ramsay; David Staunton; and probably the "theatre autocrat", Liselotte Vitzlipützli. Boy Staunton was a great eater of other people but was himself eaten by his second wife, who engineered his appointment as Lieutenant Governor* of Ontario and thereby (partly) precipitated his suicide. He may also have been eaten at some point by the Prince of Wales (the one who briefly became King Edward VIII).

Nearly every character has at some time in his or her life been known by another name. I think there's something like a symbolic rebirth here. Even Ramsay, who is "Dunstan Ramsay" for most of the books, was christened "Dunstable Ramsay" and was given his new name as a kind of serious joke by a lover. Grand champion is Magnus Eisengrim, the conjuror, whose story makes up most of World of Wonders. He is known by at least five names at different times. In The Manticore, David Staunton has another kind of symbolic rebirth when he has an exceedingly unpleasant experience in a cave in Switzerland.

Then there's the obscure jokes. The title of the first book, Fifth Business, is supposedly based on an old practice in European opera and theatre described in the epigraph, which is presented as a quotation from a nineteenth-century Danish book on theatrical practice. The book is real; the quotation is not, as Davies acknowledged when asked to give its source. I suspect that "Liselotte Vitzlipützli" hides another obscure joke: her real surname is Naegeli, but she needed a suitable name for a "Theatre Autocrat". When asked, she says that Vitzlipützli is the name of the smallest devil that attends Mephistophilis in the old pre-Goethe German Faust play. I'm not sure. I can't find a Faust play earlier than Goethe, and I understand that the Faust legend is based on old chapbooks which are not plays. I can't find any list of demons attending Mephistophilis in them either. But I discovered that the popular German writer Karl May has a character called "Professor Vitzliputzli". If Davies really took the name of the character from Karl May, Liselotte's little speech about the old Faust play strikes me as a typical piece of misdirection by a conjuror.

*The UK Penguin edition spells it "Lieutenant-Governor". The form without the hyphen is correct in Canada.

>108 haydninvienna: Speaking under correction and without checking, I believe that "Lieutenant Governor" was the correct form in 19th-century Natal, too.

>109 hfglen: Whereas in Oz we call the Big Cheese the "Governor-General" (with the hyphen) and the State Governors just "Governor".

I had to go out this afternoon in the car and wanted something new, and I noted that Audible on the phone would play through the car system courtesy of Apple CarPlay, so I gave it a go. It works! Listening to Dancing by the Light of the Moon by Gyles Brandreth, read by the man himself. Fun. I have the paper book as well, and flipping it open more or less at random I find three clerihews written by W H Auden, no less:

Lord Byron
Once succumbed to a Siren:
His flesh was weak,
Hers Greek.

Oscar Wilde
Was greatly beguiled
When into the Café Royal walked Bosey
Wearing a tea-cosy.

Sir Henry Rider Haggard
Was completely staggered
When his bride to be
Announcec "I am She!".

>109 hfglen: One reason for ours was that Natal was regarded as an outlying district of the Cape (Colony), while each of your States had the same status as the Cape. Natal got a fully-fledged Governor with representative government c. 1857.

This must be a unique moment: Mrs H and I are both reading books with James Patterson's name on the cover ("on the cover" rather than "by" for well-known reasons). Normally, JP isn't my style, but I picked up a book called The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians, by JP and Matt Eversmann. Little essays by bookstore owners and staff, and librarians. I discover that JP has a foundation that gives grants to help independent bookstores. More power to JP for that at least.

I still think Brisbane doesn't have enough indie bookstores. The only one I know of in the city centre, where real estate is expensive, is Pulp Fiction (http://www.pulpfiction.com.au/  — SFF and crime and whatnot) which is actually pretty good. All the other new bookstores in the city centre are parts of the Dymocks and QBD chains. There are some indie booksellers in the suburbs, but Brisbane is a big place!

A few posts back I mentioned A Poem for Every Night of the Year. I woke up in the middle of the night thinking of Kipling's poem "Infantry Column" (more often called "Boots"), which is the poem for 12 February. It's a bit long to put into a post, but the text is here. The poem enforces its own rhythm (standard infantry marching pace, 120 paces per minute), and I can't read it without hearing in my head Peter Dawson singing it, in a musical setting that he wrote himself.

I see that a reading of the poem from 1915 has been used in the forthcoming horror film 28 Years Later.

>113 haydninvienna: It's wonderful in its way, isn't it? Kipling has a way with rhythms.

>114 jillmwo: In its own way, yes. It's one of a number of poems that I hear as songs. I mentioned Masefield's "Sea Fever" a while back, which I hear in John Ireland's setting, sung by Bryn Terfel; "Drake's Drum" by Sir Henry Newbolt, set by Charles Villiers Stanford, and sung by Benjamin Luxon or Owen Brannigan; and the granddaddy of all, Goethe's poem "Der Erlkönig", set by Schubert and sung by nearly every lieder singer ever, but mostly by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. For a long time after our first child was born, I couldn't listen to performances of this song: it was just too close to the bone, so to speak: "In seinen Armen das Kind war tot." Brrrr!

Did you know that the great Cleo Laine and her husband John Dankworth set some of Shakespeare's sonnets as songs?

For reasons both economic (single retiree income) and practical (too many books already), I don't buy books much now. However, I've bought two recently, and both arrived yesterday. The first was the copy of The Deptford Trilogy that I mentioned in #106. The second was Getting to Know the Birds in Your Neighbourhood by Darryl Jones. I bought this because I wanted to know more about the local bird life other than the obvious ones like cockatoos. Jones is a professor of Ecology at Griffith University, which is just up the road. It's Australian birds, of course, so will be of limited interest to non-Oz LTers, but if you can get a look at it on Libby, do so. The photographs are stunning — the picture of a gang-gang* on the cover is only the start.

Jones's descriptions of the birds have a certain style to them. For example, of the Australian white ibis, he says "Quintessential urban survivor, here whether we like it or not. Bin Chicken and proud of it." The ibis is often called "bin chicken" (or worse things) because of its reputation as a scavenger.

*Yes, there is an Australian cockatoo species called "gang-gang". They used to be fairly common around Canberra, common enough that they are the faunal emblem of the Australian Capital Territory. Now in serious decline because of habitat loss and the population losses during bushfires.

>116 haydninvienna: "Bin Chicken" -- maybe one day someone should tell you what Sacred Ibises eat!

>116 haydninvienna: the picture of a gang-gang* on the cover Once you said that, I had to go look for what really appeared on the cover. Quite a dramatic impression!

>118 jillmwo: Me too. Quite a showy gang member.

>117 hfglen: Much the same as what bin chickens eat, I assume. (Checks the all-knowing) Yup.

I was wandering around in a shopping centre some way from our usual haunts this morning and spotted a LifeLine store. LifeLine is an Australian charity that basically does phone counselling: they used to be focused on suicide prevention but they go broader now, according to their advertising. I like them because one of their main fundraising activities is huge book sales: every three months here, and in other major centres as well. I popped in, y'know, just to have a quick look, and what leaped out at me but an actual copy of The Cello Suites: In Search of a Baroque Masterpiece by Eric Siblin. I read this from the library as an ebook last year, and I was astonished to find it there. So now I have my very own copy at a charity-shop price.

>116 haydninvienna: Very sorry to hear about the decline of the "gang-gang." It's bad enough that we are driving ourselves into extinction, but we're dragging just about everything else with us.

>120 haydninvienna: It's always nice when you happen upon a desirable title in such circumstances.

>120 haydninvienna: What a great find!

As I mentioned above, I've been listening to Dancing by the Light of the Moon in the car. I liked this:

The British
by Benjamin Zephaniah
Take some Picts, Celts and Silures
And let them settle,
Then overrun them with Roman conquerors.

Remove the Romans after approximately four hundred years
Add lots of Norman French to some
Angles, Saxons Jutes and Vikings, then stir vigorously.

Mix some hot Chileans, cool Jamaicans, Dominicans.
Trinidadians and Bajans with some Ethiopians,
Chinese, Vietnamese and Sudanese.

Then take a blend of Somalians, Sri Lankans, Nigerians
And Pakistanis,
Combine with some Guyanese
And turn up the heat.

Sprinkle some fresh Indians, Malaysians, Bosnians
Iraqis and Bangladeshis together with some
Afghans, Spanish, Turkish, Kurdish, Japanese
And Palestinians
Then add to the melting pot.
Leave the ingredients to simmer.

As they mix and blend allow their languages to flourish
Binding them together with English.
Allow time to be cool.

Add some unity, understanding, and respect for the future
Serve with justice
And enjoy.
Note: All the ingredients are equally important. Treating one ingredient better than another will leave a bitter unpleasant taste.
Warning: An unequal spread of justice will damage the people and cause pain.
Give justice and equality to all.

Given Zephaniah's life (look him up), the last line has to be read as an aspiration.

>124 haydninvienna: I liked that, thanks for posting it.

More poetry, of a sort. I'm reading Wendy Cope's Collected Poems* and found this ("Strugnell's** Sonnets", xi) :

Shall I compare a summer's day to you
Or not? You know how miserable it gets:
May winds rough up a darling bud or two
And English summers always take short lets.
Sometime "Phew what a scorcher! " we all say
And often is the weather dull and cold;
And everyone goes off a bit some day —
It's either bad luck or they're growing old.
But, thanks to me, your summer is immortal,
Your looks shall be preserved from year to year,
Nor shall Death brag you've wandered through his portal
When anyone who reads can find you here.
While men can breathe you'll live in this my song —
At least, I hope so but I could be wrong.

*Have you any idea how many books on LT are called "Collected Poems"?

**"Strugnell" seems to be a shot at Philip Larkin. Strugnell's sonnets are sort of parody versions of Shakespeare's sonnets, as this one obviously is.

>126 haydninvienna:

I enjoyed that. Thank you.

It is interesting that there is no copyright on book titles, even those as esoteric as, “Collected Poems”.

I'll give Wendy Cope all the stars (not just five). This is too good not to share:

On the Death of Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Although I don't believe in the afterlife,
today I can't help but imagine
the Arch's arrival in Paradise.

As he emerges through the clouds,
his face radiant, the fanfare
of heavenly trumpets begins to swing

and all the angels are moving to the beat
as he dances, laughing with happiness,
into the arms of his Saviour.

>128 haydninvienna: Wow. All the stars, indeed. Thank you for sharing.

>129 Alexandra_book_life: Wendy Cope is just marvellous. I have a couple of her earlier books. One is called Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, which is also the title of this poem:

Making cocoa for Kingsley Amis

It was a dream I had last week
And some kind of record seemed vital.
I knew it wouldn't be much of a poem
But I love the title.

Not all of her poetry is funny or even cheerful: some poems have a bitter little twist. Something like a mix of Ogden Nash and Dorothy Parker.

Those two poems are great. The Archbishop Tutu one is a lovely homage to a great human being.

>130 haydninvienna:. This one made me chortle out loud! (And yes, there are times when one really wants to bellow at publishers that "Collected ANYTHING" makes discovery of the publication difficult!!!)

Thank you for sharing the poetry. I especially love >124 haydninvienna: and >128 haydninvienna:.

>126 haydninvienna: Nice - I liked it!

Sad news this morning: Roberta Flack has gone. My opinion of her is really based on one song. I think her version of "The first Time Ever" is as close to perfect as any pop song is ever likely to get (even though Ewan MacColl, who wrote the song, hated it). Her own piano, spare Bucky Pizzarelli guitar, Ron Carter on bass (pure magic itself, as ever) ....

Yes I have seen Play Misty for Me.

Finished The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt. I thought I'd taken a BB on this from someone in the Pub, but apparently not — seems I must have been hit in one of the places I lurk. It's evidently a popular book: I put in a library hold for it and had to wait for quite a while. It was worth the wait though. It tells the story of Lucretius's philosophical poem De Rerum Natura (usually translated On the Nature of Things, although the Rolfe Humphries translation, which I have, calls it The Way Things Are). Lucretius died in 55BCE, and not much is known about his life. Nothing else written by him survives. The poem was well known and highly regarded until the rise of Christianity*, but it was too inconsistent with Christian orthodoxy to be allowed to thrive**, and was almost completely forgotten for over a thousand years, until in 1417 the humanist Poggio Bracciolini found a copy in a monastic library somewhere in Germany. Once again it was quickly recognised as a major threat to orthodox belief, but samizdat copies circulated, and it became influential among European humanists (to the extent that they could reconcile its philosophy with Christian orthodoxy, at least publicly); and eventually the new technology of printing made its suppression impracticable. Giordano Bruno, burned as a heretic, knew it well; Machiavelli copied out his own copy; it seems to have influenced Sir Thomas More; Montaigne's own copy survives, much annotated in Montaigne's own hand*** (and Montaigne directly quotes Lucretius dozens of times). Shakespeare apparently knew it, or knew of it. Shakespeare's contemporary Ben Jonson owned a copy, which survives. And it was seemingly one of Thomas Jefferson's favourite books: he had at least five copies in Latin, and copies of translations into English and at least two other languages.

Greenblatt makes a case that the rediscovery of Lucretius's poem created the modern world, in some sense. I'm not entirely convinced but I don't really care. The book is a very good read indeed.

*It is believed, on what seems to me rather slight evidence, that there was a copy in the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum.

**The poem is an exposition of the philosophy of Epicurus, who held that the gods existed but had nothing to do with human beings, and specifically did not reward or punish; that there was no afterlife; and that nothing existed but atoms and the void. Jefferson's affection for Lucretius evidently had reason: very late in his life, he declared in a letter "I am an Epicurean".

***A digital copy of this is available on line: http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR-MONTAIGNE-00001-00004-00004/1l

>136 haydninvienna: At least two YouTube videos tell us that at least two teams have worked out ways of using 21st-century technology to read the Herculaneum papyri (which do seem to be mostly works of Epicurean philosophy) without unrolling them. I await the results with interest.

>137 hfglen: Greenblatt mentions this, and also that the villa appears to have housed a school of Epicurean philosophy. I said that the evidence seemed slight, but that doesn’t make it implausible that there was a copy of Lucretius among the scrolls.

>136 haydninvienna: That sounds fascinating. Did you read the poem first and then this book? Or had you read it before?

>139 clamairy: It is fascinating. I read the poem years ago and more recently read it again up to the end of Book IV. I can't find my copy at the moment though. I wouldn't try to read the Project Gutenberg text of Leonard's translation: I don't know how accurate that translation is, but it's as clunky as any Victorian minor poetry. The Trevalyan one, also on Gutenberg, isn't complete but it reads more smoothly. I've seen the Humphries translation praised for its readability and it seems to be still in print.

Funny those Romans. They made great poetry out of subjects that aren't matter for poetry now. Virgil (a near contemporary of Lucretius) wrote the Georgics about farming. Lucretius wrote De Rerum Natura about Epicurean philosophy.

>140 haydninvienna: I'm going to see if I can find it as an audio book. Thank you.

Well, I see I will have to do some research on who did the translations, as Audible has three different versions available. All in the 8-9 hour range.

>141 clamairy: I can see 4, all of which are said to be "public domain", which I'm guessing means they use the Leonard translation.

I had a look at Apple Books as well, which has a good many more, but again they generally don't tell you which translation they use.

This is an issue, I think. Apart from giving credit where credit's due, it's even more important for an audiobook because you need to get some idea of how readable it is. With an audiobook you can't easily go back and re-read passages where the syntax wasn't clear. The only way you can know that in advance is to know who the translator was so you can "pre-read" it.

>142 haydninvienna: Oh, I tend to hit rewind all the time. That is not an issue. I will do some research. Wish me luck.

>143 clamairy: I do.

>135 haydninvienna: I'm actually surprised no one else mentioned Roberta Flack. I can't say I'm a big fan, but her songs were inescapable (and good) back in the day.

>145 Karlstar: She was an exceptionally talented singer. I can't say I was a huge fan of everything she did, but there's no debating that clear, precise voice.

>146 terriks: "Clear, precise": exactly.

>75 pgmcc: I found The Science of Storytelling in the library this morning while idly browsing. I'll let you know.

>148 haydninvienna:
Very good. I hope you find it worthwhile.

>146 terriks: >147 haydninvienna: Absolutely. Great description.

You may remember that I’ve quoted Coleridge’s poem “Frost at Midnight” more than once. As I said before, "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." And I'm re-posting this now because I've just found it on YouTube, read by Sir Ian McKellen. It all but reduced me to tears. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OeQJBee-Ck

>151 haydninvienna: Lovely. Thank you.

>152 MrsLee: No worries.

Here's something that popped up on Atlas Obscura: In Defense of Turkish Delight. The GD relevance is, of course, Edmund's regrettable gluttony in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (and possibly Lord Peter Wimsey's use of it to catch a murderer, which I've posted about before). I have been known to buy it.
Just for completeness, here's Adam Liaw's recipe.

ETA We have that episode of Adam Liaw's show on now. The format of the show is that Adam has two guests for each episode, and each of them cooks, and there is a theme. The theme is "favourite books", and the guests on this episode are a journalist and a professional chef. When Adam announces that he's cooking a dish from The Lion ..., neither guest has to be told what the "dish" was.

EATA Worth watching for Julia Zemiro's demonstration of how to eat an artichoke.

>154 haydninvienna: I have a weakness for cherry-flavour Turkish delight which I buy loose from the Turkish deli at the Monday and Friday markets. I have tried other flavours, but I'm not somebody who can tolerate citrus, and other flavours tend to come across as too sweet. Mint and pomegranate are OK. The other interesting thing he has (along with the olives and dolmades) is marinaded shallot; not the usual thing that is thought of as shallots (mini-onions) but Persian shallot (Allium stipitatum) which is more like a solid bulb. I use it when I cook Babylonian recipes.

>154 haydninvienna: That Atlas Obsura article is wonderful and I thoroughly enjoyed it! But looking at their recipe -- wow, 4 cups of sugar?

>156 jillmwo: Claudia Roden has:

500 g glucose
2.5 kg granulated sugar
375 g cornflour
Juice of 1 lemon
1 tsp powdered mastic
Food colouring
3 tbsp orange blossom or rosewater
90-120 g chopped almonds or pistachios

Even scaled down it will be horrendously sweet...

>154 haydninvienna: My teeth hurt just looking at those fabulous photos. (I do remember imagining something magnificent while reading those books as a youngin'.)

>154 haydninvienna: Fascinating article, thank you. I've never had turkish delight, I think the closest I could get was the candy 'mint leaves' my mother used to buy way back when, which appear to be similar, but much simpler.

Just looking at Adam Liaw's recipe linked above and comparing it with Claudia Roden's, the proportions of starch and white sugar in the two look to be the same but Claudia Roden's recipe has 500 g of glucose in it as well. Glucose isn't as sweet as white sugar but would still add to the sweetness. I wouldn't be surprised if Adam's recipe is adapted from the Roden one, scaling down the quantity and eliminating the glucose. One of Adam's repeated comments about desserts is "not too sweet", used as a compliment. >157 Maddz: , what does the Roden recipe do with the glucose?

I've eaten a reasonable amount of Turkish delight/lokoum* from time to time, and not found it sweeter than, say, your average milk chocolate.

*Which I've also seen labelled "Greek delight" and even "Cypriot delight".

>160 haydninvienna: "Put the glucose and the granulated sugar in a large pan with 600 ml water. Stir well and bring to the boil."

She does talk about how the commercial confectioners have an automatic stirrer for the long cooking process once the starch is added to the sugar syrup; presumably some kind of paddle arrangement.

Yes, the 'real' rahat lokum isn't that sweet - it's abominations like Fry's Turkish Delight that is. It's certainly less sweet than the Hazer Baba Apple Tea I used to get.

>154 haydninvienna: My children and I made a batch of Turkish Delight once. I believe the recipe was from the Narnia Cookbook, but it's been so long I don't remember clearly. I do remember that we liked it better than we thought we would, and we all decided that it wasn't worth the trouble to make it because we are mostly chocolate fans.

>162 MrsLee: I remember reading the Roden recipe when I got my first copy of A Book of Middle Eastern Food (the Penguin paperback) and thinking it would be a huge amount of fuss and bother. It might be something to do for a work pot-luck (for a Public Health department, we are astonishingly bad at practising what we preach). There's usually something highly sugary on our snack shelf...we won't talk about the number of different versions of the Hungry Caterpillar cake that turned up today.

I did once cook a balouza from the book, and even that was a fiddle.

>163 Maddz: Now I need to know what a Hungry Caterpillar cake is.

>164 MrsLee: One of these: https://assets.sainsburys-groceries.co.uk/gol/8007702/1/2365x2365.jpg

Obviously based on The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Pretty well all major food retailers here have versions. The reason for the glut in the office is that one of my colleagues was taste-testing them...

>165 Maddz: Thank you. I was envisioning a cake that incorporated all the foods the caterpillar ate!

Back to our usual literary musings. I've just taken Long Live Latin by Nicola Gardini out of the library, and on the very first page I find this:

For many people, Latin is useless. I won't enter into a discussion on the meaning of "utility," a concept with variations and stratifications that are centuries in the making, and which itself merits an entire book. What I will say here, however, is that those "many people"—civilians, politicians, professionals in every field—have a sadly (and dangerously) limited idea of education and human development. What their focus on "utility" betrays is the belief that, in the end, knowledge amounts to know-how, that thought should be immediately adapted toward a practical aim. But if that were the case, knowledge would hardly be useful: we'd have surgeons, plumbers, and not much else, given that machines are growing more and more responsible for satisfying our primary needs. Eventually the surgeon or plumber will disappear too. And if such is the fate of knowledge, that it be surrendered to machines—or, as we put it more often these days, to technology—what exactly will there be for humans to know?

Do you think the universe is trying to tell me something?

>167 haydninvienna:
Great quote. After reading that one would be afraid not to read the whole book lest they be lumped in with the “many people”.

>167 haydninvienna: I think it will be a while before the plumber disappears! I think the universe is indicating that you should keep on doing what you are doing, reading and learning.

Here's a bit of a walk around my cluttered mind. I'm writing a little piece of fiction (strictly for my own amusement) and it has a wedding in it. Marriage law in Australia is a Commonwealth (national) matter, under the Marriage Act 1961. Just to make sure I had the details right, I looked at the Act and I'm really quite impressed with its simplicity and elegance. First, a marriage can be legally celebrated anywhere and at any time (Mrs H and I were married on top of a mountain overlooking Canberra). There has to be an authorised celebrant (who could be a minister of religion or an authorised civil celebrant) present and certain pre-ceremony formalities (establishing the parties' identities and legal capacity to marry and such) have to have been carried out. But once that's all done all you need is the happy couple, the celebrant and two adult witnesses. The celebrant has to say:

I am duly authorised by law to solemnise marriages according to law.

“Before you are joined in marriage in my presence and in the presence of these witnesses, I am to remind you of the solemn and binding nature of the relationship into which you are now about to enter.

“Marriage, according to law in Australia, is the union of 2 people to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life.”

.Each party then has to say:

I call upon the persons here present to witness that I, A.B. (or C.D.), take thee, C.D. (or A.B.), to be my lawful wedded wife (or husband, or spouse).

In each case the Act adds "or words to that effect".

That's it. Five sentences. Once each party has uttered the required single sentence, the marriage is complete. No need for "I now pronounce you husband and wife", no need for rings. Of course, people can and do elaborate it. The celebrant has to prepare marriage certificates in triplicate, but those are evidence, and a marriage could be valid even if no certificates were prepared.

>170 haydninvienna: How would it be valid with no certificates, or is it assumed those are filed at some point?

>170 haydninvienna: The civil focus is on the key elements -- the choice between two people being made freely, the presence of a celebrant and two witnesses. I really quite like this.

>171 Karlstar: There's provision for the Minister* to issue a certificate if, for example, the celebrant dies before completing it, or in "other special circumstances". The certificate is for the parties, and for the State or Territory Registrar of Marriages. You had to ask, didn't you?

The reason why marriage and divorce are Commonwealth matters is supposed to be that one of the Founding Fathers had been divorced in one colony and wanted to remarry in another, and got into difficulty with the recognition of the divorce. He made sure that Australia's marriage and divorce law would be Australia-wide. Even then, the first Commonwealth divorce law wasn't made until 1959, and till then the grounds for divorce could and did vary from State to State.

*If an Australian Act says "the Minister" it means "the Minister who is for the time being charged with the administration of this Act". If you don't already know, you find out by looking in a separate document called the Administrative Arrangements Order, which is issued by the Governor-General every six months. The Order lists all the Acts currently in force and specifies which Minister is responsible for each. For the Marriage Act, the Minister is the Attorney-General. Most Departmental websites also list the Acts that the Department and its Minister are responsible for.

I got distracted from reading Long Live Latin (see #167), but I'm back with it now, and on the third page of the introduction, I find: "Beauty is the face of freedom. What all totalitarian regimes have most strikingly in common is their ugliness, which spreads to every aspect and form of life ...". I name no names.

>173 haydninvienna: I did, and thank you for indulging my curiosity!

>174 haydninvienna: Lol!

>174 haydninvienna:. Looking forward to the final review of this one. It's tempting in terms of topic, but given that I've never really learned much of the languate, I'm just not sure if it's for me.

>175 Karlstar: Absolutely no worries! You know how much I love to show this sort of thing off.

>176 jillmwo: Not sure you're going to get a final review. Having read a bit further, and my misgivings being the same as yours, I'm not sure I'll continue.

Most recent bit of reading: Chapter 17 of Right Ho, Jeeves. This is the scene where Gussie Fink-Nottle gives out the prizes at Market Snodsbury Grammar School. This has been called the funniest scene in all of English comic writing. And OMG the writing! Douglas Adams wrote an essay that I know I've read that compares Wodehouse to Mozart and Louis Armstrong. And there's an essay on the BBC website, which quotes that essay without citing it properly:

If we’re talking about culture that makes people happy, we have to start with the works of P G Wodehouse. There are two reasons why. One reason is that making people happy was Wodehouse’s overriding ambition. The other reason is that he was better at it than any other writer in history ... what really makes Wodehouse so addictive is the prose: the phrases which appear to float along so effortlessly, but which came about because he would, he said, “write every sentence 10 times”.
...
To read any of those sentences is to marvel at the elaborate but elegant route it takes to a perfect punchline; to delight in how it glides between Shakespeare and race-track slang, between understatement and exaggeration, between gentle humour and stinging wit. “What Wodehouse writes is pure word music,” said Douglas Adams .... “It matters not one whit that he writes endless variations on a theme of pig kidnappings, lofty butlers, and ludicrous impostures. He is the greatest musician of the English language, and exploring variations of familiar material is what musicians do all day.”

As I mentioned above, I'm trying to write some fiction. After a lifetime of writing, P G Wodehouse just leaves me feeling utterly inadequate and wondering why I bother.

For similar reasons, I've just re-watched That Scene in When Harry Met Sally. God help me, Nora Ephron's dialogue! In a way, the best bit in That Scene isn't when Sally fakes the orgasm, brilliant though that is, or even "I'll have what she's having" at the end. But just before Sally starts the fake orgasm, after Harry has been blathering about how he always knows, Sally looks at him momentarily. That look is just so perfect. Without a word, Meg Ryan manages to say, in that split second, "Right, my lad, you are an idiot and I've got you on toast and I'm going to fix you good and proper."

ETA I've just sprung A$50 for a US copy of the Penguin edition of Sunset at Blandings, which has as an introduction an essay by Adams which I think is the right one. Expensive because out of print in Australia.

OMG - both Wodehouse and Adams leave me feeling the same way - why bother, it's been done better and who am I to even try? I think Right ho, Jeeves is my favorite and I can pretty much see that scene in my head. I have an old version that I digitized from a cassette tape that has Alexander Spencer reading and for me, his is the voice of Bertie and Jeeves, and of course, Gussie. I have the TV series kicking around, too, and remember the actors totally nailed the prize giving. When Gussie calls out Bertie as probably having cheated his way into his Scripture Knowledge prize, Laurie's expression is priceless.

Oh and I think that essay is included in The Salmon of Doubt which also features commentary by Stephen Fry among others. It's a treasure.

>177 haydninvienna: Those two paragraphs a lovely expression in themselves. I must go refresh my reading of Wodehouse. I've been saving his works for desperate times, but why?

>178 Bookmarque: I thought I remembered it in The Salmon of Doubt too. I have a copy, but no hope of finding it at present.

More on Long Live Latin. I did read a bit more, and I'm not sure I want to read any further, for a peculiar reason.

Specifically, I read the chapter on Lucretius's De Rerum Natura (see #136). It opens with the sentence "There's something about discovering Lucretius; it feels like stepping into heaven." Having read the chapter, I feel a bit like the description I wrote recently for another purpose, about A Mathematician's Apology by G H Hardy. As I remember that book, and noting that it's a good while since I read it and I might be remembering it wrong and I can't find my copy to check BUT after all that, this is how I thought Hardy felt after discovering Srinivasa Ramanujan:

It’s a bit sad, isn’t it? You feel that having discovered Ramanujan, he really felt like he stood at the gates of Paradise but the gate wouldn’t open. Like Salieri in Amadeus. Hardy could see just enough of what Ramanujan was doing to know that it was far beyond him.

That's kind of how I feel about Lucretius.

In other news, I'm now a member of five of the library systems in south-east Queensland. Since they all allow any Queensland resident to join for free, and ebooks are a thing, I'm now in the Ipswich system and the Gold Coast system as well as Brisbane, Logan and Redland. As with Redland, I joined the Gold Coast for one book: Palimpsest by Catherynne M Valente, which they had as a Libby ebook. According to WorldCat, the Sunshine Coast system has Mortal Love, by Elizabeth Hand (remember it?) in ebook, but the library's own catalogue denies it.

Someone in another group mentioned Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, about Facebook and its ideals or lack of them. I have no particular wish to read it, feeling as I do about Facebook, but I recommended to the Brisbane library service that they buy it. I have just had this answer from the library:

You suggested that the library purchase copies of the above mentioned title. The library has ordered copies of the title. I have placed a hold for you. You will be notified when a copy is ready for you to collect from the library.

As I said, I'm now in five of the library services. I should probably recommend the same purchase to the other four.
ETA Done.

>182 haydninvienna:
I read Mortal Love last summer. It was a BB from @jillmwo. I managed to get a physical copy and enjoyed it.

>183 haydninvienna:
Your purchase recommendations will be a big boost for the author.

>183 haydninvienna: You're a busy little beaver there, aren't you? I keep thinking about that book but I am doubtful that it would in any way assuage any of my current concerns about cybersecurity and the use of private data.

>184 pgmcc: If such a BB was flung in your direction, it was only because others were there before me.

>185 jillmwo:
You continue your attempts to avoid compliments for your shooting skill. Be proud of your achievements; do not try to deflect the praise.

>182 haydninvienna: That is a lot of library systems.

>187 Karlstar: The main point now is ebooks. I still don't love them but I can get a Libby copy from say the City of the Gold Coast library without driving half an hour or so to the nearest branch: two or three clicks and it's on the iPad. I joined Redland for one specific physical book, and Redland's nearest branch is 35 min away.

I could probably join every public library system in Queensland, but that's probably going too far.

>185 jillmwo: I am doubtful that it would in any way assuage any of my current concerns ... It's more likely to make those concerns worse. In case it's not obvious, I don't do social media at all. The only exception is FaceBook Messenger because that's what my kids use. If I had my druthers I wouldn't be on that either. And I don't use it on a computer, only on Apple devices.

>188 haydninvienna: All the libraries in our county are in one system, so I can borrow from any of them. Downloading ebooks from the library was very helpful when I couldn't get around.

Up in #177 I mentioned Douglas Adams's essay on Wodehouse. The book just arrived. I have to say that I think the essay was worth it. It's easy to forget how good a writer Adams could be too — for example the suggestion that PGW 'ended up playing Pierre Menard to his own Cervantes'. I wish it were possible to, as he suggests, drop him a postcard to thank him for the suggestion to read Jorge Luis Borges's short story "'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote'.

Re the book I mentioned in #183: All five libraries have now told me they have ordered it. Hopefully that means here will be (at least) five more copies sold around Brisbane. Sucks to Zuck. #streisandeffect for the win!

>192 haydninvienna:
The author will be grateful.

Small moments: hearing kookaburras laughing in the trees yonder, then a crow cawing just outside the window. Weird as it may seem, I like crows.

>194 haydninvienna:

I am very fond of them myself, fried or boiled. :-)

I love crows. And ravens. They're so interesting and fun to watch. Jays too. Corvids rule. About a month ago, I got a call to transport an injured crow to the wildlife rehab place I volunteer for. The people who found it brought it inside because it was so cold out. They also fed it and waited while I got to them. They requested that when it was healed (probably a broken wing from being hit by a car) it be returned to the same location because it had family. So sweet.

>196 Bookmarque: Were you able to get any photos or was it already inaccessible?

>194 haydninvienna: I put out treats for mine. And I have gotten a couple of "crow gifts" in the last few years.

I don't put food out for any wild birds, but I love having them around. Cockatoos and lorikeets screeching, kookaburras, magpies, butcherbirds, crows, even pigeons ... The Australian magpie, incidentally, is a crow-size black and white bird, not a corvid, and different to the European magpie.

Back to books. I was flicking idly through Amazon the other day when I noticed a title by Susanna Clarke that I don't have, The Wood at Midwinter. I can still afford to treat her as an insta-buy because as far as I can tell she has only four titles, all of which I now have: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories, Piranesi and this one. It's a look inside Clarke's head, in a kind of way: it's a very short tale about a young woman who is a sort of saint and the remarkable thing she does. Clarke is unique in many ways, first that she's clearly a major writer on the strength of just those four titles over a period of, what, just on 20 years since Jonathan Strange ... appeared? (Also that even though I'm very sure that Jonathan Strange ... is a masterpiece, I've never managed to finish it.) I'm not going to describe The Wood ... any further. If you haven't already done so, buy it and read it. I looked right through the list of "other members" and didn't find any GD usernames among them, and there ought to be some.

No pics. I’m there to get them help. I don’t even listen to the radio in the car because it agitates them. I was tempted by a tiny new fawn once though.

>198 haydninvienna: I have that, read it on mid-winter eve and loved it. I thought I talked about it here, but it's possible I didn't go into too much detail. Like you, I think it needs to be discovered individually.

>200 MrsLee: Oops. I did a Cmd-F on the book page and found you. and you posted about it here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/364651#8708539.

>198 haydninvienna:. We'd talked about doing a group read of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell at some point this year. But perhaps The Wood at Midwinter might be a nice one to do as well?

>202 jillmwo: Like so many other books you folks mention, I've been pondering Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but if you want to read something else by the same author, I could be talked into it.

>202 jillmwo: & >203 Karlstar: I'm up for either one!

>202 jillmwo: The Wood at Midwinter is extremely short. I read it slowly and carefully, and reread some passages and it still didn't take much more than an hour. A reread is always pleasant, I just wanted to warn that it is more of a short fable than a full work of fiction.

>205 MrsLee: Also, shouldn't it be read at Midwinter?

>206 clamairy: The atmosphere of the book is more suited to winter, but I don't think there are any rules about when to read it. Only guidelines. ;)

>207 MrsLee: It's late summer here ... Summer in Australia tends to continue till Anzac Day (25 April).

A small incident this morning that made me happy.

The backstory is that on Friday mornings, Mrs H and I usually hit the local shopping centre and go to a particular cafe, where we have coffee and Mrs H has an omelette. I do the grocery shopping while Mrs H eats breakfast. This morning I wanted to buy some wine, something I rarely do now because Mrs H with her various medications can't drink and I'm not going to drink a whole bottle. But today I wanted a couple of half-bottles (375 ml, or half a standard bottle) of decent red to cook with. When we went to the till in the bottle shop, George Michael's song 'Careless Whisper' was playing--not quite from my childhood but pretty close--and I was singing along sotto voce. The young guy at the till noticed, and said "I used to play this on the sax, I had six years of sax", and so I said "Oh, ah--then do you know the film Local Hero and its theme 'Going Home', which has a terrific sax solo by the legendary Michael Brecker?" He said not, so I recommended he investigate it, and we agreed on the famous sax solo in Gerry Rafferty's 'Baker Street'.

Sudden silly thought: I have a few playlists on the phone. I obviously need one called "Great Sax". Those three would be on it plus Margaret Urlich's song 'Boy in the Moon', which might be less familiar.

That's darn cool when little conversations like that pop into our lives. When I had all my music on an iPod, I had a playlist for great horn sections in songs. Careless Whisper would have made it on had I had any G.M. That boy could sing.

>209 haydninvienna: & >210 Bookmarque: Speaking of great sax, is Candy Dulfer still playing?

>202 jillmwo: I'd like to do a group read of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. The wood at Midwinter is on my wishlist so a group read of that would mean I'd have to buy a copy. OH NO!!!!

>203 Karlstar: There isn’t much else. If we wanted to do a group read of something by Susanna Clarke, my candidate would be The Ladies of Grace Adieu, which is shorter but not too short.

You might have to change the rating of this thread with all the sax that's going on here.

It's about mid spring here; since both hemispheres will never be mid winter at the same time it's a good way to split the difference. I agree about The Ladies of Grace Adieu. Been a long time since I read it. I remember liking it.

>214 MrsLee: I said a few posts ago that we were taking a walk through my cluttered mind ...

Once again, I think it's time for a new thread, but I need to come up with a title first.

>209 haydninvienna: I'm not familiar with the others, but Baker Street is great.

>214 MrsLee: Ha! :)

I had a little adventure this morning. I had an Amazon delivery coming — I'll tell you what it was in a moment. Got the email saying it had been delivered but the attached photo wasn't of our door, nor any other one I recognised. On the phone to Amazon, they were full of apologies and promised to deliver it by tomorrow morning. Got an email from them in which they thanked me three times for my patience — well, I hadn't yelled or got demanding — what would have been the point of that? Anyway I left them to it and got on with life.

Just now heard a knocking at our outer gate. There stood a chap of distinctly Pacific Islander appearance with my parcel in his hand (and an extremely cute little girl on his other arm). He said they had delivered it to him, he didn't know why. So I thanked him, told him how cute his little girl was, and we went our separate ways.

The books were a couple off my LT wish list: The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt (see #136) and Humanly Possible by Sarah Bakewell.

>217 haydninvienna: Nice of them to deliver the package!

>217 haydninvienna:
Glad you got your parcel and had a chance to meet the neighbours.

Speaking of sax, our eldest played the sax. I used to love her rendition of Brazil.

History has now gone around a circle and her eldest, who is now eight, is playing the saxophone.

By the way, our daughter was inspired to play sax from watching Lisa Simpson.

What a nice thing to happen! Restores a bit of faith in humanity.

>217 haydninvienna: It's nice when humanity behaves so well. You can now settle in and examine your new books.

>221 jillmwo: I’ve read both of them. These were two books I liked enough to want dead tree copies.

Yes, it is encouraging when people behave like proper people.

Peter: so Lisa is encouraging people to have sax?

Given the amount of sax in this thread already: I was surprised just now to hear a small aircraft going overhead, and a quick glance at FlightRadar24 showed that it was a Piper Twin Comanche. The surprise was its registration: VH-SEX. I wonder how hard the owner had to argue to get the Civil Aviation Safety Administration to allot that. See https://www.jetphotos.com/registration/VH-SEX.

ETA we've just been overflown by a Harvard/AT-6/Texan: https://www.jetphotos.com/registration/VH-TOA.

You're giving me the vapors with your loose moral standards down there! LOL. No way you'd get a tail reg number with that in the US. Lots of number and letter combos are off limits for license plates. too.

ADSB Exchange is what my hubby and I use for the same purpose - it's just unfiltered data and a bit unsophisticated in it's UI, but damn does it get at the nitty gritty. Sometimes we get weird ones flying over as well, but nothing compared to the Oshkosh Fly-in week. Oh man...there's a race that basically goes over the river right where we live and it's hours of non-stop light aircraft. Kind of fun though seeing that they fly low enough to see clearly with binocs.

>224 Bookmarque: Very cool website!

>223 haydninvienna: and >224 Bookmarque: I feel as if I ought to be ducking my head down, given all the fly-overs being documented.

yeah, looking at the whole unfiltered map of what's in the air on ADSB Exchange is a bit frightening. You can see ownership though which is sometimes enlightening. I used to use it all the time to track my hubby's flights on the company's now former private aircraft. Now he flies commercial (sigh) I don't use it since commercial flight trackers will work.

There's been some comment on Clam's thread involving Edvard Munch's painting The Scream, in the course of which I noted that there's a Federal election due here soon. In fact it's on 3 May (always on a Saturday in Oz). We've just received the Australian Electoral Commission's circular about the election, and I was fascinated to notice a section headed "Stop and consider--Check the source this federal election". The text is the usual stuff about recognising misinformation. I haven't seen the AEC do this before, although this will be my first federal election since 2006, so they might have started doing it somewhen in between.

And now I have a new thread title.