Peerts Stave One

Not 100% convinced I should even *do* this, because

a) May is sort of a late start;
b) I am notably lousy at the whole social media thing

but heck, I picked up a copy of Dostoevsky's The Idiot a few days ago and am having a great time with it -- it's funnier than I was expecting it to be -- so.

Tungsten Peerts is not my real name and may not be the real name of anybody real, but it's a big galaxy and there are other galaxies.

I've decided to try and recover at least some of what I've read so far this year and list it here.

1. Balukjian, Brad The Wax Pack: On the Road in Search of Baseball's Afterlife
   
2. Bishop, K. J. The Etched City
   
3. Bowler, Maria Making Time: A New Vision for Crafting a Life beyond Productivity
   
4. Castrovince, Anthony Fan's Guide to Baseball Analytics
   
5. Datlow, Ellen (ed.) The Best Horror of the Year Volume Twelve
   
6. Datlow, Ellen (ed.) The Best Horror of the Year Volume Fourteen
   
7. Dostoevsky, Fyodor The Idiot
   
8. Flexner, James Thomas George Washington and the New Nation
   
9. Frank, Joseph Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt 1821 - 1849
   
10. Frank, Joseph Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859
    
11. Gascoyne, Kevin, et al Tea: History, Terroirs, Varieties
    
12. Kingsley, Peter In the Dark Places of Wisdom
    
13. Kipling, Rudyard Short Stories Volume 1
    
14. Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan Best Ghost Stories
    
15. Link, Kelly Get In Trouble: Stories
    
16. Mair, Victor (trans.) Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu
    
17. May, Rollo Love and Will
    
18. Noon, William T. Joyce and Aquinas
    
19. Paver, Michelle Dark Matter
    
20. Suzuki, Daisetz T. Zen and Japanese Culture
    
21. Toase, Steve To Drown in Dark Water
    
22. Van Doren, Mark John Dryden: A Study of his Poetry
    

Apologies for posting twice. This is a reflection of how little I have ... ever posted.

No worries - it happens occasionally.

I love Datlow's horror collections!

>3 drneutron: She does a great job, I think, of providing a wide range of things ... which means I won't care for some of them so much, but I'd way rather have that range than 100% Lovecraft pastiches, or something.

She was briefly a coworker of mine, but I doubt she'd remember. ;^) It was back in 1999-2001.

>4 tungsten_peerts: wow, that’s pretty cool that you worked with her.

>5 drneutron: It was at scifi.com. The ~2 years I was there sorta straddled the Internet bubble bursting ...

So recent additions to my life include:

- playing piano (not so recent any more -- I started maybe 3 years ago);
- baseball (this is not new but a very unexpected resurgence of a passion from my childhood -- what's happening to me?);
- tea (I've been a coffee guy my whole life ... what the hell?)

Baseball and piano are kind of warring at the moment: when I get home from work (recently had to start coming in 5x/week -- thanks, Donald) I am typically too tired to have much concentration for sitting at the keyboard. I'm trying to move this boulder; however, I have in recent weeks too often given up and tuned in to a Cincinnati Reds game.

>7 tungsten_peerts: What sorts of teas are you drinking these days, then?

>8 scaifea: I got a Chinese tea sampler from Upton & so far I really, really like the Keemun. I also 'like' the Pu Erh, though I guess I can see why one ... wouldn't. ;)

>9 tungsten_peerts: Oh, I've never tried Keemun, but it sounds lovely. I'll let you have the Pu Erh, though...

>10 scaifea: This is the Keemun I am liking, for what it's worth.

>11 tungsten_peerts: Thanks! I'm usually a Twinings gal (and also Harney & Sons, and occasionally Taylors), but I like the look of Upton's website. I may have to make an order.

Hi, t_p! I just noticed that your first thread is a Stave, so that meant that I needed to make a visit. I'm a life-long pianist except for the past 10 years or so when I was looking after my aged mother with no piano. (I noodled with a student cello during COVID just to have something musical to do.) I encourage both of us to sit on the bench if only 15 minutes a day to work on a measure or two just to keep mind and fingers in.

I also just read The Lost Girls at the end of which the author writes about visiting the last living one, Janetta Parladé, and taking her a Fortnum Mason tin of teas. She politely rejected it saying that she was afraid she drank only China tea. He said that maybe her guests might like it. She said, "It's a pretty tin though."

AND I'm a scifi, fantasy, and horror fan, so I'll be back to see what you're reading. Enjoy LT!

>13 LizzieD: Hi back, LD! in the interest of full disclosure (sometimes this has served me ill) I have to admit that I took the 'stave' mention from Dickens' A Christmas Carol. I remember wondering as a young'n: "so what in hell's a stave?" :^)

Just started the first volume of Joseph Frank's five-book study of Dostoevsky ... because I have no life ... all I do is read and watch baseball and try to not let piano practice depress me.

Maybe I should read someone more ... uplifting! ha ha ha. Never been very good at that. :^)

Welcome to the group t_p (I like that Peggy!).

Another tea (and coffee) lover here. Lapsang Souchong is probably my smoky favourite but I do also enjoy being refreshed by Earl Grey.

I am a fan of Dostoevsky but don't believe that I would find it easy to wade through a five book study of him and his work.

>16 PaulCranswick: I definitely have to try some Lapsang Souchong!

In re: FD ... apparently Joseph Frank did a one-volume reduction of the full five volume thang, but even that runs to almost 1,000 pages. I am unsure why I take on things like this, but I have to say it reads really well (as in propulsively: not heavy going at all).

I haven't read Dostoevsky in a long, long time, t_p. I'd feel a need to make it through most of him before tackling even one volume of criticism. Wow! My reading lamp shade is off to you!

Lapsang Souchong is the first tea name I recognize here along with Earl Grey. I am a coffee lover.

Piano! Be not discouraged! I haven't even tried yet, but I know I'll start with some easier Bach to get my brain in again. Slow and steady makes for brilliance - eventually.

>18 LizzieD: re: piano. Thanks! JSB is what I started with (even pre- finding a teacher) and I wasn't sorry. The pieces in the Anna Magdalena notebook (?) were just right, I thought.

I love coffee so much that when I told my best friend I was playing around with good tea and loving it, she questioned whether she was talking to the real me. ;^)

I go hot and cold on Russian authors ... I think. I felt for a long time like the language must be particularly difficult, because most translations I'd read felt kinda clunky. However I can recall saying this to someone who knew more than I did and s/he vigorously disagreed with what I was saying, so who knows. Maybe it's just that addressing someone with name + patronymic can be such a lot of syllables!

I have read (somewhere) that the "lumpiness" of Dostoevsky is really there in the original, and that in terms of literary polish Tolstoy was far better. Somehow this has dovetailed into the difference between Plato and Aristotle for me: my brain must be ineluctably binary, or something ....

In non-book news, I just ordered a baseball.

This way I will have a baseball to thwap into my baseball glove, over and over.

I simply need to find another oldster (I mean, I presume) with whom I can toss a baseball back and forth, just for fun. As a high-level, professional hermit, I am not sure how to go about finding such a person.

This morning I finished The Idiot and wanted to pull the covers over my head.

I'm very interested in the matter of translation (why does it seem especially fraught in the case of the Russian language?). For this one I chose the Pevear / Volokhonsky trans, even though I had mixed feelings about their Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov ... I know there's been a lot of back and forth re: the merits (or lack of merits) of "P&V" but in the case of The Idiot I have to say that _something kind of clicked in_ ... it all worked ... and by the end of the novel I was both horrified (of course) and moved.

Now I need to choose a translation of Demons/Devils/The Possessed ... I read it once ages ago but I was in the midst of my first divorce, was living in my parents' basement, and was (imagine!) not in the best place mentally or emotionally. I remember almost nothing about the book.

After finishing the Dostoevsky this morning, I drove off to Worcester to watch a minor league baseball game with friends ... the first live baseball I've enjoyed in aeons. This was wonderful, but mixt in with the Dostoevsky it made for a piebald day.

The whole "baseball thing" was a complete surprise to me when it happened last year. If I remember correctly, I simply had a memory of going to a Cincinnati Reds game with my Dad, and it blossomed into a full-on Stanislavskian sense-memory that left me feeling horribly nostalgic. Next thing I knew I found a wonderful baseball book (The Glory of Their Times, by Lawrence Ritter) and I was, well, off.

Signing up for MLB.tv followed, as well as the purchase of a television (hadn't had one of those for years) which I got so I could get cable TV with the channels necessary to allow me to watch the 2024 World Series. I'm back to following "my Reds" again, and am feeling very sheepish about the decades I spent being that annoying guy who would pipe up in conversations to ask "is that a SPORTS thing?"

I've not been stupidly into Dostoevsky before, but I seem to be stupidly into Dostoevsky at the moment.

Really, most anything in Russian literature: Gogol, Pushkin.

>22 tungsten_peerts: I’ve made a habit of hitting baseball games in cities that I visit. Not been to a Reds game, but will happily if I get there some day. And if you ever get to Baltimore, would love to take in an Orioles game -Camden Yards is awesome.

>24 drneutron: I may take you up on a game in Balto, Jim ... I've wanted to visit for some time, as at least one of my odder literary heroes used to haunt Baltimore (at a bookstore called, strangely enough under the circumstances, Normal's).

I'm in the Boston area, so let me know if you are up here and want to head Fenway-wards. The Reds are going to be up here sometime -- soon, I think.

RIP Per Nørgård, Danish composer whose 3rd symphony hit me like a bag of universes.

>26 tungsten_peerts: Haven't listened to Nørgård, but you've encouraged me to do that.

One of the probably-too-many books I'm currently reading is a collection of works (mostly poetry, but some prose mixed in) by John Dryden. John DRYDEN? WHO reads John Dryden ??? any more?

That's screeched with straightforward curiosity but also some strange reader-pride that I occasionally indulge due to my penchant for reading things others don't much read. I KNOW I read some of Dryden's hits back in undergraduate school, but probably have left him well alone since, unless I hit bits of his wonderful "An Essay of Dramatic Poesy" in a theatre/lit/crit class somewhere.

I have often suffered from the illusion (?) that the Restoration -> 18th century was an age of great English prose (I mean, Laurence Sterne! Henry Fielding! Samuel Johnson!) and, in poetry, one hell of a lot of heroic couplets. So in other words if you don't like heroic couplets you most likely won't much care for the poetry of the period. This is ... sort of true? but there are heroic couplets and heroic couplets, and it must be maintained that Alexander Pope and John Dryden were capable of remarkable things within the overall "te tum te tum te tum te tum te JUNE / te tum te tum te tum te tum te MOON" framework. I sometimes think that Dryden may have surpassed Pope, here, but I'll be able to say more after I get through this rather chunky Oxford World Classics volume.

I tell you what, that Kelly Link is something else again.

My copy of Devils is in at Porter Square Books, hee hee.

When I pick it up tomorrow I might treat myself to some Gogol short stories if one of the translations I'm looking for (And the Earth Will Sit on the Moon or The Nose and Other Stories (Russian Library) is still on the shelves.

No Gogol to be found this morning. But I got my copy of Vol. 1 of A Writer's Diary in the mail ... so it's a DOSTO DAY.

To avoid potential spoilers* in my reading of Devils, I'm going to take a break from Joseph Frank's multi-volume study of Dostoevsky and return to James Thomas Flexner's multi-volume biography of George Washington (I'll be picking back up with Volume 3 of 4). Looking forward to it ... the Flexner bio is fairly revelatory. Volume 1 has some sluggish moments (where GW is essentially 'retired' for a while) but it really heats up with the second book.

* I've read it before, but remember nothing about it.

At first dip, I thought the writing in Tea: History, Terroirs, Varieties was going to be reference-work-bland, but it got better. Plus there's lots of really great pictures.

Yep, reading a book about tea. I never know whether my enthusiasms re: things are genuine enthusiasms qua the things, or just an excuse to go and read books on said enthusiasms.

Pretentious, yes, but not pompous.

I hope never pompous.

If the White House knew what was good for it (and it doesn't), it would stop trotting out Stephen Miller. Sunlight is not his friend.

That said, I would pay money to hear him say "It puts the lotion on its skin" on live TV.

He's the most skincrawly goblin this side of Roger Stone.

I eschew the use of the word oeuvre. Using oeuvre would make me feel pompous.

I can't speak for others.

I guess, yeah, I'd be up for reading ALL of Samuel Pepys' diary ... some years ago I read The Shorter Pepys which, if I recall correctly, presents the "best" 1/3 of the whole.

But then I want to read almost everything. This is a symptom or corner of my larger malady: the desire to know everything.

Well, again, almost everything. Given the amount of time I have remaining I should probably leave some things to the side, no? Yes, I'm kidding about all this but no I'm not. After all, I walk around my apartment looking at my current collection and think "I don't have enough time left in my life to finish all these, so what am I doing daring to buy any more?" And so it goes.

Some other impossibly-large reading wannas:

- Loeb Classical Library (I'm 10% through, roughly, but they keep adding volumes)
- Gibbon, Decline and Fall
- Copleston's History of Philosophy
- Proust

I'll keep adding to this.

I'm thinking of writing a future dystopia where the narrator is the only person left on Earth whose face isn't ineluctably smunched into a smart phone screen and ... oh.

>37 tungsten_peerts: I'm older than you and have more unread books than you and probably buy more additions to the library than you. It's partly greed, partly remembering the times in my life when I desired a book and couldn't afford it or had to skip a meal or two to buy it, and partly denial of my time left and the likelihood of being physically and mentally able to keep reading for the better part of it. I accept and move on.

I meant a while back to say that I'd like to reread some of the Augustan poets and novelists and hope to. I enjoyed the Leo Damrosch bio of J. Swift - really, really good stuff!
I agree completely in your assessment of translations from the Russian - stiff, clunky. For a long time I resisted reading other books in translation. Then I lucked into Murakami and his wonderful translator, so I've been willing to try new things. I have a friend here at LT who was a Russian translator and always meant to ask her whether the big guys in 19th century wrote that way or whether it was the translator's fault. She doesn't come here anymore, but I'll try to find her.

Meanwhile, Read and comment! Play the piano!! (Mine needs tuning badly. So do I. I'm at least at the point of thinking about it again and considering what I might start with: Bach or Scarlatti, something new in the prelude line, and maybe relearn a Brahms impromptu.) Good luck to both of us!

>40 LizzieD: Thank you for the swell post. :^) I'll have to look out for the Swift biography. At some point I actually read Journal to Stella but can recall almost nothing about it ...

It's such a blessing when an author 'finds' a translator who is really, really keyed in to his or her peculiar wavelengths. And some authors (lookin' at you, Mr. Dante Alighieri!) just have ... too many to choose from!

Scarlatti! I learned K. 208 some time ago and ... ohhhh, my. What a landscape those pieces are. Heavenly.

I have not made up my mind about Lapsang Souchong. Nor Pu Erh, really. I also have a Japanese green tea with toasted rice (Gen Mai? is that it?) and ... it has an odd smell/taste. Somehow very Japanese, to me (not, lands sake, that everything Japanese is 'weird'!).

Perfectly poisonous color has been added to my left-forearm tattoo of the infamous "rat-bat-spider" from _Angry Red Planet_ (1959).

As far as tea goes, Keemun is the sh*t.

I ordered a copy of Frank Chance's Diamond from my favorite local bookstore (Porter Square Books). Have recently 'discovered' Lardner's writing -- though I must reveal that, back in theatre grad school, I was in a production of Lardner's odd playlet The Tridget of Greva, and this ... piqued my curiosity for sure!

I'm on Vol. 3 of James Thomas Flexner's 4 volume biography of George Washington, George Washington and the New Nation. The whole series is outstanding, if a little old-fashioned (who cares? that's what I was looking for) at times.

Flexner does the impossible and makes the marble image come alive. Caveats re: slavery etc remain, but I have a newfound respect for this oddly little-known founding father. It's also nice to read about a leader who actually ... led, and is competent, and can write.

I'm profoundly weary of being governed by cranky children ...

... headed up by a colicky infant.

The book Witcraft has caught my eye. I really want to read it. Here is an interesting interview of the author.

Considering moving abroad for retirement: Mexico, Canada, Australia ... others?

Plato or Aristotle? For me, it's always been Aristotle, though I concede the literary superiority of the former.

(In a way this is a canard, since we don't really have Aristotle's writings, but more like ... outlines and notes, if brilliant ones).

I should have studied philosophy ... I could have been even more useless than I am.

Although I am aware that dual-book-itude becomes really unwieldy, I am thinking about going through Pound's Cantos another time with Terrell's A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound 'by my side.' I'm curious whether having some annotations to the fractal sheets of reference will improve the experience ... though a dim voice inside me tinnily screams "if you have to have a companion to understand the poem, is it a good poem ...?" and I don't really have an answer.

I am confident *nothing* will make the "Adams Cantos" less like chewing on a cud of clay, but ... well, this will likely be the final time I go through the Cantos.

Well, at least the Red Sox didn't SWEEP the Reds. I even mentioned this in my morning staff meeting composed almost 100% of baseball haters.

Wishes are ... well, feh, who cares, but I do ardently wish I had given grad school(s) a miss and had simply moved abroad. I would have been better off, I'm reasonably sure.

On a post baseball game lark last night, I began reading In the Dark Places of Wisdom. It's a weird experience. I am in some ways a brute rationalist, but I have a healthy appreciation for the numinous -- at least, the numinous of a non-supernatural variety. I am reading this book and wondering "is this Peter Kingsley a ... crank?" One of his earlier books was published by OUP so at one point, anyway, he had some cache in the scholarly world. However his later books, and his description of himself as a "mystic" have drawn (deserved?) fire.

I mean, this is published by The Golden Sufi Center Publishing (not that I have anything against any Sufis or Sufism) ... Kingsley's use of references is, well, lengthy but quite idiosyncratic. I am drifting and wondering whether this is speaking to me or not.

Sometimes pieces of music are old chestnuts because they are magnificent: Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade is one of these, I think. When you listen to a really good recording of this (like Kirill Kondrashin's, the one I'm currently enjoying), just try not getting chills at the damned drama and color of the thing.

I have to get back to making a larger effort to read books by people who are non-white/non-male. This is all part of my Radical Left-wing Agenda.

That said, another book (by a white male) I'm excited about is Journeys of the Mind. Peter Brown's bio of Augustine was absolutely breathtaking.

Apparently Reddit is for people who are 1. unable to form their own opinions and 2. unable to name their own dang cats.

Also, the reigning algorithm there is flawed: if I look at a thing because of how unbelievably stupid I think it, that should not be a signal to send me 200 more of the same sort of thing.

Goddamned computers.

In re: tea, I am currently enjoying a cuppa this:

https://www.uptontea.com/japanese-green-tea/japanese-loose-leaf-green-tea/p/V002...

Subtle and good.

I can't talk philosophy. It's a closed book to me.

You have alerted me to the Brown bio of Augustine, which interests me greatly. I'll have to keep it on my list awhile, having spent way too much $ this month on lesser goods.

Enjoy your tea. I'm happy to have another bag of Major Dickason arriving this week to keep me coffeed.

>61 LizzieD: The Brown bio of Augustine is just great. So good. I hope you like it ... I'm going to seek out other books of his.

I don't believe 1) that your appearance necessarily says anything about you, morally or otherwise, or 2) that our pets really start to resemble us after a while; NEVERTHELESS I would be surprised if Emil Bove had a dog and the dog did not look like Renfield.

Everybody knows it's the Gulf of Freedom Fries.

I keep finding books I want to read! This must stop! Aieeee.

I doubt I'll finish the books in my library before I snuff it.

Although I have *always* lived in or around cities, I don't consider myself a "city person" and there are not many cities that pop up when I think "well, I don't like living here -- where *would* I like to live?

Cities I have liked and think of: Paris, Berlin, Groningen, Oaxaca City.

That's a diverse group, but obviously there's a theme: none of them are in the US.

CBS can suck it.

I have a Ph.D., so my saying such things has incredible _gravitas_.

>67 tungsten_peerts: I have no PhD. I weigh in as I can in agreement.

My copy of the original *Augustine* came in the mail today. I look forward to it soon! (I can't possibly read everything I want to read already on my shelves before my end, but that doesn't stop book greed.)

"You like to read, don't you?"

"Almost as much as I like to breathe."

>68 LizzieD: Oohh, good! I'm trying to decide whether I'm going to order a 1000+ page encyclopedia of 19th century baseball for my birthday @_@

I am divorcing the Internet. Bye, for now, at least.