Haydninvienna, 2025/2: walking around my cluttered mind

So, having decided to end my last thread on a decidedly low note, here we are again.

The title isn't entirely original. Back in 1966 or thereabouts The Australian newspaper had a columnist named Kit Denton, whose back page column was called A Walk Around my Cluttered Mind. I've adapted it a little.

My cluttered mind is still full of poetry. For a long time Australia's best-known living poet was A D Hope. I used to think I didn't like him much: too formal, too solemn (except for the wicked satire Dunciad Minor). But I happen to have a small book of his late poems, Orpheus, and found these:

The Mayan Books
Diego de Landa, archbishop of Yucatan
—The curse of God upon his pious soul—
Placed all their Devil's picture-books under ban
And, piling them in one sin-heap, burned the whole;

But took the trouble to keep the calendar
By which the Devil had taught them to count time.
The impious creatures had tallied back as far
As ninety million years before Eve's crime.

That was enough: they burned the Mayan books,
Saved souls and kept their own in proper trim.
Diego de Landa in heaven always looks
Towards God: God never looks at him.

I love the curt little flick of the whip in the last line. And in the same small book, from the "Western Elegies", a series of five longer poems, there's this, from "III: The Loves of the Plants":

First variation: There grows a china pear in my garden;
Every springtime before the last of the frosts have departed,
I watch it falling in love by the ancient custom of pear-trees.
Naked it stood all winter, holding its breath and extending
The gun-metal gloss of its limbs in the gesture of prayer towards heaven;
Now it grows green at each tip, along every twig till one morning,
Sudden, the ecstasy breaks from every bud of its being,
The whole tree aspiring breathless in the bridal white of its blossom,
Waiting for consummation which only the bees can bring it.
Only the bees, my heart, in love with its nectar and pollen,
Though they are neuters themselves, unable to feel that fruition,
Can bring to blind, rooted plants love's fulfilment by proxy,
Although, like them, we are parted by implacable orders of distance,
Think how lucky we are not to need go-between from the insects!

Happy new thread!

Happy new thread!

You're quite right. That last line in The Mayan Books is indeed whip-sharp. Happy new thread!

Happy New Thread!

Happy new thread!

Happy new thread!

>1 haydninvienna:
I enjoyed those poems. They both end with nice little kicks.

We have two pear trees at home. The description of the tree’s annual cycle rang true for me.

>8 pgmcc: Hope lived in Canberra for the last 50 or so years of his life, so would have had plenty of opportunity to grow pear trees. As to the line "Think how lucky we are not to need go-between from the insects!", Hope's poetry dealt quite often with erotic matters: one of his contemporaries called him "Phallic Alec".

>2 hfglen:  — >8 pgmcc: Thanks all.

Here's a minor miracle, or at least something to make life a little easier. As you might recall, I'm in five local libraries. When I see mention on LT of a book that that looks interesting, hitherto I've been looking it up in the catalogue of each of them. Now I discover that there's a Firefox extension that automates it for me, and supports all five libraries. With staggering originality, it's called Library Extension. Only minor wrinkle is that it's for Firefox, and I normally use Safari for LT. Minor.

ETA it works from the recommendations pages too, which makes recommendations much easier to follow up.

Happy new thread!

Thank you for the poems.

>10 haydninvienna: That's handy!

Happy new thread!

>11 Alexandra_book_life: — >13 Sakerfalcon: Thanks all.

In my last thread I mentioned a copy of History of Him by Geoffrey Grigson, that was printed incompletely. The new copy arrived this afternoon, and it does indeed have "Gavin Ewart" written in small, neat pencil handwriting on the front endpaper.

Still reading the Hungarian Poetry - for better, for worse website. Here's a couple of new ones, which kind of fit together.

Pancake Dilemma
by George Bilgere

Another subway station blows up in Europe,
it’s right there on the front page,
and I’m about to pour some syrup on my pancakes.

But perhaps I shouldn’t be doing this.
Maybe I should just put the syrup down
out of respect for the victims and their families.

Yet who is there to witness my sacrifice,
my gesture of solidarity, however small,
with the international community?

My wife is playing with our son in the living room.
I’m at the table by myself, and I could just go ahead
and pour the syrup and smear on some butter
and think compassionately about the victims
while eating the pancakes while they’re hot.
No one will benefit from my eating cold pancakes.

Instead, I call out to my wife from the dining room,
“Another subway station blew up in Europe,
they think it’s terrorists,” but she doesn’t hear me,
the TV’s turned up for Paw Patrol.

So I just sit here quietly for a moment,
then start eating the pancakes,
trying not to enjoy them too much.**

An Alien Observer on Earth Files His Weekly Report Home
by Brian Bilston

Not much to report this week,
beyond the usual:

Received twelve racist insults.
Got beaten up twice.

Witnessed three far-right rallies.
Watched Top Gear one night.

Four more towns under water
plus two new wildfires.

Trolled on Twitter
by climate-change deniers.

Lunch with the PM
and his good lady wife.

In sum, still no sign
of intelligent life.

**One answer, as John Donne put it:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

I don't set this as poetry because it isn't, although it's often presented as such. It's part of section XVII, 'Meditation', from John Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.

>15 haydninvienna: That pancake one is very real.

>15 haydninvienna: I'm feeling the pancake one, but I'm living the alien one.
:o(

Occasionally reading books that are not poetry. This one I skimmed: A History of the World in 500 Railway Journeys. Does anyone else find the title meme "A History of the World (or whatever) in (number) (things)" wearisome? I think this book takes it a bit beyond sense. It's really a coffee-table book, and would have been better done as one, I think. The railway journeys are interesting enough, and the book is well enough produced, but "history"? It's cheating a bit to include railways that are projected but not built such as the proposed Fluglest between Reykjavik and Keflavik in Iceland. Also, the "Underground Railway" is in there. I'm not sure about railways that actually exist and are operating, but don't carry passengers, such as the Pilbara iron ore railways in Western Australia*, or "repurposed" railways such as the High Line in New York.

The famous luxury trains are in there: the Orient Express and the Blue Train between Cape Town and Pretoria, and others. The Cape to Cairo railway is in there too, even though it was never actually completed. I count 9 journeys that I've actually been on: "The Canadian" between Toronto and Vancouver; the "Rocky Mountaineer" between Vancouver and Banff; the Oresund train between Copenhagen and Mälmo; the Dubai metro; the RER between Paris and Versailles**; the Metropolitan Line of the London Underground; the Eurostar; "The Ocean", between Montréal and Halifax; the Sydney-Canberra railway.

*"They are the world's largest scheduled trains, comprising up to 330 cars. The record belongs to the 'Mount Goldsworthy' freight train, which in 2001 hauled 99,732 tons in 682 cars, coupled up to measured a massive 4.5 miles (7.3km) long." Making us rich by digging bloody great holes in the ground.

**I went to Versailles for a concert. Coming back to central Paris around 11-ish, I was probably the only "white" face in the carriage. Nobody took the slightest notice.

That's a great list of train trips. I wish I could have taken the Paris to Versailles train, but it didn't happen.

A BB hit from Jill: The Mysterious Mr Quin by Agatha Christie. This is interesting in a number of ways. Jill compared the short-story approaches of Christie and Dorothy Sayers, and I have to agree with Sayers that the Mr Quin stories are sentimental. That's not necessary a bad thing though. For reasons I'm not sure of, I kept being reminded of Chesterton's Father Brown.

I wonder if "Claude Wickam", the composer in the story "Harlequin's Lane", is a somewhat unflattering portrait of the real composer Philip Heseltine, who published his compositions under the name "Peter Warlock" (although there are undoubtedly other candidates).

>20 haydninvienna: The stories have a peculiar sort of staying power. It's not the prose style that gets you. It's the comings and goings of Mr. Quin as Mr. Satterthwaite takes action to resolve things. The hint of magic although you know it's not magic at all.

I don't recognize the name of the composer you mention at all. The stories were (for the most part) written during the 1920s although the collection didn't get published until early in the 1930s. But I imagine it's possible that she was drawing on a real-life character. Did you know that she studied music with an eye towards going pro? She really didn't have the voice to go big time with it, but she clearly was exposed to that side of things.

>21 jillmwo: "Capriol" suite appears fairly often; it's orchestrations of Renaissance pieces, and sounds remarkably like Respighi's "Ancient Airs and Dances". The omniscient Wikipedia tells me that most of his other work was songs for solo voice and piano, none of which I've ever consciously heard.

Happy new thread!

>18 haydninvienna: I see what you're saying but railways that don't carry passengers are still railways; it might be awkward to make a journey on them, though. You could make a case for the proposed-but-not-built, if they illustrated the history of the world, but the word 'journey' throws a spanner in that.

I'm not a railway person, I'm afraid, though I have been on the Metropolitan - though not end to end - and on the Eurostar . (I was on the Met line most recently last month, during our trip to Europe. I used to travel daily into, across London (when I lived there) and out to get to work in Harrow so the third leg of my commute was from Baker Street.)

>21 jillmwo: As Hugh said, 'Warlock''s Capriol Suite turns up from time to time, and the comparison with Resphigi is apposite. I had Heseltine in mind mainly because he seems to have been a bit of an oaf (but a real musician all the same), and the date would be about right. But there are certainly other candidates.

Yes, the stories, although sentimental, sort of haunt you just a little. Mr Quin, who is never quite there, is unlike any other fictional character I can think of. And why on earth did it take me till just now to realise that "Harley Quin" = "Harlequin"?

I didn't know that Christie had aspirations to be a professional singer. Sort of explains the number of not-quite-good-enough singers and dancers in the stories, maybe?

ETA: >23 humouress: Thanks! Yes, the word "journeys" was a problem for me too.

Clicking around on the Hungarian poetry site and found this, by Bill Holm:

Wedding Poem For Schele and Phil

A marriage is a risky business these days
Says some old and prudent voice inside.
We don’t need twenty children anymore
To keep the family line alive,
Or gather up the hay before the rain.
No law demands respectability.
Love can arrive without certificate or cash.
History and experience both make clear
That men and women do not hear
The music of the world in the same key,
Rather rolling dissonances doomed to clash.

So what is left to justify a marriage?
Maybe only the hunch that half the world
Will ever be present in any room
With just a single pair of eyes to see it.
Whatever is invisible to one
Is to the other an enormous golden lion
Calm and sleeping in the easy chair.
After many years, if things go right
Both lion and emptiness are always there;
The one never true without the other.

But the dark secret of the ones long married,
A pleasure never mentioned to the young,
Is the sweet heat made from two bodies in a bed
Curled together on a winter night,
The smell of the other always in the quilt,
The hand set quietly on the other’s flank
That carries news from another world
Light-years away from the one inside
That you always thought you inhabited alone.
The heat in that hand could melt a stone.

And then by the same poet on the Poetry Foundation website:

Bread Soup: An Old Icelandic Recipe

Start with the square heavy loaf
steamed a whole day in a hot spring
until the coarse rye, sugar, yeast
grow dense as a black hole of bread.
Let it age and dry a little,
then soak the old loaf for a day
in warm water flavored
with raisins and lemon slices.
Boil it until it is thick as molasses.
Pour it in a flat white bowl.
Ladle a good dollop of whipped cream
to melt in its brown belly.
This soup is alive as any animal,
and the yeast and cream and rye
will sing inside you after eating
for a long time.

The "old Icelandic recipe" might be worth trying. I've actually tried the "square heavy loaf/steamed a whole day in a hot spring" (or at least in volcanically heated hot sand)* in Iceland, and in fact it's pretty good.
*ETA See a recipe here

I mentioned A D Hope up in #1. His second last collection was called A Late Picking. From it:

Spätlese

A late picking — the old man sips his wine
And eyes his vineyard flourishing row on row.
Ripe clusters, hanging heavy on the vine,
Catch the sun's afterglow.

He thinks: next vintage will not be too bad.
The spätlese at last, as I recall,
Has caught the grace I aimed at as a lad;
Yet ripeness is not all.

Young men still seek perfection of the type;
A grace that lies beyond, one learns in time.
The improbable ferment of the overripe
May touch on the sublime.

Old men should be adventurous, On the whole
think that's what old age is really for:
Tolstoy at Astapovo finds his soul;
Ulysses hefts his oar.

>25 haydninvienna: Bread soup is remarkable -- both the concept as a meal and as a poem. You find stuff that is truly out of the ordinary.

I must agree with >27 jillmwo:, the material you find is very interesting and the poems are intriguing and clever.

>25 haydninvienna: The Icelandic hot-spring bread is delicious!

I found The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas at the library. I've never been sure about Thomas: his rise and meteoric fall make me wonder how much of his renown was just in being "difficult". But there is one poem that has been stuck in my memory literally for decades, since I first encountered it as an epigraph to James Blish's They Shall Have Stars:

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

This is an incantation, like "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan ... ". Blish actually used only the first stanza (ETA: and only the first five lines of it), and I hadn't encountered the second and third till now.

EATA: I just re-read the first chapter of They Shall Have Stars on line. What a great closing line: "He was thinking about an immortal man who flew from star to star faster than light."

In the last thread I mentioned a limerick I remembered that contained the line "to find a rhyme for W". I thought it was by Walter de la Mare.

I found it!

It wasn't by de la Mare, it was by James Reeves:

Conclave

The King sent for his wise men all
To find a rhyme for W;
When they had thought a good long time
But could not think of a single rhyme,
“I’m sorry,” said he, “to trouble you.”

>31 haydninvienna:. I have never heard that one. It's wonderful!!

>32 jillmwo: It's clever, isn't it? I think I have Reeves's Collected Poems somewhere — might have to dig it out.

I skimmed through Dylan Thomas and of course found a few more familiar ones like "Do not go gentle into that good night" and "A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London".

Another American discovery: Bill Holm. I'm not quite sure of him, seeing as how he was apparently a frequent guest of A Prairie Home Companion (whose first criterion may have been that he was from Minnesota), but I thought this was good:

Sparrows

Morning after first snow—
outside my kitchen window,

gray sparrows flap up

and down on a sagging clothesline.

It is a corn dance

in honor of sunshine on snow.

What joy in a sparrow's body

as he jumps and eats—

a world of red barns,

snow, old clotheslines

and corn kernels is enough.

No brooding on hunger and death,

no suspicion among the sparrows.

I return from seeing a woman,

full of joy and dancing in my body—

lie awake all night

putting away old dreams like a man

packing for a long trip.

Now it is clear: her face

come to me, and I sink 
into sleep like childhood,

rising hours later to bright sun,

sparrows dancing on the clothesline.

In a world of grief, no one
has any right to such gifts

as I am given; I take them,

put on my feathers, and go

dance in the snow.

Little essay about Omar Khayyam in an unexpected setting: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/podcast-rubaiyat-of-omar-khayyam

>31 haydninvienna: Nice.

>34 haydninvienna: Thank you! :) I've read about Khayyam before, but I didn't know the story of how he became famous in England.

When I was ten (circa) I read a short book about two time travelers who meet in ancient Persia. One of them is looking for a famous mathematician, and the other is looking for a famous poet. They help each other out, and then have a heated argument because it turns out that the persons they are looking for are both named Omar Khayyam. Then they find him... surprise! It was a nice kids' book and that was how I found out about Omar Khayyam :) I don't remember the title or the author though...

>33 haydninvienna: I like that one.

>33 haydninvienna: I love the last stanza of that.

Thanks all. If you happen to go looking for poetry by Bill Holm, note that there's another author by that name, an art historian.

I've actually read (at high speed) a book! 100 Ways to Write Badly Well, by Joel Stickley. The best things about this are the title and the introduction. As the back cover blurb says, "Looking for a creative writing guide out there that will tell you how to write better? A book to tell you how to structure a perfect plot, create great characters, use language in a powerful and poetic way? This is not that book.100 Ways to Write Badly Well is an adventure in drivel." Well, yes, it is. The author asserts that it's a perfect book for the toilet, and I don't disagree.

Basically, it's 100 principles of how to write badly ("Present your research in the form of dialogue", "Find the bone mote", "Try too hard to be P G Wodehouse"), with a page or two of example for each. Funny but gets old rather quickly. Perhaps it really would be better left in the toilet.

Vaguely relevantly, I discover that the Bulwer-Lytton Awards have now ceased, although I thought "When you're a Marine, rank is what you smell, not what you pull"*, should be engraved on stone somewhere.

*from here: https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2024, by G Andrew Lundberg, under "Adventure--dishonorable mentions".

ETA: Re "Trying too hard to be P G Wodehouse": the best bit of imitation PGW (by an amateur, at least) I've ever read was in the 1965 Salisbury High School yearbook. It was called "Tales from the Top Hat Club", and it was written by a sixth-former named Ross Barber, who had an interesting career after high school. But at the age of 17 or so, he wrote a pretty good pastiche of PGW ending with an absolutely groan-inducing pun.

Ross did something very unusual for a boy from a State school who also happened to be a paraplegic: he did law at University of Queensland, and ended his career there as a senior lecturer; he got bored with being a legal academic, went into the Commonwealth public service and became a senior officer in the Attorney-General's Department where I encountered him again 30-odd years after high school.

Life is frustrating. The minor frustration first.

Mrs H is addicted to the Canadian TV cop show Hudson & Rex. It may or may not be "objectively good" (whatever that means), but it sometimes has some decent music and I want to identify one song that appears in it. No luck with Google, and I posted a question on Ask.Metafilter. AskMe is usually pretty good at this sort of thing, but the consensus so far is that no-one seems to know. Presumably the producers do, but they don't seem to be telling: the show's official website doesn't identify the song either (other than via Spotify, and the Spotify playiist doesn't seem to go up as far as season 5). So, as I said on AskMe:

what's the bluesy song at the end of episode 18 ("Jailbreak") of season 5 of Hudson & Rex? Woman's voice, spare guitar, words seem to include "I'm just catchin' my breath".

Note that AskMe user Polecat has kindly provided a link to a clip, and it's definitely the right song, but the words I half remembered are:

Gone like a dream again ♪
♪ I'm falling far behind I confess ♪
♪ Yeah, I'm still here ♪
♪ Catching my breath ♪

The show is set in St John's, Newfoundland & Labrador, so it may be a local band. Can any Canadian pub denizens help?

ETA As of now, if you search "hudson & rex song season 5 ep 18" on DuckDuckGo, my AskMe question is the second hit. Comes up in the first page of Google hits also.

I've been sort of challenged to post some pictures of faraway places, so I have to dig ino the archive a bit. Here's one:



Mrs H and some "sled" dogs, taken on 29 July 2013 on Svalbard on our first visit there. The dogs (with others) pull the little cart in the background, and even with 6 adults on it managed a pretty fair clip. This was during the polar summer, of course — we were there then because Mrs H kept complaining about how it was always cold for her birthday, so I thought I'd fix her this time ...

Beforehand we were nervous about the dogs, having heard stories about savage sled dogs, but these pooches were the fluffiest, cuddliest furballs you could imagine.

>41 haydninvienna: Can't get much more faraway than Svalbard! Thanks for the picture and story.

>41 haydninvienna:
Nice picture for a response to the challenge.

>41 haydninvienna: Yes, Svalbard is an impressively faraway place :) Thank you for sharing.

Another picture, from not quite so far away (in fact, the marketplace in Göttingen, in Germany).



This little chap (yes, really — he had a malformation of the spine, and was short even by 18th-century standards) is Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who was professor of physics at the University of Göttingen from 1769 to 1799, but is now known as a writer. He was a notable Anglophile and visited England twice — there is a story that Lichtenberg was staying in a nobleman's house near the Royal Palace and His Majesty King George III himself knocked on the door one morning and asked in German if Herr Professor was receiving visitors.

This (Sunday) morning, I was just goofing around on the net and ended reading a collection of his writings on the Internet Archive. He's been one of my faves for quite some time though. During the goofing around, on the Internet Archive I found a biography of him by a German writer, Carl Brinitzer, and after reading the introduction went looking and ordered a copy. But the main point of this little essay is how good Clive James can be. There's an essay on Slate by him using a quotation from Lichtenberg as a hook for an essay about writing. The whole thing is worth reading, but the last couple of sentences are a complete commentary on a certain kind of writer:

But there is one grain of humility that they must get into their cockiness if they are ever to grow: They must accept that one of the secrets of creativity is an unrelenting self-criticism. “My dear friend,” said Voltaire to a young aspirant who had burdened him with an unpublished manuscript, “you may write as carelessly and badly as this when you have become famous. Until then, you must take some trouble.”

I have googled Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, and I thank you.

The quote is wonderful! :)

>45 haydninvienna:
That is a fantastic quote.

Thank you for sharing.

ETA: I see the article is drawn from Cultural Amnesia, a volume I have but have not read yet. Your post has pushed it some metres up the slopes of Mt. TBR.

>45 haydninvienna: Brilliant quotation.

Nice photo, too.

>45 haydninvienna: Great statue, great quote. Now I have to try and find a statue and take a picture, but that may take a while around here. Statues of buffaloes don't count.

>49 Karlstar: Why would a statue of a buffalo not count? Yes, it has four legs rather than two, but that's no reason to exclude them as examples of public art.

>49 Karlstar: You mean you wouldn't count this one either?



Fighting Kudu Bulls, Skukuza, Kruger National Park, 16 May 2022. About the most dramatic statue I can think of.

>51 hfglen: Not a statute, but in 2013 I visited the city of Whitehorse, in the Yukon Territory. A dining (I think it was) establishment there had a wall display consisting of two sets of moose antlers locked together. The story was that the bulls had got their antlers locked together during a mating battle, and couldn't separate them, ans starved to death.

Frustrations: People who park their vehicles in spaces signed "Disabled" and then don't show a disabled parking permit. Rant follows: feel free not to read it.

The shopping centre we customarily go to has 4 disabled spaces near a particular door. There's a constant battle for these spaces, and every so often there's a large "ute" (short for "utility" = US "pickup truck") parked in one of them. I wonder about how disabled the driver or passenger is (no, of course, I'm not indulging in stereotyping). A disabled parking permit here is a small card with a suction cap on it to fix it inside your windscreen. It's tied to the person who is disabled, not to the vehicle, and you're not supposed to use it unless that person is being carried in the vehicle. We have one for Mrs H, who is restricted to a wheelchair when we go out. This morning we scored a park in one space and as I was pushing Mrs H back to our car two women walked away from a car in the next one. Neither one appeared to be disabled, and yes I know that's not the whole story. I could see that the car had a permit inside the windscreen. Again, I wonder.

And speaking of statues of buffaloes (OK, bison): here's the photo page of the website of the Legislature of Manitoba. I'm posting this because I've actually been there, even though I don't now have any photos. If you click through the pictures you'll see several of a staircase with statues of buffaloes at each side. Two stories about them, as I was told in 1996.

First, at least one of the statues is of a bull and it's, er, noticeably entire (this isn't visible in the photos and may no longer be true). When the statutes were installed, a woman who may have been a legislator objected to the display of that statue's private parts and wanted him gelded ...

Second, at the bottom of the staircase there is an elaborate tiled floor, which was laid before the statues were installed. How did they get the statues in without tearing up the floor? They waited till winter and flooded the floor, and when it froze, slid the statues across the ice.

>51 hfglen: That would absolutely count! It isn't so much about the subject matter for the buffalo statues, but they are common around here and many/most are mass produced, not unique works of art.

>53 haydninvienna: Folks who don't need those permits or parking spaces shouldn't use them.

>54 haydninvienna: A very Canadian solution. Did they play hockey on the ice first?

Occasional series of Gee We Can Do Some Neat Stuff:



This is the first ever picture of a protoplanet carving out a gap in a dusk disk around a star. Essentially it's a solar system in process of formation, courtesy of the very Large Telescope in Chile and a coronagraph to block the light from the central star..

>57 haydninvienna: Hello, sense of wonder. This is awesome!

>57 haydninvienna: Really amazing.

>53 haydninvienna: I used to have the same issue with 'family' carparking spots, which anyway are rare as in Singapore, back when one or other of the kids were in strollers and the stroller we had was a wide one (part of a set which had a car seat that could be slotted in).

>57 haydninvienna: Wow!

>57 haydninvienna: That is really cool!

>57 haydninvienna:
Fascinating.

>58 Alexandra_book_life: >59 Karlstar: >60 humouress: >61 Narilka: >62 pgmcc: It's really amazing, isn't it? Just think, in five billion years or so there might be thinking beings on that planet. (In five hundred years or so there might be thinking beings on this planet ...)

I remember that in one of Arthur C Clarke's books on the future (as seen from 1960 or so) he imagined an observatory on the Moon, and a "giant telescope sliding into position to photograph the planetary system of Alpha Centauri" (before, that is, anyone knew that it has one). He didn't foresee adaptive optics, nor telescopes with main mirrors more than 27 feet wide, eight thousand feet up on a mountain in Chile.

>63 haydninvienna: Aren't we basically seeing the past? How long did it take for that light to get to us? Who knows, they could already have thinking life while this planet still works on it ;)

>64 Narilka: The APOD page that I copied the image from doesn't name the star (and the relevant page at the European Southern Observatory website identifies it only as WISPIT-2), but plugging that into Wikipedia gets you this page, which gives a lot of information about the star. Importantly, it's "only" 437 light years away, so we are looking at it as it was in 1588 or so. Probably still has some way to go for intelligent life then.

And in the Random Discoveries department, while looking at the Brisbane City Council libraries catalogue this morning, I came upon this: The Necronomnomnom : recipes and rites from the lore of H.P. Lovecraft. Of course I placed a hold on it!

>66 haydninvienna: Recipes? That should be interesting.

>66 haydninvienna: And yet, people worry about me and an interest in poisons.... I mean, I've never conjured up Cthulhlu while cooking up something on a Bunsen burner.

>68 jillmwo: Exactly what a follower of Cthulhu would say.

An Utterly Impartial History of Britain by John O'Farrell. Kind of like 1066 and All That rewritten with regard for historical accuracy and at much greater length. Let's just say that it's an interesting alternative take.

BBs come from all sorts of odd places. Clam hijacked Hugh's thread this morning and posted a link to a very early GD thread, and in that thread I found a post from @sandragon that mentions "a niece named Thea, short for Anthea, from a character in a book by Eric Rucker Eddison". I wrote a "novel", purely for my own amusement, that has a character called Anthea, from a probably fictitious mistress of the 17th century poet Robert Herrick:

To Anthea

Let’s call for Hymen if agreed thou art –
Delays in love but crucify the heart.
Love’s thorny tapers yet neglected lie;
Speak thou the word, they’ll kindle by and by.
The nimble hours woo us on to wed,
And Genius waits to have us both to bed.
Behold, for us the naked Graces stay
With maunds of roses for us to strew the way.
Besides, the most religious prophet stands
Ready to join as well our hearts as hands.
June yet smiles; but if she chance to chide,
Ill luck ’twill bode to th’bridegroom and the bride.
Tell me Anthea, dost thou fondly dread
The loss of that we call a maidenhead?
Come, I’ll instruct thee. Know, the vestal fire
Is not by marriage quenched, but flames the higher.

(Hymen was the Greek god of marriage: he was supposed to be present at every wedding. Herrick is invoking the god's presence at their wedding.)

But of course after that, I had to identify the book by Eddison. A few minutes on Faded Page Canada found Anthea as a minor character in Mistress of Mistresses. The Brisbane library system has a copy, which I've ordered, but I also downloaded a soft copy from Faded Page. I don't know how much of this sort of prose I can take though:

The third morning after that coming of the galloping horseman north to Mornagay, Duke Barganax was painting in his privy garden in Zayana in the southland: that garden where it is everlasting afternoon. There the low sun, swinging a level course at about that pitch which Antares reaches at his highest southing in an English May night, filled the soft air with atomies of sublimated gold, wherein all seen things became, where the beams touched them, golden: a golden sheen on the lake’s unruffled waters beyond the parapet, gold burning in the young foliage of the oak-woods that clothed the circling hills; and, in the garden, fruits of red and yellow gold hanging in the gold-spun leafy darkness of the strawberry-trees, a gilding shimmer of it in the stone of the carven bench, a gilding of every tiny blade on the shaven lawn, a glow to deepen all colours and to ripen every sweetness: gold faintly warming the proud pallour of Fiorinda’s brow and cheek, and thrown back in sudden gleams from the jet-black smoothnesses of her hair.

ETA Anthea is in all three volumes of Eddison's Zimiamvian Trilogy. It appears that she is not exactly a nice person. "The finger-nails of Anthea tapered to claws: her hair seemed as lighted from within with a sun-like glory: white-skinned she was, of a classic cold perfection of form and feature, yet with eyes the pupils of which were upright slips opening to some inside hotness of fire, and with scarlet lips which disclosed, when she smiled, teeth of a mountain lynx."

>71 haydninvienna: That some rabbit hole you fell into there! Well done on the poem.

I now have the library copy of Mistress of Mistresses. With any luck I'll let you know how it goes. (Four library holds arrived at once, so I declared "library bankruptcy": that is, returned everything I had on loan, read or unread) to have some chance of reading the new ones.) I also have The Necronomnomnom: recipes and rites from the lore of H.P. Lovecraft , which has a slightly better chance of being read.

I vaguely remember beginning a post a while back with a reference to frustrations. Here's the second one.

Mrs H has recently been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. The frustration is that there is so much gluten-free stuff in the supermarkets here and so little sugar-free. OK, I know that gluten intolerance is a serious health problem, but "sugar intolerance" (i e diabetes) is at least as serious, and it's never had the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow rooting for it. I remember that once upon a time there was a British nutritionist named John Yudkin, who wrote a book called Pure White and Deadly (UK title: I think the US title was Sweet and Dangerous, which is telling you something right there). Unfortunately Yudkin's book hit the shelves at more or less the same time as Ancel Keyes was demonising saturated fat in the US, and it seems that the sugar lobby outweighed the dairy lobby in the US at the time. So here we are.

Flipped open The Necro .... and came upon a recipe for "Vegemitey Cthulhu". Basically, it's two slices of pumpernickel spread with butter and (heaven help me) Vegemite, and then a hole punched out of the centre of each and fried, with an egg dropped in. Two tablespoons of Vegemite! That's a lot for two slices. I might try it, but using ordinary wholemeal bread, even though it doesn't have the lost-soul blackness of pumpernickel.

>73 haydninvienna: I'm sorry about Mrs H developing diabetes. But that, TBH, is probably how it happened - there's added sugar in everything. Be grateful you don't live in Singapore; they even put sugar in the bread, which makes my wholemeal salmon sandwich taste so weird.

I doubt it'd do wonders for your Vegemitey Cthulhu.

>75 humouress: To be blunt, in Mrs H's case it might also have had something to do with her chocolate addiction ... I was wandering down the confectionery aisle in the supermarket this morning marvelling at all the different ways in which they can sell sugar. I'd never taken that much notice before.

As I said, the Vegemitey Cthulhu is based on pumpernickel, which often seems to have molasses in it.

>76 haydninvienna: pumpernickel, which often seems to have molasses in it Did not know that.

Also, chocolate is one of the essential nutrients. Well known fact.

>77 humouress: I looked at half a dozen recipes on line and most of them had molasses or another syrup in them.

So chocolate, coffee, cheese, wine ... are there any others?

>78 haydninvienna:. I myself feel that nutrition experts have, for far too long, overlooked the key support that caviar offers the human body. It's important that we ingest sufficient amounts of salt each day and caviar is a robust source.

More seriously, I'm sorry that you and Mrs. H are having to deal with that new wrinkle, because it does demand so much rethinking of ordinary meals.

>73 haydninvienna:
Sorry to hear about Mrs H’s diagnosis. My own liking for chocolate was probably my undoing too. However, high cocoa content, i.e. 85% and above, is suitable for Type 2 sufferers.

Two publications I found very useful:
- Eat to Beat Type 2 Diabetes by The Hairy Bikers
- Living Well with Type 2 Diabetes published by the HSE. When I get to my laptop I will send you the HSE link where this can be found and downloaded.

I remember joking about my dietary requirements with the following summary: “As long as I do not eat or drink anything I like I will be ok!”

Word of warning: as you can imagine, all the advice you find on the Internet regarding what you can eat and what you can’t eat is all contradictory. I use the HSE document as my authoritative source.

By the way, one phrase I learned to hate while learning about what I should eat was, “in moderation”. Basically everything can be eaten “in moderation”. The problem is they seldom state what moderation means in real terms. The one place I saw it stated clearly was in relation to dark chocolate: “You can eat high cocoa content chocolate in moderation, e.g. have a square as a treat after dinner on Sundays.”

>73 haydninvienna: Sorry to hear about Mrs. H's diagnosis. Good luck navigating the insidious sugar in our foods, it is everywhere. I think we've discussed oatmeal before?

>74 haydninvienna: That is a very other-worldly sandwich! I guess a variation on Toad in the Hole?

The Living Well With Type 2 Diabetes document can be downloaded from the link below.

https://www.diabetes.ie/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Living-Well-eith-Type-2-with-...

If you can download it at this URL you can ignore my direct message.

Thanks for the good wishes, all.

>82 pgmcc: Thanks Peter, duly downloaded. I can't see Mrs H taking to 85% cocoa chocolate though.

>81 Karlstar: Toad in the hole is something else entirely, although it does have a sort of Cthulhu vibe to it, doesn't it? Basically, toad-in-the-hole is sausages baked in the same batter as is used to make Yorkshire puddings. Not common outside the UK, although I remember my mother making it.

I had a topic about porridge in the Cookbookers group. ETA I can't see Mrs H taking to porridge either.

>83 haydninvienna:
The higher percentage chocolates do take a bit of getting used to.

I'm still keeping an eye on the Hungarian website Poetry — for better, for worse, and found this:

Increment
by A. R. Ammons
Applause is a shower
to the watertable of
self-regard:
in the downpour
the watertable's irrelevant
but after the shower passes
possibility takes on
an extensive millimeter.

>83 haydninvienna: Oh, I was thinking of something else entirely then!

Hmm, doing a quick check, apparently over here we call toast with hole in the middle and an egg in the hole, toad in the hole.

>86 Karlstar: Well, there ya go then. Two countries divided by a common language.

Here's Adam Liaw's take on the British version. The "sailor's gravy" is something he invented: the idea is that the dish is a British one being made by a Malaysian-born Australian with Chinese ancestry, and the gravy is one that might be created by a sailor cook from the seasonings of those four countries.

>87 haydninvienna:
You might want to define gravy as US gravy is quite different from UK gravy.

>88 pgmcc: Just another example, Peter. Like "biscuits".

>89 haydninvienna:
I had thought aboutl adding biscuits into my last post.

“Great minds…”

No need to complete the quote.
:-)

>73 haydninvienna: I am sorry to hear about Mrs H's diagnosis. Good luck with finding the best diet for her.

>91 Alexandra_book_life: Thanks, Alexandra.

I got Devotions: the Selected Poems by Mary Oliver from the library, and found this

Wild, Wild

This is what love is:
the dry rose bush the gardener, in his pruning, missed
suddenly bursts into bloom.
A madness of delight; an obsession.
A holy gift, certainly,
But often, alas, improbable.

Why couldn’t Romeo have settled for someone else?
Why couldn’t Tristan and Isolde have refused
the shining cup
which would have left peaceful the whole kingdom?

Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests
of our lives.

Over and over Faust, standing in the garden, doesn’t know
anything that’s going to happen, he only sees
the face of Marguerite, which is irresistible.

And wild, wild sings the bird.

>87 haydninvienna: Toad in the Hole with Sailor's Gravy might be a bit off-putting for some. Not because of the spices, but on the basis of that name. For marketing purposes alone, oughtn't a professional chef rechristen it?

>93 haydninvienna: I am about to invest in a volume of that woman's poetry.

>88 pgmcc: 'Gravy' as in what some Italian Americans call tomato sauce, or 'gravy' as in what most (all?) people here call a stock (usually meat) plus flour sauce? The 'sailor's gravy' is what I'd (and most people I know) would call gravy.

>94 jillmwo: "Toad in the hole" by that name has been in English cookbooks forever, along with other delicacies such as Spotted Dick and Sussex Pond Pudding. Probably too late to rebrand any of them.

Re Mary Oliver: If the collection you invest in (I assume you don't mean you're simply buying all her books  — there are a lot of them) happens to include "Just as the Calendar Begins to Say Summer", go straight to it and read the last line: "the way the flowers were dressed in nothing but light.". Perfect.

>96 haydninvienna: For a few seconds I thought you meant Mary Berry (1).

>97 humouress:. ROFL. >96 haydninvienna:. No, I'm not buying all of her books. I spent time yesterday trying to identify a collection that had the particular poem you referenced, but kept getting interrupted. I do want to learn more of her work becauses I've liked the pieces you've posted.

What are the limits to human weirdness? I picked up Rebel With a Clause, by Ellen Jovin, from the library. In the Introduction she tells of the young woman who described herself as an obsessive lover of footnotes, and proved it by showing a photo of her foot, on which was tattooed ⁷ ibid.

>99 haydninvienna:
LOL

The post just before this one seems to be from the same spam factory that put a spam message in @MrsLee's thread. Don't answer it, it's just AI slop, just flag them into oblivion.

Actually finished Rebel with a Clause.The author and her husband set up a Grammar Table — a table with a sign and a notepad and a stack of reference books — and took the whole lot on a road trip around the United States, talking to people about grammar. Brave lady. The book is quite fun to read, and she's generally sound — I bonded with her over the "Oxford comma", which I regard as a tiresome affectation. (If you need a serial comma to make your meaning clear, there's something more fundamentally wrong. That's 30 years of legislative counselling talking, though.)

Belatedly catching up here, and sending good wishes to you and Mrs H. A good friend of mine is also having to navigate hidden sugars due to diabetes; they are everywhere.

>103 haydninvienna: It's not enough I have to wrangle with Peter over Thackeray, but now you step forward and diss the "Oxford comma"?

>105 jillmwo: I'm with you on the Oxford comma.

>105 jillmwo: As I said, that's 30 years of legislative counselling. Don't rely on your punctuation to resolve an ambiguity, people!

A DNF, in fact a Hardly Started: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Jessie L Weston. I picked this up on a whim at the library, and started to read it, but the translation is the most awful cod-Biblical English. No, just no. Only now do I look at Faded Page and Gutenberg.org and find that the translation was first published in 1898, when that style must have been in vogue.

>108 haydninvienna: A pity. Have you read any other translations? I've read this one in high school (our teacher made us, he he), but I have no idea which version that was. I liked it then.

>109 Alexandra_book_life: I've not read any other translations. I have copies of 2 others (one of them the one by Marie Borroff which is apparently the standard US one) but neither seems to be accessible at the moment. J R R Tolkien and E V Gordon did a scholarly edition, and Tolkien himself did a modern-English translation late in his life. The poet Simon Armitage also apparently published a translation, although I haven't seen it.

>110 haydninvienna: Thank you :)

>108 haydninvienna: I had the Brian Stone / Penguin Classics translation, which I read yonks ago and didn't feel compelled to reread. So it disappeared in a "re-homing" decreed by SWMBO. As I recall, it wasn't anywhere near as toxic as the one you baled out on. But I fully agree with your action. It's the same problem as I had with the Malory Tales of King Arthur I commented on a few months ago.

>112 hfglen: I wish all translators of Middle English would read the discussion of "positive" versus "negative" archaism in the Fowler brothers' The King's English. Briefly, if you need to translate Middle English for the 21st century, start by translating into ordinary modern English, and then remove all the expressions that wouldn't occur in, say, the King James Bible. That's "negative archaism". Then, if you want you can put in the "forsooths" and obsolete pronouns and whatever (but if you're putting in "ye" and "thou" and so on, please do it grammatically). That's "positive" archaism. Mistress of Mistresses, mentioned above, so far as I've read it, is somewhat of an extreme example of positive archaism, but done "properly", in the sense of being grammatical and correct by the standards of the seventeenth century. Bear in mind that the syntax of English has changed a good deal since the seventeenth century too — it's not just words.

Something that just popped up on TV, and is hinted at in Rebel with a Clause: the word almonds being pronounced as 'al-monds' (with a short 'a'). I've been noticing this for years, so far always as an American pronunciation, but the person who just uttered it was a New Zealander. I've always pronounced it 'ar-monds', and I may now be in the minority.

>113 haydninvienna: Singaporeans also pronounce 'almond' the American way and pronounce 'salmon' to match (ie pronounce the letter 'l'). I assumed it was just the way they use a non-native native language.

>113 haydninvienna: & >114 humouress: In New York we mostly say "ah-mond." No L, and definitely not an R!

>113 haydninvienna: Fascinating! Thanks for the excellent summary, but now I want to read that book.

>115 clamairy: Is that a New York dialect pronunciation or is that common in the US?

>114 humouress: After reading The Legacy of Heorot, sometimes I just say 'samlon', which is easier to say, but scary.

>116 Karlstar: I've not read that book; maybe I should avoid it ...

>117 humouress: It is excellent, really! :)

>115 clamairy:
That is what I have grown up hearing and saying. And salmon is samon.

>113 haydninvienna: I pronounce the "L" in almond, but don't use the "L" when discussing the fish. (So regional practice in the U.S. may also be different.)

This turned up in a bunch of new recommendations today: Grammar for a Full Life: How the Ways We Shape a Sentence Can Limit or Enlarge Us.The description sayss

Why settle for a normal book on grammar when you could learn new things about it and become your own best self at the same time? If you're looking for a traditional manual of rules, this much-acclaimed, groundbreaking book by a cofounder of Harvard University's Writing Center may not be the one for you. Grammar is about much more than rules: it's about choices, too-since a thought can always be expressed correctly in multiple ways. In Grammar for a Full Life, author Lawrence Weinstein reveals how our grammatical choices either stifle or boost our sense of agency in life, creativity, depth of connection to others, and mindfulness. Weinstein shows that certain tweaks to a person's grammar can bring consequential changes in his or her fulfillment and well-being. In this wonderfully readable book, he describes some forty transformative moves that can be made with English punctuation and syntax. You'll learn, for instance, why a greater use of active voice constructions builds assertive energy in us. You'll discover how-paradoxically-cutting back on the "intensifiers" (exclamation marks and words like really, absolutely) heightens our awareness of the world. There is not too much about personality and life that Weinstein doesn't see benefitting from a wiser use of grammar. In a chapter titled "Bonding," even sex comes in for some grammatical attention. Even fear of death receives its own, almost lyrical chapter near book's end. No reader should be intimidated by Weinstein's university credentials. As important a book as his is, it's conversational throughout-and it's packed with numerous compelling, clear examples. You will never think of commas or possessive pronouns in the same way again.

Has anybody read this?

>119 pgmcc: Yes, the L In salmon is also purely decorative.

>116 Karlstar: Google tells me that some places in the United States pronounce the L in almond and some do not. In the parts of California where the almonds are grown no one says the L. I don't remember how people said it in Northern Illinois, because they all talked a bit funny anyway. ;o)

>122 clamairy: So you're saying we're inconsistent, which is normal.

>123 Karlstar: Of course. It makes things more interesting!

I was taken by the title of How to be a Heroine: or, What I've Learned from Reading Too Much, by Samantha Ellis. It's a memoir in the form of a discussion of her reading. I'm up to page 73 and I find this:

Discovering Cooper¹ is like joining a cult. There's a drinking game where, as you read her novels, you drink a shot every time a dog or a horse dies dramatically, toast the Queen² whenever a member of the royal family shows up, have a 'teeny tiny sip' every time you're pained by a pun. The game ends when you're drunk enough to read on without shame.

¹ Jilly Cooper.

² Presumably now the King.

Watching Adam Liaw on TV adding "a good lug" of olive oil to a marinade, and reflecting that Jamie Oliver added a new measuring unit, viz. the "lug", to the language.

>126 haydninvienna: Would that be the same as a 'glug'?

>127 Karlstar: I think a glug is 0.6 of a lug. Seriously, I have no idea.

Interesting Thursday morning. It started with reading the review by our good friend Alexandra_book_life of The Anomaly, and deciding I had to read the book; searching the libraries and finding that there was a copy on the shelf at Logan North library, which is reasonably nearby; driving to that library and securing the book; going to "morning tea" with Mrs H (this is a misnomer in more than one way: both of us drink coffee; she eats bacon and eggs, I eat nothing) and then driving to her appointment with the dietician. To my relief, I've got her on pretty much the right track and the dietician had some more options for us. In particular, fruit is OK in "handfuls" (hm, another measuring unit) and in particular bananas are OK as long as they're small ones. Supermarkets here often sell packs of small bananas as "kids' bananas",

I really liked How to be a Heroine. The author is a British playwright who is of Iraqi Jewish extraction — her family fled Baghdad to escape the Baathist pogroms. Growing up in London, she read everything from What Katy Did to Lace, The Valley of the Dolls and the works of Jilly Cooper to Wuthering Heights, Barbara Pym and Virginia Woolf, and learned something from every one of them. Lots of food for thought there for a male who thinks of himself as pro-feminist.

Weather fine and clear (27℃, light wind) but I fear we may be in for an unpleasant summer.

>128 haydninvienna: Sounds like good news on the food choices.

>128 haydninvienna: I am happy to hear the good news from Mrs H's dietician!

Wow, you've secured the book already :) And How to be a Heroine sounds like a BB... This is a nice exchange :D

>125 haydninvienna: I concur with your opinion of How to be a heroine. I thought the author blended her family's story with analysis of and her responses to the books in a perfect balance. I have her book about Anne Bronte on Mount TBR.

>128 haydninvienna: But some fruit does come in handfuls, doesn't it? Grapes spring to mind. Blueberries might as well. And between you and >131 Sakerfalcon:, I was persuaded to find How to be a Heroine in a bargain-basement-priced ebook edition. It has joined the teetering TBR pile of licensed content.

>132 jillmwo: But everyone's hands are different sizes! If it is >128 haydninvienna: that is measuring out the handfuls, I'm guessing his hands are not the same size as Mrs H's hands. Not that one can overdose on blueberries...

Getting quiet in here, isn't it?

I've had an interesting week. I'm trying to apply for an Australian Government benefit as a carer, and finding that the process is even more obfuscated than most such applications. But I think I'm through the worst of it now (said he hopefully). Next job is to sign a service agreement with a care provider that can provide in-home services (and day and overnight respite care ...).

One of my sisters in law (that is, my late second wife's sisters) has just handed me an unpleasant surprise. Yet another of my siblings in law has been diagnosed with cancer. My late wife was the 7th of 9 children, and of the 9, 6 have now been diagnosed with one or another form of cancer, and 1 of the 3 others had a narrow squeak, having had a good deal of her plumbing removed as being in a precancerous condition. Of the other 2, 1 was a cot death at the age of 7 weeks. Marcia (2nd oldest sister) has been keeping a spreadsheet, since the faculty of Medicine at the University of Queensland has been following the family as part of their research. The genetic factor is clearly in their mother's line, since among their father (my kids' maternal grandfather) and his 6 siblings, none has ever been diagnosed with cancer. Two out of 7 in their mother's (my kids' maternal grandfmother's) line.

>134 haydninvienna: Best of luck with the application.

I'm sorry to hear about the diagnosis. Could it be environmental rather than genetic (though I assume the faculty has checked that)?

>134 haydninvienna:
All the best with the application.

Sorry to hear about the diagnosis.

>134 haydninvienna: Strength to you on both counts.

>134 haydninvienna: Hoping for the best for your relative. Good luck with the care giver process too.

>134 haydninvienna: That sounds like a great deal of information (and bureaucracy) to take in and contend with over the course of just a week. A lot to process. Breathe and just handle one day at a time. And do try to take care of yourself. (((Hugs)))

>134 haydninvienna: I am sorry to hear about your relative.
Hugs to you all.

>134 haydninvienna: That is a lot all at once. Please be sure to take care of yourself! I hope all the rest goes well too.

Thanks all. Auntie Marcia (keeper of the spreadsheet) has just pointed out to me that one of the grandkids (I e one of my kids' cousins) has had two brushes with the big C (different forms), and so far survived both. I also note that if you disregard the cases of melanoma it looks slightly less scary. Brisbane used to be a world melanoma hotspot; not so much now.

As to the other thing, the application is now submitted, and we will see what happens. Next thing I have to do (I think) is sign up with a service provider for household care services, which I may be able to do tomorrow.

>142 haydninvienna: Fingers crossed for a positive outcome re: the application. I'm sorry to hear about your sister-in-law.

Thanks all. I now have another application to do ...

I'm more than a bit ticked off that I started the memorial read and than didn't carry on, but I will finish it eventually, I hope. I thought as well of @MrsLee as anybody else here, and I enjoy Sayers, so it's just the pressure of Life, the Universe and Everything.

But I did manage a quickie read this afternoon which was more interesting than I expected, and for different reasons. Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert isn't what I expected: it's not a self-help book, it's a piece of pop-psychology about happiness. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I did a psychology course at the University of Canberra, and got mildly reproved by a tutor for quoting David Hume in an essay — she said that psychology was trying to break away from its roots in philosophy. Guess what? Gilbert, who is a professor at Harvard, has Immanuel Kant front and centre. And in three sentences on pages 154 and 155, Gilbert throws all those years of behaviourist experiments with rats and pigeons in the dustbin.

However, i have to remember another thing that the same tutor said (in some context I've forgotten): "It's about as near to a fact as you ever get in psychology."

>144 haydninvienna:
Do not reproach yourself for not finishing the memorial read yet. When it was started it was stated that people could take their time and contribute as and when it suited them. I have taken that to heart and took a long time to finish the book. I am slowly collating my notes and impressions and in the next few days will be posting my comments. @MrsLee would be the most understanding person regarding when people can get around to reading something. There are many of us who miss her.

Your enthusiasm for that "pop-psychology" book is infectious. I am sorely tempted but have not taken the fatal step just yet. :-)

Sorry to hear about the endless round of applications. It reminds me of the part of The Nine Tailors where one of the locals is blaming education for creating bureaucracy and forms in general.

>144 haydninvienna: Good luck with the application.

>144 haydninvienna: >145 pgmcc: I'm looking forward to comment from both on you on The Nine Tailors.

Still on psychology: The Psychology of Stupidityby Jean-François Marmion. This is a collection of essays and interviews, rather loosely tied together. The interviewees include Howard Gardner and Daniel Kahnemann though, so there's some good stuff in it. Professor Harry Frankfurt's book On Bullshit gets quoted or name-checked quite a few times. Another party that gets a few name-checks (often in conjunction with Frankfurt) is POTUS 45/47.

Although not specifically tied to the, ahem, person i just mentioned inside spoiler tags, I though the following (from an essay by Sebastian Dieguez, "Neuropsychologist and researcher at the Laboratory for Cognitive and Neurological Sciences at the University of Fribourg"), was worth passing on:

The bullshitter, according to Frankfurt, seeks only to get away with it scot-free by acting like he's said something when he's said nothing at all, in the sense that he has transmitted no relevant information. Bullshit, therefore, is a form of epistemic camouflage: it passes itself off for a contribution to discussion, while in fact obstructing its progress. In sum, it's the opposite of the discursive process.
Why would anyone tolerate an intellectual parasite like that? The liar, once he's unmasked, generally finds himself rebuked, despised, and scorned; but the bullshitter seems to enjoy total impunity. Frankfurt left this question open, "as an exercise for the reader," but certain psychological mind-sets, in combination with particular sociocultural factors, permit us to explain this curious phenomenon. On one hand, we are excessively indulgent of bullshit. When someone says something nonsensical, our first reflex is to try to find meaning in his words, to infer something pertinent that could apply to the given situation, and to apply an interpretation that satisfies this need. In this way, those who fall for bullshit often do a lot of the bullshitter's work for him. On the other hand, bullshit also benefits from certain cultural dynamics: if poise, self-confidence, authenticity, and sincerity are valued, the simple fact of saying something clear and specific, even if it’s bullshit, not only will pass unnoticed, but can prosper. Frankfurt concluded his analysis with these words: “Sincerity itself is bullshit.” To speak “from the heart”, to express yourself "with fire and passion”, to “speak your mind”, talk “man-to-man," be “forthright” and “trustworthy” — these constructions, these contemporary values, are much more prized than rigor, prudence, precision, and exactness, and to some extent can even replace them.

>147 haydninvienna:
As Groucho Marc said:
The key is sincerity.
If you can fake that you’ve got it made.

>147 haydninvienna: That's a great comment. We value seeming earnestness more than truth, which is sad.

>147 haydninvienna:
Ok, chalk up a direct hit. It arrives tomorrow.

We're on a roll here: What We Talk About When We Talk About Books, by Leah Price. This is pretty well what the subtitle says, "the history and future of reading", which turns out to be a lot more complex than you might expect. It's not easy to summarise in a sentence, but I learned that the Golden Age of Reading, which we might be passing out of, was (like most Golden Ages) a delusion. Lots of food for thought, and a quotation about contemporary lit crit (the author is a tenured professor of English literature) that I shall treasure:

If literature cultivates empathy, I ask Jane Davis, the founder of Get into Reading, why do I leave every English department meeting wanting to strangle my colleagues? She asks, in return, whether I've heard of molecular gastronomy. By asking what we can learn about texts rather than from texts, by striving for originality at the expense of common sense, we're cooking up the intellectual equivalent of the outlandish dishes invented by celebrity chefs. What you and your colleagues write, she tells me, is snail-flavored porridge.

Recommended.

>151 haydninvienna:
I am not sure if you are recommending the book or snail-flavoured porridge.

I love the quote.

>152 pgmcc: The book. I have rather mixed feelings about snail-flavoured porridge. I noticed though that the book has a rating of only 3.5 on LT: I would have given more than that, but I suspect that some readers of it found it challenging, or maybe didn't care for snail-flavoured porridge.

As you might have noticed, I'm a fan of Adam Liaw's cooking show "The Cook-Up". The pattern is that Adam invites 2 guests for each episode and each of them cook a dish to a given theme. The guests are often chefs at fashionable restaurants and you quickly suss out whether such a guest has his or head screwed on the right way. Adam is often innovative in what I would think of as reasonably sensible ways like this Single Malt Cheesecake (substitute rum or bourbon for the single malt — and yes please), but there are restaurant chefs who do things that my sensibility regards as weird, like a dessert recipe that includes custard flavoured with wasabi, or a recipe that includes a significant quantity of ordinary garden peas that have not only been podded, as you do, but have had the inner skins removed (as many people do with broad beans) — and then charring the peas ((I give you the link so that you can see I'm not making it all up). The chef responsible for this one probably wonders why he can't keep apprentices.

>153 haydninvienna:
That looks delicious but the work involved must be crazy.

It reminds me of a recipe in the novel Butter. It was a starter with alternating layers of crabmeat and avocado topped with caviar. I would leave the caviar out, but the avocado and crab meat sounds good. I would even try the wasabi and custard. :-)

The show sounds like Saturday Kitchen. When it was hosted by James Martin he would have two guest chefs, a celebrity guest and two members of the public participating. The guests all sampled the dishes prepared by the guest chefs and the wine recommended by one of the shows panel of sommeliers. It was a live show with viewers voting by phone for a dish to be prepared by James Martin at the end of the show. There were also clips from other cookery shows such as The Naked Chef, Rick Stein's Weekend Trip, Nadya Hassen, etc... I watched this show religiously, and I do not mean on my knees.

>154 pgmcc: the work involved must be crazy: as I recall, the chef concerned hinted that it took quite a while to do enough peas for a night's service.

Adam's show gets quite a few chefs, including some international ones, but also people from other arenas: I'm watching an episode now that has as guests a singer from the Torres Strait (the strait between Australia and New Guinea, in which is a bunch of islands that have an indigenous culture distinct from those of mainland Australia), and a drag queen. Having seen the episode before, I know that both of them can actually cook.

>151 haydninvienna: I liked the quote, I am glad you shared :)

I am not sure how I feel about "snail-flavored porridge", but I might try wasabi custard if I ever meet such a thing ;)

>153 haydninvienna: Better Half and I have just enjoyed an evening of half Michael Portillo's Great British Rail Journeys and half Adam Liaw's Cook Up. Many thanks for the heads up!

>151 haydninvienna: Oh my...

I have wondered about that book and it's 3.5 rating. I tend to rate books on the higher side, but for many people in here a 3.5 is very good.

>158 clamairy:
If I find a book to be good but not having anything exceptional I will give it a 3. A book I score above 3 has something extra.

>151 haydninvienna: I quite agree with your recommendation of Leah Price's book. I certainly found it worthwhile.

>160 jillmwo:
What is your opinion on the recommendation for snail-flavoured porridge?

>161 pgmcc: Those who find snail-flavoured porridge to be a great delicacy tend to be different from those who find the same dish to be poisonously awful. You know how it is -- one man's meat... Personally, I agree with the sentiment that sometimes academics lose all common sense in their analytical maundering. It's too easy to get lost in the weeds.

>162 jillmwo: I have eaten snails, but wouldn't call myself an enthusiast, exactly. I have been known to put things into porridge (such as peanut butter, and if you don't like the idea, try it!) but snails are a mollusc too far, I think.

I discovered that in fact it's not "snail-flavoured porridge" but actually snail porridge, that is, made mostly from snails. Heston B's own recipe. That looks to me like a kind of loose paté thickened with oat flakes¹, which makes it a cheat in two ways.

¹ I assume this means rolled oats — he seems to be concerned that the result should be smooth, and steel-cut oats wouldn't dissolve fast enough.

>163 haydninvienna: So the rolled oats make it... goopier? MMMMMM.

>164 Karlstar: I don't want to know.

We started the weekend in a slightly unusual way. This morning we went to one of Australia's numerous aged-care organisations to sign up for what's called a level 2 home care care package. They do a wide range of domestic services, like housework or assistance with personal care, and they charge for it, but a beneficent government meets most of the cost. To the point that I'm not sure I'll ever be able to reach the limit of the subsidy.

Tomorrow our house is having a termite inspection, for which we have to be home. The body corporate for the units does this every year, and the cost ends up being part of our levy.

(This is the equivalent of a US "condo" development. In our case it's a block of 20 "town houses" in a few acres of ground; the body corporate owns the grounds and the fabric of the buildings, we own the interior of our unit. We pay a quarterly levy for the maintenance of the buildings and grounds, including that termite inspection.)

And some time over the weekend, I probably have to do that other bloody application I mentioned up in #144.

Found Browsings by Michael Dirda in the library. Last read in April last year, but a welcome re-read. I noted that he has an essay on the disappearance of cursive handwriting. Speaking of his son (now in their mid 20s), he says "... but they'll never develop a callus on the top knuckle of the middle finger of the right hand". I used to have a prominent callus there. It hardly exists now.

>166 haydninvienna:
Mine is almost gone too.

>166 haydninvienna: Especially bad at exam time.

Eliot's Book of Bookish Lists by Henry Eliot. Just what it says on the tin, and quite good fun. List of forms of poem, with any number of lines from 1 to 60. The traditional sizes of books. List of the residents and associates of February House Italo Calvino's list of reasons to read the classics. And so on, and on.

>166 haydninvienna: >167 pgmcc: >168 humouress: Those calluses were also due (at least in part) to some fairly crappy pens that were not designed to avoid such irritations.

>170 jillmwo: I had a metal Parker biro; too slippery for writing quickly with.

>170 jillmwo:
You may live in a literary backwater but at least you did not have to depend on cheap BIC ballpoints.

:-)

On the general subject of lists, I found this accidentally: Michael Dirda's list of the 100 best comic novels. As you would expect from Dirda, who has read everything, there's a good few obscure items, such as Augustus Carp, Esq. by Himself, Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man or An Armful of Warm Girl, and a few that I wouldn't have thought of as comedies, The Thin Man or The Rebel Angels, plus a good few that aren't novels: Man and Superman or The Road to Oxiana. Another oddity is that there's only one Wodehouse (Leave It to Psmith) and only one Pratchett, Mort. But of course I don't have any context for the list — Dirda may have decided only one book per author. And we really need the context for why United States: Essays 1952--1992 is a comic novel.

If you were looking for a reading project, there might be worse ones.

Update: I found the original article on WaPo and sure enough, one book per author: "The list adopts a one author/one book rule, otherwise half the selections would be written by P.G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, and Terry Pratchett". I still find it odd that the Wodehouse was Leave It to Psmith rather than Right Ho, Jeeves!, but it's his list not mine. Also, "Nearly all the items are works of fiction, mainly novels, but I have waffled a bit and smuggled in a few humorous travel classics, some essay collections and even one or two autobiographies: compiler's privilege." Fair enough.

Another update: The list on Goodreads shows the author of Will This Do? An Autobiography as Hillary Waugh. Hillary Waugh was an American author of crime novels, nothing to do with the English Waugh dynasty. MD's own list shows the author's name correctly as Auberon Waugh. Amazon has the author's names wrong.

I decided to give Michael Dirda's list a shot, although I'm not promising to read all of them. In passing I picked up Strong Poison, which is mentioned by Dirda in Browsings in a quotation from a book by Jacques Barzun. Flipped Strong Poison open and found, on p 149, a dialogue between Lord Peter and his younger sister Lady Mary, supposed to be happening on Christmas Eve. There's a couple of pages of it, and I think it justifies all of Barzun's praise of the book. Look for a passage beginning:

"I say, old Peter," said Lady Mary, "you're being a bit fevered, aren't you? Anything up?"

"Too much plum-pudding," said Wimsey, "and too much county. I'm a martyr, that's what I am--burning in brandy to make a family holiday."

It's beautiful. By the end of the chapter, Peter has secured Mary's permission to nudge Inspector Parker into proposing marriage to her, and we've had a hint that there may be another shock coming to their elder sister Helen. Incidentally, the striking passage in which Peter tricks a murderer into exposing himself, and during which Peter turns from a silly ass into something like a judge, occurs later in the same book.

>172 pgmcc: *sputters* Philly is a literary backwater? Or did you mean the entire state of Pennsylvania?

My callus is not completely gone, but it's just a ghost of its former self.

>175 clamairy:. He just means that Philadelphia (and by extension, I suppose, the American reading public as a population) has to wait an inexplicably long time to get the latest releases of British titles. Specifically, he mentioned this when I was bewailing the fact that I couldn't move on to the next installment of the mystery series by Sally Smith. He could lay hands on it in Ireland, but it wasn't available in the American marketplace and wouldn't be until much later this fall.

>174 haydninvienna:. I enjoy Dirda's writing and Browsings sent me off on a few book searches myself.

>176 jillmwo: Thus I shall continue to sputter.

>175 clamairy:
When you are teasing someone you have to pick something that will really get under the victim’s skin. :-)

I believe @jillmwo is such a strong person that she can withstand any paltry teasing that I might attempt and will brush it off in her stride.

>178 pgmcc: I think it is much more likely that she will pay you back in kind when you are at your most vulnerable. 😃

>179 clamairy:
You are correct. She will wait until she hits me with a BB that I cannot acquire and be unmerciful in her slamming me with scorn. I can't wait.

Aargh. As I noted up in #165, I've been trying to get us signed up with a home care package for Mrs H. We had to do so by 14 October or the package would be withdrawn. We went in to the chosen organisation last Thursday (9 October) and signed up. They ought to have notified the relevant Government body that we had done so, but either they didn't or it got lost in the system somewhere. This morning (15 October) we got a letter saying that the package had been withdrawn. (All correspondence is electronic, followed up by snail mail.) So I rang the home care organisation and asked what was going on. Politely! They undertook to call me back in an hour. So I went back to the Government website from which I was reading the letter, thinking that since it wouldn't allow me to stay logged in indefinitely I'd better print the pdf letter to have it available when the lady called back. The website wouldn't at first show me the letter, and then it did and I found a new one, dated today, on top, of which I quote the relevant bits:

Dear Mrs H
We recently wrote to you about your home care package being withdrawn.
I am pleased to advise that your home care provider has since told us that you entered into a Home Care Agreement by the required date so your home care package is still in place.
You do not need to do anything. Any services you're currently receiving will continue with your home care provider.

So all good now, I suppose, but I really didn't need the extra bit of angst.

>181 haydninvienna:
Delighted to see it got sorted. As you say, the extra bit of angst is not welcome.

>181 haydninvienna: Bureaucratic snafus make one crazy. But it's great that it's cleared up now and that you have your home care requirements in place. (Surely you can allow yourself an extra beer at some point in the day by way of celebration?)

>179 clamairy: and >180 pgmcc:. You know I can hear you, right?

>181 haydninvienna: Aarghing! with you.

But at least it worked out on the correct side for you - phew!

>181 haydninvienna: Aaaargh! It's good that it ended well, but no one want this kind of angst. Hugs.

>181 haydninvienna: Ouch! I'm glad it was sorted out finally, but who needs that kind of stress?

>183 jillmwo: Of course!

>181 haydninvienna: Very annoying but I'm glad they worked it out!

I found 4 letters in the mailbox this morning, all from the Department of Health and Aged Care, one each to Mrs H and me, saying that her Home Care Package had been withdrawn, and another two, also one each to Mrs H and to me, saying that it had been reinstated; all dated the same day. All no doubt generated automatically, with no actual human beings involved.

One of the useful things, though, that the beneficent Government does for us carers is provide counselling, to help deal with the stress of being a carer. I had an appointment with my counsellor yesterday. I think she's brilliant¹: a session with her starts all kinds of stuff fizzing in my head, and yesterday we had a discussion about how I tend to shove bad stuff "downstairs" into the "cellar", and that eventually I'd have to go down there and do battle with whatever I found there. But it reminded me of a certain incident in The Manticore, by Robertson Davies, where the successful but alcoholic lawyer David Staunton is left alone in a cave, and of Experiment in Depth, by P W Martin, which I first read decades ago. That prompted me to pick up Experiment in Depth again. (I read The Manticore within the last few months.) If I actually manage to re-read it, and can then talk coherently about it, I'll post.

¹ She's Iranian and Muslim, but dresses Western. I haven't asked how she went from Iran to Australia and counselling. However it happened, she's good at it.

>189 haydninvienna: 🙄 Bureaucracy! (And AI!)

Best of luck with the counselling. And the reading.

>189 haydninvienna: The counselling for carers is a brilliant service. It's so often overlooked that carers need care too. I'm glad you have a great counsellor.

>190 humouress: >191 Sakerfalcon: Thanks both of you.

>189 haydninvienna: Congrats on conquering the bureaucracy and good luck with the counseling.

>193 Karlstar: Thanks Jim. Still some battles to win though.

Anyone with a long memory (and nothing better to do woth it) may remember that a while back we had some dscission about the books of the physicist Carlo Rovelli (beginning with Seven Brief Lessons on Physics). Here is a slightly mind-bending interview with Rovelli (TL/DR: there is no objective reality).

I've not been reading much lately: I'm working again, and Mrs H takes up a good deal of the time I have left. But I did manage to start and finish (as distinct from just start) Experiment in Depth by the mysterious P W Martin¹. I've read this at least once before, a long time ago, but it's the sort of book that stays with you. It's a book of its time (first published in 1955) and very concerned with totalitarian ideologies, and how to defeat them. But its purpose, I think, is the development of an individual as a whole person, in a Jungian sense. Maybe it stayed with me because of the sheer strangeness of Jung's ideas about "the strange half-human entities that live in the depths" of one's personality.

Where we're going is summed up in the first paragraphs of Martin's Foreword:

The experiment in depth set out in the ensuing pages derives mainly from the work of three men: C. G. Jung, the psychologist; T. S. Eliot, the poet; and A. J. Toynbee, the historian. Each of them, in his own way, has employed what Eliot once termed the 'mythical method'—the exploration of those symbols, visions, idées-forces which, acting powerfully from the unconscious depths, enable men and communities to find new energies, new values and new aims. In the present age the mythical method has been used chiefly by the totalitarian ideologies, for purposes of domination and power. The question examined here is whether and how it can be used to better purpose.
Central to this question is what Toynbee, in A Study of History calls the withdrawal-and-return. His hypothesis is that when a civilisation comes to a 'time of troubles', such as we are now in, individuals here and there turn from the outer world of political and social chaos to the inner world of the psyche; there come upon the vision of a new way of life; and, returning to the outer world. form the nucleus of a 'creative minority' through which that civilization may find renewal.

Martin might also have name-checked William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience gets mentioned a good few times) and George Fox, one of the founders of the Society of Friends.

In the note on sources at the end he also mentions a book that might be worth seeking out, T S Eliot: The Design of His Poetry by Elizabeth Drew, in which "... the relationship between Eliot's poetry and Jung's psychology is tentatively and most interestingly explored".

And what did I make of all this? Martin describes the "mythical method" as being scientific. I'm sceptical. But I think the wisest of all one-liners is "the map is not the territory". What I mean by this is that even if Jung's theories are not "true",² they may still be useful as a description; likewise Freud's and Adler's and those of any other pop-psychologist you care to mention. Karl Popper points out at wearisome length that Freud's theory is unscientific because it is so constructed that it can't be falsified: that is, there is no conceivable way to prove it untrue. But Freud's theories could still be useful: he did apparently work some cures.

¹ Mysterious because there seems to be nothing at all on the net about him. I remember from years ago a single reference somewhere to "the psychologist P W Martin" (and can't remember the source) but that's it. There was a P W Martin who was an economist, and wrote a book on price theory, who may or may not have been the same person.

² Whatever "true"means. This is a surprisingly difficult philosophical problem. IIRC Popper held to the "correspondence" theory of truth, which he summed up as "the sentence 'snow is white' is true if snow is in fact white". Um, yes. (There's actually much more to it than that.) But see the interview with Carlo Rovelli mentioned in #194.

You're right to describe him as "mysterious". I only found the following in a footnote to a paper that sought to rehabilitate his theories. See https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10370196.2018.1446663. (Note that this is not the full text of the article.) From footnote #1

...biographical information on Martin is extremely sparse, and there appear to be no personal papers other than a dozen letters between Martin and Ralph Hawtrey, now held at the Churchill Archives Centre at Cambridge University (which I have not seen). There is a brief entry in Who Was Who Among English and European Authors 1931–1949 (947) and a paragraph in the introduction to the Journal of Social Issues, 3, 1947, 66, to which he contributed an article; nothing more.

. Curious as these things go, but I suppose -- back in those days -- one could manage to successfully vanish from view.

>196 jillmwo: The book itself is held in the National Library of Australia, and I think I found that footnote or something very like it in the NLA’s catalogue note. I said “may or may not have been” because I identified them as the same person on the basis only of the name (and it’s the sort of name that there might be two people with) and of sharing the same dates.

ETA As to two people sharing a name: if you look at Amazon's "P W Martin author page", you get somebody quite, quite different. It's almost worth doing just for the entertainment.

>196 jillmwo: I found Who Was Who Among English and European Authors 1931–1949 in the Internet Archive. Martin is there all right: born in London in 1893, educated at Columbia University (not Cambridge, which surprised me); publications, including The Flaw In the Price System; "married; ILO official", and an address in Geneva. That's it. Of course Who was Who ... came out before 1955, so even assuming it's the same Martin, Experiment in Depth wouldn't have been mentioned.

The Journal of Social Issues from 1947 is there too, but frustratingly page 66 isn't in the scanned copy: it goes straight from page 64 to page 67. Somebody must have turned over two pages at once.

>189 haydninvienna: Okay, I'm laughing, but only because it's ridiculous... I'm glad they are providing counseling. I know how much that can help.

>196 jillmwo: >198 haydninvienna: I am impressed with your dedication on this subject!

>200 Karlstar: One reason is that I'm still trying to get my head around the idea that an economist who was an International Labour Organisation official was also a writer on Jungian psychology. Incidentally, have you noticed that a significant percentage of the copies on LT (74 members) are owned by either Jungian organizations or local chapters of the Society of Friends? I wonder if Martin was a Friend.

Well, we've had an interesting couple of days, Mrs H and I. She's in hospital at the moment, taken to the emergency department at Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Hospital (gotta love how they name public hospitals here) at the suggestion of our GP, since she was manifesting symptoms of a bladder infection and neither of us was getting much sleep. So I took her up there on Wednesday morning, and they admitted her, and she's been there ever since. She's had various tests and scans, and seen no fewer than 3 doctors (all at once!). We've also seen an occupational therapist. So we've been doing our double act of entertaining the staff and I've met some interesting people:
• a "hospital ambassador" (basically, a chap who wanders around the place, chats to people, and fetches and carries things like glasses of water): Black, from South Africa, studying finance, knew what the Bank for International Settlements is and what it does; one of the cheeriest people I've ever met
• a nurse from Zimbabwe, also Black, and stunningly gorgeous — her place was to advise me about home care options, which she did
• a white Australian nurse who managed to stop one of Mrs H's tirades in mid-sentence (I wanted to marry this one)
• a woman nurse from Kerala in India
• a white British woman doctor from Leamington Spa, which was 2 stops further on the railway line from Bicester, where we used to live
• various other hospital staff from all over Asia and Africa.

And remember my Iranian Muslim counsellor (see #189)? Brisbane of 2025 is a vastly different city from Brisbane of 1955.

The hospital staff have uniformly been fabulous. Mrs H is having an MRI some time this afternoon, so looks like she'll be in overnight and I'll get another night's sleep.

>201 haydninvienna:
Wishing Mrs H a quick recovery.

>201 haydninvienna: I'm Wishing Mrs H a quick recovery too - especially if there are tirade-stopping nurses in the offing ;0)

>202 pgmcc: Thanks Peter.

And add another: a Filipino male nurse.

If you're familiar with hospital scrubs in other places, you might find the sartorial elegance of the QEII staff interesting. The standard nurse's uniform is dark blue, and actually looks pretty stylish, but check this out: Dangerfield scrubs. Quite a few of the staff wear them. Some even wear half one, half the other.

>201 haydninvienna: Sending my best wishes to you and Mrs H. I hope you'll be together at home again soon. Glad to hear about all the wonderful hospital staff.

>201 haydninvienna: I hope she's feeling better and out of the hospital soon!

Those are some very cheery scrubs. One thing I noted while my daughter was in the hospital, in contrast to 2016, when Trish was there, the staff was universally more attentive and positive. They built an entirely new hospital in between, but I'm not sure that's the difference.

>201 haydninvienna: My best wishes for you both, I hope Mrs H will have a quick recovery.

>205 Sakerfalcon: >206 Karlstar: >207 Alexandra_book_life: Thanks all.

Just another Saturday morning in Paradise: beautiful late spring weather, 23℃, blue sky, and the flowering trees are putting on a show. The Macadamia-like tree in which @hfglen once expressed an interest is in full flower, and the insects are having a party. Picture:



There's another one at the other side of the house.

These do indeed resemble the Queensland nut (M. integrifolia or M. tetraphylla, which are the commercial macadamia nuts), but there are 2 other species that do not produce edible nuts. I think our trees are M. ternifolia, but the nuts don't look quite right. Here's some opened nut capsules from last year, with an office stapler for size comparison:
.

Are you there, Hugh?

We also have 4 "mock orange" (Murraya paniculata) shrubs, which are also in flower. The perfume is pervading the house. I've had one flower off my Magnolia-in-a-tub already, and there are a couple more buds coming on.

Quick post on the phone. Now up at hospital. Yet another nationality! The nurse this morning is from Nepal.

>208 haydninvienna: Very nice!

Mrs H is now home, somewhat better, but of course still complaining. Ashma, the nurse from Nepal, put a magic spell on her this morning not to whinge for an hour. It worked for about 45 minutes.

>211 haydninvienna:
Glad to hear Mrs H is home. Sad to hear the spell was broken. Mrs H must have some strong magic of her own.

>208 haydninvienna: The tree is very pretty!

I am glad to hear that Mrs H is at home now.

>208 haydninvienna: Best wishes to you both!

As to the tree: Certainly Australian Proteaceae, which gives you a choice of some 950 species. I'd start looking in Macadamia, not one of the edible kinds and not one I know.

Oh dear. You both have my sympathies. Please try to get some help in as quickly as possible. I waited much too long, mainly because my husband insisted he didn't need help. (I did!)

>211 haydninvienna: Good news, glad she is home.

Here's a bit of ridiculous ... something.

This morning on the way back from shopping, a car passed us with "PUNJAB" on its number plate. Reminded me of this:

I remember that with one jab
Of my needle in the Punjab
How I cleared up beri-beri and the dreaded dysentery
But your complaint has got me really foxed!

Anyone recognise this? It's associated with a film (a film that probably couldn't be made now, and rightly so.) Who sings it, and to whom, and for extra credit, can you name the film?

The singer is Peter Sellers, as an Indian doctor in London. He is singing to Sophia Loren, as a spoilt rich girl who needs to give away a lot of money quickly. The film is called The Millionairess. If you need to know more, here's the Wikipedia summary. I've never seen it, nor wished to, but I remember the trailers being shown in Brisbane when I was a child. The song became a Top 40 hit in Australia. O tempora, o mores.
But the surprise, when I looked at the Wikipedia article just now, was that the responsibility for this crass piece of racial stereotyping rests with ... George Martin. Yes, him. The Fifth Beatle.

And OMG, the song itself is here, rather cleverly dubbed over a couple of minutes from the film. (The song doesn't actually appear in the film.)

>217 haydninvienna: I doubt I've ever seen the film or the trailers or heard the song but somehow that was the actor/ character that sprang to mind.

>217 haydninvienna:
The Millionairess springs to mind. Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren. We watched within the past year.

>219 pgmcc: I take it that you didn't click my spoiler. But of course that was it. What a waste of both of them (and other top-shelf people of the time — Alastair Sim, Vittorio de Sica and Dennis Price).

>220 haydninvienna:
You are correct.

I love the work of Sim and Price. I am not familiar with much of de Sica’s work although his face is familiar.

As you say, a film that would not
be made today for several reasons.

As I might have noted, I'm working again and I've just noted the following comment on a draft rule: "Please make sure this gets thought through thoroughly."
Isn't English a funny language?

>222 haydninvienna:
I can just imagine that entering the world of acronyms with TTT appearing everywhere. A key element for Buzz Word Bingo.

My Hungarian poetry website seems to be active again, after a spell of posting nothing, or only Hungarian. How about this:

The Happiest Day of your Life
by Michael Havers
You wake up and hear rain. You wake up
and think there’s not enough rain, not enough
songs about rain or memories of rain.
Of being numbed or warmed by rain.

You wake up. Your eyes are open.
Lilies in a moss-green bowl. Elms through
the window moving their hands like cellists.
Books exist. And paintings. And pillows.

Blue Mountain and Saddle Mountain.
Abundance Creek. Alpha Centauri. Delft.
The woman in your dream was putting down
a crate of oranges, but then you woke up

remembering there is custard.
There is Verdi, there is smoke-filled
late-fall air. And even joy in what
it feels like to grieve. Wanting to sleep

instead of bear what you must.
Like finishing the best book in the world.
You wake up, wanting to try.
You try. Here in the swirling eddies,

in the dark river of time and decay.
There is rain. There is this day. There is
this day and no other. Praise it with trumpets
and zithers. Praise it however you can.

Havers is a discovery for me. I went looking on the net, and found this:

Coda

From the garden rose the sound of bees
that lurched and wobbled through the peonies.
We ate eggs, French toast, drank milk that warmed
in minutes in the sun while fat drones swarmed
and looped like drunkards in the purple field.
On the porch we heard their bodies yield
to wills their fuzzy minds don’t understand.
They smelled the stains of syrup on your hand
and one, in gold-encrusted drunken strut,
smeared pollen from its mandibles and gut
along your wrist. That morning you had tied
your hair, and as you rose and ran inside,
it gently bounced, and loosed, and then unfurled.
If the next is better, I’ll still miss this world.

Another that I liked is called "The Cacti". It's a bit long to post, but if you're curious it's here .

>224 haydninvienna: Both of those are nice but I probably do prefer The Happiest Day of Your Life. Do you find (as I do) that one has to slow down dramatically when reading poetry? The acceleration of modern life is not conducive to the real enjoyment of the form.

>224 haydninvienna: I loved these. Thank you so much.

>225 jillmwo: Agreed. Lyric poetry is less of a time commitment than a fat novel though. Epic is a bit more of a problem. I have a library copy of Paradise Lost (an annotated text) by the chair, and haven't so much as opened it.

I don't have a favourite between the two poems, but I thought the line "If the next is better, I’ll still miss this world." was pretty good.

>226 Alexandra_book_life: No worries.

I've actually read a book! Years ago I read J B Priestley's last novel Found, Lost, Found by way of a library copy somewhere in England, and liked it enough to buy it. I still have that copy but it's out of reach so I looked up a copy in the Internet Archive. Well, one of the GR comments (no reviews on LT) thinks it wasn't a good work for JBP to go out on, but I'm inclined to disagree. It's so light it almost floats away, but it's fun. Civil servant who's taken to drink to ameliorate the boredom of civil service life gets introduced to a woman who, we are given to understand, likes him enough to do something really silly: goes away to stay in the depths of the country with an aunt, and challenges him to find her, else he'll never see her again. He does, of course, and that's the story. Hardly more than a novella really.

JBP had spent a lot of his career grumbling, and after having it pointed out to him he wrote a volume of essays called Delight, which I also have somewhere, about things which gave him delight. Found, Lost, Found could almost have been part of that book.

ETA I've just come upon one of the online reviews. Oh dear. Reviewer spend about a thousand words to tell us how worthless it was. No, I'm not going to add FLF to the books to avoid thread. I liked it, and it made me laugh at a time when there's not much other fun around, so yah boo sucks to that reviewer, whoever he was.

>228 haydninvienna:
FLF sounds like fun. I like the J. B. Priestley works I have read; An Inspector Calls is the only one I remember. The Alastair Sim film was great.

>228 haydninvienna: You should post your own review and repudiate the other reviewer.

>228 haydninvienna:
I found a copy via Amazon at £200. In search of a cheaper option I searched on ABE books and found one for £3.48. Much more reasonable. The postage from the USA is, however, £45.
:-(

>228 haydninvienna: Well, for what it may be worth, Kirkus Reviews liked FLF when it was reviewed back in 1977. See https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/j-b-priestley-7/found-lost-found-th... Your assessment is sound.

>232 jillmwo: Bless you for showing that to me. "For using 'hopefully' correctly, for keeping up with the times on his own terms, for reminding us that human and humor¹ are five-letter words with much in common. Bless him, and join him at the last outpost of one brand of civilization." ... Spot on!

¹ Oops. "Humour".

Just FWIW, I got thinking about Priestley as compared to P G Wodehouse. PGW could easily have written FLF had he thought of it, but preferably about 40 years before (that is, before he started to write like a self-parody). The result might have been funnier, but Tom Dekker's character would have fitted one of PGW's lovelorn young men perfectly. Not so sure about Kate Rapley, but there's a PGW young woman character that I think he used only once: Emerald Stoker, who (IIRC) carries Gussie Fink-Nottle off.² She is a competent, very attractive young woman, unlike the rest of PGW's young women, who are either PITAs (Lady Florence Craye) or psychopaths (Bobbie Wickham).

² Yes, in Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, where (inter alia) she lays Roderick Spode out with a thick china bowl.

>228 haydninvienna: Well, I don't think I can get hold of a copy of FLF (except thru the Internet Archive), but I can get a digital edition of Delight. I think that will do nicely as bedtime reading at some point.

I hang out on Ask.Metafilter from time to time, and there's quite a few questions about books on there. This one popped up today: Who are the most charming writers in your opinion? Quite a few of the obvious usual suspects have already popped up, but I thought I'd put the question to the Pub and see what other ideas we might have.

So, suggestions, anyone? If I get a decent number I'll post the answers back on Ask.Metafilter. I think I'm going to propose Clive James's book on Proust, Gate of Lilacs.

>235 haydninvienna: Richard, for me the only author that comes to mind when using the word charming is Patricia McKillip. If I had to pick one book in particular, it would be Od Magic.

>235 haydninvienna:
Like >236 Karlstar: I am focused on the word, “charming”. I am trying to think of the authors I have read and am trying to work out which ones I would call charming. There is also the question of is the writer charming or is it their writing that is charming.

In terms of a charming person the top of my list would be Colin Smythe, Terry Pratchett’s agent. He published Terry’s first five novels and when a big publisher snatched up the subsequent works Terry would not leave Colin with nothing so signed him up as his agent.

Colin ran an academic publishing business and also wrote learned tomes.

Colin was extremely charming and I thick Terry’s action towards Colin indicates that Terry was charming to.

>235 haydninvienna: This question is actually quite challenging once I sat down to think about it. And Peter's question about whether it is the work that is charming or the outlook of the author is a valid one. I agree with >236 Karlstar: when he mentions McKillip although there's can be a bittersweet undertone to some of hers.

When I think of charming as a quality in a book, I am inclined towards authors/books that are soothing with a bit of humor while managing at the same time to not be saccharine Cranford might be characterized as charming. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, The Making of a Marchioness, Miss Carter and the Ifrit. Those titles fall under the genres of domestic fiction and/or Blitz Lit. I think the two mysteries by Sally Smith -- A Case of Mice and Murder and A Case of Life and Limb -- were charming. Such books almost always have a happily-ever-after ending.

For a book to be charming, IMHO, it can't be a tear-jerker. It can't be full of tension and angst. There will be conflict in the story but they don't overwhelm. They are resolved. The book reassures me that this world is a good place to inhabit.

For me charming has to do with a person that can make you feel at ease and connected to. I've known charming people over the years, and pretty much have warm and happy memories of them. Charm and Smarm are different though - very. Sometimes the one can bleed into the other if an element of phoniness or manipulation creeps in. A charming book for me is one that delights and isn't focused on negative things. I think Jill hit it pretty on the mark about humor and not getting too twee or cutesy. A hard target and I think a moving one since we're all so individual (we are all individuals!!! {Life of Brian}).

>235 haydninvienna: Hmm, will have to think about that. I wouldn't have classified Clive James himself as charming; I do agree about McKillip's works being charming. I also like Susan Dexter's Calandra books and Bujold's Chalion series in a similar vein.

>240 humouress: Note I didn't say that Clive himself was charming, just that one book (I've read several of his, and this one stands out).

I posted the collective wisdom to the original Ask.Metafilter question, and anyone who cares to hit the link in #235 again can see the result. While I was doing so, I remembered Elizabeth von Arnim. I reckon The Enchanted April qualifies as charming. In looking at books by her, I started wondering about books about her, and found Only Happiness Here: In Search of Elizabeth von Arnim by Gabrielle Carey. The Brisbane library system has it, and I've placed a hold.

Another book I'm going to buy, and I don't even know how I found out about it: Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katharine Rundell. (I don't know if our late friend @MrsLee ever got to know about this, but I know she read Donne.) Ms Rundell (who is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and seems to have written a good few children's books) can quote one of Donne's poems to his wife, and then go on: "Read the opening stanza, and all the oxygen in a five-mile radius rushes to greet you."

ETA Borrowed the e-book from the Gold Coast City library system and read it in an afternoon.

>241 haydninvienna: I watched the film of Enchanted April years ago and liked it and have been meaning to get to the book ever since.

>243 humouress: The book is wonderful! Plus it led me to her nonfiction Elizabeth and Her German Garden.

Travis Baldree's Legends & Lattes series is charming.

>244 clamairy:
Elizabeth and her German Garden was one of our book club reads. I enjoyed it. It was quite charming.

It's that time again — time, that is, to start pondering our top reads of the year. This year has been a thin year for me reading-wise, but there's still a good few contenders for Top Five.

Fiction — standout winners are the 2 books by Robert Jackson Bennett, The Tainted Cup and A Drop of Corruption. Then, in no particular order:
• The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison
• The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke
• The Manticore by Robertson Davies
Honourable mentions:
• All Those Explosions were Someone Else's Fault by James Alan Gardner
• Libriomancer by Jim C Hines
All right, so the last couple aren't great literature, but they were fun.

Picking a top five in non-fiction is a much harder job because I found, rather to my surprise, quite a few candidates. Starting with a book I read only yesterday:
• Super-Infinite: The transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell
• What We Talk About When We Talk About Books by Leah Price
• Charles Williams: The Third Inkling by Grevel Lindop
• The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt
• Monkeys with Typewriters: How to Write Fiction and Unlock the Secret Power of Stories by Scarlett Thomas.
Honourable mention: Collected Poems by Wendy Cope.

The lists are subject to revision if I happen to read anything really outstanding in what remains of 2025. As I said above, I have Only Happiness Here: In Search of Elizabeth von Arnim on hold at the library. Elizabeth von Arnim as biographic subject ought to be impossible to write a dull book about.

Which reminds me of another biography of sorts which I own, which wasn't dull, but which I DNF: The Pike, Lucy Hughes-Hallett's biography of Gabriele D'Annunzio. I truly believe it's a good book, but I DNF'ed it because the subject was so repellent. I just couldn't stand him any longer.

>246 haydninvienna: I think you folks have finally made me notice that Katherine Addison has written other things and I should look into them.

>247 Karlstar: The Angel of the Crows happens to be the only one of hers I've read.

Somewhere up there I mentioned Clive James. Clive wasn't always an attractive character: I still haven't forgiven him his marital double-dealing. But how the man could write! By coincidence I have Nefertiti in the Flak Tower, which must be a contender for Least Comprehensible Title. But I'm reading that poem now, and it actually makes perfect sense.

The whole content of the book is on clivejames.com, but I'll post one poem:

On a Thin Gold Chain

Opals have storms in them, the legend goes:
They brim with water held in place by force
To stir the dawn, to liquefy the rose,
To make the sky flow. They are cursed, of course:
Great beauty often is. But they are blessed
As well, so long as she herself gives light
Who wears them. Shoulders bare, you were the guest
At the garden table on a summer night
Whose face lent splendour to the candle flame
While that slight trinket echoing your eyes
Swam in its colours. What a long, long game
We’ve played. Quick now, before somebody dies:
Have you still got that pendant? Can I see?
And have you kept it dark to punish me?

>248 haydninvienna:
Very nice. It flows beautifully. It also sounds like it could be a hint at what you referred to as his marital double-dealing.

>248 haydninvienna: Okay, that poem makes me want to dig out and put on the opal pendant my son brought me from Australia when he was 12.

>248 haydninvienna: What >249 pgmcc: said.

Cluttered mind indeed! I admin the Bookstore Tourism group, and was welcoming one of the (very infrequent) new members when I spotted this post further upthread, and was inspired to see what a bottle of Grange costs these days.

A quick look at the website of one of the major Australian wine retailers gave one answer: a single bottle of the 1954 vintage will set you back A$42,000, or about half a year's average weekly earnings.

You might have noticed that over the past few months I've been having some battles with the bureaucracy. Today I had a sort of a win. You need to know that in Australia, applications for benefits of all kinds are processed by an entity called Services Australia, which looks like a Department but actually isn't, although one could fairly think that's a distinction without a difference.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I rang one of their numerous phone services about something and ended up holding for quite a while — at least 45 minutes — getting more and more annoyed with their music on hold. When I finally got to talk to an operative, we had our conversation but I took the opportunity of telling him how dismal the music on hold was. He said that there had been other complaints and dropped a broad hint that a complaint to a higher level would not go amiss. So after the call, I ferretted around on Services' website, got their head office mailing address and the name of their CEO, and wrote to him by name:

Dear Mr <name>
I have a tiny, tiny bone to pick with Services Australia.
This afternoon I spent 38 minutes (at least) listening to Services Australia’s “music on hold” (on <number>, if it makes a difference). It was certainly longer than that, but I didn’t look at the time when the operator picked up my call.
It. Was. Awful. It’s too loud, comes on with a boom, and isn’t appropriate to inflict on someone who has a problem.
May I invite one of the senior managers of Services Australia to call that number some time, and wait on the line until the call is answered? Admittedly, they might be on the line for a while — the total time for my call was just on an hour, and I doubt that the actual talking bit took more than 10 minutes — but I think this is important.
Sitting listening to that overloud rubbish music was annoying for me, and I am generally a patient sort of bloke. I can just imagine what it might be like for someone with a shorter fuse. You carefully tell your callers that you expect courtesy from them, and rightly so; but why make it harder for them? Your operators are always courteous, but I suggest that your phone system isn’t.
Just as a footnote, you might like to think about the “Your call is important to us” message. If it’s important, why aren’t you talking to me already?
Really, I’m sorry to take up even a millisecond of your time with this, but at the end of the call I had a (very polite) go at your operator about the awfulness of the music, and he said he had had other complaints. Maybe if someone from head office takes an interest, something will be done.

This morning I was called by one of their "telephony infrastructure team" people to get some more details — he said he was putting together a brief for somebody important, and wanted permission to quote me. I gave him permission to quote anything to anybody. We had a pleasant, cheerful conversation and parted the best of friends.

I'm not enormously hopeful, but nihil bastardus carborundum, as they say. Now I'm thinking seriously about starting a campaign against bad music on hold.

>253 haydninvienna: Good work - but what will they use as a replacement? Old stuff from Men at Work? Inxs? AC/DC? The bagpipes in 'Its a Long Way to the Top if you wanna Rock and Roll' might be fun for the first 5 minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-qkY2yj4_A&list=RDg-qkY2yj4_A&start_rad...

>253 haydninvienna:
Well done.

>253 haydninvienna:. What a truly brilliant letter to come up with. That ought to be used as an example for composing a letter of complaint that doesn't sound rude or thoroughly unpleasant. I stand in awe.

>253 haydninvienna: What a constructive way to dispel that negative energy! Hold music is almost always awful, and often sounds like it is playing through a rusty tin can. I usually put it on speaker phone and stay far enough away that I don't have to suffer as much, but I can still get to it quickly as soon as I hear a human pick up.

>256 jillmwo: >257 clamairy: Thanks both of you. I’m modestly quite proud of that letter.

>256 jillmwo: Maybe I’ve learned something after all those years of not writing like a judge.

I copped a serious BB from Jill for Personal Pleasures, by Rose Macaulay. It arrived this morning, and I must say that the person who wrapped it can wrap Christmas presents for me any time.

>259 haydninvienna: Ha! Well, all that means is that I finally -- FINALLY -- hit the target after all of the poetry I've read, based on your recommendations. Really, the poetry does help far more than one realizes. (But I'm glad you're enjoying the Macaulay. Have you ever read her more famous book, The Towers of Trebizond? The opening line is Take my camel, dear.)

>260 jillmwo:
I suppose she took the hump when he said that.

>253 haydninvienna: If you start such a campaign, I would join it in a heartbeat! :D

Your letter of complaint is wonderful and exemplary.

The library copy of Only Happiness Here has arrived. It begins promisingly:

When I discovered Elizabeth von Arnim, I found, for the first time, a writer who wrote about being happy. So much of my reading life — which essentially means so much of my actual daily life — had been spent reading miserable literature because, let's face it, most literature is miserable. The novel that influenced me most in my early twenties was Les Misérables. Then I went on to adore the tragedies of Thomas Hardy, the horrors of Zola, the suffering of Dostoevsky, the pain of Tolstoy and the misfortunes of Henry Handel Richardson. My reading life, which led to my writing life (after which there wasn't much left over), had been misery from cover to cover.

Until Elizabeth.

ETA: Finished! Almost as much about Ms Carey as about Elizabeth von Arnim, but worth it, allowing Countess von Arnim's tumultuous life to illuminate Carey's own not-entirely-non-tumultuous life. Insights on happiness, women's sexuality, and marriage. I'm not sure that Carey believed that Great Literature is necessarily miserable, but she seems to be saying that the dominant critical position is that way.

>263 haydninvienna:
I agree with Carey entirely.

Arnim’s Elizabeth and her German Garden is about all the things listed by Carey and it can be very funny too. Also, gardeners will love the descriptions of Elizabeth’s garden and her thoughts on what flowers to plant.

Now up to 48 books for the year, and I'm half way through Personal Pleasures. Not a great reading year, but not a bad one after all.

The most frustrating thing about Rose Macaulay is her habit of quoting bits of obscure verse. In the essay on Eating and Drinking, there's 4 verse quotations, of which the first 3 are Milton (first and second from Paradise Lost, book 9, the third from Comus), but the fourth, which she identifies as 'says Sylvester' took some more work — the only English poet of about the right period by that name is one Josuah Sylvester (so spelt, according to the all-knowing), who died in 1618. And guess what, the Internet Archive yields a searchable copy of Grosart's complete edition of Sylvester's works, and there it is, on page 123 of what looks to be Volume 1. I wonder where Rose M encountered that.

>263 haydninvienna: I copied that quote into a Whatsapp post to the members of my Book Club, the ones I keep admonishing for picking miserable books. :-)

I will report on any reaction. :-)

>266 pgmcc: I will be fascinated in the reactions, if any. The whole book would be well worth their while. Unfortunately it’s by an Australian academic, and published by the University of Queensland Press, so might be hard to find outside Oz.

>263 haydninvienna: Isn't reading that many books about misery a choice? Great quote though!

>268 Karlstar: Of course, but Carey's point is that most literature is miserable — which is rather like Peter's book group, really.

ETA A footnote about Carey. Gabrielle Carey was one of the authors, with Kathy Lette, of Puberty Blues, a novel about surfie culture and sex that caused a fair old stir in Australia in 1980. One wonders if she and Katherine Rundell (see #242) might have had slightly differing views about Donne:

Outside the cathedral I admired a bronze bust of John Donne, about whom I remembered writing an essay while at East Sydney Technical College in the late 1970s. This was during my half-hearted attempt to complete my Higher School Certificate after walking out of secondary school at fifteen. While contemplating the Donne memorial, an image of my long-suffering English lecturer resurfaced in my consciousness for the first time in forty years — an earnest, bearded enthusiast doing his best to introduce a motley bunch of drop-outs to seventeenth century religious poetry. I still own my copy of the set text, The Metaphysical Poets, the pages of which bear witness to the only evidence of genuine study from that year of 1979. Around Donne's 'The Extasie', the margins are crammed with neat Biro notations in a childish print. My teenage commentary includes a statement that the poem is about 'the Relationship of Soul and Sense' and is 'the poet's philosophical discussion with himself about real love'  — clearly comments directly taken down from my lecturer. Later, having studied the poem at length, I decided it was just a long waffly attempt by Donne to open the legs of his latest object of desires and replaced the title with my own re-write: 'Ode to a Tightarse by Professional Sweet-talker' based on the lingo of the Sutherland Shire; 'tightarse' meaning any girl who didn't immediately submit to masculine gropings. For that reason, I had retained an impression of John Donne as part-poet and part-sleaze.

EATA: Another comment about Carey from The Conversation:¹

"Only Happiness Here”, the motto Elizabeth put over the entrance to the Swiss chalet where she entertained her friends, is a funny and moving study of von Arnim’s life and work. But it’s also a kind of treatise on the art of happiness: a topic that, as Gabrielle notes early in the book, presents all sorts of moral and aesthetic perils for the writer, including the risk of being sententious and boring.

From von Arnim’s writing, Gabrielle extracts nine buoyant “Principles of Happiness” that form the running motif of the book and guide its exploration of von Arnim’s troubled life, her enigmatic personality and her unjustly neglected fiction.

Gabrielle also makes the interesting claim that perhaps the reason that the literary history of Modernism has forgotten about von Arnim is that “Modernism didn’t believe in happiness”.

EYATA Please read that essay I linked to. I wish I'd known her.

¹ And if you don't know about The Conversation, you should.

>260 jillmwo: That opening line gets quoted pretty often in collections of "great first lines", but no, I've never read it. I may have to now.

Something must have happened. Ive just joined yet another library — that's 6 now. This one is the system of the City of Moreton Bay, yet another of the local government areas that adjoins the City of Brisbane.

On their website I found Dead Girl Gone, by Gareth and Louise Ward, which looks like fun. It's available as an ebook, so I clicked through to read a sample. Aargh! It's in first-person present tense. Sorry, just no.

>271 haydninvienna: Few things make me put a book down faster than discovering it is written in the present tense. So few authors can do it effectively and far too many attempt it that shouldn't.

My very own copy of Only Happiness Here arrived. UQP still has it in stock so I bought a copy direct from them.

And happy (if that's appropriate) Festivus, if you celebrate it.

Our extended family is indeed extended. Mrs H and I will go to the pub for Christmas Day lunch (the same one we went to last year). Saw elder son and his wife and our grandson the day before yesterday, but for the rest it's up to Facebook.

Weather here is Brisbane in summer — hot, sticky and threatening a thunderstorm. I'll get in early now and wish you all a wonderful Christmas and lots of good reading in the year to come. And of course lots of good cheer in the Pub! I referred to our extended family above, but the Pub is now a huge extended family. You're wonderful, the whole mad lot of you.

>275 haydninvienna: We are a grand bunch, aren't we? Have a wonderful Christmas celebration, and pass my good wishes on to Mrs H.

>276 clamairy: Thank you, for myself and on behalf of Mrs H.

Quite a while since I posted any poetry. Here's two, both of which are quite long, so I'll put both in spoiler tags. I'm posting the two because they kind of talk to each other. You can read either or both. The first is by T S Eliot, the second by Charles Williams.

Journey of the Magi

‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins,
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

The Death of Palomides

Air strives with wings, wings with air.
In the space of the glory the stresses of power contend;
through the kingdom my heart’s revolutions ascribe to the power
quicken the backward wings of passages and paths.

Once, when the Prophet’s shout had taken Cordova,
north I rode through a moon of Spanish winter,
and lay for a night in a lodging of ancient Israel,
twins of Levi, under the height of Monsalvat.

Sea-grey was one and sea-wrinkled,
one burned sun-black, with clawed hands;
guttural, across the charcoal fire, their chant
dropped into pauses, poured into channelled names.

The first mathematics of Ispahan trembled
before the intoned formulæ; their smiles cast
totals from a myriad intricate calculations,
while the screams of eagles in conflict shook the Sierras.

I sat and heard, aloof in my young seed-mail,
scornful of my secret attention; the hut shook,
the air span, with titles of cherubim and seraphim;
the voices rose into clearness; they pronounced Netzach.

Sharply I shouted into the sound: Netzach?
What is Netzach? Together and deeply they answered:
Netzach is the name of the Victory in the Blessing:
For the Lord created all things by means of his Blessing.

One now, sea-grey and wave-wrinkled,
calls through all my body to the sun-blackened:
The Lord created all things by means of his Blessing,
and they float upwards; the paths open between.

Once the paths were interminable; paths were stations.
Unangelical speed loitered upon them,
supposing the everlasting habitations had received it;
only the dolphin Dinadan swam and smiled.

Then Iseult was living; then was the tournament;
then I longed, feared, fought, was angry.
Now if still I fight, fear, am angry,
I know those terminable paths are only paths.

Loneliest of lords, Dinadan smiled; I feared.
Now no sound is near but aerial screams,
no soft voices, nothing except the harsh
scream of the eagle approaching the plateau of Netzach:

its scream and its passage approaching its primal station
backwards; about me a scintillation of points,
points of the eagle’s plumes, plumes that are paths;
paths and plumes swoop to the unbelieved symbol.

I left the Prophet; I lost Iseult; I failed
to catch the beast out of Broceliande;
Lancelot forgave me; if I was christened in that pardon
it was half because I was a greater fool so.

I have gone back, down the road of Logres, the arm
of Iseult, the pass of Monsalvat, into the hut;
I sit with the old men, as they were; we sing:
The Lord created all things by means of his Blessing.

I utter the formula; the formula is all that lives:
sharply the Prophet, Iseult, Lancelot, Dinadan,
call to me this at my dying, and I to them:
The Lord created all things by means of his Blessing.

If this is the kingdom, the power, the glory, my heart
formally offers the kingdom, endures the power,
joins to itself the aerial scream of the eagle . . .
That Thou only canst be Thou only art.

Now I'll go looking for something slightly less intense.

This is original. I have to post it as an image because I couldn't reproduce the shape with the basic HTML that I can use here.
Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree
by George Starbuck

>275 haydninvienna: Good to hear you already had some family time and I hope you have a great Christmas. Thanks for the good wishes and happy reading in the coming year. Thanks for all of the poetry.

>280 Karlstar: Thanks! Almost posted Milton's 'Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity', but that's even longer.

I wish you a wonderful Christmas, have a cozy and relaxing time!

Thank you for the poems you share.

Merry Christmas and a wonderful 2026, Richard. Hoping you enjoy every day, every book and every poem.

>282 Alexandra_book_life: Thank you, and the same to you. The poetry is for my own pleasure as well as anyone's who enjoys it.

>283 pgmcc: Same to you, Peter, and Mrs Pete and all the pgmcc gang.

We've been to the pub for lunch now. Good lunch, but my goodness it's hot out there! Possibility of a storm later (we got one last night).
Just spoke to Mrs H's daughter and her daughter (or granddaughter). That's the one that was born 3 months preemie. She was chattering away along with her mother.

>278 haydninvienna: The Journey of the Magi is terrific, thank you for sharing it! I love how it draws a picture of the setting and visualizes them as regular weary pilgrims. It's interesting to think of their return to their previous lives, dissatisfied with the old ways once they have seen the light of the new. It would be interesting to know more of their stories.

>284 haydninvienna: Message just received from Down Under with a by-the-way comment that some Tasmanians woke up this morning to a White Christmas! Aren't you glad of the distance and bearing between them and Brisbane?! Heree it's overcast and relatively cool (about 23°C).

>286 hfglen: Wow! I wouldn’t mind going halves on the temperature with them though.

I think in the years I actually lived in England we had only one white Christmas, although we had a close call in 2022.

In Dublin we had a nice day. It was dry, breezy with a high of 7C and low of 5C with windchill making it feel like 0C. It was dry, cloudy but with patches of blue sky and sunshine.

>278 haydninvienna: Both of those are wonderful, but, like >285 Darth-Heather: I believe I lean more towards the T.S. Eliot.

With regard to weather, it's not bad here today but we're monitoring the meteorologists at the moment to see what's brewing with the incoming storm due late Friday afternoon. (Strong possibility of an ice storm, sleet, rain, and accumulation of actual snow.)

>289 jillmwo:
I hope the storm does not cause you too much inconvenience. Keep safe.

Might have made another discovery. Boxing Day/St Stephen's Day poems aren't numerous but:

Saint Stephen’s Day with the Griffins
By Henri Cole
for Janet and Christopher
   Half-eagle, half-lion, the fabulous
     animal struts, saber-clawed but saintly,
  a candlewicked ornament dangling
from our rickety sugar pine. Butternut

  pudding in our bellies. His reindeer
    and sleigh hurried here and gone—thank God
   for us childless folks. Almost; the lovelocked
Griffins on the sofa, sockfooted, hearing

  gas and a kiddy heart in her tummy—
    a life more imaginary than real,
  though one is dazzled by gold that fills
the egg unbroken. We feed her crumpets

  and listen again; The lamb’s a hungry
    bugger, even snug from earth’s
  imponderable fury. Tomorrow, in a spurt
by jet I’m home. Clumsy as a puppy

  I’ll scale the flightstairs into the nosecone,
    luggage banging at my sides, enter the egg-
  shaped cabin and await the infrared
climb toward space. Tell me one

   thing true? If I could count the way
    things slip from us; Mother’s fur gloves,
  Sunday’s benediction, the dead gone before us,
love’s rambler on the prairie—all displaced

  as we buckle in our shuttle,
    jetbound on a screaming runway,
  gravity pulling at us castaways,
more mammal than bird, subtle

  leg-weary griffins made manifest,
    arrowing towards home. How do we
  ignore it; the attenuated being
of our age, the bittersweet collapse

  of dominoes mooned around our pine?
    Withered with hatred from his quarter,
  Saint Stephen even at death rolled mercifully over
in high holiness. Sonless, wifeless, nine

  thousand feet from land, I roll the lozenge
    on my tongue, youthful habit for ache
  of any kind, parting a survivor (Wait!),
love rescuing me from the fringe.

Here's a little story about why libraries are wonderful (at least so far).

Some while back I mentioned a P G Wodehouse pastiche written by Ross Barber, who was a fellow student of mine at high school somewhen between 1963 and 1966. The story appeared in the school annual in one of those years but I'm not now sure which. This morning being the Saturday after Christmas and there being nothing going on, I had the bright idea of looking at the State Library of Queensland website. And of course there they are! By request only, of course, but the Library's new premises are just down the road from me.

And I discovered that if you live in Queensland you can be a library member. Join? Of course I did!

>292 haydninvienna: That's impressive.

Something new for dinner tonight: if you noticed my mention of "rooburgers" (that is, hamburger patties made of kangaroo meat), we've just eaten them. Not bad at all. They were sold from the ordinary fridge in the supermarket along with the beef hamburgers, and I bought them on a whim last time I was in there.

From what I understand, kangaroos occupy a niche similar to what bovine species fill on other continents, so it's pretty natural to eat them. In Norway I had reindeer, not quite the same, but it's raised and treated the same as cattle is here in the US. Also tasty.

>294 haydninvienna: I did notice! I recall reading in The Fatal Shore that they were an important food source in the early days. Does 'not bad at all' mean you still prefer some other type of burgers?

>294 haydninvienna: >295 Bookmarque: A couple of weeks ago we were in a new-to-us supermarket, and bought ostrich-burger patties. Better Half and I liked them, DD not so much. hey did need somewhat longer cooking than the usual beef.

I liked ostrich, too, the time I had it. I like in kind of a food desert in some ways and so it's just not available here. Plenty of venison though, most of it still on the hoof, but I have friends that hunt so I have it from time to time.

I remember a time about twenty years ago (it was probably thirty years ago but please let me retain some fantasy in my life) when the introduction of the more exotic meats was a big thing here. Ostrich, kangaroo, and crocodile were offered on the menu of a local restaurant at the time. I have had ostrich several times, but never kangaroo or crocodile. There was another exotic meat available but I cannot recall what it was.

Venison has always been an available meat here.

When there was a scandal here about horse meat being used in burgers a French friend was reminded how much he liked horse beef* and went out and sourced himself a horse steak. Horse beef is very common in the French supermarkets. I have never knowingly tasted it.

*Yes, apparently the correct term for horse meat is beef.

>299 pgmcc: I once went to a dinner at a restaurant in Nairobi that was competition for the more famous Carnivore. Among other things they served camel; it was very dry.

>295 Bookmarque: Yes, grazers in open grassland. Been a food source for the First People for tens of thousands of years.

>296 Karlstar: >297 hfglen: >298 Bookmarque: We both thought they were pretty good, at least as good as beef. >299 pgmcc: I remember the horsemeat scandal, and who knows? I was living in the UK at the time. There was an earlier substitution racket some time in the 80s, in which meat exported from Australia labelled "prime beef" might have been anything. I believe I remember that some of it was from feral donkeys. (ETA: Yes it was, and worse things happened: see "Australian meat substitution scandal" on the all-knowing.)"Horse beef" sounds like turkey bacon, as in two words that don't belong together.

Over the course of a varied career of dining, I have knowingly eaten venison (good), reindeer (good), seal (species unspecified  — not so good), whale (probably minke whale, also not so good), emu (good), crocodile (good); antelope of some sort (in Zambia — good); water buffalo (good) ... I think that's all. So far no goat or camel. >300 hfglen: I believe you can get camel to special order in Doha: restaurants there will do you a whole camel for a big party: Whole Roasted Camel (the page names a restaurant, which isn't on the map now). Although it says "roasted", the usual way of preparation seems to be a sort of braise.

On another topic, anybody here who remembers the Good Show Sir! website may remember And Disregards the Rest by Paul Voermans, with its eccentric cover:



I found a copy on eBay for a reasonable price, and ordered it. Wish me luck.

With regard to And Disregards the Rest, I am intrigued but will await your assessment before going off in search of a copy.

>302 jillmwo: No reviews on either LT or Goodreads. According to the all-knowing:

Critic and novelist George Turner once wrote about Voermans's work that "there are enough things wrong with this novel to sink the collected writings of Tolstoy and Dickens", noting that these faults might not stand in the way of Voermans's writing career.

but no citation is given.
OTOH, Kirkus Reviews:

Voermans's wild mix-and-match structure produces some spectacular special effects—but there's a fair amount of substance here too, though none of it particularly original. An encouragingly thoughtful and well-crafted first outing.

(Here.)

And since we are now a quarter of the way through New Year’s Day 2026 here, happy new year all, and best wishes for a better year.

>304 haydninvienna:
Happy New Year, Richard. I hope 2026 is a good one for you and Mr. H.

>305 pgmcc: Thanks Peter, same to you and yours.

>304 haydninvienna: Happy New Year! Best wishes for 2026 :)

>307 Alexandra_book_life: Thanks mate, you too!