Virginia Woolf's The Waves (#ClassicsClub)

"...said Bernard...said Susan...said Rhoda...said Neville...said Jinny...said Louis..."

This is the story of six friends from an age where a first kiss is possible, but still a little shocking, on to maturity and death. They're upper middle class, articulate, privileged, a sort of Bloomsbury set in miniature. (The Wikipedia article suggests who each of the six characters is based on, but I didn't find that very helpful, or even necessarily convincing.) 

They're given backstories: Louis is scholarly, but insecure, because his father is 'a banker in Brisbane' and he doesn't have the right accent. Bernard tells stories. It's Jinny who delivers that first kiss. Susan goes to live in the country. Neville is obsessed with Percival, a not very explicit, but pretty clearly sexual, obsession. Rhoda is insecure--well, they're all insecure in one way or another.

The story takes place at interludes over the course of their lives. At first the boys and girls are relatively equal; that changes with schooling; the boys go to some Eton-like school and the girls go to some much less demanding institution. Then there's university for the boys, but not the girls. Then jobs, marriage, etc.

The interesting thing is the structure of the novel--well, Wikipedia says Woolf didn't want to call it a novel, but a playpoem, and perhaps that is a better term, even if a neologism. Though if it's a play, it's unperformable, and while the language is evocative, I'm not sure I'd call it a poem either. It's told entirely in the spoken statements--monologues--of the six characters, all of whom always speak in well-rounded sentences. Maybe some examples?

"'A shadow falls on the path,'  said Louis, 'Like a shadow bent.'"

"'Birds are singing up and down and in and out and all around us,' said Susan."

"'I burn, I shiver,' said Jinny, out of this sun, into this shadow.'"

Those are all from the first section when they're young and the monologues are typically just one sentence. The speeches get longer as the book goes on. Here's Louis, when first in school:

"'Now we march, two by two,' said Louis, 'orderly, processional, into chapel. I like the dimness that falls as we enter the sacred building. I like the orderly progress. We file in we seat ourselves. We put off our distinctions as we enter. I like it now, when, lurching slightly, but only from his momentum, Dr. Crane mounts the pulpit and reads the lesson from a Bible spread on the back of a brass eagle.'"

Each jump in time--from childhood, to that first school, to college, to jobs--is separated by an impersonal description of the waves at the shore, beginning in the morning and ending at evening:

"Now the sun had sunk. Sky and sea were indistinguishable. The waves breaking spread their white fans out over the shore, sent white shadows into the recesses of sonorous caves and then rolled back sighing over the shingle."

That's a representative start of a waves section from later in the book.

Bernard gradually becomes the primary speaker: "'Now to sum up,' said Bernard. 'Now to explain to you the meaning of my life.'" The girls fall out first and then the other two boys. But Bernard is the teller of stories. Not entirely alone, though, but as part of a representative generation. A wave.

Anyway, something like that...it is Virginia Woolf and I'm not sure I entirely got it. 😉 Compared to the other novels of hers I've read I still think Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse are superior. (I'm not that big a fan of Orlando.) This was probably easier than those, certainly easier than To The Lighthouse. That abstract speechifying she uses gives a sense of a generation in time, but at the same she gives up a useful tool for creating believable characters, which diminishes the emotional engagement. I don't know even Bernard in the way I know Mrs. Dalloway, and that does feel like a loss in a novel.

But it is one of the last off my Classics Club list!

A Sonnet from George Santayana

 

III

O world, thou choosest not the better part!

It is not wisdom to be only wise,

And on the inward vision close the eyes,

But is wisdom to believe the heart.

Columbus found a world, and had no chart,

Save one that faith deciphered in the skies;

To trust the soul's invincible surmise

Was all his science and his only art.

Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine

That lights the pathway but one step ahead

Across a void of mystery and dread.

Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine

By which alone the mortal heart is led

Unto the thinking of the thought divine.

 

-George Santayana

This is from Santayana's first book of poems, titled Sonnets and Other Verses, of 1894. After posting a poem about George Santayana last week, I went and found those few poems of his that I have around here (four sonnets are included in this collection) and this is the one I liked the best. This book is early in Santayana's career, and I suspect this poem is early even within that selection.

George Santayana (1863-1952) is better known as a philosopher, but it turns out wasn't a bad poet either...😉

Upon The Death of George Santayana (#poem)

Upon The Death of George Santayana

Down every passage of the cloister hung

A dark wood cross on a white plaster wall;

But in the court were roses, not as tongue

Might have them, something of Christ's blood grown small,

But just as roses, and at three o'clock

Their essences, inseparably bouqueted,

Seemed more than Christ's last breath, and rose to mock

An elderly man for whom the Sisters prayed.

What heart can know itself? The Sibyl speaks

Mirthless and unbedizened things, but who

Can fathom her intent? Loving the Greeks,

He whispered to a nun who strove to woo

His spirit unto God by prayer and fast,

"Pray that I go to Limbo, if it please

Heaven to let my soul regard at last

Democritus, Plato and Socrates."

And so it was. The river, as foretold,

Ran darkly by; under his tongue he found

Coin for the passage; the ferry tossed and rolled;

The sages stood on their appointed ground,

Sighing, all as foretold. The mind was tasked;

He had not dreamed that so many had died.

"But where is Alcibiades," he asked,

"The golden roisterer, the animal pride?"

Those sages who had spoken of the love

And enmity of things, how all things flow,

Stood in a light no life is witness of,

And Socrates, whose wisdom was to know 

He did not know, spoke with a solemn mien,

And all his wonderful ugliness was lit,

"He whom I loved for what he might have been

Freezes with traitors in the ultimate pit."

-Anthony Hecht

George Santayana (1863-1952) was a Spanish-American philosopher, poet, novelist. Perhaps his most famous work is The Sense of Beauty: Being an Outline of Aesthetic Theory. He was born a Catholic in Spain, lived most of life in the U.S. He lost his faith somewhere along the way and did not wish to regain it. But he lived out the end of his life by choice in a Catholic hospital in Rome.

Anthony Hecht  (1923-2004) was an American poet. There was an article I read recently by A. E. Stallings about Hecht, lamenting (a bit--her feelings are mostly positive, but occasionally mixed) how he isn't as well-known as he once was. There is a new collected poems volume as well as a new biography that she reviews.

She mentions several of Hecht's better-known poems, but not this one, which is a favourite of mine. She does mention Hecht's sometimes rococo vocabulary, which you can possibly find in evidence here. (Unbedizened, any one? 😉)

 I do think Hecht (or Socrates) is a little hard on Alcibiades, though.

Konstantin Stanislavski's My Life In Art (#CCSpin)

"...we donned all sorts of costumes, footgear, stuffing, to feel the image of the body; we glued on noses, beards, moustaches, we put on wigs, hoping to strike accidentally on the things that we did not as yet know and for which we were painfully searching."

Konstantin Stanislavski (1863-1938) was a Russian actor, stage director, and teacher of acting. My Life in Art is his autobiography of 1924.

Stanislavski was born Konstantin Andreyev to a wealthy family with an estate near Moscow. He was one of many children in a happy family; his parents were interested in the arts and indulged the children's enthusiasms. Young Konstantin quickly caught the theater bug, playing in masquerades, watching a visiting puppet theater troupe, engaging in amateur theatricals with his cousins. 

But his father's supportiveness only went so far; he was expected to have a more respectable career. In his twenties Konstantin takes a part in a racy French comedy and adopts Stanislavski--Polish-sounding so it should fool people, right?--as his stage name, but nevertheless his parents come to see the production, and are appalled to see their son in such a thing. His father tells him to set up an amateur society and limit their productions to 'decent' scripts. So that's what he does.

Until he's thirty-three. Then with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. in 1897, after an epic luncheon--it began at ten AM on one day and ends at 3 AM the next--he founds the Moscow Art Theater. They sell shares in their new corporation and decide to open their season with Tsar Feodor, a play by A. N. Tolstoy (cousin to Leo).

But Nemirovich really wants to bring in Anton Chekhov. Chekhov's first play was The Seagull. Nemirovich and Chekhov had shared a prize for the best play of the year in 1896, but Nemirovich refused his half of the prize and insisted it be given to Chekhov, as author of the far superior play. Still the first production of The Seagull in St. Petersburg was not a success--Chekhov famously fled town after opening night--and had refused to write anything else for the stage or to allow The Seagull to be played again. That is, until 1898, when it became the fourth play in Moscow Art Theater's opening season. It was such a hit, the Moscow Art Theater adopted the seagull as their emblem.

That's Chekhov reading in the center, Stanislavski seated at his right, and Olga Knipper, Chekhov's future wife in profile next to Stanislavski. 

Stanislavski directed all four plays of Chekhov, jointly in the case of The Seagull with Nemirovich, and acted in them as well, as Trigorin (The Seagull), then originating the roles of Astrov (Uncle Vanya), Vershinin (The Three Sisters), and Gaev (The Cherry Orchard). Chekhov's sister told Stanislavski his production of Uncle Vanya had better be a success, because Chekhov had had an attack of tuberculosis, and a failure would kill him. Yikes! Pressure. By the time of The Cherry Orchard it was clear Chekhov was dying and they hastened the production so he could see it.

Apparently the group reading was a standard feature of Moscow Art Theater productions. I was amused that for The Three Sisters, none of the troupe's member understood it was meant to be a comedy. I read Chekhov before I saw him played, and I certainly didn't understand he could be hilarious.

Moscow Art Theater also originated productions of Gorky, as well as classic plays, particularly Ibsen and Shakespeare. This is Stanislavski and his future wife Maria Lilina in Schiller's Love and Villainy (more commonly translated now as Intrigue and Love).

The company made their first tour abroad in 1906, starting in Berlin. 1906 was a troubled year in Russia, and they couldn't play at home. It was a success, but their real international reputation started with the production of Hamlet of 1911-12, which Stanislavski discusses in detail.

Now the book is called My Life in Art, not My Life in Business or My Life in History or My Married Life, so I guess it shouldn't be a surprise...but though he lived in interesting times, there's almost no discussion of it. There's no discussion of what the family business was or what his part was in his 20s while he was still involved. We learn about 1906 because the company has to go abroad. The Russian Revolution features largely as free tickets handed out to workers. The Russian Civil War is important because half their crew (including Olga Knipper, Chekhov's widow) are trapped on the other side of the white Russian general Denikin's lines. Even his wife and kids--theirs seems to have been a happy marriage--we learn about mostly in relationship to the theater. Maria Lilina is pregnant? Oh, no, she can't act!

Is this because he feels he shouldn't say anything about Soviet politics, or because he's genuinely apolitical? A bit of both, I suspect, but probably more the latter. Lenin was supposed to be a fan. 

The book was came out in 1924 after a successful U.S. tour and had been commissioned by a U.S. publisher. Wikipedia tells me Stanislavski would have preferred to have written about his teaching methods, but there was no interest in such a book at that time, so he smuggled in his ideas about how to become an actor in this autobiography. He later went on to write the books more directly discussing his ideas. In English, they're: An Actor Prepares, Building a Character, and Creating a Role, the last from his notes. They were all first published in English.

After the book: in 1926, he directs Bulgakov's The Day of the Turbins, a success and a play that Stalin was supposed to be fond of. When I read Bulgakov a while back, something suggested that it was The Day of the Turbins that kept Stalin from executing Bulgakov. Maybe that good feeling extended to Stanislavski. 

 

In 1928 Stanislavski had a heart attack--on stage, but kept playing until the curtain fell. But that's the end of his acting career.  He still directs, but now mostly works on his teaching system. Maybe he's too famous for Stalin to kill, but Stanislavski is also living quietly at this point. Stanislavski announces his true heir in the theater is Vsevolod Meyerhold, who had played Treplev in that production of The Seagull, and gone on to direct, but Meyerhold is executed by Stalin in 1939, shortly after Stanislavski's death. His widow Maria Lilina dies in 1943 at the age of 77.

All in all a pretty fascinating book and a successful spin choice!

Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

What an odd thing the novel was.

Goethe's second novel Wilhelm Meister's Years of Apprenticeship came out in 1795. It's a Bildungsroman, a novel of education, maybe the very first. Young Wilhelm is the son of a successful upper-middle-class merchant; his father expects him to join the family business. But Wilhelm has caught the theater bug, from a traveling puppet show that played at his house when he was a kid.

When the novel starts Wilhelm is having an affair with the actress Mariane. He's maybe twenty. (We learn about the puppets when Wilhelm bores Mariane with his backstory, when all she wants is to hop in the sack. Our man Goethe is capable of irony, as it turns out.)  Mariane is genuinely fond of Wilhelm, but she's got somebody else, somebody richer, on a string, too. What will Mariane do? Will it be Wilhelm or Norberg? 

Mariane doesn't entirely get to decide. She's guided by her maid/procuress Barbara; Wilhelm is led by his friend Werner, who's sure all actresses are unfaithful; the lovers' relationship wasn't meant to be. Mariane flees and the heartbroken Wilhelm takes to his bed. Eventually Wilhelm rouses himself and decides to renounce all artistic aspirations. Those poems he'd written for Mariane? Burned.

Really, renunciation? Ha! Wilhelm sets off on a commercial trip pursuing his father's interests with the intent of putting art behind him. He manages to complete a few business visits, but soon falls in with actors, decides to act himself, writes plays and adaptations of plays. He pays little attention to the business he was supposed to be transacting. (Somewhat improbably it seemed to me, but that's the way it was.) He takes the money he has, and finances an acting troupe, but the sets and costumes are destroyed when they are attacked by bandits.  Wilhelm manages to wangle them jobs with another impresario.

What should be the nature of a German national theater? Wilhelm knows the French classics, Molière and Racine, but then one of the characters introduces him to Shakespeare. In real life much of Shakespeare had just appeared for the first time in German in a prose translation by Christoph Martin Wieland; Wilhelm and crew decide to do Hamlet, with Wilhelm playing the title role. There's much discussion of what's a proper production. (The manager Serlo suggests that the audience would like the play much better if Hamlet didn't die at the end...Wilhelm vetoes that.)

Wilhelm has a habit of falling in love repeatedly; that's OK, because the girls fall in love with him in return. (That's a young Goethe painted by Angelica Kaufman to the left. Rather dashing, don't you think? Maybe a little autobiography here?) Should he stay with that second actress, lively and fun? The practical housekeeper? The Countess? (Already married, though.) Natalie the Amazon? (As he thinks of her.) At least some of these relationships aren't chaste because by the end of the novel Wilhelm learns he has two children by different women. Somebody slips into his bed the night of a cast party and he's not sure who.

That's most of the novel, but then there are some very odd twists. We get a couple of embedded stories, one the story of a woman who becomes a pietistic Moravian Brethren; this story provides comfort to the dying sister of an actor. The other embedded story involves characters in the present whom we've met in other contexts, an incest plot, and more Moravian Brethren. Wilhelm feels bad when he learns he may have unintentionally driven some of the characters into this rather ascetic religious practice. 

And then! We get a secret society, which has been guiding Wilhelm's actions all along. Which I'm not sure I really comprehended at all.

I read most of the novel in Thomas Carlyle's translation from the 1800s, available at Project Gutenberg, then started over and read the whole thing in H. M. Waidson's translation from the late 1970s. (Waidson was a British professor of German at Swansea University.) I can't say that either translation amazed me. Carlyle is Carlyle, perhaps overly rhetorical. The Waidson felt flat in places, though my reprint at least was marred by typos. (For example, 'natter' where 'flatter' was meant; I had to look up the German, also available on Gutenberg, to figure out what was meant. The German word was schmeicheln.)

Goethe wrote a sequel, Wilhelm Meister's Years of Wandering, which came out in installments in the 1820s.

The book--it is Goethe, after all--includes poetry, verse from plays or songs sung by various characters. Some of them are famous: 'Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt' has been set to music by Beethoven, by Tchaikovsky, by Schubert (multiple times) and that's not the whole list.  Here's one of the Schubert versions, one of a collection of songs that all come from Wilhelm Meister:

One from my Classics Club list.

Journey to the Edge of Reason

"That he is an important man is shown again and again, but he is a little crazy."

-Oskar Morganstern

Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) is famous as the mathematician who proved that mathematics doesn't quite work. The result is known as the Incompleteness Theorem, and before Gödel's proof, mathematicians assumed anything you could say with elementary mathematics (from 2+2=4, e.g., and on up) could be proven either true or false. It might be hard, it might be impossible for me or you, but it could be done. In 1930 Gödel demonstrated it can't. 

You can create mathematical statements, using math no more complicated than addition and equality, whose truth is unprovable.

Gödel was born in Brno, now in the Czech Republic, but then the largely German-speaking town of Brünn in Austria-Hungary. His father owned a textile factory and was reasonably well off. After the breakup of Austria-Hungary at the end of World War I, financially the Gödels were better off with their money in Czechoslovakia, but when it came time for young Kurt to go to college, in 1924, he went to Vienna, the old imperial capital, which still had the best universities. (It was also becoming uncomfortable in Czechoslovakia for German speakers). 

Budiansky is clearly in love with Vienna. (Understandable.) He spends quite a lot of time on the atmosphere in Vienna, citing figures whose connection to Gödel is pretty non-existent--Joseph Roth, Robert Musil--but whose interest to readers is large. Vienna was Gödel's home for roughly fifteen years, and a large portion of his important work was done there, so it's appropriate enough.

But Vienna was becoming problematic. Gödel wasn't Jewish, but his friends were; as things got worse, the sort of mathematics that Gödel did got labeled 'Jewish mathematics' (What's that?) and after Anschluss, the university wasn't going to allow that sort of math any more. Gödel did a semester as a fellow at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study when it opened in 1933--Einstein was one of their first hires--and though Gödel didn't much like Princeton, his friends there kept suggesting he come back.

He was subject to paranoid fantasies (though one of his mathematical colleagues was assassinated by a right-wing student, so maybe not entirely paranoid).  His girlfriend Adele was married and under Catholic Austrian law she couldn't get divorced, so the two of them couldn't leave the country as married. Also he was inclined to be apolitical, and was politically naive. 

But after Anschluss in 1938, German law applied in Austria, allowing divorce and remarriage. Kurt and Adele married. Gödel was still sluggish about the need to leave, but after much prodding he did, ultimately taking a full-time position at the Institute for Advanced Study.

And became close friends with Einstein

Through the forties, he continued to do mathematics, working with Oskar Morganstern and John von Neumann. The later years he taught (though he was a terribly shy teacher) and continued to suffer periods of paranoia.

And why was I interested in a biography of Kurt Gödel you might ask?

I read Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach around when it came out, devoured it more like. It was probably the first serious non-fiction book I read on my own. There were various essays in 2019 for the fortieth anniversary of the book, and I thought about rereading it then, but didn't, but when I saw about the new biography of Kurt Gödel, I was primed to be interested. The biography was well done. The proof of the Incompleteness Theorem is relatively (...?) easy to understand, but Budiansky saves the explanation of that for an appendix, where he does a pretty good job, and otherwise you can read the biography without math.

And am I about to reread Hofstadter? Well, if you look closely you can see a purple bookmark there...

Austria. Could be the Czech Republic, I suppose, but no, not really. Vienna is where it happens. Last year's Austria book for the challenge was another biography of an intellectual who left in the 30s and came to the U.S., Victor Gruen.

And the winner is... (CC Spin #36)

 

That means Konstantin Stanislavski's autobiography My Life In Art. Though not what I expected--it's gotta be a number more in the middle, doesn't it?...😉--it should be a good read. 

Stanislavski (1863-1938) was an actor, director, and co-founder of the Moscow Art Theatre. He acted in and directed many (all? but I didn't look) of the premieres of Anton Chekhov's plays, such as The Seagull and Uncle Vanya. He lived through the Russian Revolution and on into the Stalin years, though his autobiography comes out in 1924 and so misses the worst part. He's also the inventor of the Method acting system.

Did you spin? What are you reading?

Classics Club Spin #36

 

It's time for the latest Classics Club spin. You likely know the rules. A list of twenty books and next Sunday reveals the book we should read over the next month and a bit. So let's go straight to the list of twenty books.

I'm even nearer to the end of my list than I was at the last spin, so I'm going to concentrate on the books I need to finish my first Classics Club list. 

The First Quatrain:

1.) James Baldwin/Giovanni's Room

2.) Goethe/Wilhelm Meister

3.) George Bernard Shaw/Major Barbara

4.) Virginia Woolf/The Waves

A Second Quatrain:

5.) James Baldwin/Giovanni's Room

6.) Goethe/Wilhelm Meister

7.) George Bernard Shaw/Major Barbara

8.) Virginia Woolf/The Waves

Quatrain the Third:

9.) James Baldwin/Giovanni's Room

10.) Goethe/Wilhelm Meister

11.) George Bernard Shaw/Major Barbara

12.) Virginia Woolf/The Waves

And now, for the Quatrain of quatrains!

13.) James Baldwin/Giovanni's Room

14.) Goethe/Wilhelm Meister

15.) George Bernard Shaw/Major Barbara

16.) Virginia Woolf/The Waves

The pirates say, Just finish the danged books already.

Only one of those is long (the Goethe) and as I've already read two of the others (Giovanni's Room and Major Barbara) but didn't manage to blog about them. (Which I would do if they spin machine chose them.) I really should just finish the stack over the course of the month. 

But as that repetition is looking a little dull, and who doesn't want a bit of danger (?) in a spin, here's a few books from a potential new Classics Club list I've been thinking about:

17.) Luis Vaz de Camões/The Lusiads

18.) Harald Laxness/The Fish Can Sing

19.) Benito Perez Galdos/That Bringas Woman

20.) Konstantin Stanislavsky/My Life in Art

The Stanislavski would be the long one in that last quatrain.

Which look good to you? Are you spinning this time out?

European Reading Challenge 2024 Signup

 

Time to sign up for the new year for Gilion's European Reading Challenge. The idea is to visit European countries by reading books set there. It's one of my favorite challenges and I'll again be signing up at the maximum, five-star level, which means five unique European countries, but I hope to do better than that again. No idea what countries I'll be visiting or via which books I'll be visiting them, but I do know that the first this year will be Austria because I only have a few pages left in Stephen Budiansky's biography of Kurt Gödel.

While, as an Illinois native I'm happy to see its outline everywhere, it is a little surprising to see it just to the southwest of Iceland. (Though based on today's temperatures...) Does that mean I get to count that next Chicago book as part of my European tour? 😉

Thanks to Gilion for hosting this great challenge once again. Full details (and your chance to signup!) can be found here.

2023 Reading Highlights

Some reading highlights from last year:

Shirley Hazzard/The Transit of Venus

After reading Brigitta Olubas' biography of Shirley Hazzard (also pretty great!) I reread Hazzard's The Transit of Venus. I had some idle thoughts about blogging about it, but never did. But it is definitely her masterpiece and it was just as good reading it the second time as the first.

Two Australian sisters get to London after World War II...and live their lives. And once again I'm not really going to manage say anything about it. It's great.

Henry James/The Wings of the Dove

I a bit dread the late Henry James novels for their difficult prose style, and while I've had a copy of The Wings of the Dove for years, I had never read it. Until the awesome power of the Classics Club Spin Machine™strongly suggested I read it in January. It knew whereof it spun. Four young people, with the occasional interfering elders, and different possibilities of lovers. 

The prose is challenging, but maybe, just maybe, Henry knew what he was doing, and wasn't just doing it to be difficult. 😉

It got its own post here.

Hafez/Faces of Love and the Poets of Shiraz (tr. Dick Davis)

Hafez is the best-known poet in this volume of Shirazi (Iranian) poets of the 1300s, but the other two (Jahan Malek Khatun and Obayd-e Zakani) were no slouches. I've read some Hafez before, but never the other two. I thought the translations, by Dick Davis, were lovely. 

I drew it out for quite a while to savor the pleasure.

"Come here a moment, sit with me, don't sleep tonight."

Olga Tokarczuk/The Books of Jacob

Jacob Frank (1726-1791) was a Polish-Jewish mystic who proclaimed himself the Messiah, and this is a 900+ historical novel about him and his circle. Tokarczuk, of course, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2018. 

It's nice when something so large and so heralded actually turns out to be so good, too.

"Nevertheless it is written that any person who toils over matters of Messiahs, even failed ones, even just to tell their stories, will be treated just the same as he who studies the eternal mysteries of light." Even just to write blog posts about them?

Rebecca Solnit/Orwell's Roses

(Though I read her Faraway Nearby this year as well and it was just about as good, but Orwell's Roses, still the most recent of her books, was the one that got the post.)

Solnit goes to see the cottage where Orwell lived, as cheaply as he could, with his first wife in the 1930s. She goes, because Orwell had written in his journals that he'd planted some fruit trees and some rose bushes, and she wondered if they were still there. The roses were.

It's about Orwell and roses and political writing then and now, and why so politically committed a writer as Orwell would even think of planting roses and climate change and volcanoes in Iceland and rose-factory-farming in Columbia and Mexican Marxist painters and probably a few other things I'm forgetting about at the moment. And it's not very long. So much fascination and so much insight.

A bunch of pretty fun mysteries made it on to the blog, too.

Happy New Year to you! May your 2024 provide great reading and lots of other great things, too!