August Wrapup

I was reading that AI companies have burned through their vast piles of cash and have started to borrow to keep constructing data centers. Fully a third of the all-time visits to my blog came last month. (I'm sure I'm not the only one seeing such statistics.) Silicon Valley is going into debt just to read my blog? This is a bubble whose finances are going to make 2000 and 2007 look like a church pancake breakfast. 

Literary Fiction

Roberto Bolaño/The Savage Detectives

Third time I've read it. Still has that air of sweet melancholic remembrance.  

Colson Whitehead/The Intuitionist

He came to Toronto promoting his most recent novel, the conclusion of his Harlem trilogy, Cool Machine. At some point the library will deliver it to me. In the meantime I read this, his first novel. Black passing as White and Black acceptance into a White job world in a somewhat surreal take on elevator inspection.

Virginia Woolf/Between the Acts

More here.

Genre Literature

Margery Allingham/The Crime at Black Dudley

The first Albert Campion story, just with less Campion. Pretty good, but not the best. More in the mode of thriller Campion than mystery-solving Campion.  (Which generally I don't mind.)

Robert Barnard/A Little Local Murder

Documentary radio program comes to town and everybody wants to be on it. One person won't... 

Lloyd Alexander/The Castle of Llyr 

High fantasy with a Welsh-ish setting for a younger audience. I've since finished the series (of five, then there's a volume of stories). More to come. 

Helen MacInnes/Prelude to Terror

More here. 

Poetry

Shakespeare/Othello

I saw a superb production of Othello in Stratford, Ontario, and reread the play in advance. No more of that...

Matsuo Bashō/Narrow Road to the Interior

The early Japanese travel writer and author of haiku.

Literary Criticism

Morten Høi Jensen/The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of the Magic Mountain

A biography of Mann during the years he was writing The Magic Mountain (1913-1924) together with criticism of that novel. Very good if you're interested.

Also...

I read about 800 pages of Montaigne's complete essays in M. A. Screech's translation  (roughly 2/3rds). I should finish it this coming month.

For the Commonplace Book

"I consider it immoral to avoid the discomforts of indolence by writing one bad book after another."

    -Thomas Mann, via Jensen. (He was thinking of his brother Heinrich.)

 

"It is time to begin thinking about a masterpiece."

    -Letter of Thomas Mann to Heinrich, via Jensen.

 

"And therefore, Reader, I myself am the subject of this book: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain."

    -Montaigne, "To The Reader", tr. M. A. Screech.

 

"If it is to do us any good, learning must not only lodge with us: we must marry her."

    -Montaigne, tr. Screech.

 

"I am not prepared to bash my brains for anything, not even for learning's sake, however precious it may be. From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honourable pastime."

    -Montaigne, tr. Screech.  

 

"My hand is so clumsy that I cannot even read my own writing."

    -Montaigne, tr. Screech. (I can be Montaigne in that!)

 

"Malum consilium est, quod mutari non potest!" [It's a bad plan that can't be changed!]

    -Publilius Syrus, my translation.

 

"Etiam innocentes cogit mentiri dolor." [Pain will compel even the innocent to lie.]

    -Publilius Syrus, my translation. (A statement against torture.) 

 

"Truth for us nowadays is not what is, but what others can be brought to accept."

    -Montaigne, tr. Screech. Things haven't changed that much. Sigh...

 

The books still around the house:

 

 

"Potare et spargere flores/Incipiam, patiarque vel inconsultus haberi." [I'm about to start drinking and scattering flowers, even though I admit I'll be considered a fool.]

    -Horace, Epistles, I.v.14, my translation.

Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts

"What's the object of this entertainment?"

"The funds are to go to installing electric light in the church."

 

A pageant of English history is being performed as a benefit on the lawn of Pointz Hall. Miss La Trobe has written the texts and organized the actors. The Olivers--a new family in the village; they've only owned Pointz Hall for a hundred and twenty years--have offered their lawn, or the barn should it turn wet.

The pageant begins with a prologue; then there's an Elizabethan episode, a pastiche of a Restoration comedy, and finally the Present Day. The real story--that of the villagers--happens between the acts? So it would seem.

 

But it's also taking place on a June day in 1939, and is between the acts in another sense, act one and act two of the great world conflagration. That afternoon seems peaceful, nothing to worry about but the weather, but the play is interrupted by a droning aircraft and the failure of the gramophone to provide music; neither the girl who recites the prologue ("England am I") nor Queen Elizabeth ("Eliza Clark, licensed to sell tobacco") are able to remember their lines. In the audience, Colonel Mayhew keeps wondering, "Where's the British army?" because, of course, you can't tell the history of England without the British army. The implication is it will return all too soon.

 

The confusion of the actors is mirrored in the confusion of the audience. That morning before the pageant, Bartholomew Oliver, patriarch of the Olivers, terrified his grandson George with a rolled-up newspaper, and the boy runs off crying; Bartholomew now thinks he's the grandfather of a crybaby. His son, Giles Oliver, a stockbroker in the city, is attracted to the overripe Mrs. Manresa; they go off alone to the greenhouse at one point. The introduction observes that Manresa is a generic name for a Jesuit novice house (from the town in Spain) but is also a near-homonym for man-raiser. Giles, who spotted a snake with a toad half-eaten and stuck in its mouth, walks around with blood on his shoe from stomping the pair to death. Isabella Oliver, Giles' wife, thinks of her husband as handsome and the father of her children, but is attracted to Rupert Haines, a gentleman farmer of the area; it leads to nothing. "It made no difference his infidelity--but hers did."

 

William Dodge, whose name people can't remember--"I'm William"--is a homosexual; he's disdained by the men, but Mrs. Swithin, old Bartholomew's widowed sister, shows him around Pointz Hall; Isa Oliver feels a near mute sympathy with him. Will the young crybaby George become William? Or will he become part of Britain's army? 

 

The pageant itself is poetical, but so is the text it's embedded in. Just on the first page, there are the following alliterations: 'the county council', 'gobble in the gutter', 'a cow coughed', 'substance and succulence', 'a swan swimming'. Woolf, as Miss La Trobe, gets to write the verse of the pageant, and the Restoration comedy, with its classism and Lady Harraden's failed plot to marry off her niece and keep the money in the family. But between the failure of the actors to remember their lines, the failure of the technical contraptions to work, and the failure of the audience to put aside their own distractions--and this before cell phones!--Miss La Trobe thinks:

"It was a failure, another damned failure! As usual. Her vision escaped her."

This was Virginia Woolf's last novel before her suicide in March of 1941 and was published only after her death. Leonard says in a headnote that it was substantially completed, though it was likely Virginia would have made some changes when it was in proof.

I suppose nobody thinks this one of the greatest Woolf works, but I still thought it was very good. So what is the object of this entertainment? It's possible there are a few too many objects for something that's basically novella length. The Years was swift and spare in its telling; this even more so. The introduction in my edition, by Linden Peach, a professor at the University of Wales, suggests that Miss La Trobe's sense of failure mirrors Woolf's own at the time. Maybe, but I think that a sense of failure is inherent in the attempt to create; it never completely goes away, and even the chronically depressed Woolf knew this. Miss La Trobe also thinks:

"Hadn't she, for twenty-five minutes, made them see? A vision imparted was a relief from agony..."

That could be the most we can hope for. 

 

 

Basho

 

Whenever winds blow

the butterfly finds a new place

on the willow tree

 

A Dutchman arrives

to view cherry blossoms

from his saddle

 

A lovely spring night

suddenly vanished while we

viewed cherry blossoms

 

Nothing in the cry

of cicadas suggests they

are about to die

 

With no umbrella

in cold, early winter rain--

ah, well! So be it! 

Being useless,

my daydreams are disturbed

by noisy warblers

 

-Matsuo Bashō (tr. Sam Hamill)

 

Bashō (1644-1694) was a Japanese poet and travel writer, famous in his own day. (Write me a poem, Matsuo Bashō, and he frequently did.) I recently finished this collection--very good! A mix of poems and travel writing. I was a bit surprised how his travels felt quite like a modern tourist, off to see temple complexes or areas of great natural beauty. Of course the one time I got to see something in Japan, I went and saw a temple complex.

 

These are just a random few of the haiku in the volume, ones that appealed to me. You'll notice that in Hamill's translation they're not particularly rigorous about the 5-7-5 syllable system, but the introduction suggests that Bashō himself wasn't particularly rigorous either. They do show the typical haiku structure: an observation of a natural setting with a turn in the third line.