What are you currently reading?

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Dry Brett Kavanaugh

Quote from: Mandryka on October 04, 2020, 11:33:55 PM
Yes, there's a book about it



I will order 10 copies for my entire family.

BWV 1080


BWV 1080

Quote from: greg on October 05, 2020, 06:35:15 AM
Wtf lol.


What I don't get: did he really, really, think he could get away with what he did?

Or did he more than anything just want to see the world burn?

Because seems you would have to be an idiot to say you want the best for your country and then have them be a target like that. That's what doesn't make sense to me, it seems incredibly stupid and suicidal.


Also, is there anything in there about his obsession with cleanliness? Did he really take 4 baths a day?  ???

Hitler's overall plan was rational, albeit criminal and a wild gamble.  He saw Germany's defeat in WW1 stemming from the superior resources in manpower and material from both the British Empire (remember at the time, the UK could draw on the resources of its colonies) and the US.  He saw the only option for Germany to compete on an equal footing was to create a land empire in the East, exterminating most of the population of the USSR, seizing its abundant natural resources, and resettling it with ethnic Germans - he made analogies to the American conquest of the West and how white American settlers displaced native Americans.

aligreto

Huxley: Twice Seven





This is a selection of short stories. They range in length from a few pages to a novella. The quality is also variable and ranges from the compelling to the inane. Huxley tended towards excessive indulgence in philosophising and moralising at the expense of character and plot development in many of the stories. I know that is what he was about but it is a pity as the storytelling does, for me, suffer as a result.

Mandryka



What the hell is the point of this? 
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

Dry Brett Kavanaugh

Quote from: aligreto on September 06, 2020, 01:44:22 AM
Chekhov: Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories




I like Chekhov. I have named one of my dogs Chekhov.
If you like his works, you may like stories by Katherine Mansfield, who was influenced by Chekhov.
Do you happen to know the music "The Lady with Lapdog" composed by Rodion Shchedrin?

Dry Brett Kavanaugh

Quote from: Brian on July 26, 2020, 05:20:35 AM
Who translated that edition of Dead Souls? I ask because I remember it being a pleasure, even fun to read.

If the text is very old, it could be Charles James Hogarth. There are several new translations and they are much better.

Jo498

As for the dog. I seem to recall a short story by Cekhov (not sure, could have been another late 19th century writer, it must have been in some anthology) where (as a side note, not a main plot) a boy tortures a dog or dogs by letting them eat bits of meat tied to string so he can pull them up again after the dog had swallowed them.
Tout le malheur des hommes vient d'une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos, dans une chambre.
- Blaise Pascal

bhodges

Like many people, I suspect, I was not familiar with the work of Louise Glück, who just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. A friend in Austin (also unfamiliar with her) posted this fine introduction. Like many fine writers, Glück deploys disarming simplicity.

* * * * *

The Denial of Death
Issue no. 226 (Fall 2018)

1. A Travel Diary

I had left my passport at an inn we stayed at for a night or so whose name I couldn't remember. This is how it began. The next hotel would not receive me. A beautiful hotel, in an orange grove, with a view of the sea. How casually you accepted the room that would have been ours, and, later, how merrily you stood on the balcony, pelting me with foil-wrapped chocolates. The next day you resumed the journey we would have taken together.

The concierge procured an old blanket for me. By day, I sat outside the kitchen. By night, I spread my blanket among the orange trees. Every day was the same, except for the weather.

After a time, the staff took pity on me. A busboy would bring me food from the evening meal, the odd potato or bit of lamb. Sometimes a postcard arrived. On the front, glossy landmarks and works of art. Once, a mountain covered in snow. After a month or so there was a postscript: X sends regards.

I say a month, but really I had no idea of time. The busboy disappeared. There was a new busboy, then one more, I believe. From time to time, one would join me on my blanket.

I loved those days! Each one exactly like its predecessor. There were the stone steps we climbed together and the little town where we breakfasted. Very far away, I could see the cove where we used to swim, but not hear anymore the children calling out to one another, nor hear you anymore, asking me if I would like a cold drink, which I always would.

When the postcards stopped, I read the old ones again. I saw myself standing under the balcony in that rain of foil-covered kisses, unable to believe you would abandon me, begging you, of course, though not in words—

The concierge, I realized, had been standing beside me. Do not be sad, he said. You have begun your own journey, not into the world, like your friend, but into yourself and your memories. As they fall away, perhaps you will attain that enviable emptiness into which all things flow, like the empty cup in the Daodejing—

Everything is change, he said, and everything is connected. Also everything returns, but what returns is not what went away.

We watched you walk away. Down the stone steps and into the little town. I felt something true had been spoken, and though I would have preferred to have spoken it myself, I was glad at least to have heard it.

2. The Story of the Passport

It came back but you did not come back.
It happened as follows:

One day an envelope arrived,
bearing stamps from a small European republic.
This the concierge handed me with an air of great ceremony;
I tried to open it in the same spirit.

Inside was my passport.
There was my face, or what had been my face
at some point, deep in the past.
But I had parted ways with it,
that face smiling with such conviction,
filled with all the memories of our travels together
and our dreams of other journeys—
I threw it into the sea.

It sank immediately.
Downward, downward, while I continued
staring into the empty water.
All this time the concierge was watching me.

Come, he said, taking my arm. And we began
to walk around the lake, as was my daily habit.

I see, he said, that you no longer
wish to resume your former life,
to move, that is, in a straight line as time
suggests we do, but rather (here he gestured toward the lake)
in a circle, which aspires to
that stillness at the heart of things,
though I prefer to think it also resembles a clock.

Here he took out of his pocket
the large watch that was always with him. I challenge you, he said,
to tell, looking at this, if it is Monday or Tuesday.
But if you look at the hand that holds it, you will realize I am not
a young man anymore, my hair is silver.
Nor will you be surprised to learn
it was once dark, as yours must have been dark,
and curly, I would say.

Through this recital, we were both
watching a group of children playing in the shallows,
each body circled by a rubber tube.

Red and blue, green and yellow,
a rainbow of children splashing in the clear lake.

I could hear the clock ticking,
presumably alluding to the passage of time
while in fact annulling it.

You must ask yourself, he said, if you deceive yourself.
By which I mean looking at the watch and not
the hand holding it. We stood awhile, staring at the lake,
each of us thinking our own thoughts.

But isn't the life of the philosopher
exactly as you describe, I said. Going over the same course,
waiting for truth to disclose itself.

But you have stopped making things, he said, which is what
the philosopher does. Remember when you kept what you called
your travel journal? You used to read it to me,
I remember it was filled with stories of every kind,
mostly love stories and stories about loss, punctuated
with fantastic details such as wouldn't occur to most of us,

and yet hearing them I had a sense I was listening
to my own experience but more beautifully related
than I could ever have done. I felt

you were talking to me or about me though I never left your side.
What was it called? A travel diary, I think you said,
though I often called it The Denial of Death, after Ernest Becker.
And you had an odd name for me, I remember.

Concierge, I said. Concierge is what I called you.
And before that, you, which is, I believe,
a convention in fiction.

--Bruce

Dry Brett Kavanaugh

Niels Bohr's Times, Abraham Pais.

AlberichUndHagen



Haven't yet actually started this but borrowed it from the library the other day.

Scion7



A little light reading ...  0:)
When, a few months before his death, Rachmaninov lamented that he no longer had the "strength and fire" to compose, friends reminded him of the Symphonic Dances, so charged with fire and strength. "Yes," he admitted. "I don't know how that happened. That was probably my last flicker."

ritter

Some Cocteau: Mon premier voyage (Tour du monde en 80 jours).


In the mid-1930s, Cocteau managed to convince the Paris-Soir newspaper to sponsor a trip in which he'd emulate Phileas Fogg's feat in Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days. As Cocteau would later say, to keep the 80 day deadline was barely possible in those times (aeroplanes were purposefully avoided).

This is a very entertaining book (so far Cocteau and his "Passepartout", Marcel Khill, have reached Kuala Lumpur). The author combines a journalistic style with at times strikingly  poetic images. Of course, some attitudes and expressions regarding "exotic" lands and peoples will raise some eyebrows today, but the book is a product of it's time and culture, not ours.


Florestan

Quote from: ritter on October 10, 2020, 10:23:41 AM
a product of it's time and culture, not ours.

So is the music of JS Bach.


Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind. — Rossini


Florestan

Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind. — Rossini

ritter

? ?   ;D

I just don't understand what you're trying to say (or imply), cher ami.

Florestan

Quote from: ritter on October 10, 2020, 10:56:47 AM
? ?   ;D

I just don't understand what you're trying to say (or imply), cher ami.

What I'm trying to say, querido amigo,  is that each and every work of art created before we were born is a product of its time and culture, not ours.
Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind. — Rossini

ritter

Quote from: Florestan on October 10, 2020, 11:10:57 AM
What I'm trying to say, querido amigo,  is that each and every work of art created before we were born is a product of its time and culture, not ours.
Thanks.

MN Dave

John D. MacDonald, Soren Kierkegard, and a book on Macca.
"The effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence." — Arthur Schopenhauer