What are you currently reading?

[DavidW]

Mr. Murdstone might just be the most detestable villain Dickens ever created. Of course I may be biased because I have lived through similar experience to that which poor David went through.

Too many children have experienced neglect and cruelty.

[Brian]

Mr. Murdstone might just be the most detestable villain Dickens ever created. Of course I may be biased because I have lived through similar experience to that which poor David went through.

By coincidence I am currently reading Barbara Kingsolver's adaptation of the book, Demon Copperhead, resetting the events in the American South with the drug abuse epidemic. Her version of Mr. Murdstone, Murrell Stone, is so repugnant and abusive that it makes it hard to read more than one chapter at a time.

[Papy Oli]

By coincidence I am currently reading Barbara Kingsolver's adaptation of the book, Demon Copperhead, resetting the events in the American South with the drug abuse epidemic. Her version of Mr. Murdstone, Murrell Stone, is so repugnant and abusive that it makes it hard to read more than one chapter at a time.

I read about a quarter of Kingsolver earlier in the year but had to give up, it was bleak. I've never read Copperfield so I thought that I should start from there first then one day then follow up with Kingsolver if the mood is ok with it again.

[Todd]

Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2022, by the Congressional Research Service.

[Bachthoven]

Very similar to Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs and The Red Dragon. Still a good, if gruesome, read.

[Ganondorf]

So far bunch of double standard bs combined with gorgeous, almost effortless-seeming prose and plot. I probably should have mentioned the negatives after the positives since I actually really like this book.

[Mandryka]

So far bunch of double standard bs combined with gorgeous, almost effortless-seeming prose and plot. I probably should have mentioned the negatives after the positives since I actually really like this book.

I just can't get on with Balzac, though I haven't read that one. He's too old fashioned! The made novel, the omniscient narrator. Nice enough prose in French, I think. But even that is old fashioned (compared with Flaubert, Proust.)

At school we used to call Balzac "Balls ache."

[Florestan]

So far bunch of double standard bs combined with gorgeous, almost effortless-seeming prose and plot. I probably should have mentioned the negatives after the positives since I actually really like this book.

Judging the past by present standards is useless. It's a foreign country, doing things differently. 

And I'm sure that if Balzac came alive today, he'd find a lot of bs and double standards in our world as well.   

[Florestan]

Elena Kostyucheno's I Love Russia:

Hah!

I love Russian music and literature. If "Russia" is extended to politics as well, then I hate it unremittingly, be it Tsarist, Soviet or Putinist. 

[AnotherSpin]

[Brian]

We should bring back the word "smasheroo" in reviews.

[Valentino]

3 down, 18 to go of the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey/Maturin series.

Christmas present. I've read some of the books in Norwegian earlier and the film is a favorite, but reading these in English is excellent entertainment and the musical suggestions excellent ideas for listening.

[ritter]

Starting Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Terre des Hommes ("Wind, Sand and Stars").

[Philo]

Decena's Circuits of the Sacred: A Faggotology in the Black Latinx Caribbean

[Mandryka]

What a pleasure to revisit this - first time in 50 years. What poetry! Even in translation it's astonishing. I've just finished Bk 2 - the Trojan horse.

Compared with other epics - Homer, Mahabharata, the Samuel and Kings in the OT - it feels less alien, more like my world. Why that is I can't say, because there's gods and violence aplenty - it maybe that the English school system that I suffered inculcated Augustinian values.

[Mandryka]

Decena's Circuits of the Sacred: A Faggotology in the Black Latinx Caribbean

Are you an academic in this area or are you reading it just for pleasure/curiosity? I'll try to get hold of it - partly because it reminds me of a friend of mine who went to live in Timbuktu remarking that the people were adamant that there just are no native queers in Mali, that it was strictly a developed world phenomenon. Presumably lots of the people in Decena's study have cultural ties to sub Saharan Africa.

I also thought of this BBC series, which I thought was quite enjoyable - very enjoyable. I don't know if you can get it.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m0023h93/mr-loverman

@Cato What do you think of the word "faggotology". I'll look in the OED supplements later, see if it's found its way in there.

[ritter]

Starting Carlo Levi's Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli), his 1945 memoir of his two years of banishment, by the Fascist regime, to a remote town in the Lucania region (now known as Basilicata).



The title stems from a local expression that means that the Lucania region was bypassed by Christianity or civilisation. Eboli is a town southeast of Naples, still in Campania; and yes, the historical Princess of Éboli, of Schiller and Verdi fame, got her title --or rather, it was bestowed to her husband by Philipp II of Spain-- from the town's name.

The book was turned into a movie by Francesco Rosi in 1979, starring Gian Maria Volonté.

[AnotherSpin]

Starting Carlo Levi's Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli), his 1945 memoir of his two years of banishment, by the Fascist regime, to a remote town in the Lucania region (now known as Basilicata).



The title stems from a local expression that means that the Lucania region was bypassed by Christianity or civilisation. Eboli is a town southeast of Naples, still in Campania; and yes, the historical Princess of Éboli, of Schiller and Verdi fame, got her title --or rather, it was bestowed to her husband by Philipp II of Spain-- from the town's name.

The book was turned into a movie by Francesco Rosi in 1979, starring Gian Maria Volonté.

I saw this film in the cinema back then. I can't remember exactly when, probably in the early 1980s. The details have faded over the years, but the overall impression stuck with me quite strongly and vividly.

[AnotherSpin]

What a pleasure to revisit this - first time in 50 years. What poetry! Even in translation it's astonishing. I've just finished Bk 2 - the Trojan horse.

Compared with other epics - Homer, Mahabharata, the Samuel and Kings in the OT - it feels less alien, more like my world. Why that is I can't say, because there's gods and violence aplenty - it maybe that the English school system that I suffered inculcated Augustinian values.

I think I understand what you mean. When I was deeply immersed in ancient Greek and Roman literature years ago, I was a complete fanatic, reading almost everything that had been translated and published in the USSR. What struck me again and again was how astonishingly modern many of those texts felt. The themes, the human quirks, the sharp observations of character and society all seemed surprisingly close and relevant, as if they could have been written yesterday.

That sense of timelessness brings to mind a remarkable Ukrainian reworking of Virgil's Aeneid. It is the burlesque-travesty poem Eneïda (Енеїда), written more than two centuries ago by Ivan Kotlyarevsky. He began working on it in the 1790s, and the first three parts were published in 1798 in St. Petersburg, without his consent, in a pirated edition. Today, the poem is widely regarded as the founding work of modern Ukrainian literature, since it was the first major literary text written entirely in the living Ukrainian vernacular rather than in Church Slavonic or old Russian.

In Kotlyarevsky's hands, Virgil's epic is brilliantly parodied. The Trojan heroes are transformed into Zaporozhian Cossacks, complete with their boisterous, earthy manners. Aeneas becomes a clever, roguish Cossack lad, the gods resemble quarrelsome landowners or tavern regulars, and the narrative is saturated with Ukrainian folklore, customs, food, drink, swearing, and sharp satire of everyday life. The poem overflows with bawdy humor, exaggeration, and social commentary. Gods and heroes get drunk, brawl, chase women, and behave in ways that are anything but heroic.

Beneath the comedy, however, there is a more serious undercurrent. The poem subtly conveys nostalgia for the lost Cossack freedom following the destruction of the Zaporozhian Sich in 1775, and it affirms Ukrainian language and identity at a time when both were under intense pressure.

Eneïda quickly became enormously popular, inspired numerous imitations, and played a crucial role in raising colloquial Ukrainian to the level of a literary language. The complete six-part version was published only after Kotlyarevsky's death, in 1842. It remains widely read and performed to this day, with stage adaptations, operas, and even an animated film, and is cherished as a cornerstone of Ukrainian culture. It is funny, irreverent, and, in its own way, timelessly clever.

[Philo]

Are you an academic in this area or are you reading it just for pleasure/curiosity? I'll try to get hold of it - partly because it reminds me of a friend of mine who went to live in Timbuktu remarking that the people were adamant that there just are no native queers in Mali, that it was strictly a developed world phenomenon. Presumably lots of the people in Decena's study have cultural ties to sub Saharan Africa.

I also thought of this BBC series, which I thought was quite enjoyable - very enjoyable. I don't know if you can get it.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m0023h93/mr-loverman

@Cato What do you think of the word "faggotology". I'll look in the OED supplements later, see if it's found its way in there.

So, I am an academic, and I began reading this for both methodological and methodical purposes, but it is also a pleasure read as it is outside my discipline, and while incisive is written with pleasure in mind.

In sum, it is an immigrant's tale with dense theory interleaved throughout. They call what they are doing a faggotology - think hagiography, but it feels much more akin to something in-between autobiography, autoethnography, and autobiomythgraphy.

I picked it up primarily as my positionality and theirs is near overlapping, and since I see myself so infrequently in the academy, I was immediately hooked and gravitated toward it.

It is a very frank book.