As the great man's guest must produce his good stories or songs at the evening banquet, as the platform orator exhibits his telling facts at mid-day, so the journalist lies under the stern obligation of extemporizing his lucid views, leading ideas, and nutshell truths for the breakfast table.
Cardinal J. H. Newman, Preface to The Idea of a University, 1852

Friday, January 13, 2023

LRB 5 January 2023

 

Notes from my reading: work in progress 

 

Anne Enright

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison


Toni Morrison's early work is well worth reading 😀

Tom Crewe

Short Cuts: Dickens and Prince


Nick Hornby's "Dickens and Prince: A Particular kind of genius" is a book that, far from crying out to be written, was resting very still and mute in a lead-lined coffin at the bottom of the ocean.

James Meek

Underwater Living


"Foley points out that councils, but the EA [environment agency] decide what gets built where. "We'll never know what happens afterwards when the development's put in place'

The developer was allowed to build in The Quadrant in Boston in exchange for a short stretch of bypass and the new stadium for Boston United. 
A problem to the National Gallery’s curators

Christopher Kelly

London in the Roman World by Dominic Perring


Geoffrey of Monmouth's account, with the story of Lud, is charming fiction. The was nothing of London before the Romans. It was expensive for the Romans who got little input from the local merchants. 

"Given the costs, it might fairly be reckoned that the annexation of Britain and the foundation of London was in great part an imperial vanity project. An accountant would have stopped the Roman empire at the channel."

Maureen N. McLane

Poem: ‘Magpie’

The magpie came back to the courtyard & its deep chill the magpie was a jay was a jackdaw was a bird in Germany if not a German bird.

Jenny Turner

‘Chéri’ and ‘The End of Chéri’ by Colette, translated by Paul Eprile
‘Chéri’ and ‘The End of Chéri’ by Colette, translated by Rachel Careau


Colette's best books. Not read in English as much as they should have been because of poor translations and people being misled by the film Gigi.

Paul Taylor

On ChatGPT


Most people don’t have to worry just yet. ChatGPT can write something that reads like a newspaper article, draft a vanilla press release or make a plausible attempt at a legal agreement, but although the content is sensible enough, it isn’t based on a detailed knowledge of events, individuals or their circumstances. Don’t get too comfortable though: GPT-4 is due to be released later this year.


Fraser MacDonald

Burning Questions


The merits and problems (particulate pollution) of wood burners.
 
"In the early 19th century, Italy was divided linguistically as well as territorially."
 
"I've 71 sheets to wash" - Manzoni refering to the work he needed/wanted to do the draft of 'The Betrothed' to "recreate the spoken Tuscan of the cultured classes". His book became "a persuasive model of what a future national language might look like". 
 
"By the 1850s The Betrothed was already being taught in many schools, and by the time of Manzoni’s death in 1873 it had become a national institution. In 1923, the Fascist reform of the education system made it compulsory reading for Italian children."

Linda Colley

Convicts: A Global History by Clare Anderson


The history of using deportations/exile instead of imprisonment (the context of Suella Braverman's 'dream' of sending immigrants to Rwanda). It's been done to millions of people throughout history.

Michael Wood

At the Movies: ‘Fanny and Alexander’


Ingmar Bergman's film is back in the cinema 40 years after its release in Sweden.

Moral of the film: our wishes can't be relied upon to stay safely in the mind.

"It is difficult to substantiate allegations of ill-treatment in the camps, but many accounts can be corroborated".

Beijing's preferred response to international criticism has been denial. ... 

"There are undoubtedly individuals and groups in Xinjiang intent on creating an Eastern Turkestan independent of China – the same is true for Inner (Southern) Mongolia and Tibet. They are not the malevolent creation of foreign organisations and have not been the main instigators of violence in the region. Conflict and violence have resulted from discrimination against the Uyghurs; resistance to the repression of religious and cultural expressions of identity; and from reaction to the heavy-handed crackdown, in particular arbitrary detention without trial."

James Romm

At the British Library: Alexander the Great

Alexander the Great​ was a pioneer of political spin, a master of image-making. 

Christian Lorentzen

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy


"That there was an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world and there always had been. That at the core of reality lies a deep and eternal demonium. All religions understand this. ... Cohen asks her [Alicia] if [her brother] Bobby worried she was crazy: I don't think so. But it could be that the more he thought about it the more concerned he became that I wasn't. That the news could be worse? Yes. Maybe as in what if she is right."

The unconscious, he wrote, 'is a machine for operator an animal'.  ... What else could it be? ... But the souldoctors [psychiatrists] don't get any of this. They're Cartesian to the bone".

"It's like it's not the painter who sees, it's something else seeing through the painter, and is like this something is trapped in the picture and speaks silently from it...'

It's always the darkest part of the picture that shines the most, Asle thinks, 'it's in the hopelessness and despair, in the darkness, that God is closest to us'.

Talk of grace sets Fosse apart from Beckett, with whom he's often compared, and from other writers he admires (Trakl, Kafka and Hamsun)."

 

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