LRB 19th January 2023

 

Reading notes 

John Lahr

Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life by James Curtis

From a very young age, 11 months, he was on the stage with his parents on the "Orpheum vaudeville circuit" with his parents. Huge success with his own silent films made by his own company but made the mistake of signing with MGM where it all went wrong and he took to drink. But got through that and was successful again.

Letters

Hana Loftus, Andrew Hobbs, Stephen Sedley, Peter Gillman, Paul Tindall, Andrew Gelman, Neal Ascherson, Stefan Collini, Anne Summers

Letters...

Diane Williams

Story: ‘Fredella’

"One woman grew her hair so long it dragged across the floor as she walked." Bit weird this, poem/story!

Catherine Nicholson

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell

He was a Catholic but converted to Anglicanism, after his brother, Henry, died ignominiously in jail, having been sheltering a Catholic priest. John later became an Anglican priest, at the specific request of the king (James I). He became famous and celebrated for his preaching.

"[O]n his (literal) deathbed [in 1631], he hired an artist to produce a life-sized sketch of his shrouded form, to serve as the basis for the marble funerary monument that still stands in an alcove at St Paul’s." ...

 

"Four years later, then, when the portrait of a swashbuckling teenage Donne appeared on the frontispiece of the second print edition of Poems by J D., With Elegies on the Authors Death, its Spanish motto – Antes muerto que mudado [‘Sooner dead than changed’] – must have had an ironic ring. John Donne had changed, and just about everyone knew it." 

 

Izaak Walton, soon to become his biographer: "Life of Dr John Donne" (1640)

 

None of Donne’s verses was published in his lifetime.

Michael Wood

The Drunken Boat: Selected Writings by Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Mark Polizzotti

"And there is no doubt, so far as I know, that a person called Arthur Rimbaud wrote the works and letters attributed to him. Or that he was born in 1854 in north-eastern France and died in Marseille in 1891, having spent the latter part of his life in Africa. Or that he was a teenage poet who stopped writing when he was twenty. But then what is the relation of a historical person to a work that scarcely ever seems straight – that seeks, in White’s words, to ‘strain meaning to the very limits’? Can history live by metaphors alone?"

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1918-38 edited by Simon Heffer

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1938-43 edited by Simon Heffer

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1943-57 edited by Simon Heffer

The circle of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West etc. Review compares Channon's diaries with those of Harold Nicolson. "Nicolson personified the establishment – as distinct from Channon’s milieu, which was high society"

His antisemitism: "Having dined with the Rothschilds in Paris, [Channon] wonders: ‘Why cannot Jews be like other people? There was a cheap air about everything.’ Later in England, ‘the servants are casual, indeed almost rude; but this, too, is usual in a rich Jew’s establishment.’"

 

He was an admirer of Mussolini and Hitler.

 

"They had also been taken to a labour camp, which ‘looked tidy, even gay, and the boys, all about eighteen, looked like the ordinary German peasant boy, fair, healthy and sunburned ... England could learn many a lesson from Nazi Germany. I cannot understand the English dislike and suspicion of the Nazi regime.’ The ‘atrocities in Germany’ caused ‘very little excitement really – the latest Jew-baiting, the beatings ... who cares?’ And there was a larger moral: the fact that Germany ‘is not now communist is due to Hitler ... oh! England wake up. You in your sloth and conceit are ignorant of the Soviet dangers and will not realise that ... Germany is fighting our battles.’"

He was bisexual (or gay but used heterosexual relationships for convenience at times?) and very open about his affairs in his diaries.

At the 1945 election: "Channon survived the Labour landslide. [as a Tory], while Nicolson lost his seat. (In 1948 he [Nicolson] stood as the Labour candidate in the North Croydon by-election, which he lost soundly, not that he minded too much: ‘I should not like to represent Croydon, which is a bloody place.’)". My reflection: just like today, someone like that - a nazi sympathiser and who just sees the house of commons as his private club - getting elected! 

Donald MacKenzie

Short Cuts: A Puff of Carbon Dioxide

 

The envisonmental damage of ICT, and especially online advertising.

 

"Generating the electricity to get just one ad to appear on your screen can produce a puff of carbon dioxide sufficiently large that, if it were cigarette smoke, you would be able to see it."

Iain Sinclair

Negative Equivalent

The (London) super sewer.

 

(The 'clever' writing of this article, full of metaphors, analogies, decoration and ornamentation, made it difficult to extract the content. It was like diving through water full of... plants and flowers and struggling to find the fish.)

Deborah Friedell

The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler by Kathryn Olmsted

Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War by Deborah Cohen

American report Dorothy Thompson recognised the problem with Hilter and opposed the general consensus in America that they should not get involved in the war.

Malin Hay

BookTok

BookTok, the corner of TikTok populated by readers.

Tom Stevenson

The Secret History of the Five Eyes: The Untold Story of the Shadowy International Spy Network, through Its Targets, Traitors and Spies by Richard Kerbaj

Sub-Imperial Power: Australia in the International Arena by Clinton Fernandes

Five eyes is the spy network of USA, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Dominated of course the USA.

Eleanor Nairne

At the Fondation Louis Vuitton: Joan Mitchell

Joan claimed not to be influenced by French Impressionism, but..

 

John Whitfield

The Quantified Scholar: How Research Evaluations Transformed the British Social Sciences by Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra

"The case for evaluation is that as well as bringing a measure of transparency and accountability to government research funding, it has made the UK’s research better and forced its universities to act more strategically. The case against is that star ratings tell us little about the true quality of academic work, that universities are more interested in primping their ratings than knowing where they actually stand, and that too many institutions use the evaluation to discipline staff in ways that make good scholarship harder. In the universities themselves, the biggest complaint is the amount of work the process creates"

Leah Broad

The Music of Frederick Delius: Style, Form and Ethos by Jeremy Dibble

There was an attempt to claim Delius as a British composer to compete with the Germans, such as Beethoven and Brahms, because he was born in Bradford (in 1862) to a middle class wool merchant. But it didn't really work because his parents were German and he spend much of his life travelling.

 

His music is criticised as formless. He is praised as being independent, not fitting in with trends. Neither descriptions really stand up to scrutiny.

 

In American he drew on the influences of African music, but accepted the current attitudes and stereotypes of racial hierarchies.

 

In 1892 Dvorak stated that "the future of the music of this country [USA[ must be founded on what are called negro melodies'

Karen Solie

Poem: ‘Caribou’

Why, after so many years, is she with me now?

We who were not close in life

walk among the caribou lichen [...]

Sarah Resnick

Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey

Novel by Mexican author about friendship and motherhood.

Luke de Noronha

Diary: At the Deportation Tribunal