Notes from my reading: work in progress
Anne Enright
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison's early work is well worth reading 😀
Letters
Michael Thornley, Galen Strawson, Miranda Carter, Nicholas Murray, Sharon Footerman, Peter Rowland, Michael Jacobs, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry
(Galen Strawson referring to the veridicality thesis)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.
Paul Mendez
George Michael: A Life by James Gavin George Michael: Freedom Uncut directed by David Austin and George Michael
Move like a party
Tim Parks
The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni, translated by Michael Moore
Manzoni was born in 1785. "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.
Michael Dillon
The Great Dispossession: Uyghurs between Civilisations by Ildiko Bellér Hann and Chris Hann How I Survived a Chinese ‘Re-education’ Camp: A Uyghur Woman’s Story by Gulbahar Haitiwaji and Rozenn Morgat, translated by Edward GauvinThe Chief Witness: Escape from China’s Modern-Day Concentration Camps by Sayragul Sauytbay and Alexandra Cavelius, translated by Caroline Waight In the Camps: Life in China’s High-Tech Penal Colony by Darren Byler
They are shrines to Sufi saints in Xinjiang. Have the Chinese destroyed them?
"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".
Blake Morrison
Septology by Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls Aliss at the Fire by Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls
800 pages of smallish print with no paragraphs or full stops...."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)."
