What Are You Reading

[Harp]

Currently re-reading this below one, quite essential.

Calculated Murders. Ist das gut?

 

[Harp]

Another periodic look at Jacques Barzun's magnificent nightstand magnum opus,
From Dawn To Decadence, 1500 to the Present.

I must admit I've never read Barzun's classic cover-to-cover. For some reason, I always
am impatient with myself, and skip around, sampling its treasures and delights like a
******* mag kept hidden bedroom. I've handed this out to many college bound premeds,
advising Medicine's jealousy with warning to resist her envy with Barzun's rich historical tapestry while they still have elective leisure to do so.

 

[Harp]

Picked up Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, but this track crow has been too stuck horse handicapping
to read anything other than the Daily Racing Form and watching past race film.
And too many questions remain unanswered. Marcus advised to stay in the present moment,
but Marcus never bet his a-s off against an Internal Revenue Service loaded superfecta. Veritas, veritas.
Or, as Marcus wrote in Greek, Teepotah. (What the foxtrot).

 

[JasonY]

Just finished

 

[JasonY]

Just started

 

[Harp]

Just finished

Jacket dystopian inference; however laconic literary style, a picture doesn't say a thousand words Jason,
so spill the beans and frame this majestic forlorn gas station post apocalyptic Edward Hopper for us pluleazze.

And the Russian, da tovarich. Anything out of Russia needs be read. At least your perusal impression.
You can't be all literary tease but no strip around here kid. So givum up already.

 

[Harp]

The Prince arrived today with IF Stone's The Trial of Socrates, both old friends to be renewed read.

Machiavelli was prescient and obviously politically astute per Venetian tenure, yet quite telling
is his dedication to Lorenzo De'Medici, who also served patron to Michaelangelo Buonarroti. Perceived
pedestrian perspective, the view from the ground floor where all subsequent structure is built cannot be denied, and serves salient guide lamp to this esteemed, yet horrifically practical tract.

IF Stone dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania for a cub reporter gig and rose through American Journalism when it was still something of a profession, and not just rote mediocre political liberalism.
After retirement, he taught himself Greek, no easy feat, then plunged into the classics. Plato's depiction
of Socrates' trial and death is spellbinding reading in itself; however, Izzy takes a scalpel to it, and particularly weighs in on Socrates with insightful clarity seldom found elsewhere.

Both The Prince and The Trial of Socrates are constructive epistles I strongly recommend.

 

[Tiki Tom]

I just finished reading Ivan Turgenev’s novel “Fathers and Children”. (Published 1862, 247 pages.)
Considered to be Russia’s first modern novel, it was an international success in its day. I think it still serves as a good introduction to 19th century Russian life before diving into Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. I did it exactly backwards. Anyway, the writing is beautiful and readable and it touches on all the topics —politics, class, peasants & aristocrats, generational differences, love, family— in much fewer pages.
In short: the younger generation comes home from university spouting the current fashionable youthful political philosophy of “nihilism” (first spelled out and described in this very book). Fathers and sons bump heads over the old vs the new. The arrogant youths are somewhat humbled and moderated when young women appear on the scene. The boys embarrass themselves to greater and lesser degrees. In the end we find out that “all is vanity” (and quite a bit is youthful posing) and that the important things in life are still love and family.
Nice book and a good look at the overarching themes of Mother Russia before the deluge.

 

[Harp]

^ My experience with Russian women is decidedly limited, but a common theme found through
talking with them is their highly critical opinion of male literary figures in Russian literature, the male authors themselves, and Russian men in general. This caustic common denominator rather surprised me as I never
thought all Russians were Smerdyakov types.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Ivan Turgenev was an interesting guy. In the book, Uncle Pavel is the thinly disguised Turgenev, right down to his wasting the best years of his life following around an unattainable married woman. After Fathers and Children was published, Turgenev moved abroad due to the attention his book received in Russia; the old gentry and the young intellectuals both found reasons to be offended.

 

[Harp]

Ivan Turgenev .... right down to his wasting the best years of his life following around an unattainable married woman.

The razor edged arrow of blind Cupid turns rusted iron and twists inside
the heart. Turgenev obviously knew this pain; whereas Dostoyevsky had his heart impaled by a sword
wielded Lucifer. I consider The Brothers Karamazov the premiere novel of the last one hundred fifty years.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Zeppo: The Reluctant Marx Brother," by Robert S. Bader.

What would it be like to go thru your entire adult life as a punch line?

That's how it was for Herbert Marx, pushed involuntarily into show business by his mother at the age of fourteen, pushed into joining the family act at the age of eighteen, and, finally pushed out of show business by his own frustration with it all at 34. And for the next forty years, he tried to live it all down.

In this exhaustively researched biography, produced with the cooperation of the various Marx families, Bader demonstrates that the most uninteresting (as most people say, but I don't -- he's fascinating to watch once you catch onto what he's doing) of the Brothers on screen and stage had by far the most interesting offstage life. He built, ran, and finally abandoned a high-powered talent agency, with such clients as Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, and his own brothers, he founded a manufacturing company that developed the bomb clamps that dropped the A-Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then sold out when he got bored with it, he ran a grapefruit ranch, he became a commercial fisherman, his wife was love-pirated by Frank Sinatra, and he made, and spent, more money than all the rest of the Brothers combined. He was also deeply enmeshed in the gangster culture of Las Vegas, to the point where his brothers considered disowning him.

Bader actually devotes only a small portion of the book to his subject's show business career, but he does explore why the Three Marx Brothers seemed strangely incomplete after Zeppo left, and how the long string of fake-Zeppos who replaced him in their movies never lived up to the standard of the original. And the book reveals, for the first time, exactly why Zeppo was so bitter about it all: for the sixteen years he performed with his brothers, he was never a full partner in the act. Groucho, Harpo, and Chico divided up the money among themselves, and paid their kid brother a straight salary as though he was just a chorus boy. He never forgave them for that.

If you think about it, there are Zeppos everywhere in life, in every group there's always that one superfluous guy standing off to the side with a vacant, stupid grin on his face. Once you think about it, you can't stop seeing them. But Bader's book demonstrates that there was a lot more to the trope-namer than his irrelevance.

 

[Harp]

^ Dunno much about the Marx Brothers, but my maternal grandmother once remarked
she had known them growing up on Chicago's Southside. Interesting guy, Zeppo soundz.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Bader notes that Zeppo was, as a kid, a full fledged Chicago street punk -- a car thief, a thug, a g un-carrying delinquent who by his own confession would have probably ended up dead if he hadn't been forced into the family act.. But he never left that kid behind, as his adult relationships with such characters as Bugsy Siegel, Frankie Costello, etc. would indicate.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Chequer Board by Nevil Shute, first published 1947


For modern readers, The Chequer Board offers a refreshing, thoughtfully passionate post-WWII denunciation of racism – a racism which today we'd term as being against "blacks" and "browns." The denunciation is great, but here's the thing: the book is littered with the N-word.

Used in this time and context, in a novel set in the UK with side trips to parts of Asia and a very brief one to the US, the word ranges in tone from almost neutral to moderately negative, but nowhere near how we rightfully view it as toxic today.

It takes a lot of adjusting to the word, but the book's ardent stand against racism – the message to judge people for who they are and not the color of their skin – is wonderfully anticipatory of Martin Luther King.

The book opens a year or so after the end of WWII, when an English veteran, John Turner, with a bad head wound from shrapnel, learns that the risk he was warned against – the shrapnel pieces they couldn't get out in 1943 could cause major problems one day – is happening now.

After all the tests and experts weigh in, he's given about a year to live, with maybe ten months during which he can continue a reasonably normal life. He chooses to use his time to find the three men he was in a hospital military prison ward with at the time. But why a military prison ward?

Turner was being held for a court-martial on a black-market charge. A black man, David Lesurier, was being held on an attempted r*pe charge; another white man, Doug Brent, was being charged with murder; and the last man, Phillip Morgan, was mistakenly put in the prison ward.

With Turner facing death, Shute uses him as a frame to examine the lives of his former hospital mates, each one a morality tale for – for that day – progressive ideas mainly against racism and for a better understanding of how military training and combat change a man.

Brent is a commando who killed a man who goaded him into a fight outside a bar. You'll want to see how it plays out as the courtroom arguments pivot on individual responsibility versus the precise military training given to Brent to kill on instinct when attacked.

Another section is a long segment where Turner travels to (what was then called) Burma to find another hospital mate, Morgan. After his wife left him during the war, Morgan stayed in Burma. Turner's intention is to help Morgan, but Morgan, married to a local girl, might not need his help.

That marriage, between a white Englishman and a "brown" Burmese woman seems thankfully not worth noting today, but was a big deal at the time and centers a good part of this segment. One of Shute's talents is taking big ideas and bringing them down to day-to-day living.

This talent is also on display when Turner looks into Lesurier's life, which, last Turner knew, did not look good for a black man accused of the attempted r*pe of a white English woman in a small British village where Turner's unit was billeted.

Turner slowly discovers that, back then, the black American soldiers were well received in the village because they were gentlemen, compared with some of the white American soldiers who were cocky and obnoxious. This set off a lot of tension in the town and in the American units.

Turner keeps digging until he unearths the entire story, which despite being fiction and having a lot of improbable twists, sounds like real life. Most people's real life, after all, experiences several improbable twists.

An author creates his own world, and Shute creates one here that supports his views, which thankfully over time have become the norm: an acceptance of interracial marriages and a sympathetic understanding of PTSD and similar post-military-service challenges.

This all works because Shute, a prolific author of the era, is – first and foremost – a storyteller. You forget that you are reading a book about WWII veterans and come to think of them as people that a good friend is telling you about.

For a large part of the book, you're not reading about postwar Burma; you are sitting on the front porch of Phillip Morgan's house with Turner as Morgan explains how he went from a military hospital and a divorce to his new life.

You're also not reading about a small English village that embraced a unit of black American soldiers in WWII; you're on a bar stool next to Turner as the pub's owner and the town's de facto historian recounts it all to you. That's what a good storyteller can do.

In The Chequer Board, and through the lives of several "regular" men, Shute put his storytelling talent to work spinning wonderful yarns that have a point of view that has aged very, very well.

 

[Harp]

^ Merle Oberon's Anglo/Indian ancestry was hidden Hollywood backstory.
The book to read is Mayukh Sen's Love, Queenie.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Finished Daniel Silva - The Cellist.

I don't know. Too less thrilling, for my taste.

 

[Harp]

Finished Daniel Silva - The Cellist.

I don't know. Too less thrilling, for my taste.

For a suggestion, Simon Leys' excellent reminiscence, The Hall of Uselessness; and The Trial of Socrates
by IF Stone are wonderful literary escapes I am currently revisiting now. Also, Jacques Barzun's outstanding
opus, From Dawn To Decadence, 1500 to the present, is a minute examination of the last five centuries of Western Cultural life that should find permanent place atop your nightstand. Last but not least, is a slim
dovetail to Barzun titled, Vibe Shift; writ British free lance journalist Brendan O'Neill, whom occasionally
pops up in YouTube commentaries where he hawks his wares like a Chicago Maxwell Street peddler.
Worth a look if you've the mind.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Now starting Gregg Hurwitz - Orphan X. After vol. 4 and 3 now the 1.

 

[Harp]

Current wrestle is I. F. Stone's examination, The Trial of Socrates, which made reach for
Copleston's initial volume of his philosophic history, Greece and Rome, advisable since college
lecture memories awakened earlier skepticism of Plato. A distant solitary figure, shrouded mist and dark memories (a merciless reprimand lashed across final paper page scrawled furious professor); earlier sojourn
Greece; during the Colonels tenure, witness murderous terrorist mayhem. Democracy tested Athens and
Stone's ancient famed trial analysis is admittedly a heady mix for me. And Izzy Stone cut his journalist
eye teeth when journalism was still a profession and not merely vapid occupation. He takes a scalpel to
Socrates like my adolescent Christian Brothers of Ireland English master stropped razor for Shakespeare.
Literary vivisection can be vicious mockery of classical manuscripts considered great works.