What Are You Reading

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

I regularly read The Era thread. Utterly love its newsprint and comics. Terry and The Pirates owns me heart n' soul no twice abouts; yet recent awaken author Milton Caniff's technique of romance tease without consumation, or seeming avoidance grim reaper man & boy amidst the Second War has me Sherlock Holmes self on hunt no less. I hold this author and Terrence a sure cut streets above most similar fare which puzzles meself as to why the rat. Answer surely lies contemporary comics critique and scholarship so I'll drink lamp smoke and chase the daemon until.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

On the hunt forthwith, I've Terry and The Pirates meet Burma, a strip compile dating back
to 1938 which found Amazon for a lordly three dollars and change and enroute.
I'll read this for background then go after any academic lit papers or comic critique that
can box Milton Caniff's mindset square.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

I've TATP Meet Burma now and a fast peruse is enticing but with the Belmont Stakes approach
I snagged The Greatest Gambling Story Ever Told, a true tale of three gamblers,
The Kentucky Derby, and the mexican cartel. Sounds a bit Christmas-cee with the Magi
camel drivers Gaspar, Balthazar, Merchior along its spectacular 20th Century Fox headliner.
A million dollar score won the 1988 Derby in Tijuana with a cartel obstruction. A fast dash to
the border one step ahead Death, a true wedoneit writ by Mark (Miami) Paul, one of the three
stooges-pros who really f....d upwards. After my busted flush 4 horses hit in a monster Super Five Derby ticket and a 3 out of 4 Preakness superfecta rain soaked tracks tickets, a chaser
classic screwup shit hit the fan track tale was needed. Always some guy deeper in the barn horseshit than you.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Just asking.
Has anyone of you read the original novel of M.A.S.H ?

 

[Tiki Tom]

Just asking.
Has anyone of you read the original novel of M.A.S.H ?

No. However I recall having spoken with someone who did. It was his view that the book was completely different from the TV series. He particularly emphasized that the political spin was different.

 

[Fading Fast]

Evelina by Frances Burney originally published in 1778


The eighteenth-century social customs of Britain's upper classes would be obscure to us today if not for Jane Austen. Her books, and the many movies they've engendered, have kept knowledge of those rigidly orchestrated societal rules part of popular culture ever since.

So it is of literary importance that Evelina, by Frances Burney, is considered to be a major influence on Austen's works. Fans of Austen will immediately recognize, in Burney's novel, the withering satire and nuanced insights into relationships that Austen brings to her stories.

Burney's tale centers on the young charming girl, Evelina, whose aristocratic father has disowned her because of his bitter marriage with Evelina's now-deceased mother. The result has Evelina being raised by a kind country vicar, leaving her lineage a bit muddled for "proper society."

We meet Evelina when she is being brought "out" into society by wealthy friends. But having not been raised in that world, Evelina makes mistake after mistake at dances and gatherings as she doesn't know all the highly nuanced and unspoken rules of society.

That is the setup for the novel that follows the travails of Evelina through this rigid world where her sincerity and kindness are often a liability amongst a class that uses elaborate and empty compliments as both currency and, often, veiled insults.

She only learns by painful experience that if you're alone at a dance and refuse a young man's offer to dance, you can't later dance with another man. The first man, in an Austen-like scene, "politely" proceeds to brutally debone Evelina like a small chicken.

Other contretemps and more serious issues arise as Evelina becomes a pawn in her maternal grandmother's game to get back at her daughter's husband, Evelina's father. This young girl, in today's parlance, would need years of analysis to overcome her "parent issues."

Foreshadowing Austen, Evelina is also pursued by a gentleman with ungentlemanly intent. Conversely, a handsome, wealthy and kind lord comes in and out of her life, often gaining an unfair negative view of Evelina owing to circumstances beyond Evelina's control.

Austen, in the novel Sense and Sensibility, pays homage to her predecessor by giving a scheming character who preys on young women the same name, Willoughby, as was given to Evelina's nemesis in Burney's book.

Evelina is told in the style of letters written by the characters, mainly between Evelina and her surrogate father the vicar. After several pages, you adjust and the story flows, but a straight narrative with strategically revealed letters would have been a more pleasant read.

The fun here, as in Austen's books, comes from the surface tension that builds because real human emotion is thwarted by all of the constraining norms and rules. Several scenes have you cringing as Evelina finds herself trapped by an etiquette she can't quite master.

The story drags occasionally, a few twists are forced and the plot is a bit too obviously constructed. Yet all of these are mainly quibbles in a novel that, almost two hundred and fifty years after its release, is still a fun, entertaining and enlightening read.

Burney's Evelina is not up to Austen's level - how many books are? - but it is an enjoyable story with complex characters struggling like heck to navigate life in a slice of society tightly governed by elaborate rules of etiquette.

It is the same literary soil that, a few decades later, Jane Austen would till into classics.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

^ Jane suffered a sharp arrow only to banish Cupid from her life thereafter. I believe her quill
writ loneliness, its ink bleed out onto empty hearted anguish page after page, finding refuge
from herself more addictive than drink. Modern scholars attribute her celibacy and self imposed recluse as sufficient evidence for a correctly chosen life whereas Jane suffered depression over real but mostly imagined cruelty. Or so I have been informed.

 

[GHT]

Last Wednesday, (5th,) there was a repeat of The King's Speech on the BBC. The film was all the more absorbing to watch in that it kept true to Mark Logue & Peter Conrad's book of the same title.

The King's Speech is an intimate portrait of the British monarchy at a time of its greatest crisis, seen through the eyes of an Australian commoner who was proud to serve, and save, his King. Lionel Logue saved the British Royal Family in the first decades of the 20th century, he was an unknown, and certainly unqualified, speech therapist whom one newspaper in the 1930's famously dubbed: 'The Quack who saved a King.'

Logue wasn't a British aristocrat or even an Englishman, he was an Australian. Nevertheless it was the outgoing, amiable Logue who turned the famously nervous, tongue-tied, Duke of York into the man who was capable of becoming King.

The King's Speech is the story of the extraordinary relationship between Logue and the haunted young man who became King George VI, drawn from Logue's personal diaries. Those diaries throw extraordinary light on the intimacy of the two men and the vital role the King's wife, the late Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, played, in bringing them together, to save her husband's reputation and his career as King.

It's an absolute riveting read.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

^ Aldershot mess, full dress red jackets after dinner coffee converse with a visiting American
historian spending Sandhurst and Whitehall. After the Gerries quit, HRM George has a meet
with Ike and Patton, whom wore a pistol brace. The King asked Patton if he'd ever used
either weapon in actual battle. Patton claimed seven scored kills. Eisenhower leapt into fray
questioning Patton. Patton nervously reduced his memory under Ike's unrelenting poker play
raise. Patton, the historian remarked had killed two Mexican pistoleros in Pershing's Punitive Expedition into Mexico in 1914, often recounting how he'd ordered the two gunslingers strapped like felled deer onto truck hoods to be driven back to bivouac for General Pershing's
personal witness. Ike stared Patton down to admitting these twins actual count.

I can only surmise HRM, while certainly not garrulous could drive a point.

 

[Denton]

View attachment 619125
Evelina by Frances Burney originally published in 1778


The eighteenth-century social customs of Britain's upper classes would be obscure to us today if not for Jane Austen. Her books, and the many movies they've engendered, have kept knowledge of those rigidly orchestrated societal rules part of popular culture ever since.

So it is of literary importance that Evelina, by Frances Burney, is considered to be a major influence on Austen's works. Fans of Austen will immediately recognize, in Burney's novel, the withering satire and nuanced insights into relationships that Austen brings to her stories.

Burney's tale centers on the young charming girl, Evelina, whose aristocratic father has disowned her because of his bitter marriage with Evelina's now-deceased mother. The result has Evelina being raised by a kind country vicar, leaving her lineage a bit muddled for "proper society."

We meet Evelina when she is being brought "out" into society by wealthy friends. But having not been raised in that world, Evelina makes mistake after mistake at dances and gatherings as she doesn't know all the highly nuanced and unspoken rules of society.

That is the setup for the novel that follows the travails of Evelina through this rigid world where her sincerity and kindness are often a liability amongst a class that uses elaborate and empty compliments as both currency and, often, veiled insults.

She only learns by painful experience that if you're alone at a dance and refuse a young man's offer to dance, you can't later dance with another man. The first man, in an Austen-like scene, "politely" proceeds to brutally debone Evelina like a small chicken.

Other contretemps and more serious issues arise as Evelina becomes a pawn in her maternal grandmother's game to get back at her daughter's husband, Evelina's father. This young girl, in today's parlance, would need years of analysis to overcome her "parent issues."

Foreshadowing Austen, Evelina is also pursued by a gentleman with ungentlemanly intent. Conversely, a handsome, wealthy and kind lord comes in and out of her life, often gaining an unfair negative view of Evelina owing to circumstances beyond Evelina's control.

Austen, in the novel Sense and Sensibility, pays homage to her predecessor by giving a scheming character who preys on young women the same name, Willoughby, as was given to Evelina's nemesis in Burney's book.

Evelina is told in the style of letters written by the characters, mainly between Evelina and her surrogate father the vicar. After several pages, you adjust and the story flows, but a straight narrative with strategically revealed letters would have been a more pleasant read.

The fun here, as in Austen's books, comes from the surface tension that builds because real human emotion is thwarted by all of the constraining norms and rules. Several scenes have you cringing as Evelina finds herself trapped by an etiquette she can't quite master.

The story drags occasionally, a few twists are forced and the plot is a bit too obviously constructed. Yet all of these are mainly quibbles in a novel that, almost two hundred and fifty years after its release, is still a fun, entertaining and enlightening read.

Burney's Evelina is not up to Austen's level - how many books are? - but it is an enjoyable story with complex characters struggling like heck to navigate life in a slice of society tightly governed by elaborate rules of etiquette.

It is the same literary soil that, a few decades later, Jane Austen would till into classics.

Again I have to piggyback on one of Fading Fast's excellent posts, because Evelina is a favorite of mine. It has a quality that I associate with great art -- it feels like a new book every time I read it.

There is a kind of cruelty in Burney's comedy: Evelina is humiliated again and again for making elementary social mistakes. Her shyness and awkwardness are material for comic business, and also the source of her attraction. Burney's insight is that Evelina is attractive because she has not been fully formed. "Awkwardness is perhaps more interesting than grace" (according to Burney in the later novel Camilla.)

I also recommend Burney's other novels (Cecilia is the best one), her plays, and her remarkable diary, mostly written in the form of "journal-letters" addressed to her sister. Although she was essentially a timid, shy person, her life was long, adventurous, full of interesting characters and incidents. Due to the popularity of Evelina, she was recruited to be one of the queen's attendants at the court of George III during the time of his madness. She witnessed the Hastings trial, and she was so much a royalist that she viewed Burke, a former friend, as a diabolical figure for his prosecution of Hastings. Another extraordinary passage in her diary is an account of an operation (without anesthetic) in which a tumor was removed from her breast. It's an account of the experience of pain -- like almost nothing else in literature. The operation was successful; she was still alive 30 years later.

I agree that Austen is in a different category, along with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and a few other writers.

 

[Fading Fast]

Again I have to piggyback on one of Fading Fast's excellent posts, because Evelina is a favorite of mine. It has a quality that I associate with great art -- it feels like a new book every time I read it.

There is a kind of cruelty in Burney's comedy: Evelina is humiliated again and again for making elementary social mistakes. Her shyness and awkwardness are material for comic business, and also the source of her attraction. Burney's insight is that Evelina is attractive because she has not been fully formed. "Awkwardness is perhaps more interesting than grace" (according to Burney in the later novel Camilla.)

I also recommend Burney's other novels (Cecilia is the best one), her plays, and her remarkable diary, mostly written in the form of "journal-letters" addressed to her sister. Although she was essentially a timid, shy person, her life was long, adventurous, full of interesting characters and incidents. Due to the popularity of Evelina, she was recruited to be one of the queen's attendants at the court of George III during the time of his madness. She witnessed the Hastings trial, and she was so much a royalist that she viewed Burke, a former friend, as a diabolical figure for his prosecution of Hastings. Another extraordinary passage in her diary is an account of an operation (without anesthetic) in which a tumor was removed from her breast. It's an account of the experience of pain -- like almost nothing else in literature. The operation was successful; she was still alive 30 years later.

I agree that Austen is in a different category, along with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and a few other writers.

What a great post. I learned so much from it. I can't even imagine a surgery like that without anesthetic. And as you note, what a fantastic life she had. I might just have to seek out "Cecilia."

I continue to be amazed at the amount of knowledge - smart, insightful and arcane knowledge - that members have at Fedora Lounge.

 

[Denton]

I recently read Mary Lasswell's popular novel from 1942, Suds in Your Eye. Three old ladies, Mrs. Feeley, Mrs. Rasmussen, and Miss Tinkham, live together in a junkyard in San Diego. The book is mostly scenes of drinking beer and eating delicious food cooked by Mrs. Rasmussen, but they also learn Spanish and visit Mexico, and there is a plot in which they almost lose their house due to their dealings with a crooked lawyer, and there is a romance plot in which Mrs. Feeley manages to set up her nephew with their Spanish teacher.

Not great literature, but truly delightful.

George Price's illustration (from Lasswell's cookbook Mrs. Rasmussen's Book of One-Armed Cookery):

.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

With Europe so much in play, I started Douglas Murray's Europe.
A fine read of tea leaves and grafitti scrawled across walls reasoned to a fine point yet still
reminiscient Burke's letters of France and its Revolution and Reign of Terror.

 

[Denton]

What a great post. I learned so much from it. I can't even imagine a surgery like that without anesthetic. And as you note, what a fantastic life she had. I might just have to seek out "Cecilia."

I continue to be amazed at the amount of knowledge - smart, insightful and arcane knowledge - that members have at Fedora Lounge.

Thank you, Fading Fast! I have learned a lot from your posts, and from many others on this website -- and I am resolved to post more frequently.