April Update

A List: Between books currently.

B List: Anna and the King of Siam--Margaret Landon 360/391

C List: The Age of the Democratic Revolution: The Struggle--R. R. Palmer 136/578

The last thing I read for the "A" list was the poem, or collection of poems, known as "The Passionate Pilgrim", attributed on the original title page to Shakespeare, but which is in fact a compilation of a number of poets of the time, including Shakespeare, and also including some unknown authors. It has the famous lines "Were kisses all the joys of bed/one woman would another wed" which it seems cannot be positively attributed to Shakespeare, but still usually is by the general public. I read it in my clunky Rockwell Kent-illustrated complete Shakespeare, which is the only book I own that contains it. It is printed there as if it were a regular part of the Shakespeare canon, though without any introduction or notes. I was a little confused in reading it by the incoherence between various parts of the poem and the lack of continuation of various characters and motifs throughout the work, as well as the inclusion of some lines that were obviously from Marlowe's "Passionate Shepard to his Love", so I was glad to have some explanation for this.

The Landon book I am almost finished with and will be doing a full report on soon.

The Palmer, subtitled A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800, is the second, and last, volume of the Challenge-winning book I was reading last month. So far I am actually liking this second volume more than the first, in part I suspect because I am used to the style now, and also because the second volume deals directly with the events of the French Revolution and the general European war that accompanied it, which is of course a very dramatic episode of history that I have somewhat shamefully never read even a general history of. Robespierre is best remembered now for overseeing the reign of terror, but he was a compelling political animal, perhaps a genius of that art in some ways, who made some great and memorable speeches. More than a few of his bons mots have a startling resonance today, not least because they are more lucid and succinctly expressed than most prominent contemporary thinkers have been able to manage on similar topics. "Equality of wealth is a chimera...necessary neither to private happiness nor to the public welfare". But "the world hardly needed a revolution to learn that extreme disproportion of wealth is the source of many evils." More: "We want an order of things...in which the arts are an adornment to the liberty that ennobles them, and commerce the source of wealth for the public and not of monstrous opulence for a few families...In our country we desire morality instead of selfishness...the sway of reason rather than the tyranny of fashion, a scorn for vice and not a contempt for the unfortunate...good men instead of good company, merit in place of intrigue, talent in place of mere cleverness...the charm of happiness and not the boredom of pleasure...in short the virtues and miracles of a republic and not the vices and absurdities of a monarchy."

He rather humorously dismissed the spectacle of the Worship of Reason held in the desacralized Notre-Dame Cathedral in 1793 as "a philosophical masquerade".

He also famously said that "Revolutionary government owes good citizens the whole protection of the nation. To enemies of the people it owes nothing but death."

Palmer theorizes that Europe became afflicted with revolutionary fervor at the end of the 1700s rather than at an earlier time because too many people of some degree of capability had come to feel personally humiliated by existing political and social arrangements. I do believe that something like that is occurring now throughout the Western World, where the middle classes, at least, are not suffering from material deprivation or physical insecurity, yet there is a great amount of anxiety and dissatisfaction that I think is rooted in greater-than-ordinary (compared to, for example, 1964 when this book was published) feelings of humiliation, inferiority and powerlessness among the populace. Of course if I continue to believe this to be the case I will eventually have to make a stronger argument for it...

Picture Gallery

Spain

1. Madrid......................................8

2. Andalusia.................................6
    Castile and Leon......................6
4. Valencia....................................3
5. Castile-La Mancha....................2

    Islas Baleares............................2
7. Aragon......................................1
    Galicia.......................................1
    Malaga...………………………1

Philip Barry--The Animal Kingdom (1932)

I think this may be the exact book I ordered online and now have (the patterns of vertical marks are exactly the same). There were not many copies of this available.

The IWE book list loves the American theater of the 1920s and 30s. Happily I do too, which is another indicator of the strong compatibility this list has with my personal taste. Curiously the list has no evident interest in the postwar American theater, neither Tennessee Williams nor Arthur Miller nor any other figure that I can think of from that now more seriously regarded era having been included in it.

Philip Barry to my mind has fallen into obscurity, certainly as any kind of literary figure, but he was a major player in the Broadway world during the Depression years, despite (or perhaps due to, as it were) specializing in the genre of the drawing room comedy, The Animal Kingdom is the only one of his plays to make the reading list, though today it would likely be his third most recognizable title, if it were recognized at all, behind The Philadelphia Story and Holiday, the fame of these obviously being due to the classic films made of them starring Katharine Hepburn (who was a good friend of Barry's) and Cary Grant. The Animal Kingdom was also made into a film starring Leslie Howard, who had played the lead role on the stage and was also a good pal of Barry's. I think this film is supposed to be pretty good too but it is not remembered as the other two are.

In a departure from my usual routine I read most of this play on the beach when I was on vacation in Florida. It was, as popular plays from this time tend to be, easy and pleasant (to me) to read, though I did find it to be a museum piece. Nothing in it struck me as particularly fresh or funny or pertinent. The main theme of the play is the difference between conventional people and those of a distinctive artistic sensibility and development. Here this mostly has to do with matters of taste and perception, or imagination, in addition to certain attitudes with regard to social respectability and the amount of openness allowable in certain unconventional behaviors. The artists of 1932 are not especially outrageous or transgressive by current standards. Their main indulgences run to free (heterosexual) love, looking down on popular taste, and, for the women, a distaste for housekeeping and hosting tea parties. My dominant thought was of them all frozen in amber in their brief time inhabiting the New York scene, its apartments and offices and trains, riding out to the main character's Connecticut estate when they need air, and then, a few years after, they are gone, or superannuated, another generation, another movement, other outrageousness replacing them. So much for my impression of the book.

The author

In addition to this I have a reasonably sized novel and another play coming up as a reprieve from the fairly long books I have been reading on this list lately before I go back into two more gigantic novels back to back.

The Challenge

1. Robert Greene-48 Laws of Power...................................................................1,774
2. Isabelle Allende--The Japanese Lover...............................................................888
3. Stephenie Meyer--The Twilight Saga: Official Illustrated Guide......................288
4. I Married a Witch (movie)..................................................................................204
5. Paul Johnson--Intellectuals.................................................................................118
6. The Devil's Violinist (movie)..............................................................................101
7. Leah Raeder--Black Iris......................................................................................101
8. David Eisenhower--Going Home to Glory...........................................................81
9. Michelle Mankin--Keep Me (Finding Me #3)......................................................46
10. Terror in the Aisles (movie)...............................................................................44
11. NWA and the Posse (record)..............................................................................38
12. Lisa Gail Green--Soul Crossed..........................................................................36
13. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (movie)........................................................24
14. The Works of Robert Ingersoll, vol XII..............................................................10
15. Edgar Wallace--The Door With Seven Locks.......................................................8
16. Rebecca M. Douglass--Death By Ice Cream.......................................................6

Round of 16

#1 Greene over #16 Douglass

Possibly interesting or at least topical non-fiction getting the nod over genre novels until the latter show me something.

#15 Wallace over #2 Allende

The Wallace book, which is from the 20s, is completely unavailable library-wise, but he is entitled to an upset.

#14 Ingersoll over #3 Meyer.

I need to stay plausibly serious.

#4 I Married a Witch over #13 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. 

I Married a Witch is a 1942 movie starring Veronica Lake and Frederic March, and directed by Rene Clair. It also has the imprimatur of being released in a Criterion Collection edition. I may actually try to see it.

#5 Johnson over #12 Green

The seriousness factor again.

#11 N.W.A. over #6 The Devil's Violinist

The next modern movie about blood and supernatural creatures that I enjoy will be the first one.

#7 Raeder over #10 Terror in the Aisles

# 8 Eisenhower over #9 Mankin

The Eisenhower book, by the former president and supreme Allied commander's grandson, is a memoir covering the years from 1961-1969, which obviously is the period from when the author's grandfather left the White House until his death.

Elite 8

#15 Wallace over #1 Greene

Surprisingly only six libraries in the state of New Hampshire, and neither of my local ones, carry the Greene book, which was the overwhelming number #1 seed here. This still would have been enough to carry him past the obscure Wallace, but the latter was entitled to a rare second upset and thus cruises into the Final Four. Is he defeat-proof going forward?

#14 Ingersoll over #4 I Married a Witch

#5 Johnson over #11 N.W.A.

As we always do when saying goodbye to musical groups, here is a clip:


   

#8 Eisenhower over #7 Raeder

Final Four

#5 Johnson over #15 Wallace

#8 Eisenhower over #14 Ingersoll

Championship

#8 Eisenhower over #5 Johnson

I was curious about the Johnson book, but again, to my surprise, my local libraries did not have it, but the public library had the Eisenhower one. So that is the winner.

Mikhail Sholokhov-And Quiet Flows the Don (1928)

Middling long Soviet-era--really Stalin-era--novel, the major work of Mikhail Sholokhov, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965. Sholokhov is a figure not unattended with some controversy. At numerous points in his life he was accused of either plagiarizing or not having written most of his most famous book, though it appears that modern scholarship with regard to the surviving manuscripts as well as computer analysis of his authorial style across all of his extant works has acquitted him of this charge. Without knowing anything else about him, he also arouses a sense of suspicion at first consideration, deservedly or not, by the circumstance of his being a working writer through the teeth of the Stalin reign of terror in the U.S.S.R. without ever having to go into exile, or be imprisoned, or shot, as our conditioning tells would have been the case with any writer of that time or place who was at all good, or honest, or courageous. Sholokhov, however, survived the entirety of this period in apparent good standing, and on several occasions is reported at least to have written fairly bold missives to Stalin himself regarding the dire conditions in his home region (The Rostov--Don River area in the South of European Russia, roughly northeast of Ukraine). He met the dictator on at least two occasions and was summoned (well, according to his Wikipedia page he was 'invited') to the Kremlin for a personal meeting in 1937. Whatever his character or position with regard to the regime I imagine it would certainly have required a degree of fortitude lacking in most western middle class men to endure a face to face meeting with Stalin in 1937. No one was so 'in' as to be certain nothing very bad wasn't going to happen to them at any given time. Sholokhov, born of a generation of men who between war, revolution, famine, and political violence died young in large numbers, lived until 1984 and was awarded many titles and honors in the Soviet Union.

An interesting thing about the IFE list is that while it is more or less a family-friendly set of titles for middle America, and includes a fair number of specifically children's or adolescent's books, it also has a decent share of books like this which deal with grimmer material. And Quiet Flows the Don is concerned with the lives of various members of a Cossack village, mostly male, from the years just before World War I and continuing through that conflict, the Revolution of 1917, and ending in the midst of the Civil War, in the book as yet unresolved, which followed upon the revolution, the closing episodes involving the capture and executions of various troops of "reds", though these episodes follow upon others in which it is the "reds" who are administering the executions. I think it is a good book, the style in keeping with the grand tradition of Russian novels, though the main characters are drawn from a much rougher and less polite segment of society than one usually finds in the classics of the 19th century. The descriptions of the country and the working and social life of the Cossacks were presented unobtrusively, woven into the narrative and all of that, but gave a vivid picture of the setting of the book nonetheless. The physical intimacy with the earth, and with animals of all sorts, though common to many older novels, made a more than usually strong impression in this. Against this background swept the drama and intensity of rape, adultery, casual violence between men, class exploitation of all kinds, war, political executions. Much of this, especially towards the end of the book, was in the service of Communist agitprop, which weakened the impact of certain episodes, though others had the quality of seeming to be authentic accounts of real situation, regardless of the politics involved. The politically motivated violence from the sections about the Revolution and the Civil War strike me as possibly honestly observed accounts of what went on at the time. It is not implied that the communist side was pristine or at all times just in its carrying out of executions and the like, though in the service of a necessary end.

The section on World War I I thought contained some good material. I have always found books about this war to be in general more interesting than books about World War II, because the old, classical Europe that is in the process of being blown apart is almost always still present in some degree both in the consciousness of the protagonists of the books and in the geography and manner of life of whatever country we are in. The descriptions of the initial skirmishes, and the last days, and hours, just before them, along the borderlands of Austria and Russia in August 1914 partake of this haunting quality that I find so attractive and central to my perception of so much about the nature of the world.

"The silence howled stupefyingly. From the open window of one house came the naive striking of a clock."

"1916. October. Night. Rain and wind. The trenches in the alder-grown marshes of Polesie. Barbed-wire entanglements in front. A freezing slush in the trenches. The wet sheet-iron of an observation post gleams faintly. Lights here and there in the dugouts."

The first world war is famous for its atrocious weather. Mainly rain, wind, cold and mud.

In the book at least, it took some time and build-up before someone took the decisive step of putting quick bullets into the heads of captured or otherwise defenseless members of the higher social classes during the revolution. One wonders about something like this coming to pass here, especially based on what one reads on the internet, the degree of utter contempt in which so many people seem to hold their fellow countrymen, and the desire to deprive their enemies of all pretension to to dignity and human worth, well beyond the point, as far as I can see, of any reconciliation.

The Bourgeois Surrender Challenge

Due to the 14-way tie for 9th place, we had to have an expanded tournament this time.

1. Top Gun (movie)...........................................................................................1,499
2. The New England Primer.................................................................................159
3. Orlando Figes--A People's Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution.....117
4. Jose Saramago--Raised From the Ground.......................................................38
5. Alina Bronsky--The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine................................23
6. Victor Serge--From Lenin to Stalin.....................................................................5
7. R.R. Palmer-The Age of the Democratic Revolution...........................................3
8. Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke....................................1
9. William Masselink--I and the Children Thou Hast Given Me.............................0
10. William Masselink--Sermons on the Commandments.......................................0
11. William Masselink--J. Gresham Macken-.........................................................0
12. Ben Masselink--General Revelation and Common Grace.................................0
13. William Masselink--Why Thousand Years?.......................................................0
14. Ben Masselink--The Cracker Jack Marines.......................................................0
15. Edward Masselink--The Heidelberg Story.........................................................0
16. Ben Masselink--The Deadliest Weapon..............................................................0
17. Ben Masselink--The Danger Islands..................................................................0
18. Ben Masselink--Green........................................................................................0
19. Ethel Mannin--Young in the Twenties.................................................................0
20. Ethel Mannin--Stories From My Life..................................................................0
21. Ethel Mannin--Sunset Over Dartmoor................................................................0
22. Burbank and Ransel (eds.)--Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire.....0

1st Round

#22 Burbank and Ransel over #11 Masselink. The New Hampshire library database does have an entry for the winning book in its system, though there don't seem to currently be any copies of it available anywhere in the state.

#12 Masselink over #21 Mannin. With one exception, none of the other books in the first round have any presence in the New Hampshire State library system.

#13 Masselink over #20 Mannin.

The Masselinks are all related, There are some web pages devoted to the extensive genealogy of this moderately distinguished family, but I don't have the time to do more extensive researches into their respective scholarly and literary careers.

#14 Masselink over #19 Mannin

Ethel Mannin was a very prolific and long-lived British author (active 1923-1977) who probably wrote seventy or eighty books. She doesn't seem to be read much anymore.

#18 Ben Masselink over #15 Edward Masselink. This is the exception. Green: the Story of a Caribbean Turtle's Struggle for Survival is available at three locations, these being, for the record, the University of New Hampshire, the Finch Museum (?), and Lilac Public (?).

#16 The Deadliest Weapon over #17 The Danger Islands

The Sweet 16. 

#22 Burbank & Ransel over #1 Top Gun

#2 New England Primer over #18 Masselink. Kind of a grind it out victory for the #2 seed, which does not have a much stronger library presence than the Masselink champion.

#3 Figes over #16 Masselink.

#4 Saramago over #14 Masselink

#5 Bronsky over #13 Masselink

#6 Serge over #12 Masselink

#7 Palmer over #10 Masselink

#8 Clarkes over #9 Masselink

Elite 8

#2 New England Primer over #22 Burbank and Ransel

#3 Figes over #8 the Clarkes

#7 Palmer over #4 Saramago. Despite winning the Nobel Prize the Saramago book is not available at libraries easily accessible to me while Palmer's antediluvian historical tome is.

#5 Bronsky over #6 Serge

Final Four

#7 Palmer over #2 New England Primer. On a technicality. The New England Primer in the collection of the New Hampshire State library is non-circulating.

#3 Figes over #5 Bronsky. Figes's book is not available at my local libraries, while Bronsky's is, but due to multiple recurrences during the qualifying round, Figes is entitled to one upset, and he gets that here.

Championship

#7 Palmer over #3 Figes. Figes is not entitled to two upsets, giving Palmer a most improbable victory.

March Update

A List: Somerset Maugham--Ashenden, or the British Agent..............................282/304

B List: Currently between books.

C List: R. R. Palmer--The Age of the Democratic Revolution: The Challenge...333/528

Late this month. The 6th fell on a Sunday, which is a bad day for me to get any computer time. Obviously any writing time is hard to come by at this point.

The Maugham book is a readable product, ideally consumed, as Ashenden himself would do so, in first class railway carriages and sitting in one's robe and slippers with a glass of sherry by the fire in a Swiss hotel. He (Maugham) does have some literary skills, notably in the area of dialogue that moves the particular episode forward and is somewhat satisfying to the brain at the same time. He is mostly a reassuring kind of writer, the reassurance being that if you are a socially unsophisticated and only modestly smart reader, but find those qualities at a slightly higher, but not dangerous, stage of development attractive in others, he is there for you. As far as this book is concerned, Ashenden is involved in espionage, but it is really more of a travelogue and study of broad and recognizable types than a spy book, Ashenden is never in any physical danger nor is he required to outwit any particularly formidable opponent. The American character is an ignoramus and a bore who is enamored of the sound of his own voice, the Russian ones are fiercely serious and tormented and intellectual. It's that kind of book.

R. R. Palmer (1909-2002) was a historian and college professor, mainly at Princeton, from 1936 to 1977. Several of his publications are considered distinguished, and the two-part Age of the Democratic Revolution is considered his masterpiece. How I came to be reading this large work I will go into more in my next book report when I get around to it. It is a departure from the kind of thing I usually read, which is good, but some sections in it come more alive to me for whatever reason than others. To my surprise, for example, I am finding the account of the anti-aristocratic movement in the Netherlands in the 1780s to be quite interesting. As a smaller country without an internationally famous literature or, in this era, any other art, the texture of its history is not very well understood, by me at least. At the same time I was not as enthralled by the chapter dealing with a similar movement in Ireland during the same period, mainly because the main actors were almost exclusively Anglo-Irish, Catholics being entirely forbidden from the Irish parliament and other offices at that time, which dynamic--the Catholics being as it were on the sideline in the politics of the time--I had a hard time getting a clear vision of. Palmer was a man of his time and his own sympathies and principles seem to be against oligarchy and too great social and economic inequality, for wide participation (by way of voting and representation) in government and so on. His summation of the mood in Europe at the outbreak of the French Revolution resonates a little too closely to that of our own time:

"By a revolutionary situation is here meant one in which confidence in the justice or reasonableness of existing authority is undermined; where old loyalties fade, obligations are felt as impositions, law seems arbitrary, and respect for superiors is felt as a form of humiliation; where existing sources of prestige seem undeserved, hitherto accepted forms of wealth and income seem ill-gained, and government is sensed as distant, apart from the governed and not really 'representing' them. In such a situation the sense of community is lost, and the bond between social classes turns to jealousy and frustration. People of a kind formerly integrated begin to feel as outsiders, or those who have never been integrated begin to feel left out."

He had a good quote on how too extreme inequality really was bad for societies but I can't find it now.

Picture Gallery

 

Germany

1. Thuringia...........................…..10
2. Berlin.........................................9
3. Hesse.........................................7

 
4. Lower Saxony...........................6
5. Saxony...………………………5
6. Baden-Wurttemberg...………...4
    North Rhine-Westphalia............4

8. Bavaria...……………………....2
    Mecklenburg-Vorpommem.......2
    Rhineland-Palatinate-------------2

    Saxony-Anhalt...........................2
    Schleswig-Holstein....................2

13. Brandenburg.............................1
      Bremen.....................................1
      Hamburg...................................1

February Update

A List: Maurice Baring--Comfortless Memory.....................182/192

B List: Mikhail Sholokhov--And Quiet Flows the Don........314/554

C List: Luis Alberto Urrea--The Devil's Highway................153/220

Not the most celebrated group of authors this month. Mike Sholokhov did win the Nobel Prize
in 1965, though his current reputation is attended with much controversy, including the suggestion
that he did not actually write his most famous book. I will revisit this when I do my big report on him.

Baring was one of those prolific English authors of light social comedies set among the privileged classes, often in foreign locales, who flourished in the period between the world wars. I was hoping his book, published in that high-spirited year of 1928, would be a Nightmare Abbey-ish work full of drolleries and inimitable upper class English bantering, but it is nothing much. It doesn't live.

The subject matter of The Devil's Highway, which is about an expedition of Mexican would-be illegal migrants who got lost in the inhospitable Arizona desert after entering the United States on foot in 2001, resulting in the deaths of fourteen men, is one that interests me. Like most Americans I have always been curious to go out to the west and see the desert and check out what is going on out there, but besides that of course there is whole angle of the future being formed and playing out in the mass movements across the border. Urrea writes in a kind of pseudo hard-boiled, wearily knowing style that I find annoying, but evidently other people like it, so I guess it works for him...Maybe I will finish my thoughts on this book in a separate post. The continuous interruptions while trying to do what should take 30 minutes at most have defeated me for tonight...   

Picture Gallery

Apparently there is a film of 'And Quiet Flows the Don'

Viktoria Federova, "the Sophia Loren of Soviet Cinema".

Is this real?