LW in 2024

"Lady with a book, glancing at the viewer", 1900, by Slava Raškaj {RASH-kai} (1877-1906). The amazing Slava Raškaj was born a deaf mute, plagued by depression, and dead of tuberculosis before she hit thirty. Still fondly remembered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slava_Ra%C5%A1kaj

In the past I posted about my reading much less consistently than many (probably most) members of this and other record-keeping groups. Since I fear I'm beginning to repeat myself, I'm collecting here my earlier reading threads, such as they were and scattered among different groups.

Club Read:

2023 LW in 2023

2022 LW's abridged 2022

2021 LW's clubbable 2021

The Hellfire Club:

2011 Lola Reads

2012 Lola Reads, vol. 2

2020 Lola Reads, vol. 3

Lists!

2019 Weekly tallies, LW

Diverse Reading Challenge

2015/16 Lola's awareness campaign

Exotic Male Dancers Who LibraryThing (warning: the group's image may be NSFW)

2011 This Is Not A Blog: Lola Reads, Naked Boys Dance

I have no special plans for 2024. My vague projects from last year retain their vague project-ness. Keep feeding the 20th century obsession, bring on the revolution, read more Canadians, tackle Lezama Lima... The last one was bent out of shape when the Toronto Public Library, from which I was sourcing 80% of the relevant books, got knocked out by a cyber attack. It has still not resumed regular activity and the current system makes it impossible to browse books or track the waiting list. Instead of reading Lezama chronologically, I may have to just read what I have...

Welcome back to Club Read, and happy new year! Nice topper. I hadn't heard about the Toronto PL. What is it with this latest plague of cyber attacks?

>1 LolaWalser: Fabulous painting! Happy to see you back

>4 labfs39:, >5 SassyLassy:

Thank you! Yes, we're in the third month without normal, or basically as far as my M.O. is concerned, ANY library services:

https://torontopubliclibrary.typepad.com/tpl/home.html

It's more than a bit embarrassing, considering the TPL is one of the biggest systems, globally. The IT department can't have been adequate.

>6 LolaWalser: It makes me appreciate Tim's quick response when LT was attacked.

That's crazy about the Toronto public library. This stuff is painfully common. But happy new thread and new year.

I’ve been following the TPL story, obviously—waiting to see how/when they recover before I/my tech editor cover it, but it’s turning into a long wait. We may just have to go with a story-in-progress. The same has happened in the UK, and it’s a bit of a dismal feeling that libraries may segue straight from defending against Moms for Liberty to going up against a new wave of cyber crime.

Anyway, happy new year and looking forward to hearing about your reading.

Also, I like the artist! I wasn't familiar with her.

Happy New Year comrade

I love the painting. Happy new year, always glad to see you around.

>1 LolaWalser: Fabulous painting! Happy new year.

>1 LolaWalser: You have to wonder what she is reading to give us that look!

Hope you have a good year, reading and all elsewise.

>1 LolaWalser: I love that look! Happy new year.

Happy (belated) new year Lola!

>1 LolaWalser: I love the painting. As other said, I love what this look carries! Is it fair to assume you sometimes have the same look while reading some too-mainstream-to-be-good authors?

Happy new year, and hope 2024 brings improved book logistics!

Greetings, visitors! Barely started and already failing to keep up, woe is me!

>18 AlisonY:

Happy new year!

>17 raton-liseur:

Ha, could be very true! :)

I couldn't find anything about the painting or the sitter online, the image comes from an auction site, Raškaj is famous as a watercolourist and didn't leave many oils so it's a tad unusual (and to my eyes looks unfinished maybe?) I'll come back--by and by--to the rarefied topic of female artists from Croatia...

I'm still very distracted and generally not in a good mood for, I won't say reading, but talking about reading. It's all like, what's the point... what good does it do etc. Needless to say, not the attitude to bring to a book site.

I read four-five books, including correspondence, regarding Ezra Pound's postwar period, the trial for treason and his subsequent incarceration in a mental institution for a few years. Suffice it to say that from this first-hand material it is clear that he was and remained a completely convinced fascist and antisemite and never apologised or otherwise interrogated the relationship between his (publicly disseminated) opinions and the fate of Europe's Jewry.

I read Joy Harjo's In mad love and war, OPD 1990, about the Native American struggle to stay alive.

I (re)read Lorca's Poema del cante jondo, remembering with some guilt that in school we loved to parody his solemn repetitive incantations.

I read The art of writing : teachings of the Chinese masters, a compilation and selection from classic Chinese tracts about writing, so full of good sense, humour, and respect for authentic life. Example:

Poem on Egrets

Zhang Zhong has a poem on egrets that goes:

    From the deepest depths of the dark sea
    the egret catches a perch, then wades back.

Zhang Wenbao comments, "It is good, but the legs of the egret are a little bit too long."

(I cracked up.)

I read Claudia Rankine's play The White Card, whose origin story is in a question Rankine was posed by a white man attending one of her readings. The man asked her what can he do, how can he help her, and when Rankine answered that it may be better if he asked how he could help himself, the man got angry.

The play addresses the positioning of black people as victims and the ("well-meaning, liberal") white people as "saviours", a configuration that preserves "blackness" as tragedy and "invisibilises" whiteness and its fundamental role in creation of racism.

My one objection is that Rankine dismisses the role of capitalism too hastily (in a rhetorical phrase of three-four words), when it can easily be shown that it is the primary reason and motor of racial discrimination. But then, Rankine's black character belongs to the same upper class as the white ones, sharing the same level of education and privilege--just not ALL kinds of privilege. But she too agrees to capitalism (she has an investment portfolio, a pension fund, she places her art with these people precisely because they can bring her profit etc.), which makes me wonder about the limits of her critique.

In short, when she says something along the lines of "surely you won't tell me it's capitalism, surely you won't deny that white people think they are better than anyone", my response is that yes, white people may think they are "better"--and that's racism--but that is the result of capitalism (i.e. the system that demands that a large underclass be exploited by a relatively minoritarian overclass) and not some free-floating abstract thought arising spontaneously in "white people".

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On the moving pictures front, two titles to select: DEFA's wonderful (but unfinished) Fräulein Schmetterling (Miss Butterfly), 1965, scripted by Christa Wolf. I had a Wolf moment, with her memoir Patterns of Childhood, OPD 1976, and this poetic film about a dreamy 18-year old girl trying to find a role for herself in the life of the GDR. Great visuals of East Berlin and glimpses of a past way of life. This is the 71st DEFA film I saw.



And something that made me really happy--a newly issued loooooong awaited copy of King Hu's The Valiant Ones, a milestone of wuxia cinema I was lucky enough to catch in a retrospective 15 years ago and hoped to come across ever since. Aside from the usual excellence one expects from King Hu, it features one of the most beguiling martial couples ever, in a wife-and-husband team who are so in sync they communicate almost solely through looks. King Hu is credited with creating the category of a heroine, a female lead treated as a male lead would be (something that Western genre cinema still hasn't figured out), and nearly all of his most famous movies feature women in central roles--Come drink with me, A touch of Zen etc. In The Valiant Ones the lead actress from A touch of Zen, Hsu Feng, has a secondary role but as the sole woman gets even more relief. Interestingly, she's also depicted as a different ethnicity, a member of the Miao people from southwestern China whose women are considered especially emancipated, independent and strong-willed.

So many interesting things in one post. You’ve been busy. Fascinated by the movie images.

What’s DEFA?

Funny comment about the egret, it took me a few seconds to get it.

>21 FlorenceArt:

lol@egret w XXXL legs

DEFA was the moviemaking agency in the German Democratic Republic which produced almost a thousand feature films 1946-1990. Recentlyish these have been getting lots of restoration care and distribution; I'm watching them mostly on a free streaming service (Kanopy). I expected nothing back when I started but it grew into an obsession.

>20 dchaikin:

Twitchily anxious as much or more than busy, alas! Glad you liked those images, I reach for whatever seems to take one out of this world.

Thanks for the comments about the DEFA films on Kanopy, I poked around and intend to watch some of them.

Oh, great, would love to hear your comments when/if you get to them!

Rounding up some notes on some of my increasingly desultory reading...

The relevance of the Communist Manifesto, OPD 2018, by Slavoj Žižek

If you can overlook Žižek's trolling of sexual minorities and the feminists, this 60-page pamphlet contains a valuable, succinct argument for Marx, although by now that's almost a cliché, and one whose beard is greying. (For those allergic to Žižek, or who prefer a less jargony read, China Miéville's even more recent A spectre, haunting : on the Communist Manifesto is a recommended alternative.)

The question of the continuing relevance of Marx's critique of political economy in our era of global capitalism has to be answered in a properly dialectical way: not only are Marx's critique of political economy and his outline of capitalist dynamics still fully actual, one should take one step further and claim that it is only today, with global capitalism, that, to put it in Hegelese, reality arrived at these notions.

Can we, however, derive any consolation from Marx being right?--I look at the pitiful struggles of the young generations and unconscionable smugness of their odious liberal elders (to say nothing of outspoken fascists) and feel unconsoled and enraged. Maybe that can be put to good use.

To paraphrase the great man... It's time to stop interpreting Marx--it's time to change the world.

---------------------------------

The Order of Time, OPD 2017, by Carlo Rovelli

I suppose many people would find this book stimulating, as I did, and that has to be counted a positive; however, I won't hide that I was largely disappointed. There's nothing here truly new, that hasn't been taught since at least the half of last century, and I didn't find Rovelli's murky philosophising an improvement on as much as we heard about the physics of time in school. If anything, my impression is that he may confuse the issue even more, for the sake (apparently) of presenting a refreshed argument and novel metaphors.

The argument keeps coming back to the difference of perceptions on the macroscopic and quantum level, the hashed and rehashed "oddity" of the quantum world, where time doesn't figure, vs. our everyday, human-sized experiences. Time, it seems, is a side-effect of the macroscopic organisation of the world. This is puzzling enough without such cryptic utterances like "Time is ignorance"--and while I'm at it, can we please have a moratorium on physicists prattling about buddhism and the like? Although, points for not quoting Alice in Wonderland even once.

-------------------------------

 

Are you my mother? : a comic drama, OPD 2012, by Alison Bechdel

I've been a fan of Bechdel's Dykes to watch out for since the 1990s, so naturally I read everything she published. Her memoir of her father preceded this one of her mother, and I believe achieved a far greater success (including a Broadway musical adaptation). While the book is as brilliant as one comes to expect from her, the strain is here evident, possibly because her mother was still alive and Bechdel scrupulously tried to honour her boundaries. The mystery of that mismatched marriage, or even to what extent and in what way it was a mismatch, is left untouched.

At one point I was shocked by the mention of someone I had known and took a break reading another graphic novel, purely by chance comparable in more than one way, Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer. Kobabe is non-binary, asexual, uses pronouns e/em/er and, I learned later, er memoir is THE, or one of the most, banned books at the moment. I found er visual style very similar to Bechdel's (I think Kobabe mentions her as a great influence), but one could hold a master class in graphic novel structure and autobiography by comparing Bechdel's and Kobabe's work and showing why and how Bechdel does it a hundred times better. I don't mean to diss Kobabe, it's not awful to be less good than someone stellar (and considerably older and more experienced). Besides, while I found er narrative monotonous and thus eventually boring, one should keep in mind the audience of people of similar bent to whom it speaks volumes.

------------------------------

I Hate Men, OPD 2020, by Pauline Harmange

Between throwing money at Taylor Swift and giving this innocuous pamphlet five stars, I guess my radfem credentials are sadly spiralling down the toilet... what can I say, I must strike where the misogynists are, and women like Swift and Harmange are their far more visible targets than the rest of us. If we don't care about death threats and harassment of all the women, what's the point of caring for any of the women?

I read this online back when it came out and the wolves were ravening for hapless Pauline's head. Thank Biggus Dickus, our Lord and Daddy, that Harmange was a pretty 25 year old, MARRIED!--ergo certifiably bonkable, BY A MAN, or who knows what other abuse she may have drawn. Just kidding, of course she drew all kinds of abuse regardless.

And yet her big idea is merely that, what with all the crap the men (statistically) do, getting angry at men (as a group) and owning that anger is, like, only normal. That's it, the whole idea fits a single modest sentence, while the paragraphs and paragraphs around it are spent bending over backwards protesting nevertheless the --crucial point!--harmlessness of women's anger (women, no matter how angry, sad, lonely and unloved, yet somehow don't fall to the urge to go out and commit massacres), one's love for individual men (OF COURSE we love our dads, brothers, mates...), even as those individual men don't lift a finger to change the system that benefits them at the expense of women.

Women WILL get hanged for a lamb as soon as for a sheep, so, eh. Here I stand, owning my hatred of men--I HATE MEN... often. And that's the essential point. I hate men whenever I'm reminded, in private or public life, of the evil men do, to women but also everybody and everything besides. There are moments when I experience frustration interacting with some bastard, or reading about the X-trillionth rape and assaults that no other beasts commit, when I vent picturing in my head instant wholesale slaughter of the entire damned sex. Daddies brothers and mates included.

But you know what? Then I recover and go my merry, ever-lovin' way. I don't dwell on the thought that men find this kind of confession more scandalous and reprehensible than the existence of the thousands of despicable channels by incel gurus selling misogynistic poison to boys, the existence of prostitution, of the Taliban, of institutionalised treatment of women like cattle, of the pay gap, of femicide on the scale of millions, of persistent religious and cultural justification of misogyny.

I don't dwell on the thought of men at all, because I too love loving the individual men in my life.

But throw no shade on my well of anger.

America is not the heart, OPD 2018, by Elaine Castillo

There was a moment a few years back when everyone seemed to be reading Castillo's How to Read Now. I had a lot of criticism for one of her essays in particular (in the conversation starting at this post: https://www.librarything.com/topic/299542#7939511 ) but was greatly impressed by her overall. America is not the heart is her big fiction debut, richly informed by her love for her Filipino heritage and family.

I'm not one for "sprawling sagas", as a rule, but then I found this particular blurb phrase somewhat of a misnomer. While there are callbacks to the past (including the American genocide of Filipino guerrillas in the turn-of-the-century colonialist war), and a long cast of characters, the bulk of the book reduces to a period of several years in the 1980s and just a few main characters: Paz and Pol, parents of seven year old Roni, who welcome into their Californian house Pol's niece Hero, just the latest of the cousins from the Philippines to try her luck in the United States.

While the novel begins with the story of Paz, her impoverished family, and the fairy-tale encounter with the rich Pol De Vera, breathlessly told in second person singular, Hero emerges as THE main character of the novel, the one whose life is described in minute, to my mind excessive detail. (I think the novel could have been at least a hundred pages shorter, and gain by that.) Castillo revels (and excels) at capturing living people's gestures, looks, conversation. She clearly loved writing the romance of Hero and Rosalyn, both bisexual (a rare representation, and Castillo's own sexual orientation), loved the talk about food and the eating of food, the nostalgia, the importance of regionalisms, the Mexico-Filipino comparisons, the revisiting of the anime and manga that played a role in her own childhood etc.

All of this makes the book very real, but maybe somewhat less of a novel. From my POV, two important topics are neglected while potentially they had more energy to bestow on the narrative--Paz's and Pol's marriage, and Hero's political involvement. For all the description of Hero's ten years in the mountains as the field doctor to the Communist guerrillas, there was precious little about her thoughts, convictions, motivation, how it came to be that this coddled daughter of the rich went from being a directionless teenager happy to spend time drinking and having lots of sex with her boyfriend to dropping out of university and exchanging textbooks for courses on Marxism by peasants. After ten years she is captured, tortured and imprisoned for another two, until someone remembers that De Veras are Marcos' friends. On her release she goes to the States (but we can assume that America is not in her heart), where a younger woman woos her with makeup and manga. I don't know, to me it didn't quite fit.

Kitchen, OPD 1987, by Banana Yoshimoto

I read this because Castillo touted it as one of her favourite, highly significant reads. Kitchen is actually the first of two unrelated but similar stories, told by a young woman grieving a loss of beloved person. I kept seeking similarities or features that I imagined had appealed to Castillo, but no doubt I picked up only on the obvious--the importance of food as a medium of friendship, love, care, the presence of a queer (possibly transgender) character who is admirable and beloved, and--maybe?--a presence of nice men, men who are specifically nice to the female character without ulterior motives, as if in genuine friendship (in Castillo's novel such a man is Jaime, Rosalyn's ex and friend since childhood, and maybe even Pol--a womaniser who genuinely likes women).

Not really to my taste, a bit twee, I thought.

On the moving pictures front, special mention to Djibril Diop Mambéty's spectacular Hyenas (1992). I hadn't read anything about it before, but soon enough it became clear that yes, it was indeed an African reworking of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's Der Besuch der alten Dame. A rich old woman returns to the village from which she was chased away in disgrace as a young pregnant girl and promises all her riches to anyone who murders her erstwhile lover. The old lady is magnificent (not a professional actress either).



--------------------------------------

And, I finished Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. With regrets to the fans, my least-liked Trek so far. Up next is Star Trek: Picard.

>25 LolaWalser: I read your comments on Blechdel and comparison with Gender Queer with interest. I've had Fun Home on my wishlist and keep meaning to borrow my daughter's copy of GQ to read. (I meant to read it before I gave it to her, smirk). I'm glad to get a reminder for both titles.

>26 LolaWalser: Also found your review of America is Not the Heart of interest. It's an area of the world that I want to read more about, but perhaps not with this one.

>28 labfs39:

Fun Home is superb!

You may want second opinions on Castillo's novel as I don't read much of this type of fiction and I didn't mean to be negative, I just don't have much patience for storytelling, "world-building". But she's a clever, sparkling writer full of verve, and with a POV (leftist, bisexual, feminist) that, I imagine, isn't all that common.

Pure comfort reading or, rather, viewing. I don't suppose anyone of a certain age needs introducing to Jean-Jacques Sempé, a French cartoonist who also published quite a bit in The New Yorker. Actually, he may be best known to the general public as the illustrator of the "Petit Nicolas" books, written by René Goscinny, but they missed me.

There is a tenderness in his observation of people (mostly bourgeois, but also the lower classes) that is a balm to the soul.

>25 LolaWalser: >28 labfs39: Bechdel is terrific!

>27 LolaWalser: Thank you for putting this film on my radar - I am definitely going to track it down...

>30 LolaWalser: Feeling all nostalgic now :-D

>31 Dilara86:

I think you will love Mambéty! Touki Bouki is also great, and he wasn't very prolific (or didn't get many chances to direct, hard to judge the angle), but two such masterpieces are a stunning achievement. By the way, since I know you're interested in African languages, the dominant language is Wolof and to me sounds exceptionally beautiful.

Highly, highly recommended.

>32 LolaWalser: I placed a hold at the library for both La visite de la vieille dame, which I assumed is the French translation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's Der Besuch der alten Dame, and Hyènes. I love cross-cultural pollinations! And I'll get to Touki Bouki later: someone's borrowed it, which is a good thing...

ETA: And I've just realised that Djibril Diop Mambéty is Mati Diop's uncle. She recently won a Berlinale Golden Bear for her film Dahomey.

>33 Dilara86:

Mati Diop--I knew I knew the name, I listened to her talk about Ousmane Sembène recently...ish! Thanks for mentioning her and "Dahomey".

Looking forward to your thoughts.

 

The Buenos Aires Affair, Manuel Puig, OPD 1973

I had a strange ride with this novel (subtitled "novela policiaca" and superficially sporting the form of a mystery): at first deeply engrossed, at two-thirds filled with utter loathing, and then, after reading the ending twice and going back to certain points... being pretty much blown away?

The structure makes considerable demands on the reader--we are finding out about the events of only two days/nights in May of 1969, but the background is filled in with minute detail of the lives of the protagonists (beginning with each one's conception!) and devices like newspaper reports, police transcripts (in compressed language), one-sided telephone conversations, multiple POVs including those only fantasised...

Then there's the sex. This is the novel that got Puig banned and exiled from Argentina, partly due to the sexual content. It's important to understand that Puig was a sexual liberationist and as a gay man, a sexual revolutionary. Moreover, his worldview was based on a Freudian schema in which sex plays the main role in shaping people, their motivations, their lives. So the lengthy descriptions of his protagonists' sexual activity aren't gratuitous--he is describing people as functions of their sexuality and drive.

The protagonists, whose whole lives seem to have set them on a collision course with each other, are Gladys Hebe D'Onofrio, a 35 year old sculptress, and Leopoldo (Leo) Druscovich, an art critic a few years older. Gladys is extremely talented and earns early recognition for her art, but is emotionally unfulfilled. She moves to the States for a few years, doing secretarial work, where she indulges in some desultory affairs with unsuitable men. She is a victim of an attempted rape in which the attacker destroyed one of her eyes and since that event she wears dark glasses all the time. After a period of increased nervous instability, Gladys's mother comes and fetches her back to Argentina, to a beach cottage lent by some friends, where Gladys starts making art again.

Leo was brought up by his two older sisters in Buenos Aires, his mother having died at his birth and the widowed father moving to the countryside for work. Leo's physical self, specifically, the appetites of his unusually large penis, seem to determine everything about his life. He doesn't do well in school but as the strongest boy, not to mention famous for the size of his genitals, he doesn't need to. First sexual encounters with prostitutes and the occasional "regular" woman, though, hint ominously at some problem with his constitution--he loses erections with consenting partners and derives more enjoyment the more they suffer. This culminates in Leo horrifically raping and murdering a gay man who offered him fellatio but refused intercourse. Leo's penis just loves a "no". The murder is never resolved; Leo goes on with barely a twitch of conscience.

At this point I thought Leo was supposed to be actually mentally deficient, so it threw me for a loop when Puig had him (a dropout from architecture) climb the ladder from an advertising agency to a post in Argentinian embassy in Sweden, where he discovers an interest in art. Easy hours in the diplomatic service apparently furnish him with enough time to learn and study art all over Europe, so that when he returns to Argentina he launches a magazine and a new career in art criticism.

Some friends of Leo's, holidaying on a beach, discover Gladys and connect her and Leo, as fate had decreed.

I won't say more about the plot, other than I liked the ending (but had to check twice to see whether I was getting it right).

There would be more to say on the entanglement of the sex and death drive, as played out in Argentina's macabre theatre of the seventies and the eighties. More than one Argentine writer chose to understand events through that prism, but nobody more completely, and more convincingly, than Puig.

Enjoyed all your recent posts. Very interesting about Puig. Surely he loved James Baldwin and maybe vice versa ??

>35 dchaikin:

Interesting question. As writers they are very different, Puig all postmodern and psychological, Baldwin classical, but it would be interesting to know if they read each other.

The beautiful struggle : a memoir, Ta-Nehisi Coates, OPD 2009

This is a beautifully written tribute to his father, a difficult person and probably not easy to write about either... But that's the sort of conflicts one gets living under constant pressure of racism and diminished opportunity. An ex-Black Panther and tireless proponent of Afrocentrism, he saw private life in a political light too and rejected rigid bonds. By the time Coates was born, his father had had five children from three women already, but--and this was rare--he was scrupulous about providing for all of them and insisting on their education (three of Coates' older siblings graduated from Howard University, as he might have if he hadn't dropped out).

-------------------------

Les rivières pourpres : roman, Jean-Christophe Grangé, OPD 1997

Years ago I read a novel by Grangé whose details I've almost completely forgotten, except that it stuck in my mind as fabulously grotesque, a modern Gothic but without invoking any Gothic elements per se. It may have featured a creepy gang of children assassins; also Nazis. Anyway, that's why I picked this up.

Policemen Pierre Niémans and Karim Abdouf have unwittingly alighted on the same mystery, the former investigating the murder of the librarian in an Alpine university, the latter a series of strange break-ins in a cemetery and elementary school. The plot gradually brings them together and reveals a story much bigger and older than was supposed at the beginning.

I don't like reading about the police and especially "supercops", but the mystery kept me interested. To be sure, one has to be forgiving of the exaggerations, a certain almost operatic panache.

---------------------------



The book of repulsive women : 8 rhythms and 5 drawings, Djuna Barnes, OPD 1915

This was the second time I read this sad wicked witty little chapbook of Barnes', because I procured an interesting limited edition with a different layout of illustrations and poems. Certain new parallels and links become apparent. Curiously, she grew to hate this work (maybe because some loud criticism found it slight?), but to me the juxtaposition of drawings and poetry seems ever fresh and intriguing.

This book came out the same year as did Theda Bara's film A Fool There Was--the launching of "the vamp".

I was hoping to tie this post to reading a book about the painter Nasta Rojc {Royts} (1883-1964), but unfortunately I couldn't procure what I wanted (Nasta Rojc: ja borac/Me, the fighter, a graphic novel issued in 2017 on the occasion of Rojc's retrospectives in Zagreb and Vienna). So as not to lose momentum completely, here's a mini-celebration of this fascinating woman: painter, lesbian and antifascist.

   

The autoportraits here date, left to right, from 1912, 1922, 1925.

Unusually, her English Wikipedia is fairly extensive Nasta Rojc, and there are other excellent articles about her online so I'll be brief.

She was born into a well-to-do family but didn't receive support for her wish to become an artist. In order to gain some independence while preserving the surface of bourgeois "respectability", she entered into a marriage of convenience with Branko Šenoa, son of Croatian classic author August Šenoa. They were great friends and remained technically married until his death, although Rojc actually lived with Alexandrine Onslow, a British suffragette she had met at the end of WWI. Onslow had been a volunteer nurse in the Serbian army and made it all the way to Thessaloniki with them. She was older, openly lesbian, and possibly the linchpin of Rojc's self-discovery.

Rojc and Onslow travelled together in the UK and around the Adriatic, and settled down in Zagreb in 1923. Apparently they were pretty much open about their relationship, and in any case didn't give a hoot. When WWII started, these two firebrands naturally aligned with the partisans, for which the Ustashe threw them in prison and confiscated their house (designed by Rojc) and other possessions. Rojc was then 60 and Onslow 75 years old and in very frail health. (I was reminded of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, another elderly lesbian artist couple, undergoing the same at almost the same time in Guernsey: https://www.librarything.com/topic/328338#7372139 )

Onslow died in 1949 and Rojc had a sad and lonely old age, largely forgotten. But the two women were buried next to each other in Mirogoj, Zagreb's famous cemetery, and the inspiration they provide is evidently just beginning to spread.

https://globallovemuseum.net/portfolio-items/nasta-rojc-and-alexandrine-onslow/

   

Rojc; Rojc and Onslow; a photo of Rojc in the Art Pavilion, Zagreb

>37 LolaWalser: Fascinating post about Rojc. I'm off to read more online. I love the portraits and photos.

Lovely post. The self-portraits are gorgeous. All new to me.

I still haven't gotten around to The Beautiful Struggle yet.

I enjoyed reading about the lives of Rojc and Onslow!

>38 labfs39:, >39 dchaikin:, >40 kidzdoc:

Truly amazing lives! there's enough material there for several movies. I'd also like to learn more about Alexandrine Onslow and her work in the WWI. I don't recall hearing about British nurses in the Serbian army before. There must be some books about them (I don't imagine Onslow was the only one either).

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themes: Sicily, mafia, exploitation, vive la guillotine!, communism, anarchism, Salvatore Giuliano



La bolla di componenda, Andrea Camilleri, OPD 1992

More of Camilleri's essays on Sicily, this particular compilation offering a semi-fictionalised analysis of the tacit agreement between the ruling classes and the mafia. Camilleri's brilliant and bold gesture links it to the selling of indulgences, so, prosaically, to the thievery and amorality instituted and vindicated through the clergy in a land desperately poor in good governance. As many writers before Camilleri also noted, Sicily suffers through a lack of State. The handful of rich proprietors and the mafia parasitise the poor, whose only historical recourse was banditry and, in a few short instances, attempts at communistic organisation. Here the State did show up, with the army, and colluded with the lords and mafiosi in murdering the rebels.

-----------------------------------

themes: capitalism, exploitation, Anglos/Americans (re)discovering socialism, Gen Z, ecosocialism

 

It's Not You, It's Capitalism: Why It's Time to Break Up and How to Move On, Malaika Jabali, OPD 2023

In the past decade or so there's been a huge uptick in publications on socialism/communism from places one least expected it--the happy, happy lands of total capitalism where everything has been rendered golden through the grace of those benefactors of humanity, the super-rich and powerful.

So far I've discussed Thomas Piketty's Le Capital au xxie siècle, Bini Adamczak's Kommunismus: Kleine Geschichte, wie es endlich anders wird, Hadas Thier's A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics and China Miéville's A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto.

Malaika Jabali's book is to me interesting particularly for its clear addressing, in pop culture vernacular, the youngest and younger generations specifically of Americans, a nationality uniquely deprived of positive images of leftism, even of its own leftist heritage (see e.g. chapter 3 describing Wisconsin's socialist history). It can't be judged by the same standards as, for example, the above, because it attempts--and in my view succeeds--to break down the "Red Scare" anti-communist conditioning that simply has no counterpart in France, Germany, or even the UK.

Jabali's strategy is to avoid using the term "communism" as much as possible, relying on "socialism" instead and even "social democracy". Given her obviously radical values, I imagine this would irritate students of political science, although historians have no reason to feel any happier, considering some things she says (and the many more numerous ones she doesn't say) about various historical examples of socialist/communist states. However, I agree with her pragmatism in this regard, just as I agree with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez when she refuses to discuss "Marx" with dudebros and goes straight to policy.

Because this isn't a matter of theoretical debate but people's lives. In the US now (and more or less everywhere in the thrall of neoliberalism the trend is the same), the inequality has surpassed that of the Gilded Age. We can even overlook the sheer disparity in who gets how much money (what is money when a disaster hits and how much more is a trillion than a billion in any sense that would matter to an individual?), but not the growing disparity in the physical state of the rich vs. the poor--availability of shelter, food, education, sheer physical health. In the US as in no other "developed" country, the rich are cannibalizing the poor.

In no other developed country do people holding jobs, even multiple jobs, yet run the risk of living in the streets (and actually DO live in the streets). In no other developed country are teachers not only badly paid but get humiliated by corporate sponsors as in that stunt where they had to compete on their knees for money to buy supplies for their students. In no other developed country do medical bills routinely cause bankruptcies.

Books like Jabali's are a sign that there is a new generation arising which cannot be blinded or in George Carlin's metaphor put to sleep by "the American dream".

>41 LolaWalser: It's Not You, It's Capitalism sounds really interesting from your review. Does she spend much time addressing the "how to move on" aspect?

>41 LolaWalser: Great review of It's Not You, It's Capitalism. Fortunately the Free Library of Philadelphia has it in its system, so I'll try to get to it later this year.

Thanks for the reminder of Capital in the 21st Century.

>42 labfs39:

There are ten chapters and the last is dedicated to taking action, with various resources.

>42 labfs39:, >43 kidzdoc:

Just bear in mind the intended audience is the terminally online youth of the 21st century! It's a very phone-reading-friendly book, with infographics, capsules, interactive links, and a QR code. It took me a bit to acclimatise myself just to that extended "romantic breakup" metaphor, but I dare say it works.

And, something I could have said before climbing my soapbox, but is never too late or redundant to point out -- from the very beginning Jabali ties her activism to the state of things as they are, not some ivory tower weighing of relative merits and demerits of ideology. IOW, to become a socialist all one needs to do is open one's eyes to reality.

... I didn't arrive at my anti-capitalism through electoral politics. It was through studying Black history as an undergrad that I started to see how messed up our whole system really was. Reading about how slaveholders were willing to kidnap, brand, torture, and work their labor force to near-death - oh and create a system of white supremacy to maintain their profits that still thrives today - will do that to you.
I also soaked in the words of Black revolutionaries who spoke out against capitalism, including Charles Barron, a former member of the Black Panther Party. "We keep fighting the symptoms," he is prone to say. "But capitalism is the disease."

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Les Hommes frénétiques (Frantic men), Ernest Pérochon, OPD 1925

Pulp science fiction took off in the US with Hugo Gernsback's magazines aimed at children/teens, and it's probably the lack of such media that prevented the genre's flowering at the same time in continental Europe. Those who wrote "novels of the future" tended to be serious about the task of envisioning plausible, science- based scenarios in the tradition of Verne, Robida, Wells...

Such at any rate seems to be the case with Ernest Pérochon's only science fiction novel. Pérochon was a working teacher and writer known for rural novels. Although Les hommes frénétiques seem to have been a critical and popular success, he never returned to the genre, having said, apparently, exactly what he had to say about the future.

In short, Pérochon envisages that a series of ever deadlier innovations would eventually bring about the death of civilized humanity. He juxtaposes the ever-greater scientific prowess and the political problems arising from base nature, historical conflicts, even chance, and shows that the former is no match for the latter.

Quite a few innovations in the book match what we have today, down to the internet (a global communications network with visual capability). Some things indicate that Pérochon carefully followed science of the day, and sometimes jumped ahead, as in, for example, his efficient and horrific use of the mutagenic ability of radiation (mutagenesis by X-rays would be proved only a few years after the publication of the novel).

Unfortunately the entire novel is stylistically what fans call an "infodump", just a description of one damn thing after another, with people referred to mainly in groups (the "meridionals" against the people of the "parallels", South vs. the North etc.) The brilliant scientist couple of Harrison and Lygie are identified mainly to show that intelligence and good will aren't sufficient guarantors against the evil effects of their discoveries.

Pérochon's technopessimism allows for a ray of light. Harrison and Lygie enjoy the company of two "savage" children, Flore and Samuel, whom they have adopted (but apparently can't bring up). These two glorified domestic pets escape the sterilizing effect of the last radiations and by-and-by recreate a human society in the guise of their own "race", one that is "singing, lazy and gentle".

While there is no doubt that the vision of Flore and Samuel is totally racist, I think Pérochon was, in the most extremely clumsy way possible, actually saying something genuinely positive about this opposite to the ultra-technologised civilization (white, but in the novel also global, so also "yellow", Latin American, African etc.) The world SHOULD belong to people like that.

The end isn't satirical, it is yearning, for the noble savage, for Tahiti, for the natural world before capitalists decided that we are "at war" with nature.

Also, regardless even of "what the writer meant to say", this is the time to praise laziness (with or without singing), in all earnest. It's something Malaika Jabali too touches on in It's Not You, It's Capitalism: Why It's Time to Break Up and How to Move On, a small but brave book taking on so much gaslighting (her word) perpetrated by the capitalists.

We should work LESS. In capitalism we work toward our destruction: polluting, destroying, using up, breaking, creative only in the ways to CONSUME. We should breed less, eat less (meat in particular), travel less, build smaller and smarter.

>44 LolaWalser: to become a socialist all one needs to do is open one's eyes to reality

Wonderful quote - there are a lot of blind people out there.

Lots of interesting stuff here, as usual, but I've noted in particular the Andrea Camilleri essays on Sicily.

>45 SassyLassy:

It does seem so but maybe that's the effect of the bubble? Like, anyone chatting about books on LT probably isn't rushing to their third nickel-and-dime gig of the day in order to cover the month's bills.

Outside such bubbles precariousness has enveloped a larger portion of the population than anytime in the last 130 years.

>46 rachbxl:

He is my favourite "explicator" of things Sicilian and of course he wrote tons about it. A good portion of articles in Come la penso are also dedicated to Sicily.

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An epigraph in Malaika Jabali's book led me to open The prison diary of Ho Chi Minh, OPD 1946.

In 1942 Chiang Kai-shek's forces imprisoned Ho Chi Min for over a year, on espionage charges. He recorded that experience in Chinese verse (so as to be intelligible to the captors).

Moonlight

For prisoners, there is no alcohol nor flowers,
But the night is so lovely, how can we celebrate it?
I go to the air-hole and stare up at the moon,
And through the air-hole the moon smiles at the poet.

I was surprised at how often he employed humour and irony:

Goodbye to a tooth

You are hard and proud, my friend,
Not soft and long like the tongue;
Together we have shared all kinds of bitterness and sweetness,
But now you must go west while I go east.

"Instead of weeping, I prefer to keep singing."

The skinny little man in sandals made out of automobile tires who defeated French colonialism and American imperialism will forever be an icon of resistance to the rich and solidarity with the people.

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Sloboština Barbie, Maša Kolanović (1979--), OPD 2008

Sloboština, as I learned, is one of the quarters of New Zagreb, where the author was born and bred and played happily with her Barbies right through the fall of Yugoslavia. The tale of her childhood's ending doesn't coincide with the war as it played out elsewhere (e.g. Vukovar, ethnic Serbian enclaves in Croatia, Bosnia) not in duration and certainly not in human cost, which goes to explain the comic, frivolous tone, reinforced by her own exuberantly childish illustrations. In Zagreb in 1991, "the war" was a question of several weeks of sheltering when alarms sounded, as the rapidly dissolving federal army tried to destroy the seat of the Croatian nationalists (and presumably/possibly kill that piece of shit Franjo Tudjman--unfortunately they failed). One person died and four or five were injured. Despite the relatively low actual threat, Tudjman's government drummed up panic in the population for several weeks, although people quickly learned to ignore the sirens, as when, for example, Kolanović's entire building forgoes the cellar in order to catch the last episode of Twin Peaks. Finding out who killed Laura Palmer was obviously much more important.

If things like these seem surreal or obnoxious when compared to the usual gory tales of wartime suffering "in the Balkans", it is nonetheless the truth that this too was part of those times and this went on in some places while elsewhere--or even in Zagreb itself--someone was being tortured, and thousands would end up killed.

Kolanović writes in a child's persona about how she digested, through role-playing with her friends with dolls, not just the news of the day but all the mysteries presented by the adult world. In this frame "the war" appears as just another thing, stronger than rumour in its effects, but not for that easier to grasp. The subsequent changes in her life are mere substitutions to a child, and it must have been much later that Kolanović started to question just what was it that she, and we, had lost.

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Le Petit-Fils d'Hercule: Un roman libertin, OPD 17??

This anonymous novel is one of the most charming examples of early pornographic literature I've come across, showcasing all that is best about the genre: steady emphasis on the shared pleasure of sex, care for a partner's enjoyment, respect of women as sexually and otherwise autonomous beings, rejection of possessive jealousy and, last but by no means the least, the revolutionary aspect of sex as an instrument of rebellion and gateway to freethinking.

The plot is simple: a vigorous young man alights in Paris with a notion to become a gigolo. No sooner does he find the necessary go-between than his reputation begins to build and his client list expand to pretty much all and any ladies of the Court and the bourgeoisie, not forgetting the abbesses and the like. By and by he starts travelling all across Europe, with the ultimate goal of making it in Russia.

Voilà ce que doit désirer un homme raisonnable; la vigueur pour la jeunesse, l'aisance pour l'âge mûr, la liberté depuis le berceau jusqu'à la tombe. J'ai lu les livres de morale, et je n'ai rien vu dans Confucius, Platon, Sénèque, au-dessus de ce que j'ai répété. Le plaisir, le plaisir par-dessus tout.

This is all a reasonable man ought to want: vigour in youth, comfort in mature age, and freedom from cradle to grave. I have read books on morality and I saw nothing in Confucius, Plato, Seneca greater than what I told you. Pleasure, pleasure above all.

>47 LolaWalser: The prison diary of Ho Chi Minh is going onto my list. I'm curious about the translation. The pieces you quoted are melodic and lovely, and yet the content (life in prison) is grim.

Le petit-fils d’Hercule sounds intriguing. I tried to read Sade some years ago but didn’t get very far, although I still have some vague idea that I should read him some day. But this sounds like his exact opposite, and much more enjoyable.

>48 labfs39:

Yes, and it was objectively quite a horrible experience, semi-starved in the cold and the wet, suffering bouts of illness, scabies, vermin, being held in uncertainty and transported every now and then. He notes all that, but the tone is mostly gently ironic, as when he insists on describing himself as an "honoured guest".

>49 FlorenceArt:

No doubt. Sade is a central figure in my worldview but I wouldn't insist on him as a must-read to everyone. Something like this, Le petit-fils d’Hercule (excerpted from the Romanciers libertins du XVIIIe siècle), is surely more enjoyable. However, it's not particularly distinguished by style or content. If you were to read only one example of libertine literature, I would sooner recommend a stone-cold classic like Thérèse philosophe by Boyer d'Argens. But as I said, this is sweet--I'm particularly fond of the dirty poem included half-way--and some of the best fun to be had for 2 euro.

Not that you should spend any money at all, I'm sure most of these should be available free on Gallica.

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Asunaro, Yasushi Inoue, OPD 1953

I can't remember whether this is the first time I've read Inoue, but based just on this he could become a favourite. "Asunaro" is the name for an evergreen tree that figures in a saying "tomorrow I will be a cedar"--expressing promises always made but rarely kept.

We meet Ayuta Kaji as a young boy and follow him into adulthood, at every passage wondering if he will become a cedar or prove himself just another "asunaro". The boy promises a lot, getting called a "little genius" in elementary school, but he loses motivation and grows to prefer aimless wandering. Stints in a Zen monastery and college complete his formal training, thrown into background by what Flaubert called a "sentimental education", a stormy internalized adventure of the heart.

An interesting feature of the novel are multiple strong-minded female characters such as I have rarely met in Japanese literature, women with agency and own ideas about life, who pop off the page.

We should work LESS. In capitalism we work toward our destruction: polluting, destroying, using up, breaking, creative only in the ways to CONSUME. We should breed less, eat less (meat in particular), travel less, build smaller and smarter.

Thats worth repeating

>47 LolaWalser: >50 LolaWalser: four fascinating reviews. Had no idea Ho Chi Min wrote poetry (or was jailed and mistreated by Chiang Kai-shek … well, or really much about him at all). What an interesting sounding book. Loved the two poems quoted.

>51 baswood:

and again!

>52 dchaikin:

Maybe not a poet in the sense of vocation, but it seems that poetry-writing remained a part of education in the Far East, something that any literate person would be expected to do passably if not brilliantly.

I have Ho Chi Min's revolutionary writings on the TBR. Dry as hay or sparkly like champagne? To be seen. :)

Hey! Finally catching up here after being off for a couple of months—good reading and viewing, and a reminder that I've been meaning to reread some of my older Bechdel (and in the case of The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, read straight through—I bought it at a library conference a couple of years ago where she keynoted, and was standing in an endless line to get it signed when I realized that I'd left my coat on my chair and ran off to try and find it (I eventually got it back, but not that day). So I have my almost-but-not-quite-signed copy to look forward to.

Owe you a letter, too. The first bit of 2024 was all about circling my own wagons, if that's even the right metaphor, but I'm feeling more public again.

>54 lisapeet:

It's great to see you again, Lisa, whenever.

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Modern Japanese Haiku, edited by Makoto Ueda

With a crunching sound
the praying mantis devours
the face of a bee. -- Yamaguchi Seishi

Metal!

Shattered Nation: Inequality and the Geography of a Failing State, Danny Dorling, OPD 2023

The UK was born in a food crisis, and its legitimacy as a state is now dying in a food crisis.

Dorling is a professor at Oxford, the city he was born in in 1968 and which he takes as a starting reference in describing the decline of Britain. The 1970s, the decade of his childhood, was the last good time the majority of Britons would know in their lifetimes--a time of peak employment and salaries (although the wave of deindustrialization had already started in the north), least inequality, access to leisure and welfare.

The book is concise but wide-ranging and filled with startling data. In aggregate it delivers a shock very similar to what I experienced on arriving in the US, the world's "only superpower" and "richest" country, and saw homeless people in the streets. Indeed there are many parallels between the US and its British Mini-Me, and mostly not by coincidence--for example, regarding housing:

The influence of the United States has also been crucial. (ref) Calls to dismantle Britain's state housing system were first made from the US in the 1950s. (ref) Mass provision of decent housing was seen as a dangerous precedent that other countries might choose to follow, and it is still hard to make the case for more state housing in the UK today as a result of those attacks. (ref)

Forget about the hardship the US wars and sanctions caused to such formidable enemies like tiny Cuba and barefoot Nicaragua!--it could hardly have done worse in what it deems "friendship". Reagan and Thatcher, neoliberalism's Tweedledum and Tweedledee, inaugurated government-sanctioned destruction of the commons and the history's largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich -- a process not just still ongoing but GROWING.

Last year the UK has overtaken Bulgaria to become the most economically unequal country in Europe, with, according to Dorling's data, the most divisive education system, most expensive yet poorest-quality housing, most precarious and lowest-paying work, lowest state pension and stingiest welfare benefits, fastest declining health and growing food insecurity, especially for children.

The number of food banks now outnumbers McDonald's outlets. Particularly impressive is the story of a professional charity that was instituted in 2000 with a mission for Eastern Europe, but changed that to domestic needs as the food crisis in the UK grew.

Another way in which Britain, specifically, is "special" compared to Europe (and similar to the US) is in how far-right are its conservative party's policies, indeed whole ideology. In 2014 conservative British delegates in the EU parliament actually abandoned the large centre-right European People's Party and allied themselves to the smaller openly fascist group that included the Alternative für Deutschland. Let me underline again: these were British Tories, the party that's been dominating British politics of the 20th and 21st century. (The traditional "opposition" party betrayed its mission and since the 1990s merely shadows the Conservatives as a slightly less sinister option.)

Not that its behaviour vis à vis Europe matters greatly; it's enough (and the same in the US) to see how they treat their own people. The bottom of the pyramid is expanding, engulfing what little "striving" middle class there was, miring millions in cycles of poverty and ill health, near-poverty and debt.

When Thatcher said there was no such thing as "society", that wasn't a statement of fact, that was expression of a goal. Reading Dorling's book, one can't help but conclude that it has been achieved.

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Late Capitalist Fascism, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, OPD 2022

Fascism is the ghost in the capitalist machine.

There is no exploitation without domination, and domination is fascism. But between the word and the whip there is a world of what Rasmussen calls "diffuse, banal" fascism, whose exponents are "spontaneous" fascists like Trump. We are bathing in cultural fascism and have done so ever since the capitalist crisis has been normalised and propagandised as the only way of life.

You cannot be the richest country on earth and agree to human sacrifice that conditions those riches, without fascism. The cruelty and savagery inherent in the capitalist system is fascist.

Denying poor Britons state housing was no less fascist than bombing Nicaraguan and Vietnamese rebellious peasants: all of this is in service to capitalism.

We are currently watching as so-called liberal democracies give in to fascism in an effort to contain fascism.

A snake biting its own tail.

Heureux les heureux, Yasmina Reza, OPD 2013

A polyphonal novel in which almost every character of note gets exposure in others' chapters and then a chance to express their own POV. Not a Rashomon-like plot, there is no central event linking the stories/monologues, the emphasis here is on character, rendered in a few strokes by a master playwright. However, there is an undertow to it all, a concern with Jewishness. It's quiet, but not for that less sharp, as in the contrast between and old Jewish lady who wants no truck with Israel, and an equally life-scarred old Jewish man, who will allow anything but the abandonment of Israel.

While this topic seems (is) difficult, the whole novel has nevertheless a weightless, almost flippant feel.

The segment with the young man who ends up hospitalized because he becomes convinced he is Céline Dion left me perplexed. It felt dated, not really of the 2010s.

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The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, Elif Batuman, OPD 2010

Going by the title and the cover (Roz Chast could sell me an anthology of baseball stats from the 1960s) I thought I'd love this book; instead, I was disappointed. I had only read a couple articles by Batuman before, and had it on my mind to check her out; possibly I picked up a bad choice and she may yet turn out to be a writer I enjoy... but I won't rush to find out.

The main problem with this one is that instead of a work of criticism (or predominantly that), it turned out to be mostly a memoir of her graduate/postgraduate years, including detailed and lengthy descriptions of academic anecdotes, her circle of colleagues/friends/lovers, and a number of trips she took to Russia and elsewhere. I didn't find this sufficiently interesting and/or funny. Moreover, the critical parts were mostly retellings of what she learned in grad school--to a layperson like me, not unwelcome (I'm glad, for instance, for the introduction to Girard's theory of "mimetic desire"), but not what I was expecting, which was some personal revelation.

And then--a relatively lesser problem, but a thorn in my side--Batuman lost my sympathy when she referred to the PKK, the Kurdistan Worker's Party, as "terrorists". This echoed my previous experiences with privileged Turkish bourgeois in thrall to the US, which makes it worse.

Continuing thus coldly disposed, I was ready to abandon ship around page 190 (I think this was in Uzbekistan), in which case I wouldn't be recording even this much, but on flipping through the remaining pages I noticed the last part was taken up with some tale about a Croatian student and, well, can you blame me, I'm a slut for mentions of the homeland, I read that and so ALMOST read the whole thing.

The main observation I make about that tale of diabolical seduction and imitating-Dostoevsky-in-real-life, is that I think it's a pity Batuman didn't save that story for a novel. (Then again, what do I know, maybe she did.) Because therein lie the seeds for a truly funny novel about the academia and the obsessions engendered by Russian literature (Dostoevsky in particular).

One nitpick, because that's what you get when you come from places nobody cares to learn about properly--the Croatian student's cardinal relative most certainly did not work at "rebuilding the Church after communism" in Croatia, because the Croatian Catholic Church existed and expanded relentlessly during communism. Regardless of its war crimes and the criminals it protected and financed. Regardless of the corruption and scandals swiftly hidden. Regardless of the rampant abuse of women and children within its ranks and in its institutions. Nothing ever curbed the activity of or diminished the tithes/racket paid to this swinish institution, before, during or after communism. Unless by "rebuilding" one meant the explosion of obscene privatization of land and property for the church--communism for them, always, but for the people, never! Jesus LOVES a golden throne, doesn't he?

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Scoundrel time, Lillian Hellman, OPD 1973

I do not know the year when I, who had always been a kind of aimless rebel -- not only in the sense that was true for most of my generation, but because I had watched my mother's family increase their fortune on the borrowings of poor Negroes -- found that my rebelliousness was putting down a few young political roots.

There are several books on the Cold War I long meant to tackle, and I thought Hellman's memoir about the House Committee on Un-American Activities, being so short, wouldn't be a bad start. Unfortunately I found it tough going because she meanders so much AND seems to take for granted that the reader will know everything she knew about the milieu and the personalities involved (whereas, for instance, it took me embarrassingly many pages to grasp that "Joe" and "Rauh" referred to the same person, or make sense of the strategies her lawyers were proposing).

The Introduction by Gary Wills was most welcome and informative and provided a few gasps on its own (look, I'm new to this topic, and going by the kneejerk liberal "wisdom" dominating these parts, so are many other).

One piece of info to remember...

And in 1948, when Tito broke with Russia, I had gone to Belgrade and written a series of sympathetic interviews with Tito which were not well received by Communists here. Joe believed that we had to point out these Communist criticisms of me because they would be useful for the Committee and for the press to prove the independence of my past. I said that I didn't want them used in my defense, that my use of their attacks on me would amount to my attacking them at a time when they were being persecuted and I would, therefore, be playing the enemy's game.

Her hearing was short and uneventful. However, her partner Dashiell Hammett, once a member of CPUSA, was imprisoned and blacklisted for life, while they both were reduced to near-poverty. As Gary Wills explains, that was the fate of American antifascists who refused to adopt the new directive about communists, actually, being fascists. (A liberal shibboleth to this day.)

through

Blood on the Tracks series (first 14 volumes), Shuzo Oshimi, 2017 -

This was "brought to me" by stretch 's review some time ago. I can't really say anything concerning the plot because everything would be a spoiler -- and if you're in the least inclined to read this, you DON'T want to be spoiled! It's a work of psychological horror that, IME, leaves in the dust most any other kind of horror one can think of. It cuts deep and close to the bone regarding our most intimate and most vulnerable emotions.

A few other remarks to hide The author's afterword in volume 14, the first such writing he did, as far as I know, left me very worried. I didn't have a problem with Mother-Out-Of-Hell or I wouldn't have read that far. However, his apparent sudden statement that the story is autobiographical -- I don't mean necessarily literally to the last detail, murders included -- and his misogynistic outburst about women, how he sees them... it's not just depressing, it's downright wrong to spread such poison in this world and a society like the Japanese to boot. Just the other day another man murdered and injured dozens of women, total strangers, just because they were women and he hates women in general. We have lost count of such events, to say nothing of the abuse women disproportionally suffer, from sexual assault to psychological abuse such as the main character of Oshimi's story had suffered. What if women reacted to that like the murderers of women react to their problems, getting out and killing whoever? Why is it okay for someone like Oshimi to propagate misogynistic thoughts in a super-popular manga series (not to mention the planet-sized shitload of misogyny on a gazillion sites) when a woman daring to express dissatisfaction with men will get banned from Facebook etc.?

Okay, I suppose those are rhetorical questions that would be interesting only if the author answered them. And maybe he will address them, or something similar. I do intend, right now, to read the whole work and give him a chance to throw that afterword in a different light.

A great set of reviews. I was sorry to hear Batuman did not impress: that book has been on my list for a long time now and I haven't come around to reading it yet. The Dorling book in in my university library - I'll grab it, too.

>59 rv1988:

Hi! Yes, I too am sorry I didn't like it better--The Possessed happens to be my favourite Dostoevsky! I just finished looking over the reviews here and in that Other Place, as I avoid reading them before, and it looks as if Batuman's book has as many "likers" as "dislikers"... so, maybe a 50-50 chance for anyone? I did notice quite a few mention the Uzbekistan chapters as the deal breaker :) Also, it appears a lot of the material in the book had been previously published, which would explain the patchwork feel to the thing.

The Dorling book

I can't resist sharing a bit more that may not be news to people closer to that field, but that I was surprised to read (among many other surprises)... For example, that "living conditions in Britain in mid-19th century were worse than for many people around the world, even in some of the countries it colonised." This, despite Britain being then the richest country on the planet. Infant mortality and adult health were so bad that the average age of death for people born into labouring classes was 15 in Liverpool, 17 in Manchester, 19 in Leeds, whereas in rural Rutland it was 38. (My emphasis.)

Dorling has a channel and a number of lectures up on YT. Here for example is a talk about how Oxford changed within his lifetime (audio only):

The social geography of Oxford: A desperately divided city (Feb 9, 2024)

Lower down are links to the 8 part podcast on Shattered nation.

>56 LolaWalser: "There is no exploitation without domination, and domination is fascism."

That’s a very wide definition of fascism, too wide in my opinion to retain any useful meaning. And it does include communism as it has been practiced in communist states and communist parties around the world.

>61 FlorenceArt:

Well, if I had thought I was giving a definition of fascism, I'd have been more careful and not so cryptic.* :) It's more of a (partial) description of fascism's core, a hint to its essence as well as its raison d'être. To fascism, domination and violence aren't simply the means, they are extolled as virtues in themselves, to be used to eradicate the "weak" and the "inferior". This is diametrically opposed to communism.

As for using coercion and violence in the name of protecting the state etc. that is a ubiquitous tendency practiced anywhere anytime. (When the heavily militarized police in so-called liberal democracies go out to stifle protest, do observers more readily--or ever, really--think they are witnessing a "communist" behaviour, or... something kinda fascist?)

So a deeper question may be imposing itself, whether there is a connection between any sort of violence, even that in so-called liberal democracies, and fascism... and here I think we must agree, in order to avoid what you rightly say would be too wide a "definition", that something more than a willingness to be violent or dominate must be present. Sometimes there are also good, ethical reasons to be violent and want to dominate (conquer) something.

*Rasmussen begins his book talking precisely about the difficulties in defining fascism, and in particular about the need to abandon the mechanistic, point-by-point checklists derived from historical examples. Not that they are "wrong", but inadequate.

ETA: changed a word, for I am forgetting them

>62 LolaWalser: Yes, I see what you mean and I agree, to a certain extent. I am uneasy about "Sometimes there are also good, ethical reasons to be violent and want to dominate (conquer) something." It’s something I find difficult to have a clear cut opinion about, but I guess it’s not meant to be a clear cut issue.

>63 FlorenceArt:

Yes, it can be very difficult. On the other hand, let us yet hope that we won't live to see circumstances in which the necessity for violence is unambiguous.

Geneva, a fancied page of history in three acts, OPD 1939, George Bernard Shaw

I never expected this... Flippant to a sin (Shaw's standing defect), outdated already on issue, today this play, for all its shortcomings, reads uncannily on point. We are again on the brink of global war (although the ideological conflict is this time one-sided), the scene is pullulating with fascists, and we ARE threatened with a planetary natural disaster that OUGHT to unite us all, sweeping away political differences... and just like before, only the play retains a glimmer of hope.

Side note: I collect indications against the often-repeated statement that people didn't know what Hitler had in store for the Jews (the Holocaust as a "surprise", "dark secret" etc.), of the contrary and here too it is in evidence, with Shaw's "Jew" (sic) character protesting the imminent annihilation.

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La guerre du feu, OPD 1909, Joseph-Henri Rosny (aîné)

Another example of French speculative fiction, this time projected into the far past of humanity, the "stone age". A tribe of shaggy cave dwellers loses its fire and volunteers are solicited to find another, presumably to steal it from other tribes. Two little teams of scouts go in different directions, both motivated by the promised prize of the chief's daughter, but in the case of Naoh, son of Leopard, it's true love.

I was surprised by how captivating I found the story and how good was Rosny's style, how beautiful his imagination.

P.S. I remember loving Jean-Jacques Annaud's film as a kid, but I haven't seen it since a kid.

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Gros-Câlin, OPD 1973, Romain Gary

This was the first of the novels Gary would publish under the pseudonym "Emile Ajar". Frankly and sheepishly, I don't know why I continue to read Gary, whose books I consistently dislike. It's some mix of needing confirmation that he really is as lacking as I think he is, a touch of hate-reading, a dimly projected exploration of the French literary scene "as was" (intensified by getting addicted to and regularly irritated by "Apostrophes", a TV series from 1975-1990), and even nostalgia--I remember translations of Gary/Emile Ajar on our bookshelves in Syria, which I didn't read, but whose titles, dustjackets with seventies-style photos, tantalizingly scratched at me



"Momo, why are you crying?" -- a translation of La vie devant soi I think (and upcoming...)

Anyway, Gros-Câlin is a python that one lonely and infinitely self-pitying man buys to enjoy his hugs. Buying "love" is not only the big theme in this novel but recurs in all of Gary's writing. The worst is that he really seems to have believed that whores sell "love"--at least, those worthy of their name. This odd, petulant, self-serving blindness is what passes for "romanticism" to some.

The question, OPD 1958, Henri Alleg

'This is the Gestapo here!'

This small book has the distinction of having been the first book to be banned in France since the 18th century. Henri Alleg, a Communist and editor of the anti-colonialist newspaper Alger républicain, was arrested and tortured over a month by the French military in Algeria. He was then transferred and kept imprisoned for another three years, when he managed to escape. The book he wrote about the torture he underwent (and acknowledging that as a European he was still treated less harshly than the Arabs) inflamed French public opinion against the colonial rule.

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L'opium et le bâton: roman, OPD 1965, Moulud Mammeri

Mammeri's novel focusses on three Berber brothers and their destinies in colonised and embattled Algeria. Bachir Lazrak, the middle one, is the urbanised doctor with an interest in literature, a French girlfriend, and a Marxist friend who nags at him to join the resistance. Belaïd, the eldest, after a catastrophic harvest in the village chose to immigrate to France for work. He managed to survive for one year working like a dog and sending money home, when he broke down and sank into alcoholism and vagabondage. Almost a decade later his now adult son fetches him back home, but Belaïd has nowhere to go but down, becoming a trusted informer to the French. Ali, the youngest of the brothers, is a famous leader of the guerrilla.

The last section of the book describes the destruction of the village of the Lazrak brothers, a distillation of the injustice and crimes of colonialism.

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Triste tigre, OPD 2023, Neige Sinno

WARNING: child sexual abuse, incest

When Neige Sinno was six and her sister Rose four years old, their 28-year old mother met their 24-year old stepfather-to-be. This man began sexually abusing Neige when she was seven and would continue for approximately seven years, through her fourteenth year. Neige moved out at seventeen and at twenty told her mother about the abuse and her decision to report him. It took another year before Neige's mother gathered the courage to break up the family and joined Neige's charge (they each wrote a letter to the prosecutor general). The stepfather confirmed "almost everything" that Neige accused him of. He was sentenced to nine years imprisonment but served only five, due to "good behaviour". In prison he "got religion" and on discharge went on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, where he met a young woman (25 years his junior) whom he married and with whom he had four children (he was also the biological father to Neige's stepsister and stepbrother). Neige's stepsister remained in the village in which they grew up and where the stepfather had raped Neige continuously over seven years in "every room in the house" (besides other rooms in other houses and places). Neige's mother once asked an old village neighbour why did they continue to greet the stepfather, knowing what he had done. The old biddy (who had been kind to Neige and whom Neige had liked as a child) replied "but he didn't do anything to us".

Why do I put these things down: because they give the coordinates, the layout of the land. Because they are almost sufficient to bring home the horror. But the gist, the life of the little girl who suffered it... I don't have the strength.

I don't have the strength to discuss this book. Maybe right now; maybe ever. And yet there is so much to say. Neige Sinno is a remarkable person. Her courage is immense. I want to find strength and come back to her with an adequate response.

Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel, Omri Boehm, OPD 2021

Doing injustice is worse than suffering it.

In 2021 Boehm saw two paths for Israel, one leading to the entrenchment of fascism with the concomitant further expulsions and massacres of Palestinians, and the other constituting what he explains as the only feasible democratic solution, a one state in which Arabs and Jews are equal partners.

As the genocide in Gaza continues apace, one might conclude the choice has been made and reading about alternatives is useless. In fact, this short book is nevertheless highly informative on the network of past choices and Israeli political philosophy that is still illuminating. Boehm makes the point that everything he proposes has sources in the past, in different ideas about Zionism that at times were at the forefront (many chances missed), and are therefore organically connected to the region's history.

I can't find it in me to go on in requisite detail about many difficult topics raised but I must note his discussion of "Holocaust messianism" and its role in shaping modern Israelis ("Holocaust messianism has corrupted the Jewish conscience by placing the Jewish state above the realm of normal morality."), as well as discussions of Israel's right wing's rapprochement with fascists and neo-Nazis of every stripe, including Netanyahu's obscene rewriting of history that goes as far as to exonerate Hitler and make Palestinians guilty of the Holocaust.

Also important are his discussions of the lack of responsibility for the crimes committed against Palestinians and the one-sided, downright dishonest way Israeli history is taught.

Finally, a note about the notion of "remembering to forget". In essence it is about the problem of how to remember the past without repeating it, without perpetuating its hatred and violence.

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The secret life of Saeed, the ill-fated pessoptimist : a Palestinian who became a citizen of Israel, Emile Habibi, OPD 1974

Emile Habibi was born in Haifa in 1922, in a Christian Palestinian family. Haifa's Arab population of 70000 would suffer a pogrom in 1948 when the Israelis invaded, with only 4000 Arabs remaining in the city--Habibi was one of them and became an Israeli citizen. He was also a founding member of Israel's Communist party and served as its representative in the Knesset multiple times.

The secret life of Saeed is his best known work and deserves all accolades: it is true, heart-rending, and self-deprecatingly funny. Saeed is a poor ass of a man trying to survive in a mad and maddening world of bizarre injunctions and capricious laws, where the disloyal are persecuted, but the "too loyal" can get executed, and where, above all, no Arab is ever in his right.

La vie devant soi, Romain Gary (as Émile Ajar), OPD 1975

Another entry in my weird antagonistic reading of Romain Gary. This may be his most popular book, winning him a second (unprecedented) Prix Goncourt, but complicated by the fact that the author was supposed to be someone else (Gary actually got a distant cousin to spend years pretending he was the author Ajar). All this came out after Gary's suicide in 1980.

The narrator is an Arab boy of ten, Momo (from Mohamed, a name best discreetly avoided), whose life revolves around the old obese ex-prostitute, Madame Rosa, and her chances of continued survival. For, as Madame Rosa goes, so go Momo and other of her fatherless charges, children of prostitutes, thrown together like a pack of rags in the poor slummy Belleville (I couldn't help thinking Pennac might have got here some inspiration for his Malaussène saga...) This travesty of a family life is still preferred to what happens once "Assistance publique" gets involved.

Momo's faux-childish voice, littered with malapropisms that stopped being funny after the first dozen times, got on my nerves and unfortunately there was no plot to offset the grind. Madame Rosa, an Auschwitz survivor with Hitler's portrait under the bed (reminder that things could be worse), deteriorates until death without giving away much of anything. As usual, I just didn't care for Gary's sentimentality. He was, as Holden would say, a phony.

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The seven princesses, Maurice Maeterlinck, OPD 1891

There is a palace. Seven princesses are asleep on the stairway within. An old king and queen lament and comment some off-stage events. A ship brings the Prince Marcellus, grandson to the king and queen. Marcellus seems amazed that all seven princesses, his cousins, are still alive. Well, they are alive, but they sleep forever. They are sick. No telling why or how. Marcellus is taken by the sight of one of them, Ursula, the middle one, the tall one. But they cannot wake and there is terror in their sleep. Darkness falls over the land, distant voices promise never to come back, Marcellus is directed to "go down" with a lamp and open the hall with the sleeping princesses. They all wake, except Ursula.

Gem of decadence. Belgians!

Great reviews. I'm particularly interested in >67 LolaWalser:

>67 LolaWalser: I've had The Secret Life of Saeed on my TBR forever. I keep looking at it, but somehow never pick it up. If there was ever a time, this is it. Thanks for the reminder.

>68 LolaWalser: The Seven Princesses sounds intriguing. I notice there is a "Medieval Persian Epic" of the same title in Touchstones. What a beautiful cover on yours.

Nice reviews of Haifa Republic and The Secret Life of Saeed, Lola. Both books are available from the Free Library of Philadelphia, so I've added them to my Interesting Books list.

I admire your reading on Palestine. I find it difficult myself. It took me months to get to the end of the Very Short Introduction.

I read La vie devant soi ages ago but nothing else by Romain Gary. I think I liked it well enough at the time, though it was one of these books that I read because everybody says it’s great but don’t take a lot away from. Your detestation of Gary intrigues me 😊

>67 LolaWalser: The secret life of Saeed, the ill-fated pessoptimist was on my radar, Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel wasn't. They both sound really worth a read, but I'm not sure I can face them right now...

Catching up on your thread. Shattered Nation, Danny Dorling seems to have put in wise words everything I think about England. I think it would be dangerous for me to read this book.

Heureux les heureux, Yasmina reza I enjoyed recent, but I did not pick up on the Jewishness as you did.

Super reviews

>56 LolaWalser: >74 baswood: Now that an election has been called, Dorling's book may be just the thing voters should read.

On another front, Rishi Sunak in Inverness has called the SNP's "obsession" with independence a risk to the integrity of our nation.
I think he's finally caught on! Isn't that the whole point of the SNP? What Sunak sees as a nation is not a nation.

Wonder what he will say in Wales.