First and last for In the Cut

The last is already in the last post but anyways--

First:

I don't usually go to a bar with one of my students. It is almost always a mistake. But Cornelius was having trouble with irony.

Last:



She knows the poem.

Great lines from In the Cut

Read almost as a joke but the joke's on me as I dug this book. Even if the end fucked me up a bit.


The introduction to our protagonist, a linguaphile and NYU (? presumably) professor who is also nameless, which I'm sure is on purpose but I'm not sure what it means. Here she discusses her class:

But irony terrifies them. To begin with, they don't understand it. It's not easy to explain irony. Either you get it or you don't. I am reduced to giving examples, like the baby who is saved from death only to be hit by a bus on the way home. That helps a little. Cornelius said that he preferred realism to irony because irony turned conceived wisdom on its head. Whether he meant to say conventional wisdom or received wisdom, I don't know. I was so distracted by an image of wisdom being turned on its head that I simply nodded and let him go on. Irony is like ranking someone or something, he said, but no one knows for sure you're doing it. 

On getting home and finding Detective Malloy's card in her mailbox and why she doesn't plan on calling him:

I used to keep a shopping bag full of the things that had been left on the stoop or pushed into my mailbox until the bag finally ripped at the sides. It had in it, among other things, a demo cassette of an elderly Welsh poet reciting eighteenth-century Cockney rhymes; a nude barbie doll bound and gagged that my landlord brought upstairs to give to me-it had been on the Greek Revival doorstep all afternoon, he said warily, was it mine?-and a box of condoms, each one engraved or, more accurately, embossed with my name, the letter i dotted with a heart, a gift which I knew was meant for me, which I could not with absolute certainty say about the other gifts, and which I assumed had been left by someone I'd once dated.


So, needless to say, I threw Detective Malloy's card away.

I admire the economy of words in the book, how much Moore is able to get across about the protagonist while saying so little. This is one of the few times she mentions her mother yet it tells you volumes:

He looked at the jade hairpins again, each a different shape. They had belonged to a Chinese maid in my grandmother's house in San Francicso, whom I think of tenderly as the only person, as far as I know, that my mother ever loved. 

Alas, the hairpins will later be stolen by her student Cornelius following a failed, awkward sexual encounter. 

On her first encounter with Malloy:

He sighed in dismissal and stood up, the chair swaying beneath him. "My ex-wife collects dolls," he said. He put the hairpins back on the table, lining them up absentmindedly, and I suddenly wondered if he was neat. I imagined that he, too, had a collection of dolls. Lined up neatly.

The poetry on the subway is a running theme. This line will turn up later, significantly:

I noticed that the Poetry in Motion poem was new. An excerpt from "The Passionate Man's Pilgrimage." Walter Raleigh. "Give me my Scallop shell of quiet."

BTW, the poem's text is here (and I'm sure, many places.) It was written around 1603. The first stanza goes:

GIVE me my scallop-shell of quiet,
    My staff of faith to walk upon,
My scrip of joy, immortal diet,
    My bottle of salvation,
My gown of glory, hope's true gage ;
And thus I'll take my pilgrimage.

It sounded better out of context. 

I love this scene where she leaves Pauline's apartment to find her student Cornelius waiting for her outside which manages to be funny and disturbing, like many parts of the book:

"Well," I said slowly, "I think that there is. Something wrong with that."

"I got words for you and shit."

I did not necessarily disbelieve him, but I still did not think it a good idea that he had followed me. And waited for me. Three hours. To give me words.

"You might not want them 'cause they be words for--you know," he said slyly.

"What?" I asked.

"You know."

"I don't know. What are you talking about?"

"Words for that. What you calls sex."

 I wanted to ask him what he called it.

More Subway poetry and creeping dread:

As I walked home, I thought about the new poem in the Number Four subway. I have become so paranoid in the last month that I believe that the Poetry in Motion placards are messages for me. Not in a metaphorical sense, but literally selected for me by someone who has managed to gain influence over the Transit Authority Selection Committee. The new poem is a haiku by Yosano Akiko. "Come at last to this point/I look back on my passion/And realize that I/have been like a blind man/Who is unafraid of the dark." For me, right?

.......

I'm getting better. I don't assume that every man with a moustache, wearing a suit, is a detective. I do not think the new poem in the subway is meant for me. It is a Seneca Indian song. "It's off in the distance. It came into the room." Clearly not for me.

After finding Pauline, so revealing in the way your mind reconfigures itself after a tragedy:

I was so ashamed by the things that used to make me unhappy. That I was upset because he lied to me about his wife and then went on vacation with her. That Yale University won't give me permission to use the letters of C.K. Whitney. That my father forgot me in Geneva.

And the ending which shocked me, partly because I'd seen the shitty movie and partly because, damn. Spoilers if anyone is actually reading and cares:

My face. My throat. My breasts. My breastesses. Malloy would know when he saw my hands. My arms. he would know. How I fought.

He lifted himself from me. I heard him unlock the door. For a moment, I felt the cool air from the river, smelling of fish. Smelling of Eve [reference to the old, unfunny joke Rodriguez told her a page ago about God never getting the smell out of the fish.] It made me shudder. I was cold.

There is an essay on the language of the dying. The dying sometimes speak of themselves in the third person. I was not speaking that way. I said: I am bleeding. I am going to bleed to death. And I will be lucky if I die before he returns.

Give me my Scallop shell of quiet.

You know, they did not print the whole of the Indian song in the subway. Only a few lines. But I know the poem.

"It's off in the distance. It came into the room. It's here in the circle."

I know the poem.

She knows the poem.

 

I also loved the McGuffin with the rubber hand someone left below her mailbox. The killer takes souvenirs. She (and the reader) think, hands? It's a message? Nope, he takes something else, something worse. What did the hand mean, then? Dunno but sufficiently diverting and disquieting.

In the Cut research

So, In the Cut. While the movie is doltish and embarrassing to watch (for all the wrong reasons), the book is kind of good.

Some random things I looked up--

The narrator-do they ever mention her name?-mentions that Pauline is wearing a Japanese Happi coat. They are traditionally worn only for festivals in Japan, however you can buy them online (beware, the website has an annoying midi file) for wearing anytime and I admit, I kinda want one. Here's a sample image:

Good excuse to learn some NYC geography. The narrator lives on Washington Square Park. This puts her in the Greenwich Village area of Manhattan, near NYU. Although Moore makes the area sound seedy, the Wiki article says the crime rate is very low (although maybe someone from the Mayor's office writes for Wikipedia.) Does this mean no bars with 13 year olds with fake id's? (one of the credulity straining parts of the book. Surely no bar in a major American city is that brazen.)

Our nameless narrator mentions that the tenor of the neighborhood grows more boho below 14th street. Here is one of the better maps I found from a cursory search:

There's also a good Manhattan neighborhood map here.

Maybe I need to look through seedier listings but out of curiosity, I searched apartments in the Village and the cheapest I found (a studio) was $1695 a month.

Some basic Manhattan geography: the Hudson River and New Jersey are to the west. The East River, Queens and Brooklyn are to the east. Brooklyn is to the southeast and Staten Island is due south. It's the most densely populated of NYC's five boroughs although the borough with the largest population is Brooklyn, with Queens a close second. Only Manhattan is in New York County (actually each borough is in its own county.) When New Yorkers speak of going to the city, they generally mean going to Manhattan.

From Greenwich Village, you can take the Holland Tunnel under the Hudson River to scenic Jersey City. One of the many routes into the island that earns commuters the moniker "Bridge and Tunnel people."

Finalt thoughts and First/Last for The Winter Queen

I still want to look up the order of St. Valdimir and the crisis in the Balkans they referred to (the year is 1876.)

This is kind of a schizophrenic book. A cozy mystery with a typically complicated plot (tricking someone into suicide, pretending to be a ghost, a vast worldwide orphan conspiracy) that with few modifications could be Steampunk. But then there's that surprising turn at the end that reminds you, hey a Russian did write this. Poor Erast. Poor Lizanka's arm-nevermind the rest of her. I'll probably read more of this eventually although really, I'm kind of wanting to boo and throw tomatoes at that last chapter. I'm curious to see where the series goes from here and what happens to Erast. I'm guessing the tone of the next novel must be different.

First:

On Monday the thirteenth of May in the year 1876, between the hours of two and three in the afternoon on a day that combined the freshness of spring with the warmth of summer, numerous individuals in Moscow's Alexander Gardens unexpectedly found themselves eyewitnesses to the perpetration of an outrage that flagrantly transgressed the bounds of common decency.

Last:

No, the attention of those he encountered, especially the ladies, was attracted by one particularly intriguing feature of his appearance: despite his obvious youth the bon vivant's temples were a stark white, as if they were thickly coated with hoarfrost.

what I've looked up thus far for The Winter Queen

I love how this book opens:

On Monday the thirteenth of May in the year 1876, between the hours of two and three in the afternoon...numerous individuals in Moscow's Alexander Gardens...

Poetic, no. But perfect in its geo/temporal data. It's Moscow, 1876. The rule of Romanov Tsar Alexander II (he would be assassinated in 1881 after decades of various attempts on his life. He was famous for freeing the serfs but was a bastard to Poland and the Baltic States. However, he encouraged Finnish autonomy and language so they like him there. The poor son of a bitch died after escaping a bombing attempt on his carriage. A second bomber threw a bomb at his feet. There was a third bomber waiting in the crowd. They really wanted him dead, in little pieces.) He was followed by only two more Tsars: Alexander III and then Nicholas II.

The book opens at any rate with a suspicious suicide in the Alexander Gardens in Moscow. This was one of Moscow's first public parks. It was built from 1819-1823 in commemoration of the defeat of Napoleon at the request (or, probably I should say "request") of Alexander I, the uncle of the ill-fated Alexander II. The Gardens are adjacent to Red Square and the western wall of the Kremlin.

Here is the gate that commemorates victory in the Napoleonic Wars:

It was built on the site of a the former riverbed of the Neglinnaya River (the flow was diverted underground.)

Enjoy this Wikimap of the layout.

The book references a "Table of Ranks" at the back to show the standing of the protagonist, Collegiate Registrar Erast Fandorin, rank 14, as compared with others. It's a convoluted system established by Peter the Great in 1722. Among other things, it correlates military ranks with the civilian equivalents.

Many streets in Moscow are mentioned so, once again, I would have liked a map to be available. Fandorin travels up Mokhovaya Street a number of times. Here is what it would have looked like then:

It literally means "Moss Street" and was named for a market. It is still a major thoroughfare in Moscow. It's part of the ring road that circles the Kremlin area.

I believe the university he mentions visiting is Moscow State, purported to be the oldest university in Russia. Here is what it would have looked like about a century before:

I think the "yellow building" that Fandorin goes to is what is now called, factually, the Old Building. It was built in 1783. Here's what it looks like now:

Old, yellow. Those Russians get right to the point. Today, the journalism faculty and Oriental studies are located there.

Interestingly, after the October Revolution in 1917, anyone could be admitted (well, technically) and tuition fees were abolished in 1919. Now all you had to do was avoid studying or teaching the wrong thing and being sent to Vorkuta.

This site has an archive of historical maps. Here is one of 19th century Moskva.

Near the end, the book mentions there is trouble in the Balkans that is distracting the leadership. I think they are referring to the Balkan/Turkish crisis. The Balkans, including Greece, were under Ottoman rule at the time. The Slavs all hated each other but they hated the Turks more so they banded together in the Bulgarian Uprising in April of 1876 where Turkish troops killed up to 15,000 people (it's controversial-apparently the troops weren't regular Turkish army.) It was nasty business at any rate-people taking refuge in churches and being burned alive- and things snowball, the world gets wind of the Bulgarian massacre, the Russians are still pissed about the Crimean War, Slav nationalism flares up and by June Serbia and Montenegro have declared war on the Turks.

The Russians proposed a peace agreement in 1877 called the London Convention (Austria-Hungary are involved too) but the Turks rejected it. Now the Russians declare war. The bottom line is the Turks, being neither the first nor last to do so, severely underestimate the Russians and finally in 1878 peace is declared with some intervention from the British as the fear of Pan-Slavic fervor spreads through the rest of Europe. At the Congress of Berlin, the Balkans get re-diced with Bulgaria split into 3 pieces and Austria granted the right to occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina. All of this pisses Russia off because they want the Balkans for themselves. A Second Balkan Crisis will follow in 1885 and, of course, there will be more.

Incidentally, this conflict also led to the Red Cross/Red Crescent split which continues today.

At the end of the book, before everything goes to hell for Erast, he is awarded the order of St. Vladimir. Naturally, there is a website dedicated to Russian medals. Here is an example of what it looked like:

It was awarded for life-saving acts or famine relief (it was also awarded for military valor during the Crimean War.) There are different degrees of the order which can be seen in the Wikipedia article.

Great lines from The Sun Also Rises

Damn you, Paris Wife. Now I have to re-read this book which I barely remember from 20 years ago (also to re-read: A Moveable Feast although that's not in the cards in the immediate future.) I want to read more of Hemingway actually and since I plan to eschew anything that involves slaughtering bulls or African wild life, I think the list should be quite manageable.

One of my favorite literary scenes from a movie, btw, was in Peggy Sue Got Married when teen Peggy asked the local beatnik guy why he was so enamored with Jack Kerouac. He said "He [Hemingway] is the perfect American author: fat, violent and drunk.....Jack Kerouac doesn't have to KILL a BULL to have something to write about." I fell a little in love with that guy then, even if I have no intention of ever reading On the Road and do like me some Papa now and again.

Here's an article about the real life inspirations for the characters. The Paris Wife also goes into some detail on the trip to Spain that inspired this novel. Interestingly, Ernest was married to Hadley at the time but she does not appear in it. According to McLain's book, Ernest said this was because she was the only well-behaved person on the trip and was too above the muck to include in the story.

And here is a study guide with further links, courtesy of Grand Valley State.

Great lines:

On the writer Robert Cohn (he was someone in Hem's circle named Harold Loeb who slept with Duff-Lady Brett in the book-and went insane with jealousy when she slept with someone else):

Then there was another thing. He had been reading W. H. Hudson. That sounds like an innocent occupation, but Cohn had read and read "The Purple Land." "The Purple Land" is a very sinister book if read too late in life. It recounts splendid imaginary amorous adventures of a perfect English gentleman in an intensely romantic land, the scenery of which is very well described. For a man to take it as thirty-four as a guide book to what life holds is about as safe as it would be for a man of the same age to enter Wall Street direct from a Paris convent, equipped with a complete set of the more practical Alger books. Cohn, I believe took every word of "The Purple Land" as literally as though it had been an R.G. Dun report. You understand me, he made some reservations, but on the whole the book to him was sound. It was all that was needed to set him off. 

(this was a real 19th century novel, btw. Borges called it the best example of "gaucho literature." It involves an Englishman's misadventures in Uruguay. R.G. Dun is the predecessor of Dun and Bradstreet.)

On Lady Brett's early morning visit:

This was Brett, that I had felt like crying about. Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

On the bad vibes of certain streets:

It was like a certain stretch on the PLM between Fontainbleau and Montereau that always made me feel bored and dead and dull until it was over. I suppose it is some association of ideas that makes those dead places in a journey. There are other streets in Paris as ugly as the Boulevard Raspail......Perhaps I had read something about it once. That was the way Robert Cohn was about all of Paris. I wondered where Cohn got that incapacity to enjoy Paris. Possibly from Mencken. Mencken hates Paris, I believe. So many young men get their likes and dislikes from Mencken.

Final thoughts on Horns, + first and last

Well, nothing to look up for this book. Ok, not exactly true. The book takes place in the fictional town of Gideon, NH near Portsmouth so I looked up a map of NH. It's right across the bay from Maine actually so I wondered if the reference to Derry might have been a shout-out to his dear old Dad's Derry, Maine. Evidently though, there is a very real Derrry, NH so just as likely not. Especially since the name Pennywise didn't come up.

JB had said this book was good, if blasphemous. I guess I can see someone thinking it's blasphemous, although the only part that bothered me was the animal cruelty (too many gruesome snake killings-especially the poor rat snake who gets tricked into swimming into the killer's gullet.) We all have our bailiwicks. I wonder was it the scene where the newly demonic Ig gives a loopy speech to a forest full of snakes:

"I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman's power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be. the author is unworthy of His own characters. The devil is first a literary critic, who delivers this untalented scribbler the public flaying He deserves."

Well, this goes on for pages. Or maybe it was the remark Ig made near the end about why wasn't the devil the hero of the Bible since he rescued Adam and Eve from a bucolic prison run by a megalomaniac? That actually was kinda funny. Or maybe it was just that the devil isn't nearly as bad as some people in this book.

Anyways, this is good but for scares, nothing can top his short story "Twittering From the Circus of the Damned." It's crazy that a story told in Twitter format worked for starters, nevermind that is is piss your pants scary.

First:

Ignatius Martin Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things.

Last:

"Poor devil," Terry said before he got into his rent-a-car and drove away.

First and last for After Dark

First:

Eyes mark the shape of a city.

Last:

There will be time until the next darkness arrives.

Some great lines from After Dark

This was my first Haruki Murukami. I've known about his him for a while, chiefly because of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but I've been interested in him more since PRI's The World ran a story about the extreme devotion of his fans. Some even write him letters asking him for advice. This confuses him but he answers them.

I liked this book, especially any scene that involves Mari, a 19 year old student who speaks Chinese. She's a strangely passive choice for a narrator but she works and I love the conversations she gets into with Takahashi (a young jazz musician who clearly likes her), Kaoru (the manager of a love hotel called Alphaville-Godard references are intentional-who seeks Mari's help with a beaten Chinese prostitute and illegal immigrant) and Korogi (a worker at the hotel on the run from vague but sinister villains.) The story also follows Mari's sister who is in some kind of metaphysical sleep and-possibly?-is having her soul sucked out through her (unplugged) television and it seems to be going to the office of the businessman who beat the prostitute. Yeah, that part was not very clear to me at all. Mari's sister is a model named Eri.

The thing about Mari is that she's so impassive in her interactions with others, it's easy to mistake her as disdainful, particularly in her first interaction with Takahashi-by the way, if everything in the novel was as strangely compelling as his conversation with her about Denny's menu, the book would have been a home run. She's just not disdainful though, she's just...I'm not sure. Weighed down by worries: why do others want to interact with her, are they trying to get to her pretty sister, why won't her sister wake up, how is she going to summon the courage to leave on her exchange program to China next week.

I really liked the way the intimacy of the late night/early morning hours sparked the deep metaphysical conversations between near or utter strangers. I fear the meaning of the book might be largely beyond me but part of it seems to be the intimacy engendered by the dark. Something about memory. Uhm, I don't think I totally got it but I liked it even if I'm not yet ready to embrace the cult of Murukami.

Some lines I liked:

Korugi stands there holding the remote control.

"You know what I think?" she says. "That people's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn't matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned They're all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed 'em to the fire, they're all just paper. The fire isn't thinking, 'Oh, this is Kant,' or 'Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition,' or 'Nice tits,' while it burns. To the fire, they're nothing but scraps of paper. It's the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there's no distinction-they're all just fuel."

Korugi nods to herself. Then she goes on:

"You know, I think if I didn't have that fuel, if I didn't have these memory drawers inside me, I would've snapped a long time ago. I would've curled up in a ditch somewhere and died. I would have curled up in a ditch somewhere and died. It's because I can pull the memories out of the drawers when I have to-the important ones and the useless ones-that I can go on living this nightmare of a life. I might think I can't take it anymore, that I can't go on anymore, but one way or another I get past that." 

Takahashi leaves a convenience store at 5:24 am (part of the literary device is the precise marking of time between midnight and 7am):

The new day is almost here, but the old one is still dragging its heavy skirts. Just as ocean water and river water struggle against each other at a river mouth, the old time and the new time clash and blend. Takahashi is unable to tell for sure which side-which world-contains his center of gravity.

It's funny how you can watch a movie or read a book and know that it's intended for you to care about what is happening, but you just don't (I'm thinking about the movie "Crazy Heart" which I just watched this weekend.) And on the other hand, there's this understated goodbye between Takahashi and Mari is so melancholy and touching to me:

"I don't really want to go," Mari says.

"To China?"

"Uh-huh."

"Why not?"

"Cause I'm scared."

"That's only natural," he says. "You're going to a strange, far-off place all by yourself."

"I know."

"You'll be fine, though," he says. "I know ou. And I'll be waiting for you here....You're very pretty, did you know that?"

Mari looks up at Takahasi. Then she withdraws her hand from his and puts it into the pocket of her varsity jacket. her eyes drop to her feet. She is checking to make sure her yellow sneakers are still clean.

"Thanks. But I want to go home now."

"I'll write to you," he says. "A super-long letter , like in an old-fashioned novel."

"Okay," Mari says.

She goes in through the ticket gate, walks to the platform, and disappears into a waiting express train. Takahasi watches her go. Soon the departure signal sounds, the doors close, and the trains pulls away from the platform. When he loses sight of the train, Takahashi picks his instrument case up from the floor, slings the strap over his shoulder, and heads for his own station, whistling softly. The number of people moving through the station gradually increases.

6:40am:

The lavish morning light washes every corner of the world at no charge. Two young sisters sleep peacefully, their bodies pressed together in one small bed. We are probably the only ones who know that.

Final thoughts on Madame Bovary, + first and last

I am glad to have read this book as it has such cultural weight and is such a reference point. I kind of got Emma Bovary references before (some unhappy 19th century French chick who had affairs and killed herself) but I'll really get them now. Yes, she was all of those things but she was also kind of a shitty person. She's vain, adulterous, materialistic, a shitty parent and possibly bipolar. Actually, that last part doesn't make her shitty, per se, and kind of explains the other behaviors. Anyways, as I said on Goodreads perish the thought this slutty, whiny cow is a feminist icon. And while the book was entertaining (the town of Yonville and its citizens were definitely more fleshed out than I expected them to be), I was glad to turn the last page on it for sure.

Her husband was a nice guy but was undeniably a dullard-and thanks to Dennis' clarification, he wasn't a doctor but a public health officer which clears up some scenes like Homais and Bovary having to call the doctor when something went wrong. I also could understand why the operation on Hippolyte was so outrageous-he should never have been doing it. Per the linked article above, a public health officer receives somewhat less training than an LPN.

The story takes place in and around Rouen, where Flaubert lived with his mother for much of his adult life. He never married but he did have a mistress for several years who apparently was pissed at him for some personal details he used in Bovary. Flaubert himself came to resent the book in later years as he felt it overshadowed his other writing. He's buried in Rouen. Fun fact: the 19 year old Joan of Arc was burned at the stake there in 1431 (the area was under English control at the time.) It's also the location of the Cathedral that inspired Monet's series of paintings. It's the church where Leon and Emma meet and Emma attempts to break up with him (instead, it's implied he bangs her like a Salvation Army drum as they take a carriage ride through town. Classy!)

Oh well. Before I mention first and last, here is what Dennis' literature professor friend (and Bridge partner had to say on the subject:

I think you restate what I said pretty accurately, though I also said something about the compelling characters, the depth and plausibility of Flaubert's psychological realism. The difficulty of adequately answering your question about why Madame B is considered a great novel, of course, is that it involves the larger question of what constitutes greatness in any novel, and that question immediately invites platitudes for answers. If we turn to novels for the pleasures of escaping our own cultural confines by entering into a radically different culture and reality, then Madame B is a great novel because it so plausibly represents its world, provincial France in the mid nineteenth century. If we turn to novels to gain access to another human mind in ways that exceed our own imaginative grasp of real human minds (even our own), then Flaubert's psychological realism is great because it so powerfully presents the illusion of full access to psychological depths. If we want more fully to understand the interweaving of mind and culture, Flaubert provides such a compelling paradigm that the word Bovarisme enters the French (and English) language to describe the achievement. If we want to experience the tragedy of balked yearning, of what Browning calls the "infinite passion and the pain of finite hearts that yearn," it can be argued that Flaubert's stark realism offers us access to these emotions in ways unsurpassed even by Sophocles or Shakespeare. 

First:

We were in Study Hall when the Headmaster entered, followed by a new boy dressed in regular clothes and a school servant carrying a large desk.

Last:

He has just been awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor.

(That refers to the apothecary Homais of course, not Charles Bovary who dropped dead basically because he married some skeeze.)

Final thoughts and first and last for The Redbreast

There weren't a lot of memorable lines although there were memorable scenes, like the murder of one character-which I kind of like that Nesbo had the balls to leave unresolved. One of the killers is still a policeman. I really learned a lot about Norway, specifically how they are still dealing with WWII and Nazism which is of course relevant to helping understand current events, unfortunately. Would that Nazi shit were only a handy plot convention.

I wasn't sure if Harry Hole was really coming through to me as a character until he gets a call from a crying woman one night (it's never said but it must be Rakel although who knows, maybe people just do that in Norway) and he keeps her on the phone talking about a documentary he just watched on TV about a brother and sister who traveled the world. I knew then I liked him. Also, how guilty he felt at the end when the informer in South Africa received the death penalty after Hole promised him and his sister he'd help them in exchange for information and then didn't.

Anyways, as I said the lines are really memorable but here are first and last anyways:

First:

A grey bird glided in and out of Harry's field of vision.

Last:

Harry sighed, stuffed the newspaper under his arm and walked out into the shimmering afternoon heat.

What I've looked up thus far for The Redbreast

The writing isn't beautiful but it's competent story-telling after a slow beginning (lots of dangling threads to drop.)

A big part of the story is Norway's role in WWII. Norway of course was occupied by the Nazis during the War but that's about all I know since reading The Moon is Down doesn't count.

The Nazis occupied Norway from April 9, 1940 to May 8, 1945. The Norwegian version of the Nazi party was Nasjonal Samling. The book mentions Norwegians who fought on the Nazi side which was news to me. Wikipedia says:

"Furthermore, about 15,000 Norwegians volunteered for combat duty on the Nazi side; of the 6,000 sent into action as part of the Germanic SS, most were sent to the Eastern front."

Which matches what's in the book. 

The head of the Nasjonal Samling was the now infamous Vidkun Quisling, probably another name whose descendants all rushed to change like Hitler and Vichy. He was executed in October of 1945 and has the distinction of being hated by the Nazis and everyone else.

Milorg was the main of the Norwegian Resistance.

There is a lot of talk in the book about the Waffen SS, which I frankly had barely heard of.  The Waffen was the military wing of the Schutzstaffel and was separate from the army, per Hitler's wishes so he could have his own personal police/army after the war was over. Originally composed of only the master race types, they eventually allowed foreigners to join which is how Norwegians came to serve in it. Waffen was declared a criminal organization at Nuremberg which some people say is unfair. They were just military, not like the rest of the SS. I really have no idea what the answer is but SS veterans were denied pension until they sued the West German government in the 1960's.

The Norwegian Parliament is called the Storting ("great thing.")

Oslo has the distinction of being one of the largest world capitals by land area and has abundant green spaces.

First and last for The Paris Wife

First:

Though I often looked for one, I finally had to admit that there could be no cure for Paris.

Last:

There was nothing Paul could possibly do for me except let me go--back to Paris and Pamplona and San Sebastian, back to Chicago when I was Hadley Richardson, a girl stepping off a train about to meet the man who could change her life. That girl, that impossibly lucky girl, needed nothing.

McLain mentions in her sources note in the appendix a number of books she used as research. Here are a few that might be worth looking into (I haven't looked anything up about these):

• The Hemingway Women by Bernice Kert
• Hadley: the First Mrs. Hemingway by Alice Hunt Sokoloff
• The True Gen by Denis Brian
• The Crazy Years by William Wiser
• Paris Was Yesterday by Janet Flanner
• Zelda by Nancy Milford

Things I'm wondering about today-existentialism

Is there a God? If there isn't, what is the purpose of life? If the universe doesn't care about me, should I?

Actually, nothing so dramatic today because who cares about the universe-I fixed a huge problem at work this week and I have Japanese eggplant I'm going to cook this weekend. I'm wondering specifically about existentialism and Albert Camus. During our book discussion for The Postman Always Rings Twice, we discussed how Camus had said it inspired him to write The Stranger. I mentioned that I didn't know much about Camus besides he was an existentialist and got a funny look from someone who said, "I wouldn't say that."

This bugged me-did I have it wrong? So I went to teh googul. Trying to side-step the whole definition of existentialism (which no one really understands no matter what they say), it's a slippery movement. I guess the trend is to declassify some former existentialists including Camus, who considered himself an Absurdist. Camus in fact rejected the label. The Camus Society of the UK though says it's perfectly reasonable to label him an existentialist, however they don't get hung up on labels (that's so existential. Uhm, I guess.)

I don't want to cite 1000 sources. The bottom line is academics are torn but it's pretty much ok to say he is, even if he thought he wasn't (The Myth of Sisyphus was evidently intended to challenge existentialists. I don't read much philosophy because, not to brag, I don't understand it.) So, if someone tells you that Camus was an existentialist, there's no need to look at them as if they said, "Jane Austen was the greatest American writer of the Belle Epoque, much better than her contemporary John Dos Passos."

Great lines from The Paris Wife

Paula McClain has an enviable way with a story that makes you lean forward fully engaged (you say, Hadley, that you lived across from a sawmill in Paris? I'm strangely fascinated.)

Here are a few passages I liked:

This is from the Prologue and about Pauline Pfeiffer, the Vogue writer who befriended Hadley and then had an affair with Ernest. She became his second wife and was treated poorly in the original version of A Moveable Feast. She was also a devout Catholic-although that didn't seem to prevent her from banging her friend's husband-and supported the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. So, she was kind of an all-around asshole and fittingly, Ernest would later cheat on her with Martha Gellhorn and meanwhile Hadley would say years later in an interview that divorcing Ernest turned out to be a huge relief. It's the Lee Krasner story all over again.

This isn't a detective story-not hardly. I don't want to say, Keep watch for the girl who will come along and ruin everything, but she's coming anyway, set on her course in a gorgeous chipmunk coat and fine shoes, her sleek brown hair bobbed so close to her well-made head she'll seem like a pretty otter in my kitchen. Her easy smile. Her fast smart talk-while in the bedroom, scruffy and unshaven and laid flat out on the bed like a despot king, Ernest will read his book and care nothing for her. Not at first. And the tea will boil in the teapot, and I'll tell a story about a girl she and I both knew a hundred years ago in St. Louis {Katherine Smith}, and we'll feel like quick and natural friends while across the yard, in the sawmill, a dog will start barking and keep barking and he won't stop for anything.

Hadley's musings in Paris where she's very lonely much of the time while Ernest goes to his second apartment (!) to write.

A cold wind sliced through my thin coat, but just beyond was the Ile St.-Louis with the beautifully preserved houses and elegant streets that made it an oasis. I walked all the way along the island until I found a park at the tip, thick with bare chestnut trees, and then followed a little staircase down to the river. Fishermen were stringing their lines for goujon, and frying them up on the spot. I bought a handful wrapped in newspaper and sat on the wall watching the barges move under Pont Sully. The nest of fish was crisp under a coarse snow of salt and smelled so simple and good I thought it might save my life. Just a little. Just for that moment.

Ezra Pound, who not surprisingly comes across as only semi-likable, offers Hadley some advice when she becomes pregnant.

"I like him the way he is. Surely you believe me."

"Of course. That's how you feel now. But mark my words, this baby will change everything. They always do. Just bear that in mind and be very careful."

"All right, Ezra, I promise," I said, and moved away toward Ernest and our train. Pound was Pound and given to speech-making, and I didn't take him seriously that day. I was far too optimistic about everything to heed any warnings, but years later his parting remarks would come back to me sharply. Pound was Pound, but about this one thing he had been dead right. 

Ernest takes Hadley away for a ski vacation in Austria as she desperately needs to get away from Ernest's new friends in Paris-too much of the fame monster. He's even fighting with Gertrude Stein.

After three days, we came back down the mountain to find two telegrams waiting for Ernest. One was from Sherwood {Anderson} and the other was from Horace Liveright and both said the same thing: In Our Time would be a book. They were offering a two-hundred-dollar advance against royalties and were sending a contract soon.

It was an epic moment, one we'd never forget-and somehow the skiing seemed ineluctably part of it, as if we had to trek up nearly to the sky and fly back down to get this news. If was the end of Ernest' struggle with apprenticeship, and an end to other things as well. He would never again be unknown. We would never again be this happy. 

The next day we boarded a train back to Paris.

One of those beginning of the end moments, Ernest ignores Hadley at a party and flirts with Duff-evidently the inspiration for Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises-and Hadley comforts her friend Kitty who is being left by Ernest's writer friend, Harold.

I stayed by Kitty's side for the rest of the evening, but kept one eye on Ernest, too. This Duff character was just too lovely and too familiar. She and Ernest talked so freely you'd think they'd known each other for years, and I felt newly vulnerable after hearing Kitty's news. The wrost events always have the threst of accidents, as if they come out of nowhere. But that's just lack of perspective. Kitty was blindsided, but Harold had likely been plotting his escape for months. I couldn't help but wonder if this could happen to me, too. just how long had Duff been in the picture anyway?

This sequence ends by Hadley telling Ernest she's ready to go home and him suggesting someone walk her then.

Outside I started to cry quietly.

"I'm so embarrassed," I said.

Kitty gave me a firm, buck-up sort of embrace. "He's the one who should be embarrassed, darling. Her, too. They say she has to keep scores of men around because she can't pay her own bills."

"Duff," I said. "Who calls themselves such a thing?"

"Exactly. I'd be good money that even someone with as little sense as Hem wouldn't leave a woman like you for that number. Cmon. Chin up."

"You've been so good to me, Kitty. I can't tell you how much Ill miss you." 

"I know. I'm going to miss you, too, but what choice do I have? all I can do is run off to London and hope Harold chases me."

"Will he?"

"I honestly don't know."

Hadley discusses Pauline, when they were on better terms.

If Kitty was too decorative, Pauline would be as well. She was the type of professional beauty he generally despised. Not only did she talk endlessly about fashion, she was always maneuvering her way toward the most interesting people and sizing them up to see how they might be of use to her, her dark eyes snapping, her mind's wheels turning shrewdly. There never seemed to be any spontaneity with Pauline. if she saw you, she meant to. if she spoke to you, she'd already planned what to say so it came out sharply and perfectly. I admired her confidence and was a little in awe of it, maybe. She had that sense of effortlessness that took, int he end, a great deal of effort. And though I never knew quite what to say around other women like her-Zelda, for instance-under Pauline's fine clothes and good haircut, she was candid and sensible, too. I knew she wouldn't unravel on me at any moment and quickly came to feel I could count on her.

I also love the scene where they meet the Fitzgerald's (which I can't find for the life of me) and Hadley asks what Ernest thinks. "She's crazy. Look at her eyes."

Here's a fascinating bit about The Sun Also Rises, as Hadley reads it for the first time.

...when he gave me the pages to read, it took me no time at all to realize that everything was just as it had happened in Spain, every sordid conversation and tense encounter. It was all nearly verbatim, except for one thing-I wasn't in it at all.

Duff was the heroine. I'd known and expected this, but it was troubling just the same to see her name over and over. He hadn't changed it yet to Lady Brett. Duff was Duff, and Harold was Harold and Pat was a drunken sot, and everyone was in bad form except the bullfighters. Kitty was in the book, too-he'd lied about that-in a very unflattering role. Ernest had made himself into Jake Barnes and made Jake impotent, and what was I supposed to think of that? Was that how he saw his own morality or cowardice or good sense of whatever it was that had kept him from sleeping with Duff-as impotence?

 Damn it. I will have no choice but to re-read that book now.

The most squirmy part to read is watching Pauline Pfeiffer parasitically attach herself to the Hemingways and they take a truly awkward vacation together in Juan Les Pins (in Antibes on the Cote d'Azur.) :

At our hotel, there were three of everything-three breakfast trays, three terry-cloth robes, three wet bathing suits on the line. On the crushed rock path along the windward side of the hotel, three bicycles stood on their stands. If you looked at the bicycles one way, they looked very solid, like sculpture, with afternoon light glinting cleanly off  the chrome handlebars-one,two, three, all in a row. If you looked at them another way, you could see just how thin each kickstand was under the weight of the heavy frame, and how they were poised to fall like dominoes or the skeletons of elephants or like love itself.

...

When the sun grew too hot, I went into the water, which always hit you cold and was wonderful that way. I ducked my head and then surfaced, and swam out several hundred yards, where things were still. I treaded water and let the swells buoy me. At the top of one, I could look back at the beach and see them small and perfect, my husband and child and the woman who was now more to us than we could manage. From that distance, they all looked equal and serene and I couldn't hear them or feel them. At the bottom in the trough of the wave, I could see only the sky, that high white place that seemed not to change much for all of our suffering.

Poem of the day-Katherine Larson

Here's a quirky offering from Katherine Larson, about whom Poetry Found has almost nothing to say. According to a review of her collection Radial Symmetry, her day job is molecular biologist, which you'll see makes sense when reading the poem.

Why I like it: what's not to like? Quirky, sciencey, funny, some memorable imagery, cameos from tequila and Norse giants.

Speaking of which, Aurvandil was a giant from Norse mythology. While Thor was carrying him across a river, his toe froze. Thor broke it off and put it in the night sky. Apparently, exactly which star inspired the story is up for debate.

Love at Thirty-two Degrees by Katherine Larson

I

Today I dissected a squid,

the late acacia tossing its pollen

across the black of the lab bench.

In a few months the maples   

will be bleeding. That was the thing:   

there was no blood

only textures of gills creased like satin,   

suction cups as planets in rows. Be careful

not to cut your finger, he says. But I’m thinking

of fingertips on my lover’s neck   

last June. Amazing, hearts.

This brachial heart. After class,

I stole one from the formaldehyde

& watched it bloom in my bathroom sink

between cubes of ice.

                               II

Last night I threw my lab coat in the fire   

& drove all night through the Arizona desert   

with a thermos full of silver tequila.

It was the last of what we bought   

on our way back from Guadalajara—

desert wind in the mouth, your mother’s   

beat-up Honda, agaves   

twisting up from the soil

like the limbs of cephalopods.

Outside of Tucson, saguaros so lovely

considering the cold, & the fact that you   

weren’t there to warm me.

Suddenly drunk I was shouting that I wanted to see the stars   

as my ancestors used to see them—

to see the godawful blue as Aurvandil’s frostbitten toe.

                               III

Then, there is the astronomer’s wife   

ascending stairs to her bed.

The astronomer gazes out,   

one eye at a time,

to a sky that expands   

even as it falls apart

like a paper boat dissolving in bilge.

Furious, fuming stars.

When his migraine builds &

lodges its dark anchor behind

the eyes, he fastens the wooden buttons

of his jacket, & walks

outside with a flashlight

to keep company with the barn owl   

who stares back at him with eyes

that are no greater or less than

a spiral galaxy.

The snow outside

is white & quiet

as a woman’s slip

against cracked floorboards.

So he walks to the house

inflamed by moonlight, & slips

into the bed with his wife   

her hair & arms all

in disarray

like fish confused by waves.

                               IV

Science—

beyond pheromones, hormones, aesthetics of bone,

every time I make love for love’s sake alone,

I betray you.

Things I've looked up for The Paris Wife

First, I love the language and I'm really savoring reading this book but I need to pick up the pace. I have stacks of reading waiting, not to mention Madame Bovary for book club. I have lots of chanson and bal musette music set aside to put me in the mood though, no worries.

I didn't know a lot about Hadley Hemingway, other than she was quite an influence on Ernest. I didn't realize she was 8 years older than him and they married when he was only 21. Despite her fame (even before I started on this book, she was the only spouse of his I could name, although that's probably because of A Moveable Feast), they were only married from 1921-1926. Here is a picture of the both of them with their son John in 1926:

He looked old even when he was young.

According to Wikipedia, she remarried Paul Mowrer, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, in 1934. Hemingway gave her all of the proceeds from The Sun Also Rises in the divorce (she also was paid for the movie rights.) She only saw Hemingway once more, on vacation in Wyoming. She outlived Hemingway by nearly 18 years, dying in January of 1979. It's all very sad considering how in love they once were and the circumstances of Hem's death. By many accounts, he regretted dumping Hadley for women who were more trendy.

Hadley mentions shopping at Les Halles marketplace (not sparing any details about the rats in the alleyways and the stench of rotting food-also, when you bought a chicken there, it was a whole feathered dead chicken.)  Les Halles was torn down in 1971 and relocated to the suburbs. There is now a huge underground mall on the site. There weren't many pictures I could find, but here's one of the market from 1954:

Poem of the Day-Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) is famous of course as being perhaps the greatest poet of the Spanish language. I guess some people were turned off by him for his love of communism. Ezra Pound's boner for fascism keeps me from enjoying his work but the fact that it's not very accessible probably doesn't help.

No rhetoric here though, my droogs. Just an ode to his dog that is truly lovely. If dogs don't go to heaven then no one will.

A Dog Has Died by Pablo Neruda

My dog has died.

I buried him in the garden

next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I'll join him right there,

but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,

his bad manners and his cold nose,

and I, the materialist, who never believed

in any promised heaven in the sky

for any human being,

I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.

Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom

where my dog waits for my arrival

waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth,

of having lost a companion

who was never servile.

His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine

withholding its authority,

was the friendship of a star, aloof,

with no more intimacy than was called for,

with no exaggerations:

he never climbed all over my clothes

filling me full of his hair or his mange,

he never rubbed up against my knee

like other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,

paying me the attention I need,

the attention required

to make a vain person like me understand

that, being a dog, he was wasting time,

but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,

he'd keep on gazing at me

with a look that reserved for me alone

all his sweet and shaggy life,

always near me, never troubling me,

and asking nothing.

Ai, how many times have I envied his tail

as we walked together on the shores of the sea

in the lonely winter of Isla Negra

where the wintering birds filled the sky

and my hairy dog was jumping about

full of the voltage of the sea's movement:

my wandering dog, sniffing away

with his golden tail held high,

face to face with the ocean's spray.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,

as only dogs know how to be happy

with only the autonomy

of their shameless spirit.

There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,

and we don't now and never did lie to each other.

So now he's gone and I buried him,

and that's all there is to it.

final thoughts on The Sign of Four, + first and last

The (in)famous Mormon interlude in A Study in Scarlet may have been a little clunky but I still think I preferred that to the second Holmes novel. Too many characters that want to tell the story "FROM the beginning." And the beginning went back a ways. It was like hanging out with someone who didn't know who to edit their own stories. Interesting detail about the 1857 war in India though which led me to a Google Books result of a version with an appendix by Shafquat Towheed about Doyle's treatment of the uprising (surprisingly accurate given he didn't witness it first-hand.)

Some of the dialogue though feels very contemporary. I'd heard of course about Holmes's predilection for cocaine but it's funny that he shoots up to keep his mind busy and interesting that Doyle book ends the story with him fixing. And then there's the Watson and Mary Morstan business. They hang out for a few hours total and decide to get married. I had never even heard that Watson was married so I googled it and Doyle evidently thought it was a bad idea too and she vanishes without explanation later on. Let the bromance continue unfettered.

First:

Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case.

Last:

"The division seems rather unfair," I remarked. "You have done all the work in this business. I get a wife out of it, Jones gets the credit, pray what remains for you?"

"For me," said Sherlock Holmes, "there still remains the cocaine bottle." And he stretched his long white hand up for it.

Poem of the day-Raymond Carver

Not actually from Poetry Found. I just happened to see it quoted somewhere and it's possibly my favorite Raymond Carver poem (as opposed to this one about how the dog being run over inspired him to write a great poem about how sad his daughter was about the dog. A lot of dogs seem to die in Chandler's stuff.)

“Rain” 
by Raymond Chandler

Woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day
and read. Fought against it for a minute.

Then looked out the window at the rain.
And gave over. Put myself entirely
in the keep of this rainy morning.

Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgivable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance. Yes.

What I've looked up for The Sign of Four

The previous ACD novel that I got from the library had fabulous footnotes. This copy has none but it's a gift so not to look a gift Doyle in the mouth because I'd be looking things up anyways.

So, Thaddeus Sholto is a sickly guy who has information for Holmes and Watson's client, Mary Morstan, about the disappearance of her father years ago when he returned to London from service in India. Sholto mentions he is destined with his health to be a valetudinarian which interestingly can mean either an invalid or a hypochondriac.

Evidently, there was a large collection of Far East valuables that Morstan and Sholto Senior were supposed to divvy up but Morstan died unexpectedly and Sholto concealed it. Too long to get into the story but he set aside a chaplet to give to Mary but he was a greedy prick so he didn't want it given to her until he died. Thaddeus sent her one pearl at a time. You can gather from the context it's some sort of necklace. More specifcally, these are prayer beads like, but not necessarily, a rosary.

Thaddeus says at one point "Le mauvais gout mene au creme" which means, "Bad taste leads to crime." It's a quote from Stendhal.

It's mentioned that Thaddeus has an astrakhan collar. Curious about what exactly that looks like?

Sholto mentions his collection of paintings by Corot, Salvator Rosa and Bouguereau. I was only vaguely familiar with Corot. Rosa (1615-1673) was an Italian Baroque painter and printmaker.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) was a French Classicist painter. He seems to have painted quite a variety of subjects: mythology, pietas, contemporary scenes. Apparently, he was mad popular during his lifestyle was but was derided by Degas and company for being too slick.

I really enjoy the Dutch Realism influence he shows. See here:

Tete L'Etude l'Oiseau

The Wave

There is a quote from Goethe between Holmes and Watson that I was going to include but in the end, I'm  because evidently it was a misquote and it's long and full of crazy teutonic diacritics.