Ersatz TLS discussion

Welcome to the new thread. Warm and sunny spring weather has finally arrived in our corner of Vermont, after a couple of weeks of more or less constant rain. I’m looking forward to planting season in the garden while still maintaining a varied reading agenda. Currently I’m on:
A German Officer in Paris (much to go, outstanding)
The Rigor of Angels (almost finished, comment in due course)
Republic: Britain’s Revolutionary Decade, 1649-60 (about half-way through)
A novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett (on which I’ll report separately).
A couple of plays by JM Synge

On the posting of images, it might take me a bit to put up GP’s detailed guidance as it looks as though I’ll have to re-type it.

...

AB - But perhaps you were there to support Palace? They were excellent, carving through Spurs’ defence at will.

Re: Cally

I was supporting Spurs, as my nephew is Spurs mad, from my excellent shaded seat, i could see Palace were enjoying themselves, a group of palace fans were on tube with us after game, one said it could have been 7-0...i agree. Spurs fans were leaving from 70th minute onwards...

As for the Cally,, compared to Tottenham High Road it is a lot more affluent but also afflicted with the London plague of jumbled, bittiness, where a row of tatty, dirty shops and small independent mosques and backpack hostels, merges into a classic victorian terrace,shaded by plane trees. One ghastly thing about heat and london is all the small offal stores(aka chicken and kebab joints) that reek as you pass by and the slobby pavement culture where passing by requires a detour

I loathe most cities in the sun, so it didnt look beautiful to me yesterday but it is an impressive street. For me london is most beautiful in foggy cold weather, or steady drizzle, although for some it may look worse.

One plus point of Tottenham High Road, a lot of trees, good to see!

I am in Llangollen for a week's holiday. I stopped at a restaurant for lunch on Sunday to find it had a huge 2nd hand bookshop above. I had a look round but found it a bit overwhelming to be honest. Visited Chirk castle today and, like many National Trust places, they also had a small 2nd hand book shop.

giveusaclue wrote: "I am in Llangollen for a week's holiday. I stopped at a restaurant for lunch on Sunday to find it had a huge 2nd hand bookshop above. I had a look round but found it a bit overwhelming to be honest..."

lovely part of the world, hope you have a good week. i love little 2nd hands shops in churchs and national trust spots. there was even one in my GP practice about a decade ago, quite a good selection in a little bookcase

AB76 wrote: "giveusaclue wrote: "I am in Llangollen for a week's holiday. I stopped at a restaurant for lunch on Sunday to find it had a huge 2nd hand bookshop above. I had a look round but found it a bit overw..."

Thanks AB. So far so good.

Thanks for the new thread. I'm off to the Auburn library, hoping to thin the piles of books...

"...As for the Cally,, compared to Tottenham High Road it is a lot more affluent but also afflicted with the London plague of jumbled, bittiness, where a row of tatty, dirty shops and small independent mosques and backpack hostels, merges into a classic victorian terrace..."

Which sounds like a good setting for a multi-family state-of-England novel, which is what I understand Andrew O'Hagan's Caledonian Road to be. It's certainly very thick, as, surprisingly, I was able to look at it in our village library, who have bought it for the collection. I don't think that anyone on GR has read it. Perhaps someone on WWR, but I don't remember.

RussellinVT wrote: ""...As for the Cally,, compared to Tottenham High Road it is a lot more affluent but also afflicted with the London plague of jumbled, bittiness, where a row of tatty, dirty shops and small indepen..."

my brother who isnt much of a reader, did read it as he lives on he Cally and he didnt like it.

giveusaclue wrote: "I am in Llangollen for a week's holiday. I stopped at a restaurant for lunch on Sunday to find it had a huge 2nd hand bookshop above. I had a look round but found it a bit overwhelming to be honest..."

We spent a book-hunting holiday in North Wales years ago. We passed through Llangollen and were impressed by the deep, dark greenness of the valley - without realizing we should have stopped..

In the last thread AB wrote about the different varieties of “difficult”.

How about difficult in the sense of "not enjoying it at all"? I've never read anything Ivy Compton-Burnett as far as I remember, so I picked one up at random, A House and its Head, and the first 35 pages involve five adults in one family speaking spikey thoughts to each other over breakfast on Christmas morning, 1885, followed by a cold lecture from the vicar, in place of a cheering sermon, and spikey words to the other congregants. The dominant adjectives are fierce, grim, awkward and sullen. I will give it a bit longer, but it will have to show some charm or wit or stylishness pretty soon or I won't make it to New Year.

... Yet it did have a certain momentum, and I kept reading. The story turns eventful, and the dry, in-turned, unsmiling, undeserving head of the house eventually arrives at a place of satisfaction. But with all the deaths and marriages along the way the plot slides close to melodrama, the wit and charm never appear, and the spikeyness never lets up. So even though I finished it I won't be rushing to read another by ICB.

RussellinVT wrote: "In the last thread AB wrote about the different varieties of “difficult”.

How about difficult in the sense of "not enjoying it at all"? I've never read anything Ivy Compton-Burnett as far as I rem..."

I have read a couple of her novels along time ago. I remember nothing of them, except a slight remembrance of the taste of something sour being left in the experience... But her life was fascinating, and that is somehow what she wrote about, manipulations of people by the power of others. All kinds of family/work/romantic/theological manipulations. I like to think that she is no longer popular because we live in a less class ridden and bigoted society, and so there is much less to identify with, as a reader.

But, I suspect that its just that the types of bigotry and manipulation that we live with, as a matter of course these days, are just very different, and so we no longer easily identify with her archaic descriptions of common forms of manipulation in an Edwardian life, relations and politics...

I think of her somehow as being a rather sad and and maybe a bit of a bitter person. Maybe she wrote her books to pass on some knowledge to others as to what to look out for in order to identify common forms of being bullied or manipulated in those days? However, 'the times they are a changing'...

RussellinVT wrote: "In the last thread AB wrote about the different varieties of “difficult”.

How about difficult in the sense of "not enjoying it at all"? I've never read anything Ivy Compton-Burnett as far as I rem..."

its so odd how some books can be "difficult" and others not. So far Voss is a joy, i expected it to be a real trudge and a challenge. its not easy reading but its hitting the right spots

in last 25 years i have read some novels that just would not sit and scan well for me, where every return to reading is met with a grimace and spaces inbetween reading grows weekly. as yet in 2025...that has not happened!

Tam wrote: "I have read a couple of her novels along time ago. I remember nothing of them, except a slight remembrance of the taste of something sour being left in the experience... ..."

I also had the general impression of her being an unhappy person, leading a life that was cloistered and almost secretive, and I think you put a sympathetic case for her outlook. Whether her novels can provide the enjoyment, or at least the satisfaction, we mainly look for, is more doubtful. I wonder if they will remain in print. I did see that NYRB had a couple of hers in their list, including this one, so that is a kind of imprimatur.

AB76 wrote: "its so odd how some books can be "difficult" and others not...."

I’ve already had some great reads in 2025 but I’ve also had a more than usual number of the not-so-great – which leaves me in the position of having to decide whether to give a negative review, something on the whole I prefer to avoid. I waver – some people may have enjoyed it, so why do they need to hear from me; on the other hand, some may prefer to be warned.

RussellinVT wrote: "AB76 wrote: "its so odd how some books can be "difficult" and others not...."

I’ve already had some great reads in 2025 but I’ve also had a more than usual number of the not-so-great – which leave..."

you can never quite predict how any novel will go down, i have a few authors who always supply a good read but then a dud can pop up

before i forget, i just watched ep2 of the netflix doc on the vietnam war, its very good indeed, based on interviews and archive evidence, no narrator, really good analysis, hour long episodes called Turning Point: The Vietnam War

AB76 wrote: "before i forget, i just watched ep2 of the netflix doc on the vietnam war..."

That definitely sounds like one to watch. It's the sort of thing that you used to expect from one of the mainstream channels, and now it's coming from Netflix, who not so long ago were competing with the video store by sending you CDs of old movies in the mail, in red envelopes.

The Rigor of Angels by William Egginton, a professor at Johns Hopkins, which came out in 2023, explores how three very different people – an idealist, a fabulist and a physicist – held converging views on the perception of reality. His argument is that Kant, Borges and Heisenberg each thought that the assumption on which we all base our daily lives, our belief in an ascertainable objective reality, is an illusion. The closer we think we get to an ultimate tangible truth the more elusive it becomes. We’re probably most familiar with this in the realm of quantum physics, where the foundational proposition is that we cannot know simultaneously both the position and the momentum of a particle, because to measure one is to lose the other. I don’t pretend to understand these mysteries in any depth. Egginton does an excellent job on the biographies of the three men. In the analysis of their thought he did seem to me to engage in a good deal of elaborate refinement that didn’t add to the substance. The best chapter was the one at the end, which I actually read first, on Heisenberg’s interrogation by his American captors in 1945. And it is one pithy statement of Heisenberg, to which Egginton comes back again and again, that I found most graspable and indeed memorable: “We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”

RussellinVT wrote: "AB76 wrote: "before i forget, i just watched ep2 of the netflix doc on the vietnam war..."

That definitely sounds like one to watch. It's the sort of thing that you used to expect from one of the ..."

exactly, one feels that the titans of mainstream tv have reduced their cultural/historical shows to an all time low. though i thought the BBC series on the end of the USSR was a major recent work, using loads of old footage . it was called Russia1985-99: Traumazone

Reading Voss set in 1840s Australia or more accurately the Colony of New South Wales, has led me to delve into my archives on the census returns from 1836 to 1851 and googling paintings of 1840s Sydney(Conrad Martens painted the most of this period)

The city of Sydney was largest in the colony with 30,000 souls in 1841, the population was slowly changing from a significant convict minority to an immigrant majority from the British Isles and Ireland. Catholics formed 30% of the colony of NSW, far higher than in the UK, which is probably due to convict populations rather than imigrants. The city of Sydney had 70% of its houses built of stone and Martens shows an urban profile that resembles british cities of the same era

The female population was growing but still low for emerging colonial British society(wheras the 13 Colonies and Canada were well balanced from the start). Its hard to read too much into historical accuracy from White, i'm more reading it as an exercise in great writing but he mentions "freed" domestic servants . (The 1836 census was the last to directly record convicts, 36% of the colony were convicts and only 17% of the city of Sydney. Up North, towards Queensland 61% were convicts)

Importantly for anyone interested in historical accuracy, all the mainland locations were in NSW between 1836 and 1851. It covered Southern Queensland and Victoria/Melbourne(then called Phillip Bay) where the populations were smaller but growing. Victoria and Queensland broke free in the 1850-1861 period

One sign of new immigration is shown when the "arrived free" percentages are studied. In Sydney 56% of males arrived free in 1841, in Melbourne it was 85%. Within 20 years Melbourne would begin to become the wonder city of Empire and outstrip Sydney for another 20 years after that, the gold rush helping this boom

As regards non-British or Irish immigration, there seems to be very little, some German moravians in Queensland but little else

AB76 wrote: "...Catholics formed 30% of the colony of NSW, far higher than in the UK, which is probably due to convict populations rather than imigrants...."

That is very high, isn't it? They must have been largely Irish, and since this pre-dates the Famine my guess is that transportation was a standard sentence for Irish criminals.

Doing Yeats in school we learned about Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World as a controversial play that Yeats helped put on at the Abbey Theatre - there were street riots led by nationalist protestors - but I never read it till now, and what an excellent drama it is – full of personality and movement, and dialogue that feels authentically rustic and yet also, in the mouths of Pegeen Mike and Christy Mahon, beautifully lyrical. The nationalists thought the play insulting to Irish peasantry, and to the honour of Irish women. To me it seems a respectful evocation of their spirit. I’m impressed that such a story should even have occurred to him, a member of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. I shall have to learn more about his life and work.

The Dover edition includes an interesting introduction by Synge himself, who clearly knew what he was aiming for in this play. It’s worth quoting what he says about using the language of rural working people:

“This matter, I think, is of importance, for in countries where the imagination of the people, and the language they use, is rich and living, it is possible for a writer to be rich and copious in his words, and at the same time to give the reality, which is the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and natural form. In the modern literature of towns, however, richness is found only in sonnets, or prose poems, or in one or two elaborate books that are far away from the profound and common interests of life. One has, on one side, Mallarmé and Huysmans producing this literature; on the other, Ibsen and Zola dealing with the reality of life in joyless and pallid words. On the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy…”

Riders to the Sea, a one-act accompaniment in this edition, is written in the same style. Even In a short space he conjures a dense tragedy from the hard lives of fishermen. I know a little of that life, having grown up in a fishing town. It was a regular occurrence to hear of men lost overboard in the icy northern seas.

Robert - Here is what GPFR posted some time ago when I needed help.
…

Copy and paste
into your post.

Paste your postimage link between the first pair of inverted commas thus:



Then adjust the width and height and check if it’s OK in preview

Click on (some html is ok).

As I mentioned before, GP added that if you are posting your own photo already on postimage you post that link as above; and if you are posting a photo from elsewhere on the web, you just post the link [between those same two inverted commas] and you don’t need to go through postimage.

Well, I re-typed it all and it still messed up.

The missing words are:



If they don't show up this time, I'm defeated.

RussellinVT wrote: "AB76 wrote: "...Catholics formed 30% of the colony of NSW, far higher than in the UK, which is probably due to convict populations rather than imigrants...."

That is very high, isn't it? They must..."

It is, the only official religious census of the UK in 1851 recorded about 4% of the population were \Catholic and that had already been inflated by the famine emigrants into Liverpool and the rest of the Uk in the 1840s. The USA at the same time was low, as was Canada, so the Colony of NSW was possibly the most Catholic place in the Empire, 12 or so years after the 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act

i would imagine the irish were the poorest of the poor in the 1800-1840 period, falling foull of the incredibly petty laws of the time, stealing tiny things and getting long sentences and deportation.i would expect many could have been political prisoners too

RussellinVT wrote: "Robert - Here is what GPFR posted some time ago when I needed help.
…

Copy and paste
into your post.

Paste your postimage link between the first pair of inverted commas thus:



Then adjust the..."

Thank you.

RussellinVT wrote: "Doing Yeats in school we learned about Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World as a controversial play that Yeats helped put on at the Abbey Theatre - there were street riots led by nationalist pr..."

i studied Synge at uni, i did history but there was a set of seminars in the first year where you had to study two "national" literatures in a historical context and Synge and Irish playwrights was one, the other was early american literature, i remember a huge Norton book full of documents for the american lit. it was more primary source studies, so Synge was more linked to the Arran Islands and his book about the people of the islands

I think that this was gpfr's advice for posting photos here, if it helps. I have to admit that I tried a few times, and failed... But as the old story goes "fail again, fail better'. It might help someone though... hopefully. My reading at the moment is ziltch, though I have picked up 'Light Perpetual' by Francis Spufford, from a charity shop. Hope springs eternal...

pasting photos from postimages


https://i.postimg.cc/RZR9K01Q/pasting...

Those uni courses sound good. At a rather lower level, I had the great good fortune that my A levels (English, History, French) all overlapped, so that in this particular connection I did Yeats and Joyce in English (fantastic - I still enjoy reading both of them today) and a lot of 19C and 20C Irish history in History (integral to Westminster politics).

As regards Synge I was happy to find and order a very inexpensive, illustrated HB biography by Robert Skelton in the "and his World" series, which will be all I need to get a good picture of his life - and some guidance on which other plays by him I should really read.

RussellinVT wrote: "AB76 wrote: "...Catholics formed 30% of the colony of NSW, far higher than in the UK, which is probably due to convict populations rather than imigrants...."

That is very high, isn't it? They must..."

Benjamin Franklin satirized the practice of transportation of convicted criminals to America, saluting the British government for the successful breeding of new felons here. He noted that felons were now being sent to the new colony at Botany Bay.
However, England in the early 1800s still had a ferocious legal system; a number of crimes against property carried the death penalty.

When Robert Peel became Home Secretary, he saw a system with non-professional police and juries increasingly unwilling to find a thief guilty of a crime that would take him to the gallows. Peel successfully sought changes in the law; more and more felonies carried the penalty of transportation rather than death.

Peel also created a new, professional London police-- often called "bobbies" or "peelers"--a system that spread to other British cities.

Robert wrote: "RussellinVT wrote: "AB76 wrote: "...Catholics formed 30% of the colony of NSW, far higher than in the UK, which is probably due to convict populations rather than imigrants...."

That is very high,..."

i knew about the peelers but had forgotten about Peels law changes, which explain the huge rise in transportation

RussellinVT wrote: "Those uni courses sound good. At a rather lower level, I had the great good fortune that my A levels (English, History, French) all overlapped, so that in this particular connection I did Yeats and..."

he was one of many Protestant Irish writers like Wilde,Yeats, Shaw, O'Casey, Stoker, Le Fanu and others, who all contributed so much to the irish literary canon

Robert wrote: "When Robert Peel became Home Secretary..."

Yes, I always thought Sir Robert Peel was a great man. The concept of policing by consent can, I think, be traced back directly to him. He would have a place in history for that alone, never mind Catholic emancipation and the repeal of the Corn Laws. Like AB, I’d forgotten about his work on criminal law.

AB76 wrote: "he was one of many Protestant Irish writers like Wilde,Yeats, Shaw, O'Casey, Stoker, Le Fanu and others..."

I'm wondering if Shaw is another I should explore further. He was of course a titan in his day. I think now his reputation might be fading a bit in popular esteem (unlike say Wilde or Yeats) and perhaps even in the literary canon (no "and his World"!). I tried reading one or two of his plays years ago and found them not very...dramatic.

RussellinVT wrote: "AB76 wrote: "he was one of many Protestant Irish writers like Wilde,Yeats, Shaw, O'Casey, Stoker, Le Fanu and others..."

I'm wondering if Shaw is another I should explore further. He was of course..."

i think his early plays are well worth a visit and some of his novels but he can be a bit like marmite. i was a big fan in my teens after seeing a tv adapation of Arms and the Man but am possibly less interested in his fiction and more in his non fiction now. John Bulls Other Island is a great play

my grandfather was a uni student in early 1930s london and used to see Shaw riding by on his bike, not sure where in london this was but probably central london area

Dogsitting at my parents abode in the country from Sunday to Friday, am going to make sure i am well supplied with books and the ones i am reading. Although with my parents wonderful bookshelves i am never short of a read at the family home of 40 years

the childrens bookshelf is a wonderful reminder of my reading back then,my mother has kept it well ordered, except for the section within reach of the five little ones, which looks like a bomb has hit it. Grandchildren are not tidy things!

Republic: Britain’s Revolutionary Decade, 1649-1660, a new history by Alice Hunt, was lively and workmanlike. It tells the story in 12 chapters, one year at a time, and it offers judgments, e.g. on the atrocities at Drogheda and Wexford: “that Cromwell purposefully oversaw a massacre of civilians cannot be safely claimed.”

The longest sections on particular themes were from the middle years – the unplanned seizure of Jamaica instead of Hispaniola, the de facto toleration of the Jews (who for decades had passed as Spanish Catholics), and the rise and oppression of the Quakers. These were well presented.

I also particularly liked the passages on the offer of the crown to Oliver, and the disintegration of the Protectorate under Richard.

I learned some startling facts – e.g. that several Levellers in the Army were summarily shot.

There was less than I was hoping for on political theory and religious persuasion, but perhaps I was expecting too much from a book I would rate as a very good introduction.

I occasionally have a look at the comments and have seen that Russell has had trouble with my instructions for posting an image in a comment.
Here they are again — in fact, to copy my instructions, I took a screenshot and posted it as an image :)

it says we have 246 members, is that correct? cos 95% must be ghosts, or are the 246 the people who moved here when the G shut down WWR in covid times? If so i guess many moved back to the G and its censorship?

Gpfr wrote: "I occasionally have a look at the comments and have seen that Russell has had trouble with my instructions,..."

Thanks, GP. I never thought to do a screen shot.

AB76 wrote: "it says we have 246 members, is that correct? cos 95% must be ghosts, or are the 246 the people who moved here when the G shut down WWR in covid times? ....."

I'm sure that's what happened, and when it was possible to move back to the G, many will have just left their accounts here open.

Tam wrote: "I think that this was gpfr's advice for posting photos here, if it helps. ..."

Thanks, Tam. That is exactly what I was trying to post.

I basically read anything Francis Spufford puts out, and Light Perpetual is one of my favourites.

We’ve been watching the Dalgliesh series on TV with the excellent Bertie Carvel. I've never read any PD James but now I’m interested. Would anyone here know if the untelevised books in the series are just as good? I discovered yesterday that our village library has half a shelf of her books.

RussellinVT wrote: "AB76 wrote: "it says we have 246 members, is that correct? cos 95% must be ghosts, or are the 246 the people who moved here when the G shut down WWR in covid times? ....."

I'm sure that's what hap..."

thanks russ

for crime fans, i have just started Solea by Jean Calude Izzo....a noir novel set in Marseilles, the last in his triology

RussellinVT wrote: "We’ve been watching the Dalgliesh series on TV with the excellent Bertie Carvel. I've never read any PD James but now I’m interested. Would anyone here know if the untelevised books in the series a..."

I have read many of the books and enjoyed them very much. The earlier series with Roy Marsden was much better in my opinion.

Have you read any of the Inspector Wexford books by Ruth Rendell? They are good too and have been televised.

giveusaclue wrote: "Have you read any of the Inspector Wexford books by Ruth Rendell? They are good too and have been televised."

Thanks, giveus. Some good tips there. I knew of the Ruth Rendell books (often mentioned here, I think), but never did anything about it.

heavenly reading Fugards Notebooks last night with dog snoring in the hall....she is a 7yr old lab called Daisy, getting a little elderly now but if a ball, a stick, or some food is on offer...age becomes just a number...

I’ve started on Len Deighton’s Bomber (1970), which does for Bomber Command what The Cruel Sea does for navy ships on convoy duty. It certainly draws you in to the dangerous lives of those brave men. It also shows us, as fully rounded persons, the German night-fighters, and the German civilians who don’t know yet that their towns are tonight’s target.

Also - Critique of Pure Reason – Immanuel Kant. Having recently read about him in The Rigor of Angels, and seeing it there on the shelf at our rather amazing village library, I thought I’d test myself a bit by reading the original. Not sure how deep into it I’ll get. So far, it’s fine. Indeed, I’d say it’s easier to follow what Kant himself is saying than what someone else says he’s saying.