All summer I didn’t read any books. My mind was totally absorbed by either work or the apartment purchase — a project that required as much positive thinking as I could manage. Now, here I am timidly stepping back into the world of literature by starting the sequel to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sky, and hoping I’m able to make more sense of it all.
I found this paragraph in the 1989 introduction. It seems predictive of the current situation in Hong Kong, and relevant to the USA’s treatment of the Kurds.
As to Hong Kong—is that all history too? Even as I write, Mrs. Thatcher’s Foreign Secretary is in the Colony, bravely explaining why Britain can do nothing for a people she has dined off for a hundred and fifty years. Only betrayal, it seems, is timeless.
“Truman”, by David McCullough. To remind me what it was like to have an actual down-to-earth human being as POTUS. (He was Carter’s favorite POTUS, btw.)
Although the fact that he stayed clean and pressed in the trenches of France during WWI makes me wonder if he wasn’t some sort of a mutant; he could also tolerate physical, as well as metaphorical, high temperatures without breaking a sweat. It’s mentioned a few times throughout the book, folks noticing that about him.
What I didn’t know (and this is my eleventieth reading) is about the dreadful stress headaches he got from the pressures of his various offices. And as for no “executive” experience? What is being an administrative judge, chopped liver?
Once upon a time, there was a man who never became wealthy who was POTUS…oh yes, Virginia, it DID happen. And this very human man, despite whatever he was raised with, decided to do what was best for the people he’d been chosen by Fate to govern.
“…and if that ends up in my failure to be reelected, that failure will be in a good cause…”
How unlike JFK, who said he wanted to pull US troops from Vietnam but wanted to wait until he was reelected. (I can cite that, but I have a cat on my lap and don’t remember the page number off the top of my head from “The March of Folly”, from which I got the JFK item.)
I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it—would they let me—since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.
Everybody seems to like this book except me. Too much arrogant solipsistic academian navel gazing for me. It also reads like Up the Down Staircase from the perspective of the arrogant male teacher.
I’d stayed away from this one as it didn’t seem my thing based on all the dissertations it’s inspired, I prefer my horrors less high-brow. (Also, I didn’t care for it’s prestigious film adaptation 1961’s The Innocents. Vulgarian that I am, I actually preferred the prequel film, Michael Winner’s The Nightcomers.) But, I must confess it’s rather great.
Strange that it’s such a near contemporary to the equally stiflingly over heated and ambiguous horror novella Heart of Darkness, also written by an immigrant to Britain.
Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems—aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity.
A while back, when I was flush, I bought the “A Wrinkle in Time” boxed quintet of softcovers and mentioned it here. Someone said they’d love to have it, but I don’t remember who. I’d be willing to sell them for the S&H price alone to whoever that was. Be honest now, lol!
I read them only once, and had a hard time getting them back into the box without bending the covers (I hope they’re not bent, I’m not taking them out to try again, lol).
I’m surprised they all have two breasts. They could have been turned away from realizing that teenage boys would fetishize that shit, but realize that the lack of variety in erotic art is worse. Versus realizing that the Amazon myth was pretty fucking weird.
It honestly took a moment to realize whether you meant they should have less or more breasts. I mean, this is old pulp and they are space Amazons; maybe they started with three.
For the record, though, that myth is a folk etymology. The name Amazones is probably of non-Greek origin but it sounds a lot like Greek a- + mazos, meaning without breast. The paintings on vases show warriors like Hippolyta and Pentheselia with normal chests, so I’m not sure it was a regular part of the stories.
Wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him. And those same things that would have repelled most others, they were the very magnets that thus drew me. I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy. I drew my bench near him, and made some friendly signs and hints, doing my best to talk with him meanwhile. At first he little noticed these advances; but presently, upon my referring to his last night’s hospitalities, he made out to ask me whether we were again to be bedfellows. I told him yes; whereat I thought he looked pleased, perhaps a little complimented.
Three Men In A Boat. It’s enjoyable, a strange combination of travelogue, history, and farce. The narrator J and his friends George and Harris (to say nothing of the dog) certainly are a bunch of loveable twits.
