Good reads

[SerjeantWildgoose]

Both look to be very interesting works, the Ottoman Scramble for Africa perhaps more so than yet another collection of pointless essays that will do little to clarify misunderstanding or resolve the scourge of religious fundamentalism.

I always enjoy an author's efforts to try to find something new in a seemingly exhausted area of research and the prospect of being able to make a case for the Ottomans trying to get in on the imperial punch-up in Africa should offer some cracking laughs. This was an empire about as capable of mounting a late 19th Century charge for imperial possession as the Romans. The Ottoman empire was in terminal decline and I think that the closest it came to imperial expansion during the 'age of high imperialism' was to provide the rail bed for part of Germany's Berlin to Baghdad railway - but I'm always open to another view.

[rowan]

Both look to be very interesting works, the Ottoman Scramble for Africa perhaps more so than yet another collection of pointless essays that will do little to clarify misunderstanding or resolve the scourge of religious fundamentalism.

I always enjoy an author's efforts to try to find something new in a seemingly exhausted area of research and the prospect of being able to make a case for the Ottomans trying to get in on the imperial punch-up in Africa should offer some cracking laughs. This was an empire about as capable of mounting a late 19th Century charge for imperial possession as the Romans. The Ottoman empire was in terminal decline and I think that the closest it came to imperial expansion during the 'age of high imperialism' was to provide the rail bed for part of Germany's Berlin to Baghdad railway - but I'm always open to another view.

The Ottomans' decline began with Selim the Sot and defeat at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, and was in full swing by the time Mustafa III lost the Crimea and various other territories to the Russians two centuries later.

[SerjeantWildgoose]

Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story. Written in 1926 and allegedly the inspiration behind Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, I picked up this novella so that I might continue to read something by someone I had never heard of. This was clearly of its time and while sexual obsession ran through each of its 99 pages, it was notably lacking in eroticism. Nevertheless, it was worth the hour or so it took to read.

[mcshinnertheligind]

Hey Sarge. Reading Ronan Fanning "Fatal Path" good read so far.

[SerjeantWildgoose]

Hey Sarge. Reading Ronan Fanning "Fatal Path" good read so far.

I will get round to reading Fatal Path one of these days, but I have to admit to being very much in the same camp as those pro-democracy nationalists such as Roy Foster, who Fanning accused of revisionism.

I would regard him as an apologist for violence and unlike him, I regard Easter 1916 as a complete and unnecessary disaster that delivered nothing that had not already been delivered by the (temporarily suspended) Home Rule Bill. The rebellion not only set back the prospects of a united Ireland by generations, but condemned the south to civil war, decades of De Valerian theocracy and a political system that even today is riven by the divisions of the past.

I hope that you and I might live to see Fanning's views widely discredited, though have to admit that we're a couple of ancient knackers so this is probably unlikely.

[rowan]

Edit: Just made a giant ass of myself. Didn't notice this article was 3 years old.

Sad news. Just read 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings' fairly recently (last year?), and it was more enjoyable than most books I've read in the past few years. I've heard mixed things about her, though; how she was at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement and marched alongside Malcom X and all, but also how she neglected her son and ran off with a Ghanaian politician or something. Anyway, a major contributor to literature and a voice for African-Americans in troubled times has been lost to us. RIP Maya Angelou . . .


Poet, performer and political activist Maya Angelou has died after a long illness at her home in Winston-Salem, N.C. She was 86. Born in St. Louis in 1928, Angelou grew up in a segregated society that she worked to change during the civil rights era. Angelou, who refused to speak for much of her childhood, revealed the scars of her past in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first of a series of memoirs.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/ ... dies-at-86

Meanwhile, this looks like an interesting rugby read: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/news/ar ... d=11862167

[paddy no 11]

To Siberia - Per Petterson Not quite as good as OSH but I did like if it was a little flighty in style

[paddy no 11]

The cellist of Sarajevo, not up to much surprised me with one aspect of the storyline was about all the merit in it

[rowan]

Looks promising:

Arundhati Roy’s second novel is not just one story, but many. Here is a trans woman from Delhi, here is a man from an untouchable background passing himself off as a Muslim, here is a government official retired from a post in Kabul, here is a resistance fighter in Kashmir, here is a woman in the Maoist rebellion in Bastar, here is a rebellious woman who kidnaps an abandoned baby, and more. Indeed, from time to time the birds and the beetles become as important as the people in this narrative.

This scene seemed to me to sum up the unique flavour of the novel: an owl is looking through a window; inside the room, a woman is lying with a sleeping baby she has kidnapped. The reader is eager to leave the owl’s point of view and move into the woman’s mind; we’ve heard about her and this baby already, and we want to understand what is going to happen to them. But the woman is dreaming about a weevil teaching ethics and quoting a contemporary philosopher on why we should never rely on pity. “Evil Weevils always make the cut,” says some graffiti on the weevil’s classroom wall. The woman’s interior monologue descends further and further into the surreal, as alligators, lizards and a “neocon newt” crowd into the classroom. After a couple of pages, the scene cuts off and we switch point of view again, this time to the woman’s ex-husband. What links the baby and the woman is left behind, to be continued much later in the novel.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/ ... are_btn_fb

[kk67]

I've just watched a documentary that suggests Henri Charriere wasn't Papillion but just nicked the story off a fellow inmate. First I've heard of this.

[rowan]

I've just watched a documentary that suggests Henri Charriere wasn't Papillion but just nicked the story off a fellow inmate. First I've heard of this.

Certainly possible. Great read anyway. Also a good film adaptation - for a change.

[SerjeantWildgoose]

I've just watched a documentary that suggests Henri Charriere wasn't Papillion but just nicked the story off a fellow inmate. First I've heard of this.

I heard that it was that written by Harper Lee writing under the pseudonym of Truman Capote - or that it was ghost-written by Jordan.

[kk67]

I've just watched a documentary that suggests Henri Charriere wasn't Papillion but just nicked the story off a fellow inmate. First I've heard of this.

I heard that it was that written by Harper Lee writing under the pseudonym of Truman Capote - or that it was ghost-written by Jordan.

It was a fairly convincing documentary. If it had been about Ringolevio I would have questioned it more.

[paddy no 11]

There are a couple of books out there dismissing papillion as well.

Either way its a brilliant read and a great film and inspired the mark kozelek song "hey you bastards" which is just awesome

[Vengeful Glutton]

Papillon and Banco are great reads |(mostly ball licks though? A fertile imagination with some facts thrown in?)
The movie was terrific. Soundtrack is great too.

[rowan]

Anybody read this? I thoroughly enjoyed 'God of Small Things,' but Arundhati Roy's second novel two decades later is apparently of a more political (rather than social) nature and seems to be receiving mixed reviews . . .

I absolutely adored the opening quarter of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, but even the beginning paragraph in the prologue hints at an incipient social undercurrent: “white-backed vultures, custodians of the dead for more than a hundred million years…have been wiped out. The vultures died of diclofenac poisoning. Diclofenac, cow aspirin, given to cattle as a muscle relaxant, to ease pain and increase production of milk, works—worked—like nerve gas on white-backed vultures.” So here it is, right at the beginning, environmental degradation because of chemicals. Birds of carrion have died. Not a good sign for what will follow later in the novel when Roy will whip up her multiple concerns about how man has mucked up the environment. Yes, they are legitimate issues, but best addressed in moderation.

A page later, however, Roy is at her most engaging, describing the birth of a child with organs of both sexes, a hermaphrodite, but gender preferences being what they are in India, the parents want a boy and name the child Atfab. The problem is that by age fourteen, Atfab wants to be a girl, especially after he observes the flamboyant beauty of Delhi’s most famous hijras (roughly, transgendered). So a year later, Atfab becomes Anjum and joins one of the celebrated Hijra communities. Surgery and hormones follow to remove the offending male organs and help with the transformation, and somewhat later Anjum becomes Delhi’s most famous Hijra, even in time adopting a three-year-old girl who has been abandoned and assuming the role of the child’s mother.

Hijras are considered special people, holy people, accepted as part of the community, and yet they are also the objects of discrimination. The time frame for events in the story is more or less contemporary, with racial tensions in India (between Hindus and Muslims) depicted as they have always been—subject to outbreaks of violence. Roy uses the Gujarat riots of 2002 as a turning point in Anjum’s life. On a trip away from Delhi, she is ensnarled in the massacre but survives, traumatized. After she returns to Delhi, she moves out of the community of hijras she has lived with, briefly assumes the identity of a man, and takes up residence in a graveyard near a hospital. That setting will become her new community as others join her and set up both a funeral parlor and a guesthouse. All of these activities are depicted with great color and character, including the introduction of a man who joins the community, who calls himself Saddam Hussain.

Then the story falls apart, shifting for a couple of hundred pages to other characters and other issues (besides the lives of hijras) but centering on the relationship of a diplomat who becomes a quasi-terrorist, fighting for Kashmir’s independence, and his on-again, off-again relationship with a woman named Tilo. Besides the issue of Kashmir’s independence, Roy touches on India’s move into modernity, which appears to mean for her capitalism and its worst aspects, including slums being cleared. The Union Carbide gas explosion in Bhopal is mentioned, as is Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination and its bloody aftermath, India’s troubles with Pakistan (and the opposite), more abandoned babies, genetic engineering of food, the mistreatment of untouchables, “The war of the rich and the poor” in Delhi, and a quasi final observation: “Life went on. Death went on. The war went on.” In short the entire kit and caboodle, including a quasi-happy ending back at Anjum’s graveyard/guesthouse after a story that has shown very little happiness. Much of this is boring as hell, negating the earlier vibrancy that chronicled Anjum’s fluid sexual identity.

More here: https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/16 ... happiness/

[SerjeantWildgoose]

Ernest Hemmingway's The Old Man and the Sea. This was such a considerable notch above other works of his that I have read and I can understand why it is regarded not only as his finest work, but also a worthy winner of the Pulizer and enough to secure the Nobel. It remains rooted in a theme that I still cannot comprehend, that a hunter loves his prey, but captures beautifully the desperate existence of an old man in poverty and the cruelty of his life.

Still find Hemmingway to be an irremediable tosser, but The Old Man and the Sea is a thing of beauty.

[rowan]

Surely that's not the first time you've read it, Sarge? I think I read that in school. Certainly a long time ago anyway. Yes, Hemingway is great, easy to read, concise yet descriptive, and a great deal more profound than he appears at first reading. Certainly one of my top half a dozen or so authors, but I did find a few of his later works to be a bit too personal and tedious - while still containing some wonderful prose.

[SerjeantWildgoose]

Yes, 1st time of reading. Many years ago I read Death in the Afternoon and Green Fields of Africa and was appalled by the almost pornographic imagery that Hemingway attached to the savage butchery of the bull-fight and his hunting exploits. When, as I do, I delved deeper into the character of the author to try and fathom where their work sprang from, I found him to be a loathsome caricature of faded machismo, or a fat, hairy cunt if we're to be more literary. I then read For Whom The Bell Tolls and was so frustrated by the pretentiousness of it that then, and on the few occasions since when I have attempted to read it, I managed to get no further than half way.

I like The Old Man and the Sea; still fecking loathe Hemingway.

[rowan]

Yes, 1st time of reading. Many years ago I read Death in the Afternoon and Green Fields of Africa and was appalled by the almost pornographic imagery that Hemingway attached to the savage butchery of the bull-fight and his hunting exploits. When, as I do, I delved deeper into the character of the author to try and fathom where their work sprang from, I found him to be a loathsome caricature of faded machismo, or a fat, hairy cunt if we're to be more literary. I then read For Whom The Bell Tolls and was so frustrated by the pretentiousness of it that then, and on the few occasions since when I have attempted to read it, I managed to get no further than half way.

I like The Old Man and the Sea; still fecking loathe Hemingway.

Generally agree there. For Whom the Bell Tolls is one of my all-time favourites, but I also read that at a young age and wonder whether it would be able to enjoy it so much today, given my much greater understanding of the conflict.

[SerjeantWildgoose]

Peter Schneider's The Wall Jumper. This is a short novel of Berlin in the early 1980s and centres around an unnamed narrator and two of his friends; one who has come across from east to west and another who remains on the eastern side of the wall. The narrator meets with them both and along the way explores the myths of those who jumped the wall. Its pretty good.

[SerjeantWildgoose]

Alan Palmer's The Salient. The latest in my Centenary reading pilgrimage, this is a very easy read and looks at the three great campaigns for the Ypres Salient between 1914 and 1917. Very definately one for the general reader, Palmer's book notes some of the controversies and arguments around the British Army's performance and generalship during the Great War, but does little to court controversy.

[rowan]

First visit to the book store in quite some time today. I'd actually struggled to finish anything over the past year or so and deduced this had a lot to do with the vast amount of reading I'm already doing on the internet. But I came home with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'The General in his Labrynth' (fiction) and Papagianni & Morse's 'The Neanderthals Rediscovered' (archaeology). Both relatively light books at about 250 & 200 pages, respectively.

[rowan]

Looks interesting:

The seductive pull of Western cinema becomes an increasing sub-text in Igiaba Scego’s visceral narrative, Adua, the story of a Somali young woman who becomes a movie star in Italy in the 1970s. It isn’t until the end of the novel, however, that Adua confesses to the lure of those films: “I wanted to be Marilyn. I wanted to Audrey, I wanted to be Katharine or at least Kim Novak. I wanted to tap dance like Ginger Rogers and do the splits like Cyd Charisse. I wanted flowers from Gene Kelly and looks full of respect from a passing Jimmy Stewart. I wanted the white clothes, the crinolines, the puffy sleeves.” (169)

She wanted another life, anything to remove her from Somalia, but what she got instead was the short-lived career of a porno-star and all of the subsequent humiliation after she realized what had happened. Which is only to say that Adua is the sad account of a young woman’s shattered expectations and escape from her culture and environment. Her one big movie, Femina Somala, was filmed after she was totally inebriated and required to act like a creature of the jungle that has a sexual encounter with a great white hunter. Besides the sex, the movie was a racist smear of African women. The director paid for her airline ticket to Italy with one goal in mind: exploiting her and making a sexploitation movie in the years after Western cinema began making porno movies for mainstream movie theatres. (Remember Deep Throat, playing in your local family-run movie theatre?)

Adua is left with nothing after the movie is filmed, but she stays on in Italy for many years; and much, much later she marries an illegal Somali man in order to save him from the authorities, from being sent back home. He’s half her age, at most, and she wonders why she “saved” him. “Every night my little man falls asleep on my droopy chest like a baby hungry for milk. I rub his head and nestle my hand in his hair. It makes him forget the cruel waves of the Mediterranean that nearly swallowed him up. It makes him forget the tranquilizers they put in the bland soup at the immigrant welcome center. It makes him forget the girl he used to love, who was raped and murdered by Libyans in the desert.” (23)

The novel skillfully juxtaposes the fate of Somali immigrants, today, seeking a better life in Europe, with that of much earlier Somalis who were often lured or sent to Italy for exploitative purposes. Adua’s beauty inspired the Italian film director to bring her to Italy. She is old enough to be her young husband’s mother, and she even refers to him as her “little husband, my sweet little Titanic,” (51) a derogatory reference to the American film. But there’s an earlier generation also, her father’s, equally used and abused. His story begins in 1934, when Zoppe is a translator for the Italians. Barely more than twenty, “He spoke Arabic, Somali, Swahili, Amharic, Tigrinya, and several minor languages….” (12) He’s brilliant obviously, but that will not prevent Italians from humiliating him, once he’s brought to Italy by an Italian Count who identified his brilliance.

I don’t want to reveal too much of the story, but Zoppe’s humiliation is actually even worse than his daughter’s. Eventually, he will come to understand that as a translator he has facilitated the exploitation of his own people. There’s an interesting parallel here with a short story by the great Somali novelist, Nuruddin Farah, one of the continent’s finest writers. Years ago, Farah published a short story (“My Father, the Englishman, and I”) that draws on the same issue of how translators—who facilitate colonialism’s implementation and success—are often involved in dicey matters that require them to compromise their own people. Shades of recent accounts of Iraqi translators denied entry into the United States because of Donald Trump’s entry restrictions.

Thus, Igiaba Scego’s Adua is an indictment of one colonial power, Italy, over several generations and how it destroyed the lives of many of the people “employed” by that power. This is something we have seen before in the works of other African writers who grew up in the countries controlled by the other major colonial powers in Africa, but the story of Italian fascism in East Africa (Somalia, Ethiopia, Eretria) has mostly been unrecorded. The novel skillfully draws together the changing aspects of colonialism over a period of more than a century, asserting the obvious: Europe’s immigration problem today is the result of the ex-colonial subjects’ desire to seek security (from war, from famine, from climate change) in what was once considered the “mother country”? Some mother.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/07/07 ... egos-adua/

[rowan]

Just a blog, but an interesting read:

On August 29, 2015, Eric Shannon died on the rugby pitch. https://aedelhard.com/blogs/stories/lif ... -the-pitch