Bonfires In The Sky: What Are You Reading, Winter 2021-22?

Do you have the luxury of being able to use "droll" blithely in conversation and if so with whom do you converse?

Tarzan = ape = Neanderthal = someone not as smart as someone else = nowadays offensive like TinTin, Babar, or Dr. Seuss for all that was good and bad in them?

How Beautiful We Were, by Imbolo Mbue. This is a novel about a small African village being poisoned by an oil company. The author is from Cameroon but lives in the U.S., and has a very crisp prose style. She also does some really interesting things with point of view, alternating between the voice of "the children" collectively and one child in particular, which to me subverts the usual centering on the individual. Worth the read.

I finished Parable of the Sower two nights ago. Yesterday I went hiking and spent a bit of time thinking about it. The one thing that struck me most was how deeply and essentially American it was, both in how the dystopia was imagined, but also in how it presented the "Earthseed" idea as the most practical response. I found Earthseed very reminiscent of the various utopian religious communities that sprang up all over the USA in the nineteenth century, but with a much harder edge to it, more Waco than Oneida. Even the details of how the social chaos, extreme violence, and disintegration were imagined would not be a good fit for any nation but the USA, right down to the ubiquity of handguns.

Octavia Butler's strengths as a storyteller in this were exactly the same set of strengths I found in Kindred. She brushes aside the temptation to write backward-looking 'explanations' for exactly how her dystopia arose or how life was outside the locale of the book. It is just what exists for her characters and must be accepted as such. Her dialogues are succinct and powerfully realistic and her characters take on life, depth and dimension through them.

I think I would like to reread Herodotus next. I'll give it a whirl tonight and see how it grabs me.

Youn: I consider 'droll' a very normal word to use in conversation. Among individuals on this board, for instance, I can readily imagine saying it to Tim. He may not wish to imagine this, though. But he is often droll.

Tarzan = ape = Neanderthal = someone not as smart as someone else

Tarzan def offensive but not for that reason! It's the idea of a white man getting dropped into the jungle and quickly becoming its Master that's the problem.

Yeah. The books make him more complicated and darker than the movies, except the last one I saw, Greystoke, gets his origins and early adulthood right: born John Clayton, Lord Greystoke (and I think the movie makes him a viscount as well), he's rescued and raised by the great apes after his parents die, learning the ape language, which series creator Edgar Rice Burroughs demonstrates, to a degree, not pushing his luck (Greystoke extends this via real life expertise of researcher Roger Foutts), and he makes himself literate in several languages by studying his father's books, also becomes a very strong and graceful Greystoke x primate life proto-superhero, especially after he renounces the civilized life he's been rescued by and to, returns to the jungle, and settles in, among the apes and strange humans there---lot of race and gender problems, as noted here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarzan
But if you're curious at all, the first book, Tarzan of the Apes, is worth a look, and usually considered the best (only one I remember, though I think I read most of them as a child)(preferred Burroughs' swords and sandals in space books)

Earl, not Viscount, and Fouts, not Foutts. The director also used Dr. Earl Hopper, the American author of Social Mobility, as an adviser on the film's psychological and social plausibility. Would like to read that.

Ah, so being addressed in Tarzan-language was meant as a compliment to the animals of the jungle and the Irish, the opposite of what I surmised. Thank you for the clarification!

Tarzan language, if you mean "Me Tarzan, you not," was only in the pre-Greystotek movies, but yeah books had him as White Savior/Top Cop in a loin cloth.

Also some rando action on his part from time to time, xpost wiki covers all that pretty well I think.

I've looked into the Tarzan story as best I can and as far as I can see, it may not actually be accurate. That is: I'm not sure that this actor even played Tarzan at all. So much for the scholarly history of the Abbey Theatre.

FWIW, though, the point of the (perhaps apocryphal) story was, as I understood it, simply that people weren't meant to understand "Tarzan's language", and people in Hollywood also couldn't understand Irish, so it was convenient for him to use Irish to speak incomprehensibly yet, in fact, coherently.

It seems that the actor, who may not have played Tarzan, eventually made a late appearance in John Huston's THE DEAD (1987), which I, like many people, like very much.

I returned to Robert Sheckley's 1953 story 'Seventh Victim'. I have read this whole long book of Sheckley's stories - but it was 8 years ago and I already realise that I 'need' to read this book again to remember just what's in it. It's very enjoyable so I might just do that.

I've started walking further afield in London and have picked from the shelf Geoffrey Fletcher's THE LONDON NOBODY KNOWS (1962, but seems to have been revised a bit later?). It contains drawings by the author, and a rolling discourse about London in a style that's now gone - as is a great deal of what Fletcher mentions. Indeed very little that he's specifically mentioned is familiar to me at all, even in areas I know - except The Roundhouse. He's rather obsessed with music halls.

XP JUst being reminded of the Navajo actors on the John Ford film of Cheyenne Autumn speaking a language that the white crew didn't so getting really bawdy and specifically insulting to some of the cast playing historic white figures. Which apparently caused a lot of Navajo speakers to go and see the film for this in-joke . & I think in turn generated some Native American film creation .
John Ford's supposed tribute to the great native American population he had made into a faceless mass or portrayed by people who had nothing to do with the ethnicities portrayed had very little to do with the Mari Sandoz book it takes its title from. I have enjoyed teh Mari Sandoz I have read so far.

Also I was trying to remember what theatre Orson Welles had joined when he went to Ireland on the art tour he had used money from his inheritance to fund.I was thinking he still had a living dad at home in the US but this was inheritance not allowance.,
& it was the Gate not the Abbey. I was thinking it was the one located around the top of Parnell st but Gate is Stephen's Green isn't it?
Abbey is Customs House side of O'connell st, Abbey street stretches a long way across the middle of Dublin.

Anyway Welles was in Dublin at like 16 involved in one of the big theatres in the early 30s. But it's a different one .

The first Youtube search result for bach chaconne guitar is a performance I really like (8 minutes in noted). It's played by a cleric in what seems to be a church office. This and Crossroads got me thinking about the position of clergy in novels such as those written by Jane Austen, in particular, I presume the dependence on landowners and the freedom and leisure to follow interests. I think the Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois also presented plantation life and social hierarchies and ties very well.

I just started The Romantics by Pankaj Mishra. There is a reference to Benares, which I think is also an important location in The Apu Trilogy by Satyajit Ray.

Love the Leon Fleisher recording of that

No idea where to put this, but ...

My wife is very active on Goodreads. A couple of days ago she realized that our neighbor (a friend, as far as neighbors go) was on Goodreads, too, but my wife had never checked out her activity. My wife looked at her page, and apparently it was overwhelmingly (deep breath) alien erotica. Yes, you read that correctly. Romance novels about people hooking up with aliens. Now, my wife found this kind of surprising, not just that our neighbor would be into this, but that she would be keeping a public tally of the alien erotica books she has read. And yet, when my wife went to the page today to read me a couple of the book descriptions, the page had been deleted! Or at least made no longer public.

So, what are your theories here? What are the odds that just a couple of days after my wife discovered this page the page should vanish? Is there any way for the reader/reviewer to know someone has scoped out their page? Maybe it's a coincidence and she suddenly realized her page was public and was embarrassed? That would be some coincidence. Just kind of odd all around. What's up wit that?

Omg.

As far as I know, Goodreads doesn’t show you that but I only use the app, so I’m not really sure.

I’d have to assume that your wife’s account is a) in her own name and b) she may have accidentally friended the neighbour or liked a post?

She's visiting her secret love and won't be back for a while?

No idea. I do know that there are some good stories about this topic from James Tiptree Jr and Kij Johnson, but yeah, this does seem a bit something.

Of course the other option here is that the neighbour had her Goodreads linked to her Facebook and was posting status updates until someone noticed and had a word but it was just bad timing on your wife’s part.

lmao stevolende

Yeah, lol at that.

Seems most likely
Of course the other option here is that the neighbour had her Goodreads linked to her Facebook and was posting status updates until someone noticed and had a word but it was just bad timing on your wife’s part.
Happiest!
She's visiting her secret love and won't be back for a while?
So no more need for books!

There is definitely not a "x viewed your profile" function on Goodreads. More to the point, what's the big deal with alien erotica? Not like it's a Left Behind novel, a Jordan Peterson book, or the complete works of Jeffrey Archer.

Yeah it could've been a lot lot worse. Now to take a sip of morning coffee, Google alien erotica and see what comes up.

Doris Day, classic or dud?

I've started walking further afield in London and have picked from the shelf Geoffrey Fletcher's THE LONDON NOBODY KNOWS (1962, but seems to have been revised a bit later?). It contains drawings by the author, and a rolling discourse about London in a style that's now gone - as is a great deal of what Fletcher mentions. Indeed very little that he's specifically mentioned is familiar to me at all, even in areas I know - except The Roundhouse. He's rather obsessed with music halls.

Have you seen the film, the pinefox? Can be accused of poverty porn in places, but there's some astonishing footage in there and a lot of narrator James Mason looking awkwardly at the camera.

I think I haven't seen it. I seem to recall hearing that the film was very different from the book and shared little more than a title. Unsure.

i think there is a thing that suggests people to add on goodreads, neighbor was probably recommended to add your wife which made her think "oh no i wonder if people can see this" and then realized her profile was public

It certainly has a lot of footage of old music halls!

Any Flanagan and Allen action?

alas no, just ghostly choruses intoning music hall chants in abandoned buildings.

Any Flanagan and alien action?

lollllll

Read Torrey Peters' "Detransition, Baby," and also some chapbooks for an upcoming piece.

I recommend the Peters, though I found its ending a bit sudden for my tastes. I have a feeling that she's writing the sequel right now.

Any Flanagan and alien action?

The first time I read Herodotus I often found the long preliminary lead-up to Darius's invasion of Hellas to be tedious and confusing. This time I can see the structure he employed much better, and I am not nearly as confused by how it all connects, but the density of proper names for places and peoples who have sunk into obscurity over the millennia makes it slow going. Just processing a single sentence that may reference three or four distinct geographic features, cities, gods, peoples and personages by totally archaic and abandoned names can take multiple readings.

Aside from that, it's an amazing treasury of facts, myths, tall tales, and crazy cross-cultural misunderstandings that will generate arguments among historians forever.

Hey, all you reading people!!! LOOK at this brand new WAYR thread:

Lilacs Out of the Dead Land, What Are You Reading? Spring 2022