non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere
Joined October 2012
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I just saw that Simon Winchester passed away this last week. I enjoyed The Professor and the Madman, The Man Who Loved China (on Joseph Needham), and especially The River at the Center of the World (I cruised the Yangtze in 1983, before the damn dam).
Many of his yet to read.
RIP Maestro Blomstedt.
His are among those albums I keep within easy reach...
I can't imagine this ever being on the ballot in Washington State.
I have the 1894 Winchester (mf'd 1949), handed down from grandpa to dad to me, so I know which I'd vote for if I could.
Did you know it was Hermann Broch's birthday?, born on this day in 1886.
I've only read The Death of Virgil, currently 60% through a re-read. Do you have a favorite?
I read 'To Africa and Beyond,' by James Stroud (2021). The author's parents, Bronnie & Annabelle Stroud, were missionaries in the Gold Coast (later Ghana) in the 1950s-70s, beginning in the period just following my own grandparents' time there. But, where my grandparents were in the large southern coastal city of Takoradi, the Strouds were based in Bawku in the far northeast where everything had to be done from scratch. Bronnie Stroud was at times a medic, a mechanic, a builder, an agronomist, a mediator, a linguist, a teacher, and a pastor.
Jim's book (in the first half, covering the stretch before he was born) draws extensively on excerpts of his father's letters (now held at Yale's Day Missions Library), with Jim's commentary; later it moves into events that Jim himself experienced. I found it riveting and often moving, and the author's love and admiration for his parents is unmistakeable.
It was fun recently to meet up with Jim (we were college classmates) and to learn that he had written this and that he had actually lived for a spell in the house that my grandfather built.
Watched Pasolini's Gospel According to Matthew (1964) last night, for the first time. I don't know what I expected, but I was quite moved by it. Whatever Pasolini thought he was doing, it turned out better than that.
The cast was kind of amazing: Elsa Morante recommended a 19-year-old communist economics student for Jesus, her brother and 15yr old nephew were also in it (Joseph, John).
Pasolini's mother played the elderly Mary
Natalia Ginzburg - Mary of Bethany
Giorgio Agamben - Philip
Rodolfo Wilcock - Caiaphas
and more, plus all the locals & non-actors
I read That Mighty Sculptor, Time, by Marguerite Yourcenar (1983; 1992 translation by Walter Kaiser). A late essay collection that ranges about very miscellaneously but always engagingly.
I read Short Talks, a series of prose poems by Anne Carson (1992; this is Brick Books' 2015 reprint).
Something from the most recent Nobel Prize winner.
#MelvilleMonday
everyone has the odd whale vertebrae sitting around, right?
(I'm not sure how this came to be in the house, but my father was an occasional visitor of various Inupiat communities.)
I read The Birds, by Tarjei Vesaas (1957; Archipelago reprints the 1968 translation by Michael Barnes & Torbjørn Støverud). Set deep in the Norwegian hinterland, the novel follows Mattis, whom the villagers call Tusten ('simple Simon'), and the sister who devotes her life to caring for him. It is no spoiler to say that some surprising things happen.
TIL:
Oakley Hall wrote the libretto for an opera based on Stegner's Angle of Repose (w/ composer Andrew Imbrie). It had a premiere run with the San Francisco Opera in 1976 but, in spite of the promising response of critics and audiences, that was its one and only staging.
I pruned my Rosa mulliganii a few weeks ago and thought I'd see what would happen if I stuck cuttings in a marmalade jar (I've already potted two)
