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[Brad]

Speaking of thefts, did you see that Roma are hopping mad. They claimed that they had a deal with Malcolm and Barcelona stole him from them. 

[mjazzg]

Yes. My neighbour's a dyed in the wool Roma fan. Maybe they could agree to alternate  

Edited July 29, 2018 by mjazzg

[Brad]

Started this yesterday. 

 

[ejp626]

I was making my way through Max Apple's The Propheteers when I discovered that the first chapter is his short story "The Oranging of America" with only the most minor changes.  I realized I had never read the entire collection, though I'm pretty sure I read the title story a long, long time ago.  For good measure, I picked up his recent short story collection The Jew of Home Depot.

What surprised me a bit is the sameness of so many of the stories in Oranging.  Well over half involve some kind of naive struggle against American capitalism, followed by the protagonist running off with some cute chick.  "The Oranging of America" does break this pattern and is definitely the better for it.  I wouldn't say I disliked the collection, but it definitely felt padded, and I don't think it will stand the test of time.

I'm not as far along with The Jew of Home Depot, but the running theme seems to be the struggle of the various protagonists to maintain their Jewishness in the face of the acid bath of American culture and American-style capitalism more broadly, which as Marx says will wash away religion and even family ties.

So now I've gotten through The Jew of Home Depot.  In addition to the Jewish theme, approximately 1/3 of the stories involve the protagonist needing to deal with a family member's medical needs, typically dementia or Alzheimer's.  Quite possibly this is something that Apple was going through himself and was doing some "processing" in the stories.  Anyway, it definitely lead to quite a few melancholy stories.

Edited August 4, 2018 by ejp626

[Brad]

On 8/1/2018 at 9:41 PM, Brad said:

Started this yesterday. 

 

Finished this. A good commentary on the British school system. Not a spy book, more of a murder mystery. 

On 8/2/2018 at 7:01 AM, ejp626 said:

I was making my way through Max Apple's The Propheteers when I discovered that the first chapter is his short story "The Oranging of America" with only the most minor changes.  I realized I had never read the entire collection, though I'm pretty sure I read the title story a long, long time ago.  For good measure, I picked up his recent short story collection The Jew of Home Depot.

What surprised me a bit is the sameness of so many of the stories in Oranging.  Well over half involve some kind of naive struggle against American capitalism, followed by the protagonist running off with some cute chick.  "The Oranging of America" does break this pattern and is definitely the better for it.  I wouldn't say I disliked the collection, but it definitely felt padded, and I don't think it will stand the test of time.

I'm not as far along with The Jew of Home Depot, but the running theme seems to be the struggle of the various protagonists to maintain their Jewishness in the face of the acid bath of American culture and American-style capitalism more broadly, which as Marx says will wash away religion and even family ties.

So now I've gotten through The Jew of Home Depot.  In addition to the Jewish theme, approximately 1/3 of the stories involve the protagonist needing to deal with a family member's medical needs, typically dementia or Alzheimer's.  Quite possibly this is something that Apple was going through himself and was doing some "processing" in the stories.  Anyway, it definitely lead to quite a few melancholy stories.

I hope you don’t take offense but the Home Depot story sounds rather depressing. 

[ghost of miles]

[Brad]

Started this tonight

[ejp626]

11 hours ago, Brad said:

 

I hope you don’t take offense but the Home Depot story sounds rather depressing. 

It was kind of an odd departure, as Apple was always known as a humorist.

[ghost of miles]

[BillF]

4 hours ago, ghost of miles said:

A favorite, David. Less impressed by the recent film.

[paul secor]

Bernard MacLaverty: Grace Notes

[erwbol]

Gerald Horne The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean

[Utevsky]

Eerie sci-fi from Russian authors. 

 

[felser]

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I've just finished reading A history of Europe, by H A L Fisher, which my wife bought me for Christmas last year.

She got me an old edition (1945 - first edition was 1937) from Amazon because I didn't want a paperback. I asked my Mum to buy it when I saw a Penguin edition in a shop window in 1954 and read it so many times it was completely knackered by the mid sixties. It opened my mind to history and got me through my exams because I just knew more than the other kids.

When I started working on Education policy in 1974, I found out that Fisher was the Minister for Education in the Lloyd George Government and was the guy behind passing the Education Act 1918, which was one of the key pieces of legislation in education. Unlike in America, we never name Acts after the people who instigate them, but that Act is known as the Fisher Act.

And reading it again, I found something I'd never realised before - I learned to write from Fisher! Time and again, I'd find myself reading phrases and constructions I'd frequently used in the Civil Service! I'd forgotten a fair bit of the history, but I hadn't forgotten those turns of phrase.

MG

[Matthew]

Simon Says: The Sights and Sounds of the Swing Era: 1935 - 1955 by George T. Simon. Simon wasn't the most insightful person in the world, and the writing here is very prosaic at times, but I love this book for some reason.

[ejp626]

I'm about halfway through Alif the Unseen.

I have mixed feelings about it.  I was expecting/hoping it would be along the lines of Effinger's When Gravity Fails and the rest in that series.  (Really great books, which I ought to reread.)  And it sort of starts off that way, but the descriptions of coding are pretty laughable and it departs fairly quickly from the cyberpunk vein.  Pretty soon we are interacting with actual djinns (not just deluded humans who think they are djinns or people with djinn avatars in a virtual world).  So it really is much more a fantasy book with some cyberpunk elements.  It's quite readable, for all that.

Back to traditional lit. after this, Porter's Ship of Fools and McCarthy's Birds of America.

[ghost of miles]

On 8/7/2018 at 3:16 AM, BillF said:

A favorite, David. Less impressed by the recent film.

I finished it this evening—very good, but increasingly grim as it progressed. I’ve also made some headway with this book, which has been on my to-read list for many years:

[Larry Kart]

Just read all three of these in a row -- three of the best biographies I've ever read. And what a fascinating subject.

Am now reading a previous book that Steven Englund co-wrote:

Very enlightening so far, in part because it doesn't begin with the blacklist era but starts in 1930. That background matters a great deal.

[Brad]

Continuing my studies of Spain; the writer is the New York Times correspondent for Spain and Portugal. 

[ghost of miles]

10 hours ago, Larry Kart said:

Am now reading a previous book that Steven Englund co-wrote:

Very enlightening so far, in part because it doesn't begin with the blacklist era but starts in 1930. That background matters a great deal.

This is high on my to-read list as well--my interest spurred in part by Glenn Frankel's recent book about the effect of the blacklist on the making of High Noon.  

[Larry Kart]

1 minute ago, ghost of miles said:

This is high on my to-read list as well--my interest spurred in part by Glenn Frankel's recent book about the effect of the blacklist on the making of High Noon.  

Again, aside from the authors' so far general good sense/savvy, the key virtue of this well-written book is that it begins at what was pretty much the beginning -- the advent, with the coming of sound in film, of screenwriting and screenwriters as a key factor in the Hollywood production mill as never before. Then, with the nature and details of the screenwriters' relationship to movie-making in general and the producers/studio bosses in particular set firmly in place, a great deal of what then happened politically in and around Hollywood begins to seem virtually inevitable/make a dire sort of sense.

[Larry Kart]

 

Speaking of movies that bear some relationship to the blacklist and the role of/issues stirred by communism in the Hollywood community, I urge you to seek out if possible the fairly demented 1947 film noir “Desert Fury.” Here’s a squib I once wrote about it:

'Another interesting (and I think little known) noir is "Desert Fury” (1947), with John Hodiak, Wendell Corey, Lizbeth Scott, Lauren Bacall, and Burt Lancaster -- directed by Lewis Allen, script by Robert Rossen (the likely autuer and eventually one of the Hollywood Ten). To me, it's the quintessential pre-Hollywood Ten movie because its chief theme, transformed into a gangster setting in a more or less allegorical manner, is loyalty on the part of actual or would-be intellectuals  (or, in this case, frontmen) to the Communist Party no matter what (or rather to some degree because) the loyalty the CP required was of the "no matter what” sort. 

'This comes through in one key element of the plot -- the belief (held by many committed CPUSA members) that the ultimate test of virtue was one's "hardness" (not only as in toughness but also in one's willingness to do almost any deed in the name of submission to party discipline -- especially if the Party's dictates ran counter to the promptings of one's personal [i.e. bourgeois] conscience, convenience, or morality.) Thus Hodiak's character is a handsome, narcissistic frontman (a star gambler) who throws his glamorous rather menacing weight around but who shies away from doing the rough dirty stuff, while Corey, his sidekick who does do he rough dirty stuff when that's necessary (actually, he deeply enjoys doing it), is at once literally in love with Hodiak's character and his "star" aura (this homo-erotic aspect of the film is quite startlingly evident for its time) and enraged by the gap between what Hodiak's character thinks he himself is unwilling/ too good to do and what Corey's character both has to and, in some sense, chooses to do instead. Corey, playing a deeply twisted man, gives a terrific twisted performance.

'BTW, I can't swear that this is true, but a great American writer who shall be nameless (because, again, I can't swear that this story is true, though I trust my source for it) and who was a committed CPUSA member of the type outlined above (that committed CPUSA member part is fact) was among those who decamped to Mexico when things got hot in the immediate post-war Red Scare era and was among those who bought into the ultimate test of one's virtue as a committed Party member was one's "hardness" -- this despite (or maybe in some sense because) he was an essentially kind, gentle man. In any case, according to the story I was told, in Mexico his "hardness" was put to the test and on Party orders he engineered the death of a fellow leftist American emigre who was suspected of being a traitor to the cause and an FBI snitch.'

 

BTW, Rossen, was probably best know for writing and directing "The Hustler."

P.S. Lewis Allen is not to be confused with "Lewis Allan," the pseudonym of Abe Meeropol, the New York schoolteacher who wrote the lyric to "Strange Fruit" and eventually adopted the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

https://www.filmcomment.com/article/lewis-allen-desert-fury/
http://www.noiroftheweek.com/2012/04/desert-fury-1947.html

[ghost of miles]

[ejp626]

On 8/13/2018 at 9:22 PM, ejp626 said:

Katherine A. Porter's Ship of Fools

Ok, but a bit slow-going.  There is a cast of dozens, so it is a little hard to care about any one character (that's probably the point).  A much different approach from Ondaatje's The Cat's Table, which focuses on an ocean voyage through the eyes of a child (a stand-in for the author).  I should be wrapping this up over the weekend.

Then on to Rezzori's Death of My Brother Abel, which is supposed to be his greatest achievement.

Supposedly in a year or two, NYRB should be coming out with a new translation of this, along with Rezzori's final, unfinished novel, Kain.  I decided I wanted to tackle it sooner than that, but will pick up the NYBR edition whenever it arrives.