Kevin's Watch

deer of the dawn wrote:I think I need to re-read George Borrow's books. Lavengro and Romany Rye changed my outlook on the minds of 19th century people...

I tried reading "Isopel Berners"... to try to reply to.. some post of yours in Mallory's.
I was sick in bed that day, and it got my attention.

Unfortunately, I think that might not have been the best introduction to George Borrow for me... I felt like he was all over the place!
But I skipped to the end, and I don't think I can forget Isopel's philosophy of life! =)


I'm in a I-need-something-new-and-fictional funk.
Have been reading "Girl Meets God," by Lauren F. Winner.
It's a memoir, but I've concluded that I may not finish it 'cause her narrative voice is grating on me.

deer wrote:...and Tolkien and Borrow go off about philology and Lewis just rolls his eyes.

Speakin' of the devil... I got an author recommend out of one of C.S. Lewis' lectures a bit back.
Lewis was all like, "in happy familes, like the <something family*> in War and Peace, and nearly all the families in Charlotte M. Younge's stories..."

The other day, I was looking on Amazon, and it seems like you can get all Charlotte M. Yonge's novels as one kindle e-book for $2.99. I am curious!


* yes, I haven't read War and Peace. and I don't have the Lewis book with me atm. So I don't know which family.

I downloaded War and Peace and intend to give it a go... at some point, heheh. So I can't help you with which family.

I actually haven't read Isopel Berners, but Borrow tells of his unrequited love for her in Romany Rye in a very touching way. When she leaves suddenly for America, your heart goes with her. Borrow's books are flawed, and given to strange prejudices (he hated "Papism", etc) and a lot of what purports to be biographical is thought to be imaginative; but the guy was quite obviously a character and a wild genius of the British countryside.

Lazy Luke wrote:

Since I visited this thread last I actually did read War and Peace and loved it. Although it wasn't fair to decide somewhere in the middle of the book that one of the ensemble was going to be the focus of the rest of it. Hmmph. But I did love it.

I've checked out One Hundred Years of Solitude from the library, but it hasn't really grabbed me. I've renewed it twice but if I don't get a spurt of interest in the next couple of days, I'll turn it in.

Yeah, I couldn't get into it either tbh.

--A

deer of the dawn wrote:Since I visited this thread last I actually did read War and Peace and loved it.

I read that in my final year of my Russian degree at St Andrews Uni and wrote a dissertation comparing the novel with the 1966/67 movie adaptation by Sergei Bondarchuk. It was a helluva lot of work at the time, but it's still one of my biggest achievements 23 years later.

I still prefer Gogol and Dostoevsky though. I started rereading Anna Karenina as my birthday book last year and DNFed it. I read that in my first year at uni when I was utterly hopeless at writing essays. I don't remember the book being that much of a chore though. Maybe I'll have another go on my birthday this year.

I've been reading the English translation Eloquence of The Sardine a book by a French author, Bill Francois, about the sea and the creatures that live there; as well as our relationship with them. One interesting fact that I did not know was that if a human infant is placed in water it instinctively floats on its back. A chimpanzee infant, as well as other primates, sink when placed in water. That points to a hypothesis, that I had heard of, that our species developed by leaving the forests and seeking food along the seashore.

Damelon wrote:I've checked out One Hundred Years of Solitude from the library, but it hasn't really grabbed me. I've renewed it twice but if I don't get a spurt of interest in the next couple of days, I'll turn it in.

Yeah - same for me Damelon. Recommended to me by a friend, I tried very hard to get into it, but about half way through realised it just wasn't going to work for me. The same friend recommended John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces - one of my favourite all time books. He wrote the book, submitted it to various publishing houses, and depressed by its rejection, killed himself. His mother continued to circulate the manuscript after his death and was eventually successful. Kennedy Toole was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for the novel, his single piece of published work. In my turn, I recommend it to you.

Damelon wrote:One interesting fact that I did not know was that if a human infant is placed in water it instinctively floats on its back. A chimpanzee infant, as well as other primates, sink when placed in water. That points to a hypothesis, that I had heard of, that our species developed by leaving the forests and seeking food along the seashore.

IIRC, this is only the case up until 6 months, after which they no longer naturally do so.

As for the hypothesis, the many and large shell middens found along coastlines around the world, and particularly in Africa, certainly point to this. I have seen it plausibly theorised that it was the increased fatty oils and acids from a shellfish-rich diet that promoted the development of the brain.

--A

Billy Summers - Stephen King

Avatar wrote:

Damelon wrote:One interesting fact that I did not know was that if a human infant is placed in water it instinctively floats on its back. A chimpanzee infant, as well as other primates, sink when placed in water. That points to a hypothesis, that I had heard of, that our species developed by leaving the forests and seeking food along the seashore.

IIRC, this is only the case up until 6 months, after which they no longer naturally do so.

As for the hypothesis, the many and large shell middens found along coastlines around the world, and particularly in Africa, certainly point to this. I have seen it plausibly theorised that it was the increased fatty oils and acids from a shellfish-rich diet that promoted the development of the brain.

--A

The early Strandloper people I'm thinking; South African author Lyal Watson wrote a fascinating essay about them in which he painted them as a much more 'cerebral' type (historically) in our development. He found a beautiful shell, clearly put away and saved, on a beach and postulated a very aesthetically inclined individual behind its securing. He referred to them as the 'flowering ferns' of our development - too rare and fragile to survive against the warlike aggression of their contemporaries - and wondered how many such rare and wonderful minds were shut away in our psychiatric hospitals today, simply for the 'crime' of being too different.