Reading Circle
I cruised home from Milwaukee on my usual 11 pm arrival Friday night. On the plane home I read a fair amount of an issue of The New York Review of Books. We subscribe, and the thing sits around the house for a month, but plane rides seem to be the only time I sit my ADD ass in one place long enough to read it. Helps that I have to have my laptop off for portions of the ride.I always learn something when I do page through it. For instance, this issue had:
- a review of Tom Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia plays currently on Broadway. We’ve enjoyed his Arcadia, Rough Crossing, and Travesties, and we’ll see another (On The Razzle) in Ashland (in less than 2 weeks!!!). The Utopia series is 3 plays about mid-19th century Russian intellectuals - all performed in one day, apparently. I would trust his depth of research and spell-binding command of language to make it worthwhile. A friend of mine saw the cycle in New York and enjoyed it.
- David Lodge (author of The Art of Fiction) reviews a biography of Kingsley Amis, and I learned a bit of lore about the pre-post-modernists.
- A review of a book about the Indian Mughal dynasty and how its devil’s bargain with the East India Company helped morph it from a regime tolerant of many religions and sects into a hapless participant in the bloody Indian Mutiny. This is the second piece I’ve read this year that spoke of two phases of the British adventure in India - a comparatively benign first phase wherein East India operatives were symbiotic with the Indian culture and often assimilated, and a repressive second phase characterized by evangelical Christian missionaries. I’m interested enough to read some actual books about it.
- Reviews of a re-release of Casanova’s autobiography, titled, with characteristic humbleness, History of My Life. The memoir comes in two flavors - a 6-volume, 4,300-page set and an abridged 1,400-page edition. Always a one-word caricature to me, he turns out to be a pretty interesting figure. It seems like he was everywhere at once - Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Britain. He hob-nobbed with the age’s great philosophers and politicians, and apparently only (!) a third of the 4,000 pages is about his sexual adventures. It seems he actually wrote quite a bit (there is an allusion to a trunk full of life-long note-taking that he mined for the memoir), and his prose seems entertaining and droll. Here, he wanders into an Amsterdam nightclub:
It was a musicau - a dark orgy in a place which was a veritable sewer of vice, a disgrace to even the most repellent debauchery. The very sound of the two or three instruments which made up the orchestra plunged the soul in sadness. A room reeking with the smoke of bad tobacco, with the stench of garlic which came from the belches emitted by the men who were dancing or sitting with a bottle or a pot of beer to their right and a hideous slattern to their left…
I find myself admiring his sheer exuberance for living, and I might be tempted to try reading his account of it.
