Category Archive: WRITING & LITERATURE
The Peninsular War
Further undermining Wellington's faith in the Spanish - Battle of Castalla (by Jean-Charles Langlois)
(by Charles Esdale) We can be thankful that Napoleon, like that chap Hitler, ridiculously over-extended himself. Exhibit ‘A’ is the seven year war on the Iberian Peninsula, which ruined Spain (and Portugal) for decades and created a schism there that lingers today. It also, fortunately, hived off necessary men, arms and resources that weakened the French Emperor’s efforts to subjugate the continent. This comprehensive book, based on old as well as up-to-date and diverse sources, offers a complete overview of the bloody campaign, the struggles of the various Fields Marshal and in particular the intricate politics. It is dense but…
Continue Reading →Glengarry Glen Ross
"We're adding a little something to this month's sales contest. As you all know first prize is a Cadillac Elderado...3rd prize is you're fired."
(Written by David Mamet) (Dir. James Foley) (1992) The sales staff get the leads, such as they are. They go out on sits, when (in various guises) they descend on the unsuspecting and try to sell them what sounds very much like swampland. The salesmen are driven less by greed and more by fear because as the motivational guy has just confirmed, failure to close the deal is death. This film of Mamet’s play is stagy (of course), but with top-shelf power acting (by Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin, Alec Baldwin and Jonathon Pryce), it amounts to…
Continue Reading →Old School
Image by W. A. Fraser, 1901
(by Tobias Wolff) Imagine! A school of boys whose role models are writers! Where is this youthful intellectual paradise? Somewhere in the USA of the 1960s. But beware, boys. Literature is a wolf and your morals are its prey.
Continue Reading →The Earthquake in Chile
Apart from Japan, Chile is Earthquake Central. The main picture accompanying this post (by Carlos Varela) shows accumulated rubble about the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago in 2010. There was another big bad quake yesterday, reportedly one of a recent series, and one of increased magnitude. It is hard to imagine the experience of an earthquake, along with its equally dangerous sequelae, such as tsunamis, fires, disease and so on. To get a taste, in safety, read the superb short story by Heinrich von Kleist, The Earthquake in Chile (1807), an account that while fictional, is so rich in nuance and matter-of-facts that it amounts…
Continue Reading →Richard Wagner and the Modern British Novel
"Let's see what he makes of this brief..."
(by John Louis Di Gaetani) (1978) When P brought this obscure little tome at the Paradise Bookshop, L asked, not unreasonably, “What has Wagner to do with the modern British novel?” Oh ye of little faith and so many brains! Well, let’s see…. In this book, Dr Di Gaetani mounts the case that the operatic works of Wagner, and in particular the poetry and prose in his librettos, had a vital galvanising effect on five major British novelists maturing (if not all necessarily in their prime) during the Edwardian Age: Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. P read this…
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