Book Reports

 To find something to read is made a little bit more difficult now that archive dot org and its affiliates have been neutered.  For a goodly period you had a superb library at one’s command from the comfort of home.  It’s a rearguard action before the strategic withdrawal.  Making money from books may for a while devolve into intellectual merch.  I don’t discount t-shirts.  Justin E.H.U. Smith a man in a die-cast suit, an angster whose antennae are attuned to the moons of the internet has gone substack with the promise of exoteric free, esoteric you pay me for the entry into a fanum which casts us on our faces.

Still there are areas which are free where copywright is not snaffled by self-styled new editions of old works which the public do not appreciate as though they were the spoil heaps of ancient mines which can have the last speck of gold extracted.  Fadedpage dot com a Canadian outfit has a lot of good titles meticulously produced.   Evelyn Waugh is there in full and Charles Williams.  I’m reading ‘The Place of the Lion’ now.  Realism which is also magical and doubts itself is my red tea.

I was reading ‘Daniel Martin’ by John Fowles and I’ve stopped where I balked before.  It became unreadable where it became un-writeable.  Emergency story lines were brought in and were cast buoy attached but the narrator sunk for the third time.  I may go back to see what happened.  If our Dan’s lungs were not filled with water he may have been murdered before being dumped in the sea.

Which brings me to Colin Dexter’s Morse books.  Entertaining puzzles with twists that are not factitious if that is not a contradiction.  ‘Turn back Lewis’.  The literary epigraphs as chapter headings are apposite and the mental elaborations of Chief Inspector Morse are usually noughted by his intuitions, the something not quite right.  The TeeVee adaption is a superior product also but naturally less inward.  I’ve watched them several times.

I have a Kate O’Brien book in hand as well - ‘The Flower of the May’.  Is she read much or known outside of Ireland?  Probably not and even here moving to the bins.  Virago published several of her novels.  ‘Flower’ starts with that great device for introducing a milieu, the wedding.  1909 Dublin, Southside - Mespil Road reception at home, ceremony in Haddington Road.  Merchant families.  I will write about this later.  Will it end with a funeral, a death in childbirth: that sort of bookend?  What is expected is also satisfying.

Philosophy: Lots of back and forth - Brahma Sutra Bhasya, Upanisads, Maritain ‘Approaches to God’.  Very French that title and old fashioned in its brisk clarity.  Nisargadatta and he would agree on the intuition of existence.

Bergson of course by two good explainers - Keith Ansell Pearson & John Mullarkey - Key Writings. Elie During on Bergson and Time, the twins paradox etc.  Both available from Academia.edu  What Bergson meant by ‘images’, ‘the world as an aggregate of images’   swims after the fashion of an eidolon  before my corporeal vision.