Martin Gilbert, The First World War – A Complete History

Saul hath slain his thousands
But David his tens of thousands
- Memorial to British Machine Gun Corps, Hyde Park Corner

This is not the book to read for grand strategy, for sweeping panoramas of the Great War’s great forces and clashes. Gilbert does not spend much time in palaces and cabinet rooms. This is the little person’s view of history — what it was like in the trenches and to be a mother, wife, or sister of someone on the battlefield. Gilbert includes frequent diary excerpts and verse of the British War Poets  — Sassoon, Owen, Rosenberg. A little of this is a useful check on the Great Man view of history; too much (and it is too much), and the reader feels stuck in the mud.

Gilbert has a funny way of using footnotes. The book has a 10-page bibliography and a 32-page index. Footnotes are Gilbert’s way of adding little asides, often to let the reader know what happened to someone after the war. Page 448 n.1: “In 1921 Roosevelt was stricken by polio. From 1929 to 1933 he was Governor of New York State, and from 1933 to his death in 1945, President of the United States.” Page 467 n.1: “In 1948 Truman was elected President of the United States, the position to which he had succeeded (as Vice-President) on the death of Roosevelt in 1945.” Too much detail, maybe? I will allow for the possibility that Gilbert was thinking of his primarily British audience, as he feels no need to identify Anthony Eden so precisely. On the other hand, even Hermann Goering gets a mini-biography by footnote.

The book really is overwhelming in its accounts of maimings, blindings, and blasts of human flesh to smithereens. If you weren’t a pacifist before this book, you might look more reasonably on such cases once you heave it back up onto the shelf. It is an encyclopedia of death. What are we to think of this: Good friends at Cambridge from two different countries, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, each felt compelled to take action once the war began. Wittgenstein returned to Vienna and saw years of fighting on ship and two battlefronts, while Russell became a leader of the conscientious objection movement in Britain. Both are giants in the development of modern logic.

The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells

I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.
It will undo him.
-Stevens, “The Plot Against the Giant”

The first lines can’t be read without hearing that other Well(e)s: “No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.” There are few greater openings; perhaps only Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness can compare:

  I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell the reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic — with its vast fossil hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice caps. And I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain. . . .

The novel (let’s call it that) is remarkable for its local detail and achieves much of its terrible effect through the accumulation of place and road names — Horsell, Maybury, Chobham, Woking, Ottershaw, Weybridge and Shepperton, the Byfleet Station. As though writing for a friend in the next village, the narrator describes without elucidation the burning of trees by the Oriental College and the disappearance of the “pinnacle of the mosque.” (The Shah Jahan Mosque was built in Woking in 1889.) This is Joycean naturalism avant la lettre.

The last four chapters of the First Book shift the narrative perspective to the narrator’s unnamed brother, who is caught up in the attacks in London and witnesses a naval battle with the tripods. The skills that Wells brought to this early science-fiction work did not include a Conradian facility with shifting perspectives. Even the narrator admits at the beginning of the Second Book that he has left his own story suspended for four chapters while he put his brother’s experiences at the forefront. This is only the slightest of blemishes on the face of the book — the kind that could be painlessly excised with a heat-ray.

Man with a Conley Folding Camera, from antiquecameras.net

Die Walküre, Metropolitan Opera, April 13, 2013

Doch fort muß ich jetzt . . .
– Wotan

Interesting how the non-native German speakers have such precise diction. Boarsch i’ nit zu horn.

It’s been remarked that even in Germany, supertitles in Wagner would be helpful. A listener remarked that the back-and-forth between Wotan and Brünnhilde was like the waves crashing on the beach; not so, though Ferdinand Frantz and his wife, Helena Braun, shocked Met audiences in 1949 with an unscheduled appearance as father and daughter when Helen Traubel took sick.

These are not the planks by Robert Lepage for the Met Ring

The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, by Roger Penrose

Truth is no Apollo
Belvedere, no formal thing. The wave may go over it if it likes.
Know that it will be there when it says,
“I shall be there when the wave has gone by.”
–Marianne Moore, “In the Days of Prismatic Color”

Did you ever think about sitting in on graduate level mathematics and physics lectures at Oxford, letting the formulas flit by, and hoping that something would sink in? If so, then this is your book.

Penrose’s aim is to show the mathematical and physical basis for all of reality. If you’re not already halfway to your own Nobel prize, he says, it’s OK, just skim the math. This works in some spots, but at over 1000 pages, there are numerous stretches that are just incomprehensible to a lay reader.

The author spends a certain amount of time arguing with his fellow mathematicians and theoretical physicists. Unlike others, Penrose is not convinced that mathematical concepts must have application in the real world. (He shows that this was the belief of the Pythagoreans, and many contemporary mathematicians also want it to be true.) Complex numbers, for example (using the square root of -1, or i) actually have real-world applications. Other elegant theories, however, such as string theory, have never been shown to have any existence outside of the lecture hall (or Mathematica v. 1000).

An interesting point that the lay reader can appreciate is the nature of entropy as applied to gravity. Penrose illustrates that although for a gas, entropy increases as the molecules become more dispersed, gravitating bodies increase their entropy as they clump together, ultimately forming a black hole. So, then, since the Big Bang assumes that the origin of all matter and energy that we now see was once compressed in a singularity of maximum gravitational entropy, what would cause it to explode and create the universe? He asks the question, but doesn’t attempt to answer it.

Spaceman Klaatu (Michael Rennie) solving the Professor’s problem in The Day the Earth Stood Still

 

 

Les Misérables

The apparition of these faces in the crowd …
–Pound, “In a Station of the Metro”

Yes, this really is an opera rather than a musical, in that there are few spoken lines. A handful of scenes approach an operatic feel, especially the trio with the young tenor (Eddie Redmayne), soprano (Amanda Seyfried), and mezzo (Samantha Barks). The music itself, though, is unremarkable. No one is going to go home humming any of it (well, maybe “On My Own”). All the opera houses have supertitles now–subtitles would have helped here, or room in the budget for a diction coach.

Hugh Jackman’s part was too high for him–especially in the second half of the film, where he was straining with his head voice, it was a bit painful to watch. A just transposition could have worked wonders. Russell Crowe burst past his low expectations. His role called for no singing fireworks, but he excelled in the limited range that he had.

The inn scene with Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter was a welcome change from the dour mood of the first half hour, but it didn’t need to be so . . . gross.

The film relies heavily on CGI, so that Paris resembles Minas Tirith (complete with a statue of an Oliphaunt). Scenes are generally very dark; perhaps only about 20 percent of the screen time is in daylight.

Anne Hathaway’s part was cut as short as her hair, so that she played not a character, but a statistic.

And on the hair–not to give away the ending, but it could be pointed out that the blessed will rise again at the age of youth, as Christ did.

 

Chesterton: Man & Mask, by Garry Wills

If ever I cross the sea and stray
To the city of Maryland,
I will sit on a stone and watch or pray
For a stranger’s child that was there one day:
And the child will never come back to play,
And no one will understand.
–”Memory,” G.K. Chesterton

This is an early book by Wills in his National Review days. It’s both a bio of sorts and a tour through Chesterton’s major writings. It’s an all-out apologia for the big fellow as a major English author–few flaws are found. Wills even adopts Chesterton’s style. This may be only the result of close discussion of the texts–the voice of Wills is lost in Chesterton’s roar.

The book covers the poems, essays, novels, plays, and political writings.

In the Introduction, Wills asks:

If Chesterton was the laughing prophet and saint, why did his religious quest mark time between his entrance into the Anglican communion and his transfer of allegiance to Catholicism? How could he ignore the practice of his Anglican faith, and all but the minimal action of a ‘practicing Catholic’? How could asceticism and vocation be so absent from his life?

If he was an apologist for orthodoxy, how could he ignore sin and the need for penance? Did he know what original sin really is, or was an ignorance of it at the root of his optimism, his glorification of the common man, his utopian politics?

If he was a philosopher, why did he never speak except in symbols and highly colored language? If he lacked emotional depth, why did he use the heightened rhetoric of passion? Are his poems and prose not merely aesthetically negligible, but empty bombast incapable of any justification at all? In short, if he is a philosopher, he chants his meditation to rather hysterical rhythms.

Why did he channel most of his professional efforts, against the wishes and advice of those nearest him, into political commentary?

Was he a monster of innocence and insight, or a neurotic with a defensive smile and desperate gaiety? Did his gaiety surmount evil, or simply ignore it?

As noted, Wills hews closely to the texts themselves, so you have to like this kind of thing. The suave cisalpinism of Wills’s later writings is not on evidence.

Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi

I ran, I ran so far away . . .
–A Flock of Seagulls

This graphic novel is in two parts, though this edition makes you guess at where the break is–apparently, it’s at the point where the author is sent to a French school in Vienna as a teenager. The book is good for the local view of Iran’s troubles in the Seventies and Eighties.

Marjane is the only child of educated Iranians who obey the Revolution in public but maintain a liberal milieu in their home. She has relatives who go to prison and are tortured and/or executed. The second half is not as interesting, as it focuses mainly on the adventures of a teenager in a foreign city as a student, with the familiar problems of language/cultural barriers, sex, and drugs. The comic-book format allows little depth, but it’s worth reading to be reminded that not all Iranians are supporters of Islamic revolution, though she recalls her sophisticated family’s surge of patriotism when the national anthem is played on the radio at the start of the Iran-Iraq War.

Memorial Plaque to King Jan III Sobieski in Vienna