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2009 Reading XXIX
Curiously, today has been about books, and about reading.
But first a backtrack: just over ten days ago I went to Professor Roger Luckhurst's inaugural lecture which, in a stunning display of Birkbeck think, was about the mummy's curse and ends up being a Secret History of 19th century literature. Bad things happen to many of those at the opening of Tutankhamen's tomb, although novelist Marie Corelli seems to be one of those who invented the Tut curse. Other Egyptian curses circulate - such as the one on the dedicatee and co-plotter of The Hound of the Baskervilles, Bertram Fletcher Robinson, although there is a suggestion that he was poisoned (by Doyle), one on a mummy in the British Museum, and a rumour of a sarcophagus on the Titanic, whose passengers included W.T. Stead, of the Pall Mall Gazette and Maiden Tribute of Babylon fame. There is a sort of meta-curse, as those who write about the curse also seem to die in odd circumstances.
I note this because Richard Dadd lost his sanity in Egypt (he thought he was possessed by Osiris) - and he was written about in All the Devils Are Here by the now-late David Seabrook. And in Saturday's Guardian, which I have but have yet to read, there was a selection of summer reading recommendations, including - as noted by Peter Mclachlin - Iain Sinclair:
H'mm...
Meanwhile, I paused at Cafe Nerd on the way home to finish rereading a volume I seem to have had on the go forever:
XXIX: Robert A. Heinlein, I Will Fear No Evil
I wish I could recall my first thoughts on reading this - it's a 1982 printing, so I suspect I bought and read this in 1983 or thereabouts. I suspect I thought it was awfully daring, now I suspect it is just awful. Age has not been kind.
Dirty old goat Johann Sebastian Smith seeks a body into which his brain can be transplanted on dying - and by a staggering coincidence finds it in his secretary, Eunice Branca. There is apparently some trace of her mind or soul left, as Smith is able to engage in ongoing dialogue with her, though frankly it needs the use of "Boss" and "sweetheart" to keep the voices distinct. I suppose some excitement could be had from wondering whether it is fantasised, but I think we take the voice to be real. Smith learns to be a woman, which seems to involve wearing make up and jumping into bed with her nurse, her doctor, her lawyer, her bodyguards, Branca's widower, the widower's new partner... It's one thing to accept that his lawyer would find Eunice attractive, it's another to accept that Branca and Smith would find an old man attractive, on grounds of age and sexuality respectively. Heinlein is playing with a stacked deck - sometimes holding that there are some things that ladies will not do or say, sometimes holding that in 90 plus years Smith has seen everything and is not shockable.
Then home via the Barnardo's bookshop (dull, dull, dull) and Oxfam - where I scored a copy of Purity and Danger, the reprint of the Yale French Studies devoted to Lacan and Henry James and a volume of the Collected Auden.
This is an endeavour which I never quite follow because I can't work out what has been released, and I never know if I care enough to collect the set. As far as I can see, the Collected Poems is still the version in which Auden butchers himself, and there is no American Auden to complement The English Auden. I have the Juvenilia and Libretti, but there are at least two volumes of prose to get - and I dare say Auden wrote prose after 1955.
But first a backtrack: just over ten days ago I went to Professor Roger Luckhurst's inaugural lecture which, in a stunning display of Birkbeck think, was about the mummy's curse and ends up being a Secret History of 19th century literature. Bad things happen to many of those at the opening of Tutankhamen's tomb, although novelist Marie Corelli seems to be one of those who invented the Tut curse. Other Egyptian curses circulate - such as the one on the dedicatee and co-plotter of The Hound of the Baskervilles, Bertram Fletcher Robinson, although there is a suggestion that he was poisoned (by Doyle), one on a mummy in the British Museum, and a rumour of a sarcophagus on the Titanic, whose passengers included W.T. Stead, of the Pall Mall Gazette and Maiden Tribute of Babylon fame. There is a sort of meta-curse, as those who write about the curse also seem to die in odd circumstances.
I note this because Richard Dadd lost his sanity in Egypt (he thought he was possessed by Osiris) - and he was written about in All the Devils Are Here by the now-late David Seabrook. And in Saturday's Guardian, which I have but have yet to read, there was a selection of summer reading recommendations, including - as noted by Peter Mclachlin - Iain Sinclair:
The book about "place" to which I return, as often as I venture along the banks of the Medway or roll up my trousers for a paddle in Ramsgate, is All the Devils Are Here (Granta, 2002) by David Seabrook. [...] When Seabrook died, earlier this year, it was a horribly premature loss: now this mysterious author is fated to become part of the zone he described to such effect; an anecdote, a rumour, a legend.
H'mm...
Meanwhile, I paused at Cafe Nerd on the way home to finish rereading a volume I seem to have had on the go forever:
XXIX: Robert A. Heinlein, I Will Fear No Evil
I wish I could recall my first thoughts on reading this - it's a 1982 printing, so I suspect I bought and read this in 1983 or thereabouts. I suspect I thought it was awfully daring, now I suspect it is just awful. Age has not been kind.
Dirty old goat Johann Sebastian Smith seeks a body into which his brain can be transplanted on dying - and by a staggering coincidence finds it in his secretary, Eunice Branca. There is apparently some trace of her mind or soul left, as Smith is able to engage in ongoing dialogue with her, though frankly it needs the use of "Boss" and "sweetheart" to keep the voices distinct. I suppose some excitement could be had from wondering whether it is fantasised, but I think we take the voice to be real. Smith learns to be a woman, which seems to involve wearing make up and jumping into bed with her nurse, her doctor, her lawyer, her bodyguards, Branca's widower, the widower's new partner... It's one thing to accept that his lawyer would find Eunice attractive, it's another to accept that Branca and Smith would find an old man attractive, on grounds of age and sexuality respectively. Heinlein is playing with a stacked deck - sometimes holding that there are some things that ladies will not do or say, sometimes holding that in 90 plus years Smith has seen everything and is not shockable.
Then home via the Barnardo's bookshop (dull, dull, dull) and Oxfam - where I scored a copy of Purity and Danger, the reprint of the Yale French Studies devoted to Lacan and Henry James and a volume of the Collected Auden.
This is an endeavour which I never quite follow because I can't work out what has been released, and I never know if I care enough to collect the set. As far as I can see, the Collected Poems is still the version in which Auden butchers himself, and there is no American Auden to complement The English Auden. I have the Juvenilia and Libretti, but there are at least two volumes of prose to get - and I dare say Auden wrote prose after 1955.