“It was late afternoon when he [Coke, still lame from a recently broken leg] was summoned to Warren’s quarters and given orders for the night attack that night. Coke observed that some of the troops meant to participate in the attack [have not yet arrived] and that if he was to lead the attack, he perhaps should first go and take a look at the hill. Warren readily agreed and the operation was postponed until the following night. When Coke left Warren’s tent it was dark, and although his own camp was not far away, he became so hopelessly lost, that he was forced to spend the night in the open. That a lame general, who could not find his way in the dark was a poor choice to lead a night attack on a strange height did not occur to Warren”.

The entire first 200 pages of this book is in this vein, bumbling, incompetent, childish, irresponsible generals leading their men to slaughter. If you did not know it to be history, you would think it was a black farce, an macabre Monty Python version of the good soldier Svejk.

Remember, if the chance to volunteer and stand up for your country ever presents itself, duck it.

Byron Farwell, The Great Anglo Boer War.

I rather liked Lord Byron’s imaginary poem (quoted below). And the intriguing idea behind the novel Byron and The Beauty that young Byron might have fought a saber duel somewhere in Herzegovina over a famous local beauty. Unfortunately, the novel spends most of its time giving vent to theories of the nature of the fundamental difference between East and West, pronounced by the author’s mouth piece, while Lord Byron listens on, nodding and learning and agreeing. In my experience, all such theories of the fundamental difference between East and West are products of half-informed minds.

This is not to deny Bazdulj greatness. The great Tanizaki does the same thing in his In’ei raisan (“In praise of shadows”). But his In’ei raisan is not what made him great.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Talib Salih’s Season of Migration to the North gives me the creeps. I have never entertained the idea of visiting the Sudan, but now I will fight to the death not to. Long discussions of whether circumcised or uncircumcised women are better lovers. A heroine beaten into submission to remarry a 40 year old man, hateful to her and already three times married, stabs him to death. The central character has once lived in London, where, oh proof of cultural attainment, he studied English literature, while murdering his English wife, and causing two English lovers to commit suicide, and now he is retired to his preferred life in a Sudanese village. Yuck. If Talib Salih is not a stupid and sick man — I have no reason to think he is — then the reality he describes is. Goodness gracious.

Someone has observed that Isaiah Berlin’s essays on European thinkers are more interesting that the thinkers themselves. I am reminded of this truism as I put down Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi. In his The Durrell’s of Corfu, Hage says it is the best the man has ever written. Great, I thought, no need to dare The Tropic of Cancer, why not start from the top. But I didn’t get very far before my mind began to wonder and I began to skip around. Yes, the man can be mildly entertaining — he is passionate about his views — which probably accounted for his social success, something normally quite useful in the pursuit of any entertainment career, that of published author also — people are suckers to witness the passions of others perhaps because they themselves by and large have none — and does occasionally manage a deft phrase (“we baptised ourselves in the raw” — i.e. “we swam naked”). But that’s… all. He has no insights nor knowledge to impart, he does not manage his life in a way worth studying. And if this is his best book, well, no need to bother with The Tropic of Cancer.

Mencken, Orwell and Beckett thought Miller was great?

John Mack Faragher, A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland

Reading, in the wake of Michael Crummey’s The Innocents, all I can about New Foundland, I came across this and read with delight how during their first dismal winter, the first French settlers — some forty men — having experienced similar winters elsewhere in Canada, decided to take keep up their spirits by taking turns organizing elaborate feasts (even if they only had snow and salted meat to eat), complete with dressing up, exquisite manners, toasts and the officers taking turns serving as maitre d’hotel in special festive attires.

John Mack Faragher, A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland

Byron’s Women by Alexander Larman gives me my first transparent account of the Byron/Agusta/Anabella triangle, for which my many thanks to him; but the book’s entirety — all of his relationships with women, and each individually — except perhaps that with his wife — can be pretty much summed up the way Iris Origo sums up his last attachment (The Last Attachment) — Teresa Guiccioli: a bored, unhappy, desperate woman throws himself at him, seeing in him her only hope of escaping her dreadful existence; and using sex-appeal as bait to entrap him; he bites the bait, then quickly bores with the person, refuses to self-immolate for the sake of saving a boring person from boring her own self, and attempts to extricate himself; at first awkwardly, not wishing to be cruel, but eventually resorting to the cruelty such break ups call for.

In the picture: Caroline Lamb who sent him as memento a lock of her short hairs.

PressFrançois-Xavier Fauvelle’s The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages is a treasure trove of delightful obscure facts about medieval Africa, like this Golden Rhinoceros, excavated at Great Zimbabwe, and presumably gilt there; but, he points out, it is not an African two-horned rhino, but an Asian one, or perhaps Indonesian one; now as extinct as Great Zimbabwe itself.

In the beautifully atmospheric first chapter of Muharem Bazdulj’s Byron and The Beauty, the bard lies half awake under a roof resounding with rain and dreams a poem:

A drop of rain licks my eyebrow like a suppressed and secret tear.
It tracks across my cheek like the Rhine the continent.
In a silent insurrection, autumn kills the sun of my summer,
Just like the Acheans did to Illium, in their wooden horse.

He wants to get up and write it down, but then he asks himself: why should I do that? Let it live in my head. It would be better for oblivion to devour it than flames.

Perhaps he means: let it die in my head.

Water, sky; sky and water; clouds; these gave way to land, seemingly floating on water. This was the mainland of China. This was to be my second homeland. One that appeared so often in my dreams.

— Miyazaki Toten

There is a video, sometimes to be found on youtube, of Amalia going over this song with Alain Oulman, the man who wrote all her most beautiful songs, and who must have loved her. It is called “Medo”, i.e. Fear.

Quem dorme à noite comigo
É meu segredo,
Mas se insistirem, lhes digo,
O medo mora comigo,
Mas só o medo, mas só o medo.

E cedo porque me embala
Num vai-vem de solidão,
É com silêncio que fala,
Com voz de móvel que estala
E nos perturba a razão.

Gritar quem pode salvar-me
Do que está dentro de mim
Gostava até de matar-me,
Mas eu sei que ele há-de esperar-me
Ao pé da ponte do fim.