Classic #17

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2015 for the category “Children’s Classic”

A bright child would have no problem reading this book. It is in fact published in an unabridged Puffin Classics edition for children.

The Lost World – Arthur Conan Doyle, 1912

Summary

Conan Doyle takes us to a plateau in South America isolated from the rest of the world. An English expedition has gone there to confirm the claim that prehistoric animals survive there. They not only run into pterodactyls but fight battles with hominid missing links. The first-person narrator is a young journalist. The narrative is a series of reports, which is a lively and suspenseful way of telling the story.

When this book was first released, it was a critical and commercial success. With its variety of scenes and incidents and clear characterization, it is no surprise it inspired film-makers.

 I recommend this highly to fans of adventure stories and readers into Conan Doyle’s non-Holmes productions. One point is that this is funnier than Holmes stories.

Exposition

Mystery writer P.D. James credits Conan Doyle for his contribution to crime fiction: “He bequeathed to crime writing a respect for reason and a nonabstract intellectualism, the capacity to tell a story and the ability to create a specific and distinctive world.”

Furthermore, critic Dan Piepenbring asserts Conan Doyle influenced early science fiction. He claims this novel “remains the paradigm for a sort of swashbuckling supernatural adventure, full of bumbling professorial types and out-of-their-depth journalists and strapping, granite-abdomened men in pith helmets.”

I’m not sure the two professor-types in this novel are as “bumbling” as Piepenbring remembers. Socially inept, conceited and tactless  are not the same as bumbling.  Like our stereotype says about nerds such as Sheldon Cooper, the opinionated scientists in The Lost World are both narrow in their interests and passionate about generating knowledge and defending their claims. They argue vociferously because in Western science truth is arrived in adversarial fashion. Experts and newbies that are making new claims had better be ready to take their lumps before the bickering greybeards accept such claims. Conan Doyle’s acceptance of this combative style as the proper way to generate knowledge is evidenced in the excellent scene when the med students are hooting at Prof. Challenger’s claims at a public lecture.

… Creatures which were supposed to be Jurassic, monsters who would hunt down and devour our largest and fiercest mammals, still exist." (Cries of "Bosh!" "Prove it!" "How do YOU know?" "Question!") "How do I know, you ask me? I know because I have visited their secret haunts. I know because I have seen some of them." (Applause, uproar, and a voice, "Liar!") "Am I a liar?" (General hearty and noisy assent.) "Did I hear someone say that I was a liar? Will the person who called me a liar kindly stand up that I may know him?" (A voice, "Here he is, sir!" and an inoffensive little person in spectacles, struggling violently, was held up among a group of students.) "Did you venture to call me a liar?" ("No, sir, no!" shouted the accused, and disappeared like a jack-in-the-box.) "If any person in this hall dares to doubt my veracity, I shall be glad to have a few words with him after the lecture." ("Liar!") "Who said that?" (Again the inoffensive one plunging desperately, was elevated high into the air.) "If I come down among you——" (General chorus of "Come, love, come!" which interrupted the proceedings for some moments, while the chairman, standing up and waving both his arms, seemed to be conducting the music. The Professor, with his face flushed, his nostrils dilated, and his beard bristling, was now in a proper Berserk mood.) "Every great discoverer has been met with the same incredulity—the sure brand of a generation of fools. When great facts are laid before you, you have not the intuition, the imagination which would help you to understand them. You can only throw mud at the men who have risked their lives to open new fields to science. You persecute the prophets! Galileo! Darwin, and I——" (Prolonged cheering and complete interruption.)

I wonder if the incessant conflict in the search for truth also fits into Conan Doyle’s admiration of “manliness.”  Men ought to contend forcefully, honorably. Upon the defeat of their point of view, they should accept the truth. Shake hands, move on, hopefully, the next fight.  For him, real men are unpretentious, modest, dutiful and diligent in their occupations. These sterling qualities ought to be reflected where they live. The rooms of Lord John Roxton, the hearty well-tempered milord, have “extraordinary comfort and elegance combined with an atmosphere of masculine virility.”

Mount TBR #17

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2015. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

Barchester Towers – Anthony Trollope

Late in this novel, the second of the Barsetshire Chronicles, a poor clergyman’s wife and the mother of fourteen children elucidates “the upshot of her practical experience:”

Oh, that's the way of the world, my dear. They all do just the same. You might just as well be angry with the turkey cock for gobbling at you. It's the bird's nature.

Trollope describes characters who act terribly - Mrs. Proudie, Obadiah Slope, and Charlotte Stanhope. With genial irony, he implies the question, Can we imagine a world in which people don’t act ambitiously, graspingly, venally? And he asks similarly of the protagonists – Mr. Arabin, Mr. Harding – can we imagine meek people who don’t act in soft, yielding, spineless ways?

How about a world without energetic bullies like Archbishop Grantly? Without feeble Romeoes like Bertie Stanhope? Without clueless rich people like the Countess de Courcy?

Such a world is unimaginable. It’s like imagining a world without mendacity.

Trollope’s other message, I think, is that fallibility is our lot. We all think and do dubious things that we’re not proud of. Trollope gently tells us, implicated in greed and conceit as we are, not to judge – not one of us is completely good or completely bad. We are as we are made and can’t help ourselves.

To lessen the sting of the latent gloomy message, another of Trollope’s assumptions – a comic one, mercifully -  is that confusion and misapprehensions are a natural part of life. We proceed assuming our mere opinions and misgivings are correct instead of just asking someone else their take on a situation. Their take may be more correct than ours. Eleanor Bold is assumed to have a close relationship with the odious Slope simply because she takes his part in a couple of conversations. Her family rashly assumes that she will marry Slope, which leads to funny misunderstandings.

Well worth reading, though Trollope frankly admits as tedious certain slow spots such as the interminable description of Ullathorne manor’s decorations and Miss Thorne’s endless fête.  His admissions are rather winning, as are his statements that tell us he is not an omniscient narrator. His other appeal is that he so clearly enjoys the characters that we readers can’t help but enjoy them too.

New Music

Classical and Avant Garde Music

New Music

Philip Glass – Four Movements for Two Pianos (2008)
Steven Stucky – Piano Quartet (2005)
Roger Reynolds – Quick are the Mouths of the Earth (2012)
Paul Hembree – Nyx

Fernanda Navarro – Emptying the body

Elliott Carter – Duo for Violin and Piano (1974)

Morton Feldman – For Aaron Copland (1981)

Brian Ferneyhough – Unsichtbare Farben (1999)

John Cage – Eight Whiskus (1985)

Roger Reynolds – Thoughts, Places, Dreams (1992)

Augusta Read Thomas – Scat (2007)
Bernard Rands – Memo 1 (1997)

Lukas Foss – Capriccio (1948)

Jacob Druckman – Come Round (1992)

Heinrich Sutermeister – Capriccio (1946)
Alexina Louie – Scenes from a Jade Terrace (1987)
II. Memories in an Ancient Garden

Karklheinz Stockhausen – Der Kleine Harlekin (1977)
Alejandro Viñao –  Burritt Variations (2012)
Andrew Greenwald – Juku II (2014)
Jeffrey Stadelman – No. 9  (2013)

Elliott Carter – Figment II (2001) and  Elegy (1943)

Morton Feldman – King of Denmark (1964)

Charles Wuorinen – Praegustatum for James Levine (2005)

Charles Wuorinen – Trombone Trio (1985)

Young composers

Shuyue Cao – Winter Dreams

Elliot Grabill – Katharos

Louis Goldford – documentary

Iddo Aharony – A Stone the Size of a Dream

Ori Talmon – Learning from the Laughing Man 

Zane Merritt – Burning City

Weijun Chen – Memos

Stephen Yip – Awaiting the Dawn

Texu Kim – Shake It

Ryan Jesperson – Hebdomas Squatinae

Liliya Ugay – Nostalgia for piano and live electronics

UB-related Composers

Martin Bresnick – Bird as Prophet (2003)

Lukas Foss – Echoi (1963)

Harvey Sollberger – Hara

Charles Wuorinen – New York Notes (1982)

Martin Bresnick – A Message from the Emperor

David Felder – Canzone XXXI (1993)

Brian Ferneyhough – Bone Alphabet (1991)

Steven Stucky – Refrains (1979)

Iannis Xenakis – Okho (1989)

Classic #16

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2015, category “Classic by a Woman.”

Among the Tibetans – Isabella Bird

Isabella Bird, the Victorian spinster traveler, wrote classic travel narratives such as A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains and Unbeaten Tracks in Japan. Both are lengthy insightful books about very different places, flowers, trees, food, and people. Her writing is plain, pointed and honest, calling to mind letters in an agreeable conversational tone.

For readers into flora, she is especially good with flowers and trees. She was lucky to be there in June, 1893:

But for a brief fortnight in June, which chanced to occur during my journey, the valleys and lower slope present a wonderful aspect of beauty and joyousness. Rose and pale pink primulas fringe the margin of the snow, the dainty Pedicularis tubiflora covers moist spots with its mantle of gold; great yellow and white, and small purple and white anemones, pink and white dianthus, a very large myosotis, bringing the intense blue of heaven down to earth, purple orchids by the water, borage staining whole tracts deep blue, martagon lilies, pale green lilies veined and spotted with brown, yellow, orange, and purple vetches, painter's brush, dwarf dandelions, white clover, filling the air with fragrance, pink and cream asters, chrysanthemums, lychnis, irises, gentian, artemisia, and a hundred others, form the undergrowth of millions of tall Umbelliferae and Compositae, many of them peach-scented and mostly yellow. The wind is always strong, and the millions of bright corollas, drinking in the sun-blaze which perfects all too soon their brief but passionate existence, rippled in broad waves of colour with an almost kaleidoscopic effect.

Her cultural attitudes, by our strict post-modern standards, are predictably insensitive and ethnocentric. But aside from prejudice she will boast in a disagreeable way about her toughness.  She brags, “I did not suffer from the climate, but in the case of most Europeans, the air passages become irritated, the skin cracks, and after a time the action of the heart is affected.” Of a storm she writes:

My baggage, which had arrived previously, was lying soaking in the sleet, while the wretched servants were trying to pitch the tent in the high wind. They had slept out in the snow the night before, and were mentally as well as physically benumbed. Their misery had a comic side to it, and as the temperature made me feel specially well, I enjoyed bestirring myself, and terrified Mando, who was feebly 'fadding' with a rag, by giving  [the horse] Gyalpo a vigorous rub-down with a bath-towel.

I’m all for seeing the humor in all situations, but “Their misery had a comic side to it” seems callous, even in a clergyman’s daughter.

This book is very short because it doesn’t provide the detail of the two books mentioned above. I would recommend it to readers into Tibet or short travel narratives, but because it is perfunctory, it’s not her best work.