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Hieronymous Alloy
Jan 30, 2009


Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!




Morbid Hound
Welcome goonlings to the Awful Book of the Month!
In this thread, we choose one work of literature absolute crap and read/discuss it over a month. If you have any suggestions of books, choose something that will be appreciated by many people, and has many avenues of discussion. We'd also appreciate if it were a work of literature complete drivel that is easily located from a local library or book shop, as opposed to ordering something second hand off the internet and missing out on a week's worth of reading. Better yet, books available on e-readers.

Resources:

Project Gutenberg - http://www.gutenberg.org

- A database of over 17000 books available online. If you can suggest books from here, that'd be the best.

SparkNotes - http://www.sparknotes.com/

- A very helpful Cliffnotes-esque site, but much better, in my opinion. If you happen to come in late and need to catch-up, you can get great character/chapter/plot summaries here.

:siren: For recommendations on future material, suggestions on how to improve the club, or just a general rant, feel free to PM me. :siren:

Past Books of the Month

[for BOTM before 2018, refer to archives]


2018
January: Njal's Saga [Author Unknown]
February: The Sign of the Four by Arthur Conan Doyle
March: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
April: Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio de Maria
May: Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov
June: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
July: Warlock by Oakley Hall
August: All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriott
September: The Magus by John Fowles
October: I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara
November: Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
December: Christmas Stories by Charles Dickens

2019:
January: Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
February: BEAR by Marian Engel
March: V. by Thomas Pynchon
April: The Doorbell Rang by Rex Stout
May: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
June: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann
July: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
August: Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay
September:Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay
October: Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
November: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
December: Moby Dick by Herman Melville

2020:
January: The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
February: WE by Yevgeny Zamyatin
March: The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini by Benvenuto Cellini
April: The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio





Current: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Dame Rebecca West

The book is available in the following locations:

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Lamb-Falcon-Penguin-Classics/dp/014310490X


About the book

quote:

IN 2000, the Modern Library listed Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, published in 1941, among the 20th century’s greatest works of nonfiction. Until recently, this was not an extraordinary assertion to make. Geoff Dyer, writing in the Guardian in 2006, called the book “one of the supreme masterpieces of the 20th century.” Ten years ago, Condé Nast Traveler named it among the top 86 travel books of all time. Diana Trilling, speaking after West’s death in 1983, said it was “surely one of the very greatest books of the last 50 years.” Virtually everyone who has read it declares it to be West’s undisputed masterpiece. Richard Tillinghast, writing in The New Criterion in 1992, quotes from a variety of critics: “one of the great travel books of this century,” “one of the great books of our time,” “a major book in every sense.”

And yet, 2016 ended without anyone, it seems, commemorating the book’s 75th anniversary. There was no special edition, no retrospective conference, no editorial genuflection. Even the International Rebecca West Society appears to have missed the date — the conference topic for its annual meeting in late 2015 was a snoozer: “Rebecca West and Dissent: The Politics and Poetics of Heresy.”

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-judgment-of-rebecca-west/

quote:

As a book about Yugoslavia, then, it is of “extraordinary usefulness” - a kind of metaphysical Lonely Planet that never requires updating. (West herself observed, “sometimes it is necessary for us to know where we are in eternity as well as in time”.) The book’s practical worth is nicely suggested by the journalist Robert Kaplan, who remembers taking the book with him everywhere in Yugoslavia. “I would rather have lost my passport and money than my heavily thumbed and annotated copy of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.”

quote:

Even some commentators who claim the book as a masterpiece have little to say about why it is one. In Abroad, Paul Fussell’s highly regarded survey of “British literary travelling between the wars”, West, unlike Waugh, Lawrence or Greene does not get a chapter-compartment to herself and her book receives a mention more or less in passing. Victoria Glendinning, in her biography of West, has no doubt that Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is “the central book of her life ... the work in which Rebecca West formulated her views on religion, ethics, art, myth and gender”. Beyond that, she has almost nothing to say about it. Is the book doomed to repel attempts to articulate the awe that it inspires?


About the Author

quote:

Like the book itself its reputation is rather odd. West is considered a major British writer. If she is not regarded as a writer quite of the first rank that is largely because so much of the work on which her reputation should rest is considered secondary to the forms in which greatness is expected to manifest itself, namely the novel. As a novelist West is clearly less important than James Joyce, Lawrence or EM Forster (“a self-indulgent old liberal with hardly a brain in his head,” as West sharply deemed him). Her best work is scattered among reportage, journalism and travel - the kind of things traditionally regarded as sidelines or distractions.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/aug/05/featuresreviews.guardianreview2

Themes

quote:

West’s intention was “to show the past side by side with the present it created” and part of her achievement is to reveal how even an apparently ahistorical sensation - the scent of a plucked flower, say - is saturated with the smell of the past. Geography and history, to make the same point rather more sweepingly, cannot always be distinguished from one another - hence the way that certain places “imprint the same stamp on whatever inhabitants history brings them, even if conquest spills out one population and pours in another wholly different in race and philosophy”. Impatient readers tempted to skip the historical bits are taking a big risk because the past - the narrative history - can melt into the immediate present with zero notice.

quote:

The gray falcon is an enigmatic figure in a Slav folksong about a military defeat in the year 1389; and it offered the Serbian king a choice which expresses the sad dilemma of modern pacifism and points to its tragic results. The black lamb is the symbol, seen in a gypsy rite in Macedonia, of false -- and thus of impious -- sacrifice; and the terrible complexity of the choice between good and evil becomes not less but more tragic when man identifies himself with the false altar's hapless victim rather than with its cruel priest. For the king chose piety and immolation instead of the effective defense of Christian civilization against its oncoming enemy; "all was holy and honorable" within him, but like the celebrants of false sacrifice, he had set death before life. He and his soldiers died vainly on that consecrated but disastrous battlefield. And slavery closed down upon the Balkan peoples -- no legend here, but history -- for 500 years.

This may seem remote and recondite, but it is not. It is part -- the distilled spiritual essence -- of what may be accurately described as a most brilliantly objective travel book; although the travels are most significant for their observation of history.

http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/00/09/10/specials/west-lamb.html

Pacing

Read as thou wilt is the whole of the law.

Please post after you read!

Please bookmark the thread to encourage discussion.


References and Further Materials



Suggestions for Future Months

These threads aren't just for discussing the current BOTM; If you have a suggestion for next month's book, please feel free to post it in the thread below also. Generally what we're looking for in a BotM are works that have

1) accessibility -- either easy to read or easy to download a free copy of, ideally both

2) novelty -- something a significant fraction of the forum hasn't already read

3) discussability -- intellectual merit, controversiality, insight -- a book people will be able to talk about.

Final Note:

Thanks, and I hope everyone enjoys the book!

Somebody fucked around with this message at 14:40 on Jun 2, 2020

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Hieronymous Alloy
Jan 30, 2009


Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!




Morbid Hound
every time i get to legitimately use the "falconry" thread tag I consider it a major personal victory

Take the plunge! Okay!
Feb 24, 2007



My copy has the objectively better cover with the icon of St. Pantaleon. It is also a few pages shy of 1200, not counting the bibliography so LMAO

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus
this book owns

quote:

But our boatman plainly wished us to make a move, he kept on looking over his shoulder at the other island, and explaining that the baroque church there was very beautiful, and that many miracles had been performed in it. ‘He does not like us being here,’ I said; ‘perhaps there are snakes.’

But when we rowed to the other island we found he had wished to take us to it simply because he lived there, and his dog had been wearying for his company. He had been quite right in thinking this important, for it was a unique animal. Its coat, which was of drab tow, struck one as uncoiffed. Apparently dogs must pay some attention to their toilet, since it could be seen at a glance that this one paid none, being preoccupied with holy things. It had fervent sherry-coloured eyes and was the very dog for a miraculous shrine, for it had such a rich capacity for emotional life that it could hardly have retained any critical sense of evidence.

There's so much in this, even for a 1000+ page work. West has a wonderful and charming voice which doesn't let up when she's being snobbish in the extreme or racist/homophobic. She's clearly trying though, in a sort of early 20th c. English socialist sort of way? Like when she's grappling with Balkan politics, she seems to start by thinking "right, I'm educated, I know small country politics, think back to the Irish question". And even then she pays attention to the lives and stories of women she meets in a way that I think is probably still fairly rare for travel literature.

I found very little of it a slog tbh. Maybe some of the bits about the nitty gritty of icons but every few pages has at least one standout bit of writing, whether it's some sharp observation about the locality or some statement about Art or just a humourous anecdote about Constantin goofing off (or Gerda being lovely). The line about Scots being the only people simultaneously rich and Presbytarian enough to invent the "sober luxury of shortbread" stuck with me, for example.

Hieronymous Alloy
Jan 30, 2009


Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!




Morbid Hound
Ok I'm one percent of the way into this book and this woman has already borne H.G. Well's out-of-wedlock child, I'm impressed

Famethrowa
Oct 5, 2012

quote:

Even some commentators who claim the book as a masterpiece have little to say about why it is one.

Well, gently caress, I have to read it now. That's some grade A snark.

Hieronymous Alloy
Jan 30, 2009


Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!




Morbid Hound
This book is very well written but it does that Grand Pronouncements thing that a lot of pre-ww2 Literary Writers like Chesterton did / do, where they'll say something like

quote:

When a man takes charge of a factory the factory takes charge of him, if he opens an office it falls into a place in a network that extends over the whole world and so long as he obeys the general trend he will not meet any obvious disaster; but he may be unable to meet the calls that daily life outside this specialist area makes on judgment and initiative. These people fell into that category. Their helplessness was the greater because they had plainly a special talent for obedience.
.

and most of the time she pulls it off and it just sounds like ok, look, she has Wisdom, i will keep reading

but then sometimes she'll flop out a paragraph like

quote:

Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: they are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.

And to a modern reader it's just, ok, look, sexism

still though when she's on her own ground and making direct observations though she speaks right through the page to the present:

quote:

At the height of this collective rhapsody the young man with the second-class ticket came back. He had been there for a minute or two before anybody, even the ticket-collector, noticed his presence. He was standing in the middle of the compartment, not even understanding that his seat had been taken, as my husband was at the window, when the business man’s wife became aware of him. ‘Oho-o-o-o!’ she cried with frightful significance; and everybody turned on him with such vehemence that he stood stock-still with amazement, and the ticket-collector had to pull him by the sleeve and tell him to take his luggage and be gone. The vehemence of all four Germans was so intense that we took it for granted that it must be due to some other reason than concern for our comfort, and supposed the explanation lay in the young man’s race and personality, for he was Latin and epicene. His oval olive face was meek with his acceptance of the obligation to please, and he wore with a demure coquetry a suit, a shirt, a tie, socks, gloves, and a hat all in the colours of coffee-and-cream of various strengths. The labels on his suitcase suggested he was either an actor or a dancer, and indeed his slender body was as unnaturally compressed by exercise as by a corset. Under this joint attack he stood quite still with his head down and his body relaxed, not in indifference, but rather because his physical training had taught him to loosen his muscles when he was struck so that he should fall light. There was an air of practice about him, as if he were thoroughly used to being the object of official hostility, and a kind of passive, not very noble fortitude; he was quite sure he would survive this, and would be able to walk away unhurt. We were distressed, but could not believe we were responsible, since the feeling of the Germans was so passionate; and indeed this young man was so different from them that it was conceivable they felt as hippopotami at the Zoo might feel if a cheetah were introduced into their cage.

quote:

Then came a climactic mystification. There came along the first Yugoslavian ticket-collector, a red-faced, ugly, amiable Croat. The Germans all held out their tickets, and lo and behold! They were all second-class. My husband and I gaped in bewilderment. It made the campaign they had conducted against the young man in coffee-and-cream clothes completely incomprehensible and not at all pleasing. If they had been nasty people it would have been natural enough; but they were not at all nasty, they loved each other, tranquillity, snow, and their national history. Nevertheless they were unabashed by the disclosure of what my husband and I considered the most monstrous perfidy. I realized that if I had said to them, ‘You had that young man turned out of the carriage because he had a second-class ticket,’ they would have nodded and said, ‘Yes,’ and if I had gone on and said, ‘But you yourselves have only second-class tickets,’ they would not have seen that the second statement had any bearing on the first; and I cannot picture to myself the mental life of people who cannot perceive that connexion.

Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 16:02 on May 9, 2020

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

And to a modern reader it's just, ok, look, sexism

Yeah, West is pretty essentialist about sex and gender in general, whatever her other progressive/feminist bonafides. Women are like this, they are important, men are like that, they are also important. Same as whenever she talks about homosexuality, she seems to bring it up as part of these big sweeping statements about cultures, what this says about their manhood, their cultural vigour or whatever. Again that essentialism, Serbs are like this, Croats are like that, etc. Definitely a very early 20th century attitude.

Still makes for some zingers though, like the bit about how she'll believe feminism has achieved its goals when a woman as bald and clownish as d'Annunzio can run a city. A lot of those Grand Pronouncements really are beautifully put, even when they almost contradict other things West put out. Like this

quote:

Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted. If one’s own existence has no form, if its events do not come handily to mind and disclose their significance, we feel about ourselves as if we were reading a bad book.

is good stuff but then when West is feeling morose at Frushka Gora, talking about tzar Lazar's death, we get

quote:

Art covers not even a corner of life, only a knot or two here and there, far apart and without relation to the pattern. How could we hope that it would ever bring order and beauty to the whole of that vast and intractable fabric, that sail flapping in the contrary winds of the universe?

which is also very good stuff. Incidentally while searching for those I found this not far from the first quote:

quote:

English persons, therefore, of humanitarian and reformist disposition constantly went out to the Balkan Peninsula to see who was in fact ill-treating whom, and, being by the very nature of their perfectionist faith unable to accept the horrid hypothesis that everybody was ill-treating everybody else, all came back with a pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the massacree and never the massacrer.

lol. West might have been aware but she wasn't immune.

Hieronymous Alloy
Jan 30, 2009


Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!




Morbid Hound
Am I the only guy reading this this month

sorry folks I thought a travelogue would be good since we're quarantined

Kangxi
Nov 12, 2016

"Too paranoid for you?"
"Not me, paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen, right, you can never have too much."
I only started it yesterday. I've had much less energy and time for reading than I thought.

sitnalisa
Dec 16, 2004

stupid virgin
It may be that West is such a superbly self-confident writer that there is not a lot one can do with it apart from marvel. I haven't read it for at least 15 years, and can't find my copy (early edition, two volumes), which is a pity. But I do remember not just the grand set-pieces, like the visit of the Turkish envoys to Sarajevo, the Montenegrin track that would have led them to their doom; the sacrifice of the lamb, and perhaps the central horror of the book, Gerda grabbing the bowl of eggs at the Easter Service. In which she proves her unfitness for the world of art and the world of myth. But also little scenes and phrases that have stayed with me: the drunken officer 'with his legs at the other end of the world' while someone tenderly holds his head while he's being sick into the gutter; 'the dusty, fly-blown waking dream of Turkey-in-Europe'. I love it and if I can't find it then I shall have to get another copy.

I's not really a travelogue, either, more an enormous vehicle for her world-view. I do know that she was actually planning to set it in Finland first, and had even started leaning Finnish, but got sent to YU for a book tour or or something, and fell in love. And fell out of love after the war, when Tito took over. The fact that it was banned there for ethno-nationalism and didn't get translated and published in full until 2004 might also have had something to do with it

And Constantine was definitely Stanislav Vinaver, who was a parodist, poet and translator, and an actually important figure at the time. Here's the cover of his 1922 Nova Pantologija Pelengirike, which I suppose you might translate as A New Pantsology, which is full of parodies of poets and novelists of the time, none of which I can really understand almost a century later and not being a native speaker.

Only registered members can see post attachments!

sitnalisa
Dec 16, 2004

stupid virgin
Oh, and it's pretty much accepted that she was having an affair with Vinaver on at least one of the three trips she made to write the book. So Gerda/Ilsa's foulness might not be quite as simple as represented.

There are also bits when she simply betrays her ignorance, as when she builds a complaint about failure to understand foreign languages by Brits when she is at the Trepča mine in Kosovo, and she sees a sign saying Stanterg, which she interprets as a misreading of Stari Trg (Old Market). But Stantërg is the Albanian name for Trepča. And the almost total absence of Albanians in the book apart from flower sellers, sweetmeat makers and people luxuriously resting in the shade is weird too.

I may be wrong on the precise details, as this is all from memory, but I will say that it's a book that stays with you for a very long time.

Hieronymous Alloy
Jan 30, 2009


Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!




Morbid Hound
https://twitter.com/alloy_dr/status/1264661413227827201?s=20

Seagull Fiasco
Jul 25, 2011

This thread provided the kick in the butt I needed to pick up my copy of the book again. I read about half of it in 2008 but never finished it, not because it's not good (it is) but because it's such a beast of a book and at the time I was only reading for pleasure when commuting. We're still in Dalmatia over here, so I don't anticipate finishing this read-through until probably July.

I find it hard to put my thoughts on this book into words, for some reason. It's just so... vast in scope? One thing however that stayed with me since the first read and that I'm appreciating now again is the attention she pays to the women and their fates when she digs into the history of places (for example Galeria Valeria and Anna Comnena). That, West's essentialist sexism, and her frankly rather accurate zingers like this one (mentioned by another poster):

quote:

I will believe that the battle of feminism is over, and that the female has reached a position of equality with the male, when I hear that a country has allowed itself to be turned upside-down and led to the brink of war by its passion for a totally bald woman writer.
- they all combine to make for a really interesting look into the mind of an early 20th century feminist.

sitnalisa posted:

Interesting stuff
Thanks for this! I hade no idea about Constantine's true identity, or the supposed affair. That certainly adds another level to reading the sections with him and Gerda.

Take the plunge! Okay!
Feb 24, 2007



Yeah, the book is vast. I just finished the Shestine chapter, which is nice and lyrical until it's not. I am barely a hundred pages into the book.

Hieronymous Alloy
Jan 30, 2009


Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!




Morbid Hound
I got to the part where she describes the city of Rab and decided to look it up online for pictures:





cryptoclastic
Jul 3, 2003

The Jesus

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Am I the only guy reading this this month

sorry folks I thought a travelogue would be good since we're quarantined

It sounds like a really interesting book, but a 1000 pages is a lot of pages.

Hieronymous Alloy
Jan 30, 2009


Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!




Morbid Hound
When she gets to talking about the split, Italy and the palace of Diocletian:

quote:

“ I would like to go into the palace at once,” said my
husband, " and I greatly wish we could have brought Robert
Adam’s book of engravings with us.” That thought must occur
to many people who go to Split. Adam’s book on Diocletian’s
Palace is one of the most entertaining revelations of the origins
of our day, pretty in itself and an honour to its author. He
came here from Venice in 1757, and made a series of drawings
which aimed at showing what the palace had been like at the
time of its building, in order to obtain some idea of “ the
private edifices of the ancients ”. The enterprise took a great
deal of perseverance and courage, for all idea of the original
plan had been lost centuries before. He had to trace the old
walls through the modern buildings, and was often hindered
by the suspicions of both the inhabitants and the authorities.

The Venetian Governor of the town was quite sure he was a
spy and wanted to deport him, but the Commander-in-Chief
of the Venetian garrison, who happened to be a Scotsman, and
one of his Croat officers, were sufficiently cultured to recognise
Adam for what he was, and they got him permission to carry
on his work under the supervision of a soldier.

The indirect results were the best of Georgian architecture,
with its emphasis on space and variety and graceful pomp ;
often when we look at a facade in Portman Square or a doorway
in Portland Place, we are looking at Roman Dalmatia. The
direct result was this book of enchanting drawings — some
of them engraved by Bartolozzi — which, though service-
ably accurate, are beautiful examples of the romantic con-
vention’s opinion that an artist should be allowed as much
latitude in describing a landscape as an angler is allowed in
describing a fish. The peaks of Dalmatia are shown as monstrous
fencers lunging at the black enemy of the sky ; the Roman
cupolas and columns have the supernatural roundness of a
god’s attack of mumps ; vegetation advances on ruins like
infantry ; and peasants in fluent costumes ornament the fore-
ground with fluent gestures, one poor woman, whom I specially
remember, bringing every part of her person into play, including
her bust, in order to sell a fowl to two turbaned Jews, who like
herself are plainly Veronese characters in reduced circumstances.

In the corner of certain drawings are to be seen Adam himself
and his French assistant, Clerisseau, sketching away in their
dashing tricornes and redingotes, very much as one might
imagine the two young men in Cost fan Tutte. It is delightful
to And a book that is a pretty book in the lightest sense, that
pleases like a flower or a sweetmeat, and that is also the founda-
tion for a grave and noble art which has sheltered and nourished
us all our days.

“ Yes,” I said to my husband, “ it is disgusting that one
cannot remember pictures and drawings exactly. It would
have been wonderful to have the book by us, and see exactly
how the palace struck a man of two centuries ago, and how it
strikes us, who owe our eye for architecture largely to that
man.” " Then why did we not bring the book ? ” asked my
husband. “ Well, it weighs just over a stone,” I said. “ I
weighed it once on the bathroom scales.” " Why did you do
that ? ” asked my husband. " Because it occurred to me one
day that I knew the weight of nothing except myself and joints
of meat,” 1 said, " and I just picked that up to give me an idea
of something else.” " Well, well ! ” said my husband, " it
makes me distrust Fabre and all other writers on insect life
when I realise how mysterious your proceedings would often
seem to a superior being watching them through a microscope.
But tell me, why didn’t we bring it, even if it does weigh a little
over a stone ? We have a little money to spare for its transport.
It would have given us pleasure. Why didn’t we do it ? ”
" Well, it would have been no use,” I said ; “ we couldn’t
have carried anything so heavy as that about the streets.”
“ Yes, we could,” said my husband ; “ we could have hired a
wheelbarrow and pushed it about from point to point.” “ But
people would have thought we were mad ! ” I exclaimed. “ Well,
would they ? ” countered my husband. “ That’s just what I’m
wondering. In fact, it’s what made me pursue the subject.
These Slavs think all sorts of things natural that we think odd ;
nothing seems to worry them so long as it satisfies a real desire.
I was wondering if they could take a thing like this in their
stride ; because after all we feel a real desire to look at Adam’s
book here.” ” I don’t know,” I said, “ but there is Philip
Thomson standing in the doorway of our hotel, and we can ask
him.”


That book is online here:

http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/DLDecArts/DLDecArts-idx?type=header;pview=hide;id=DLDecArts.AdamRuins

The wanton trollop she mentions:



That same location today:



:vince::peanut::vince:

Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 00:39 on May 29, 2020

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
holy poo poo, great encapsulation of the book as a whole right there, all the best and worst

sitnalisa
Dec 16, 2004

stupid virgin
Hmm. But an improvement on previous travellers:



from Through Savage Europe by Harry de Windt, a former British officer visiting Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1905 or 6. At this time Bosnia and Herzegovina was occupied by Austria-Hungary, and we all know how well that turned out.

edit: someone help me with the picture pls

sitnalisa fucked around with this message at 17:00 on May 29, 2020

Sham bam bamina!
Nov 6, 2012

ƨtupid cat
You're trying to embed the page the picture is on instead of the picture itself. I would do it, but Imgur is blocked on my work computer.

sitnalisa
Dec 16, 2004

stupid virgin
Thank you! fixed.

quantumfoam
Dec 25, 2003

Please add " by Guy Boothby" http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/54771 as a voting option for the upcoming June 2020 Book of the Month Club.
A Prince of Swindlers is a bunch of short stories about a master thief scamming and robbing the upper social classes in 1890's London.


-it is copyright expired everywhere
-it is freely available online via project gutenberg or archive dot org
-there is a Sherlock Holmes analogy/parody character in it
-100% of the scams & schemes & robberies in it operate on completely different logic than what a modern crime-heist story or a crime-heist story published in the past 55 years would use

Hieronymous Alloy
Jan 30, 2009


Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!




Morbid Hound

quantumfoam posted:

Please add " by Guy Boothby" http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/54771 as a voting option for the upcoming June 2020 Book of the Month Club.
A Prince of Swindlers is a bunch of short stories about a master thief scamming and robbing the upper social classes in 1890's London.


-it is copyright expired everywhere
-it is freely available online via project gutenberg or archive dot org
-there is a Sherlock Holmes analogy/parody character in it
-100% of the scams & schemes & robberies in it operate on completely different logic than what a modern crime-heist story or a crime-heist story published in the past 55 years would use

Remind me for next month's poll

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quantumfoam
Dec 25, 2003

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Remind me for next month's poll

Will do, if I remember 26 days from now. Think we went through this loop before.

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