Alexander Pope (1688-1744) Vs. A.I.

In his "On Epic Poetry", Pope satirises the proliferation of bad epic poetry, written not by poets with "genius", but by hacks according to a "recipe" in which they take themes and episodes from the great works of literature, "stack them up" and pour out verbiage void of any true human meaning, moral or value. ???

My reading of this essay was enhanced by it sounding in my mind as narrated by Simon Callow ?

I'm about ¼ through this essay collection, having just finished the selections by Joseph Addison (1672-1719), which I've really enjoyed.
He was co-founder of The Spectator magazine, the title of which was borrowed by a still-extant conservative periodical, which is ironic given that Addison's satirical essay, "The Tory Fox-Hunter" lampoons the Little Englander mentality that still prevails amongst current Spectator & Daily Mail reading folk. ⬇️

#SocialistStandard for April 2025 had a cover story about Little Trump (a name fits Nige on several levels 🍑💨), which looks at his pernicious political presence, offering a hopeful analysis that his dream (threat?) of becoming the next UK PM is unlikely to happen🤞
Other articles include a stirring call for solidarity with trans people, a slightly snotty reply to a critical letter, a continuation of the series on socialist fundamentals, and a ⬇️

#TransRightsReadathon
“Digital Book Burnings in Trump's America:
Attacks on marginalised groups are likely an early indication of rising authoritarianism. A century ago, the Nazi party of Germany targeted transgender people & the scientists who were pioneers of sexual research, raiding Magnus Hirschfeld‘s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, one of the world‘s first centres dedicated to the study and care of queer and trans people. The Nazi Party ⬇️

Weird Walk #3 features an interview with author Andrew Michael Hurley and the use of walking through the British landscape in his novels, a dolmen "review" and the Uffington White Horse, and a really interesting piece on the history and folklore of beer and ale. ⬇️

On the recommendations of @Cathythoughts & @LeahBergen , I bumped this one up my reading list, & I'm pleased to report that I really liked these dark short stories.
I'd expected ghostly horror stories based on the cover indications, though there was only one definitely featuring an apparition, and another in which it was a little ambiguous. The other stories were horrible rather than horror, in the way of Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected ⬇️

Was this 1954 collection of short stories by ideologically faithful cadres of the Chinese Communist Party full-on Maoist propaganda? Yes. Was it an interesting insight into the historical processes and concerns of the early Chinese Revolution? Also yes.
It doesn't seem any more jingoistic to me than many western movies of the post WWII period, and probably less so than, say, the Top Gun films.
The stories focus on the shift from traditional 👇

A collection by Lakes poet, Polly Atkin (pic), which draws on the landscape of fells & water, on the diaries of Dorothy Wordsworth, on the author's chronic illnesses & (as background, not foreground), the COVID pandemic, during which the poems were written. I really enjoyed them, and she's won awards and was a writer in residence at Gladstone's Library, if other recommendation is needed 🙂
The cover is by painter and wild swimmer Nancy Farmer 👇

"Everyone everywhere is talking about the moon."
- Full Wolf Moon (Grasmere, January 2020)

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

Sitting in the spring sunshine, listening to the Bill Evans Evans Trio play the relaxing 🌷Spring is Here🌷, drinking coffee, cat minding (which is easier now we've had a broken fence panel replaced) and reading Weird Walk No. 2, which includes articles on the Third Doctor's folk horror storyline, The Dæmons, progressive Morris dancing, Stonehenge-inspired rock & foraging.
#TuesdayTunes @TieDyeDude
https://youtu.be/zhvA0P_qQms?si=RfvjbevsTaPFhP4z

"The evening sun was being swallowed up by the far horizon. A northwest wind was stealthily ruffling the grass till the plain looked like a racing sea, while the dark clouds gathering overhead resembled the calfskin roof of a tent. Everybody knew the autumn rain was at hand."
- On the Kholchin Grasslands, by Malchinku

I loved this family drama, focusing on the fortunes and missions of an affluent Indian Muslim family in the years before and after Partition, mainly through the lens of the unconventional girl/young woman, Gaythi, though we get insights into the POVs of other characters, too. Fatima has compassion and empathy for her characters, even when they act badly, and I cared for and worried about them.
👇

I'm making good progress with The One Who Did Not Ask, enjoying it and it's possible I'll finish it today, despite needing a little break from it.

Rather than picking up one of the other books I'm currently reading, I've picked up a "new" one. It's a short story collection published in 1954 by the People's Republic of China's state publisher, the Foreign Languages Press, so all the stories will be "ideologically sound", but I'm hoping that ?

Now that Skye has had her vaccinations, we're letting her go outside for a little bit. This is the third day, and first time during the afternoon. She's skittish, I assume from the sensory load of novel sights, sounds and smells, but did meow to be allowed out today, so she's obviously enjoying it.
I'll be moving that bird feeder!

It's OK to be angry about capitalism? Phew! Thank fuck for that! 😅

I got this from the library as much to validate the decision of whichever librarian it was who decided to order this in as I did to actually read it. I wasn't sure that I would read it as, a) it's about five years old and things have moved on (in a hell-in-a-handcart way) and, b) Bernie's preaching to the converted with me. But, I read the first few pages and think I'll continue.

Shusterman & Martínez present a series of stories set in WWII in which figures from Jewish folklore empower resistance to the nazi Holocaust. Shusterman notes in comments that there is a high degree of wish fulfillment in the stories, and I think he is successful in balancing the fantasy elements with the awful truth of history. It's a YA GN, so the horrors are not explicitly shown, while honouring the impact and consequences.
The final story 👇

"Doors had closed all over Europe to Jews and other groups that the nazis deemed "undesirable."

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

Next sentence: "But it is said that when God closes a door... He opens a window."

Ironic that one of the main countries of refuge for Jews and others persecuted by the nazis is now governed by a man whose policies and pronouncements indicate that he is broadly in sympathy with the nazis.

A low pick for this library book, a graphic bio focusing specifically on the author's experience of breaking into animation work in LA.
This could have been too niche, but, while there is zero chance of this being my new life direction (🤣), the specificity about a career, city & lifestyle utterly different to my own was of interest.
Text heavy, with lots of career tips, but mercifully short enough that I only skipped a few pages at the end! 🤫

#WeirdWords Squir or Squirr: "To throw with a jerking motion; to skim".

A spendthrift heir being disinherited & bequeathed only a silver shilling, "put him into such a passion, that having taken me in his hand, and cursed me, he squirred me away from him as far as he could fling me."
From Addison's, "The Adventures of a Shilling", in which an Elizabeth I coin recounts its travels from Peru as part of Drake's plunder, to its minting & circulation.

😀🐇✊🏻🚩

“The only thing that proves to be right is Time, which slowly and steadily brings every mistake and every truth to light.”

This is a lovely little book, covering Kilby's stay with the Tolkiens in the summer of 1965, invited by JRRT to give him "editorial and critical assistance", and an impetus to focus on his authorial task at a time when age and the distractions of a fame to which he was ambivalent combined with a natural dilatoriness and a tendency for his interests to be "Like butter that has been scraped over too much bread". His personal impressions of ?

Next up, a memoir of Kilby's summer assisting JRRT with his Silmarillion materials, after which he was asked to read the manuscript prior to publication. Kilby's book was published 1976, the year before The Silmarillion, so his impressions will be personal & unaffected by its general & critical reception.
Kilby was an Inkling scholar, with several academic books about Tolkien, Lewis and the others, so I'm also expecting it to be well-considered.

My previous posts ridiculed this book, but Gardner Fox has the last laugh as I actually rather enjoyed it despite its manifold faults. I guess the Sword and Sorcery genre was such an early escape for me that it's now entwined with my DNA.
Still, having a character called "Alaine, the Lady of Shallone"! ??‍♂️?
Kothar is named by Gary Gygax as a recommended read for D&D players, and one of the stories, The Treasure in the Labyrinth, is the ?

"He leaped sideways, sword flashing in the sunlight. The blued blade clove through neckmeat..."

I literally lol-ed reading this! ? Mmmm! Neckmeat! ?

I think this goes so far into bad, it comes out the other side almost good (almost ?).

The image is Melvyn Grant cover art for a Conan book, and other than a change of hair colour, Kothar "the Cumberian" is a Conan clone, but the copy is rarely as good as the original, and this isn't. Still...

@BarbaraBB posted about a StoryGraph challenge recently, TBR I Spy, which she inspired me to join to help me focus on some of the titles I've rightly or wrongly neglected.
I added Kothar to the Bad A$$ prompt, the description being: "Find a cover that features a warrior/fighter/Barbarian etc. Basically someone on the cover that looks Bad A$$".

Gardner F. Fox was a comic writer who created super-heroes for DC including The Flash and Hawkman. ?

I loved this book! Especially the account of the Holmesians' first road trip to Switzerland in full Victorian cosplay! Author, Michael Pointer, pictured, though he didn't state what character he represented.
Probably for Baker Street diehards only, but if you're a bit irregular then there's plenty to love.

One of the chapters is an account of the first Sherlock Holmes Society of London's pilgrimage to the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland in 1968.
The society Flickr account has an album of photos showing their journey, in costume, from London to Switzerland, including several luminaries of Holmesian studies. It was gratifying to find a couple of photos including Michael Pointer.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/shsl/albums/72157640063611234/
#Sherlocked

"If Conan Doyle had really meant business when he attempted to get rid of Sherlock Holmes, he should have killed off Dr Watson. That's the key to it. Without Watson there really can be no Holmes."

Pointer giving the good doctor his due recognition, both as a character & as a narrative device.

Of all the Watsons, Nigel Bruce's incarnation (despite the un-Canonical bumbling) is always the one that springs to my mind.
#NoPlaceLikeHolmes #Sherlocked

I read " The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes" last week & enjoyed it enough that I bought the author's follow up, "The Sherlock Holmes File".
They do cover similar ground but from different angles, & the File is a larger format to better display the significantly greater number of illustrations. I imagine the material Pointer put together when researching the first book was enough to justify this one.
It focuses on the development of Holmes's ⬇️

A return visit to Castlerigg stone circle, and possibly the best photograph I've ever taken 🪨☀️ I love this place 🩶🤍🩶
On our way home from the Lakes, we stopped at the poshest (and most expensive 😳) motorway services in the country at Tebay, where they were selling Weird Walk zine, and I caved to the inevitable and bought all those I don't already have 📚
Good times 😊

"The soul of man is not by its own nature or observation furnished with sufficient materials to work upon; it is necessary for it to have continual resource to learning & books for fresh supplies, so that the solitary life will grow indigent, & be ready to starve without them; but if once we be thoroughly engaged in the love of letters, instead of being wearied with the length of any day, we shall only complain of the shortness of our whole life."

"Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention." ?
- Of Studies, Sir Francis Bacon

"When a traveller returneth home...let his travel appear rather in his discourse than in his apparel or gesture; and in his discourse let him be rather advised in his answers, than forward to tell stories; and let it appear that he doth not change his country manners for those of foreign parts; but only prick in some flowers of that he hath learned abroad into the customs of his own country."

- Francis Bacon, "Of Travel"

This was at the start of our walk around Buttermere, which was lovely but, despite being fairly flat, was rather too much for Mrs B's sciatica, even being doped up on prescription painkillers.
We've safely made it back to the tea shop, now, and fortifying ourselves with Earl Grey tea and fruity tea-bread.
As for the guide book, either it is too vague, or I am too urban. 🧭🤔

"The message of the English landscape is one of embrace - is one of humankind's ability to find our individual narratives among the pathways and allow those narratives to coexist harmoniously. My ghosts and your ghosts each take up zero space while coexisting in the same location; my myths and your myths have equal footing and, in fact, combine to form new, better, stronger myths."

Justin Hopper, Weird Walk zine #1

The Weird Walk zine is greater than the sum of its parts, though its parts are very good.
At 40 pages, there is, of necessity, a brevity to the articles, but the atmosphere created is cohesive, a folkiness with strands woven of calmness and unease, groundedness and ethereality, and a modernity steeped in a deep antiquity. It's a hauntological love letter to the English landscape 💚💛💚

I really enjoyed Pointer's knowledgeable critiques and reviews of the Great Detective's appearances off the page and on the boards, the silver screen, the airways, the idiot box, and vinyl.

It could have been a dense info-dump, but Pointer cleverly distilled that into the 80-odd pages of Catalogue at the back of the book, delivering 116 initial pages of deftly handled history and anecdotes.
On the strength of this, I've ordered a copy of his 👇

Yesterday's #BookHaul from Bookends in Keswick.

Two essay collections from beloved authors:
Garner's reminiscences on a creative life ends with the word "Finis", and it feels like it will read as an elegiac swansong from a writer we're lucky enough to still have creating in his 90s.
Le Guin's book begins with 1979's Space Crone, about the then (and still now) taboo subject of the menopause.
Then two creepy short story collections: ?

We're in the Lakes for a few days, and I picked up another couple of issues of the Weird Walk zine: nos. one and seven.
Topics in 1 include folklore, music, poetry, medieval graffiti and standing stones. Topics in 7 include forests (a bit of an accidental theme for me so far this year), the Northumbrian Holy Island, cheese lore (!), and old stones.

"So far we have been spared the spectacle of Sherlock Holmes on ice!"

If you live long enough, though... ?⛸️?

"Sherlock Ice Skating Show"
https://scarlettentertainment.com/gb/acts/sherlock-ice-skating-show

#Sherlocked

“Let a man beware how he keepeth company with choleric and quarrelsome persons; for they will engage him into their own quarrels.”

Good advice from Sir Francis Bacon, from his essay, "Of Travel", from this 1935 edition of a collection of English essays, originally compiled in 1903.
I bought it today on a visit to a National Trust property, where some pretty spring crocuses were blooming amongst last autumn's fallen leaves, dipped into it, and ?

I loved this little book of travellers tales by Arabic (specifically, a Baghdadi of the Abbasid Empire from what is now Iraq, written while he was living in Egypt in 947CE) writer, Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn al-Husayn al-Mas'udi.
His accounts of Persian, Greek, Egyptian, East African,Indian, Central Asian, Chinese, Malaysian, Cambodian, etc. life and cultural practices are fascinating, and there are hints of knowledge of the Americas and Japan, all 👇

I haven't been able to find editions I want of the next two reads for the #ClassicLSFBC , Childhood's End and The Weapon Shops of Isher. I did find the tagged book though, which, confusingly, was published before Weapon Shops, but is set after it. I've read a review recommending it be read second, so I'll TBR it for now.
Not buying it wasn't an option as it was a reasonably-priced copy with my favourite cover artist, Bruce Pennington! 😍

A couple of Sherlock Holmes books I didn't go looking for yesterday, but which I found anyway! ?
I'm pleased to have added Baring-Gould's pseudo biography to my collection: it's a 1962 first edition and treats its subject as if historical, in best Holmesian tradition.
The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes is a 1975 review of "the many ways in which the entertainment industry has used, and misused, the best-known character in all fiction." ?

al-Mus'ādī is describing some of the wonders of Egypt, including the excavation of a temple lost beneath the desert sands. Uncovering stairs leading to the entrance, a rash man sets foot on the fourth step, triggering two swords to spring out of the walls & slice him to pieces, one of which rolls onto another trigger-step, causing the whole edifice to collapse, burying 2000 people!
I love that Indy's Tomb Raiding has such a venerable lineage! 😃

"... all traces of science have vanished and its splendour is spent; learning has become too general and has lost its depth, and one no longer sees any but people filled with vanity and ignorance, imperfect scholars who are content with superficial ideas and do not recognise the truth."

Written in 947 CE, presumably al-Mas'ūdī had the gift of precognition? Either that, or human nature is constant over the millennia, which is either ? or ?

"We beg our readers' indulgence for any mistakes or negligence which they find in this book; for our memory is weakened and it strength spent as a result of the great weariness brought about by voyages which have taken us by sea from one country to another and by land across extensive desert."
Opening line of a short selection of entries from Baghdad-born Mas'üdī's lengthy account of his 10th C. CE travels.

#FirstLineFridays @shybookowl

#SocialistStandard #1447
I have nothing to say about the cover story that can't be expressed by ?‍??
Other stories dip into AI panic amongst the super rich and tech bros; tariffs and the likely unintended consequences of ?'s "plan"; Taiwan, China and the West; the fundamentally pro-social nature of humans; musings about the concept of money, and; the socialist lessons to be learnt by reflecting upon road rage!
Free to read link in comments ✊?

Another book by political cartoonist, Polyp.

This one collects examples of his work up to 2016, mainly aimed at debunking conspiracy theories, anti-science, religious and far-right bigotry, racism and homophobia. In good left-wing tradition, he also excoriates hypocritical left-wingers, too.

Polyp kindly tucked some postcards in with the book. Love an unexpected lagniappe! 🎁