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adam_mcphee's Reviews (2.87k)
Some of the more insane bits that don't require much context:
Strindberg was also greatly occupied with alchemy, and claimed to have extracted gold from earth which he had collected in the Cimitière Montparnasse.
In the crèmerie where he still continued to take his meals and to appear perfectly normal among his friends, Madame Charlotte discovered him in her kitchen one morning having arranged all the saucepans in a circle and, wearing nothing but his shirt and his underpants, performing a dance of exorcism around them. Madame Charlotte reported affectionately:
He explained he was doing this to chase away the evil spirits which might poison the food. During the hot weather he would usually climb in through the window, since evil spirits stood watching the doorway; and one day everything in the kitchen exploded just before lunch was to be served.
This was a consequence of Strindberg trying to make gold in a saucepan, and the whole meal was ruined.16
He also practised subjugating Munch to his will. His diary of 4 June reads:
I went to see the Danish painter who lives in the rue de la Santé. The huge dog had gone. We set off to get some dinner at a pavement café in the boulevard Port-Royal. My friend was cold and felt indisposed. I put my coat over his shoulders and he became most amenable, I could do what I liked with him … Then suddenly he had a nervous seizure, he began to shake like a medium under the influence of the hypnotist … what could this mean? A tunic of Nessus? Was my garment impregnated with my nervous fluid? … Had I become a magician without being aware of it?
Munch merely had a chill.
Strindberg blushed that his family should be living in such an irregular household. In a family context he could be correct to the point of prudery and his embarrassment at the sound of Frankenau and her servant's drunken dinners next door turned to fury one day when Hansen took an axe to the communicating door and burst blind drunk into the family dining room, waving his revolver and terrifying the children.
(the relationship deteriorates until there are accusations of stolen peacocks and then this:)
‘Horribly nervous and with mild persecution mania after stormy days and sleepless nights! Go about with a revolver and a lead-tipped stick to protect my fair-haired boy from the Gypsy's kidnap plans!’ he wrote to Edvard Brandes in a letter jocular in tone but paranoid in undertone.53
As for Hansen, without Strindberg's friendship to live up to, he reverted to his previous bad behaviour. He did not even pretend to fulfil any duties about the estate but stayed out all night tomcatting, returning at dawn to sleep away the day. He broke into Strindberg's quarters, disarranging his possessions without stealing anything but perturbing him by infinitesimal but deliberately detectable disruptions. It was a war of psychic demoralisation using strange weapons that show Hansen to be every bit as familiar with the snakepit of psychological torment as the playwright.
‘He sets his dogs on me’, wrote Strindberg, ‘has infected the latrine, is drunk and riots every night, breaks into my apartment and terrifies my family, shoots his revolver beneath my window at three o'clock in the morning, performs Indian dances outside my door at the same time rattling sheets of zinc … enters my apartments with an illegally copied key, not to steal but to seek out family secrets so he can blackmail me at his leisure.’54
Spoiler
During his morning walks he would take a box of morphia and a syringe in his pocket to conduct research en route. He thought he might be able to prove whether plants had nervous systems by injecting them with morphine. Once he was arrested when injecting apples hanging from a tree but he explained his scientific quest to the policeman who thought he was a madman and let him go.Spoiler
He tried to make an electric generator using bits from the family spinning wheel, the whalebone spokes of an umbrella and strings filched from a sibling's violin. He drove the family mad with tearing their useful things apart. When his father told him there had long existed a reward for the person who could invent a perpetual motion machine, he set to work with parts of the coffee percolator, a soda-water bottle, bits of a birdcage, a hanging lamp and planks that he had made by smashing a chest of drawers to bits. When the machine did not work, he hurled it against a wall in a fury. However, he succeeded in making a Leyden jar, a primitive electrical device whose ingredients included the skin of a dead black cat13 he had found in the road on the way back from school and brought home in his handkerchief, and some home-made electro-phosphorus. This established his reputation as a scientist and after this triumph he laid chemistry aside for the time being.Spoiler
Strindberg seemed extremely interested in monkeys at that time. He had a theory that the gorilla was descended from a shipwrecked sailor and an ordinary female monkey. One of his great proofs of this was the similarity between the inside of the paw of a gorilla and the palm of the hand of an old sailor. He showed photos of both, and indeed there was a great resemblance.Strindberg was also greatly occupied with alchemy, and claimed to have extracted gold from earth which he had collected in the Cimitière Montparnasse.
Spoiler
Earlier in the year Strindberg had tried to cast an envoûtement on his daughter Kerstin so that she should become ill and Frida would summon him to her side for a reconciliation but the spell had misfired: it was not Kerstin who became ill but another of his daughters, Karin, his eldest. Racked with remorse, he became terrified that he had lost the upper hand over the hounds of Hell. He began to hear voices in the walls of people who were plotting to kill him and he resorted to exorcisms.In the crèmerie where he still continued to take his meals and to appear perfectly normal among his friends, Madame Charlotte discovered him in her kitchen one morning having arranged all the saucepans in a circle and, wearing nothing but his shirt and his underpants, performing a dance of exorcism around them. Madame Charlotte reported affectionately:
He explained he was doing this to chase away the evil spirits which might poison the food. During the hot weather he would usually climb in through the window, since evil spirits stood watching the doorway; and one day everything in the kitchen exploded just before lunch was to be served.
This was a consequence of Strindberg trying to make gold in a saucepan, and the whole meal was ruined.16
He also practised subjugating Munch to his will. His diary of 4 June reads:
I went to see the Danish painter who lives in the rue de la Santé. The huge dog had gone. We set off to get some dinner at a pavement café in the boulevard Port-Royal. My friend was cold and felt indisposed. I put my coat over his shoulders and he became most amenable, I could do what I liked with him … Then suddenly he had a nervous seizure, he began to shake like a medium under the influence of the hypnotist … what could this mean? A tunic of Nessus? Was my garment impregnated with my nervous fluid? … Had I become a magician without being aware of it?
Munch merely had a chill.
Spoiler
Strindberg's host in Dieppe was the successful Norwegian landscape painter Frits Thaulow26 who made enough money to exercise his naturally benevolent nature. When, the following year, Oscar Wilde was released from Reading Gaol he went straight to Dieppe where Thaulow was not embarrassed to be seen with him and often invited him to dinner at the Villa des Orchidées. His wife Alexandra was equally magnificent. During Strindberg's stay at the Villa des Orchidées she was at first puzzled to discover dribbles of candle wax about her well-kept home but she soon discovered that Strindberg was getting up in the night and tapping the walls and ceilings with a broomstick to check for hidden machines. She suggested that they go round the house with a compass which would detect any untoward electrical activity. This pacified him for a while but when Strindberg saw a man peering through binoculars, a sight not uncommon on that or any coast, he was not to be mollified. People were spying on him and on 28 July 1896 he left Dieppe for Ystad in southern Sweden to take the medical advice of Anders Eliasson,27 a doctor he had briefly visited the previous year.Spoiler
Strindberg would become neurotically upset if people arrived a minute before or a minute after the allotted hour of seven o'clock. The Beethoven Boys would gather on the stairs with their instruments and there would be a great studying of pocket-watches and listening for the church bells before ringing the doorbell on the dot.Spoiler
Laura Hansson was not amused. Her husband had encouraged Strindberg to join them in Berlin to further both their literary careers and Strindberg, who was supposed to be the blue touch paper for cultural revolution, spent his time shut up in a kitchen cooking up experiments like the Sorcerer's Apprentice. In addition, sulphur smelled terrible. Laura had organised a programme of introductions to the right literary people but Strindberg would not cooperate: networking was not, and never had been, of the slightest interest to him. He felt that he was being organised, something he always disliked, especially by a woman. He started to call her Laura the Mortician and Lady Bluebeard. Threatened by her energetic efforts to manage his career, he decided she was ‘A dangerous woman, stealing the spermatozoa from men and passing them off as her own. Bit by bit she'll box me up and put me away in the nut-house’21 and he did a midnight flit, leaving the Hansson house without a word and showing up at Przybyszewski's with the precious Green Sack. Laura the Mortician had been spying on him, he told Przybyszewski, he had found the Green Sack gaping open and the letters from Nietzsche were missing. She had stolen them for unnamed purposes. Later he remembered that he had left the letters in Sweden for safekeeping but meanwhile the feud raged.Spoiler
Strindberg blushed that his family should be living in such an irregular household. In a family context he could be correct to the point of prudery and his embarrassment at the sound of Frankenau and her servant's drunken dinners next door turned to fury one day when Hansen took an axe to the communicating door and burst blind drunk into the family dining room, waving his revolver and terrifying the children.
(the relationship deteriorates until there are accusations of stolen peacocks and then this:)
‘Horribly nervous and with mild persecution mania after stormy days and sleepless nights! Go about with a revolver and a lead-tipped stick to protect my fair-haired boy from the Gypsy's kidnap plans!’ he wrote to Edvard Brandes in a letter jocular in tone but paranoid in undertone.53
As for Hansen, without Strindberg's friendship to live up to, he reverted to his previous bad behaviour. He did not even pretend to fulfil any duties about the estate but stayed out all night tomcatting, returning at dawn to sleep away the day. He broke into Strindberg's quarters, disarranging his possessions without stealing anything but perturbing him by infinitesimal but deliberately detectable disruptions. It was a war of psychic demoralisation using strange weapons that show Hansen to be every bit as familiar with the snakepit of psychological torment as the playwright.
‘He sets his dogs on me’, wrote Strindberg, ‘has infected the latrine, is drunk and riots every night, breaks into my apartment and terrifies my family, shoots his revolver beneath my window at three o'clock in the morning, performs Indian dances outside my door at the same time rattling sheets of zinc … enters my apartments with an illegally copied key, not to steal but to seek out family secrets so he can blackmail me at his leisure.’54
I tried writing a review, but I only read this book because of bro_pair's review, and it says everything I'd want to say anyway. If you need any more convincing, just remember that this book predicted the 2008 crash three years before it happened.
Exactly what it says on the cover. The obscene tendencies to financialize, commodify, privatize and redistribute wealth upwards is leading us down a dark road, towards what the author calls 'class restoration'.
Exactly what it says on the cover. The obscene tendencies to financialize, commodify, privatize and redistribute wealth upwards is leading us down a dark road, towards what the author calls 'class restoration'.
Too much billionaire worship and too much victim blaming. They blame NASA's problems on itself, when really it's not given enough funding and keeps having its mandates changed.
As a survey of what's going on in different space-related sciences, it's okay. The rest of it switches between boring and garbage, especially the 'future' segments where they try to predict what life on Titan will be like (though I admit the part about naturally floating cities was interesting and hadn't occurred to me).
As a survey of what's going on in different space-related sciences, it's okay. The rest of it switches between boring and garbage, especially the 'future' segments where they try to predict what life on Titan will be like (though I admit the part about naturally floating cities was interesting and hadn't occurred to me).
Spero Lucas is like a millennial James Bond.
A fair amount of the book deals with the brands Lucas associates himself with, all more attainable and current than Bond's throwback style and working to shape a more modernized masculinity; the possibility of a movie version must be a marketer's wet dream. On the other hand, it's fun watching Lucas track people down, and the shadier side of the rapidly-gentrifying D.C.'s history is fascinating.
A fair amount of the book deals with the brands Lucas associates himself with, all more attainable and current than Bond's throwback style and working to shape a more modernized masculinity; the possibility of a movie version must be a marketer's wet dream. On the other hand, it's fun watching Lucas track people down, and the shadier side of the rapidly-gentrifying D.C.'s history is fascinating.
Yeah, Dan Brown is dumb, but...
My high school French teacher lent the Dan Brown books to me after I mentioned how dumb the Da Vinci Code was. But I read them anyways because a girl I liked was reading them, and she admitted they were dumb. I read them back-to-back over the course of a single week, so my teacher probably figured that I didn't actually read them, and my criticism of how dumb they were was so harsh that it came off like I was being mean to the girl, because I was too stupid to be nice to her, so who's the real idiot? That's right, me.
My high school French teacher lent the Dan Brown books to me after I mentioned how dumb the Da Vinci Code was. But I read them anyways because a girl I liked was reading them, and she admitted they were dumb. I read them back-to-back over the course of a single week, so my teacher probably figured that I didn't actually read them, and my criticism of how dumb they were was so harsh that it came off like I was being mean to the girl, because I was too stupid to be nice to her, so who's the real idiot? That's right, me.
A quick ranking of the Simenon novels that I've read:
1. Dirty Snow
2. The Train
3. Tropic Moon
4. The President
5. Lock 14 (Maigret)
6. Striptease
7. The Widow
8. The Engagment
9. The Mahé Circle
And to think there are hundreds of these things out there.
The top 4 are amazing, and I'd recommend to anyone. Lock 14 and Striptease are okay, and the others bored me to sleep.
1. Dirty Snow
2. The Train
3. Tropic Moon
4. The President
5. Lock 14 (Maigret)
6. Striptease
7. The Widow
8. The Engagment
9. The Mahé Circle
And to think there are hundreds of these things out there.
The top 4 are amazing, and I'd recommend to anyone. Lock 14 and Striptease are okay, and the others bored me to sleep.
Skip it and read Chester Brown's graphic novel instead.