Missed again!

 

I missed another facebook video chat! "Ein alter Kamerad", Armin Stiller, in my (c)old hometown Braunschweig tried to contact me late at night his time which is early morning my time when I'm still asleep or gone to the pool or for a walk around the village.

Armin and I were both in the "Fahrenden Gesellen", something akin to the Boy Scouts, with whom I spent many weekends and, during school holidays, many weeks away on hiking trips, and the comraderie and the many adventures of those early days shaped much of my later life.

 

Armin is second from the left

 

We lost contact when "der Ernst des Lebens" began and we went off to work and I, soon afterwards, to Australia. I've forgotten now when but through the internet we made contact again and reminisced, first via Skype and then facebook, for many hours about the "good ol' days".

Because of the time difference of eight hours and because neither of us adheres to any agreed schedule, I keep missing Armin's calls. When I email him to apologise for not having been near the computer at the time he called, he makes light of it by saying, "Ah well, it was nothing important anyway." As if! Those memories become more and more important as we get older and older. They made us what we are today.

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All quiet on the Western Front

 

What brought me to Australia? Reading "All Quiet On The Western Front" in my teens! So when the "Bundeswehr" gave me the thumbs-up on my medical and a "Wehrpass" which obliged me to report my whereabouts every time I moved, I knew it was time to move - PERMANENTLY!

"All Quiet On The Western Front" is a powerpul anti-war novel written by Erich Maria remarque, a German veteran of World War I. Published in 1929, it was deemed degenerate, or anti-German, and banned in Germany with the rise of the Nazi Party. In 1933, Nazis began burning copies of the novel, and in 1939 Erich Maria Remarque emigrated to the United States, where he became a naturalised citizen in 1947.

"This book is intended neither as an accusation nor as a confession, but simply as an attempt to give an account of a generation that was destroyed by the war - even those of it who survived the shelling."

 

 

There are three movie adaptations of Erich Maria Remarque's famous 1929 anti-war novel: a 1930 version, the above 1979 version, and the most recent one in 2022. All have the same powerful anti-war ending:

 

"He fell in October, 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad that the end had come."

"All quiet on the Western front." I wish we could say the same about the Eastern front right now.

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Will they let me back in?

Click on image to enlarge

 

We've just been for another visit to the pool at the crack of dawn, and to crack a few jokes with Jake who was hired as a temporary lifeguard while he tours this Big Brown Land.

He's pretty good with his mouth which must've convinced Management that he'd also be good with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, although I wonder if they saw the metal stud on his tongue which is a tracking device left by the Western Australian mental asylum he escaped from.

Having written several colouring-in books himself, he promised to submit to Management my complaint that their safety instructions have a comma missing after 'facility' and a colon after 'the following'.

Question is: why did they let him out and will they let me back in?

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Michael Dirda, a reader's reader

 

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library", wrote Jorge Luis Borges, but they could also have been written by Michael Dirda, a book collector and -addict close to my heart who has been guiding readers like me to great books since 1978.

I've become a follower and admirer of his in recent years, and am slowly acquiring all his books. They are all available online at archive.org ...

• "Browsings - a year of reading, collecting, and living with books"
• "Readings - essays and literary entertainments"
• "Caring for your Books"
• "Classics for Pleasure"
• "Book by Book - notes on reading and life"
• "An open Book - chapters from a reader's life"
• "Bound to Please - an extraordinary one-volume literary education; essays on great writers and their books"
• "On Conan Doyle, or The whole art of storytelling"

... but, of course, to a book collector reading a book online is similar to going to wine tasting: once you have found a book you enjoy, you want to hold in your hand, to turn its pages, and to add to your library.

For more on Michael Dirda, go to his website. Paradise indeed!

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P.S. To read the books online, SIGN UP (it's free!), LOG IN, and BORROW.

P.P.S. There are many Michael Dirda talks on YouTube; here's one I liked.

 

"All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

 

If Tolstoy had had an iPad, perhaps "Anna Karenina" would never have been written, or at least its first line might have been, "All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family uses iPads."

If Tolstoy had had an iPad, he would have spent his time chatting with Dostoyevsky, reading Turgenev's post, changing his profile picture, and watching YouTube videos. But then again, what if Tolstoy had used his iPad to write his novels? His patient wife Sofya would have been saved from copying the 1,440 pages of "War and Peace" seven times by hand.

But everything happens for a reason, and the reason of this blog is to remind you of this gem of Russian literature, widely considered to be one of the greatest works of literature ever written. "Anna Karenina" is a complex novel in eight parts, with more than a dozen major characters, and spread over more than 800 pages (depending on the translation and publisher), typically contained in two volumes. It deals with themes of betrayal, faith, family, marriage, desire, Imperial Russian society, and rural versus city life.

If 800 pages seem a little too much for you, why not try the 8-part film adaptation? It's all in Russian which adds to its authenticity, and it has English subtitles and plenty of commercials to allow for toilet breaks.

 

Part 2   Part 3   Part 4   Part 5   Part 6   Part 7   Part 8

 

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