I don't have anything to add except that Curtis Mayfield was a bona fide genius.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttZjT6QdG7k
I put that track on some stupid percent of any and all mixes I've ever made.
From the other place, a friend of two friends' younger siblings, Aaron Cohen, has written a book about Chicago Soul in the seventies. Hoping it doesn't violate the sanctity of offblog communication to relate:
I discuss some of these issues in my book, but to answer your direct question on "Back To The World" (yes, an amazing album): Rich Tufo did the string arrangements and he was a staffer at Mayfield's Curtom at the time so he was, pretty much, always on call. Chicago studios were running not just musical, but also commercial, sessions on the regular into the 1970s, so there were plenty of top local pros to regularly enlist (including musicians from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra). It should be noted, though, that the template for all of these arrangements came from the people who Mayfield collaborated with earlier: Johnny Pate and Riley Hampton, both of whom brought their jazz training into R&B. Definitely connections between Mayfield and Earth, Wind & Fire, although the regular working members of Mayfield's groups were not EW&F members (both bands were too busy in the 1970s to share personnel). However, Johnny Pate was a mentor to producers/arrangers Charles Stepney and Thomas "Tom Tom" Washington, both of whom worked extensively with EW&F. And some musicians who worked often with Mayfield also worked in earlier groups that fed into EW&F (percussionist Master Henry Gibson, for instance). There may have been occasions when, say, Maurice White and Mayfield jammed together--wouldn't that be something great to hear! https://press.uchicago.edu/.../chicago/M/bo18705279.html
I was curious about the record, those string sections cannot have come cheaply.
Working URL for book in 2: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo18705279.html -- thank you for sharing this!
It's not Notre Dame de Paris, but I read The Three Musketeers last year, and I'm about 80 percent of the way through The Count of Monte Cristo right now. I prefer Dumas to Hugo, I guess?
I read the first and am reading the second in English. In each case I got a few chapters into a French version and found it too much of a struggle. My French is better than I'd expect in some ways but not in others. I still hope to finish them in French at some point but it's definitely more work and less fun than reading these in English.
Language aside, it's clearly an antiquated style. And one thing that annoys me is the names. The whole plot depends on the main character having multiple identities, that's not a problem, but there's also several parents with different family names than their children and a major character who changes his name halfway through the story (Fernand/Morcerf, if anyone needs the reference). Not sure if that's normal for France, or was normal for France at the time, or was a quirk of the time Dumas wanted to satirize/comment on, but in any event, it was confusing. It took me way too long to figure out which characters were targets of the revenge plot and which weren't, that sort of thing.
John Darnielle, bless him, has blurbed translations from the Catalan of Mercè Rodoreda, one of the century's great writers who's had a real uphill battle to get noticed in the US.
John Darnielle, bless him, has blurbed translations from the Catalan of Mercè Rodoreda, one of the century's great writers who's had a real uphill battle to get noticed in the US.
I hadn't heard of "Back To The World."
Curtis/Live! is one of my all-time favorite albums. So full of love and deep commitment to social change.
6: nothing so logical. A character named Fernand Mondego changes it to Fernand Morcerf halfway through the story for no obvious reason. He's come up in the world since then and I might guess it's meant to be a sign of distancing himself from his past, but it wasn't clear enough to me after "Morcerf" was introduced, and another character with a similar social status change didn't change his name. Or Noirtier de Villefort, father of Gerard de Villefort, but the narrative always refers to the first as "Noirtier" and to the second as "Villefort", to the point that I thought they had different last names. I think there were more examples of this, but I don't want to look too hard since I'm still not done.
I've never read any Dumas in any language, but this Vox piece about Dumas's father was really interesting.
I had a friend in college whose favorite book was The Count of Monte Cristo, and the lesson I took from it was "Never ever cross this guy."
As far as nineteenth-century French fiction goes, it's far and away Stendhal and Flaubert for me, with Maupassant on a somewhat lower eminence. I enjoy the Balzac/Hugo/Zola social panoramas too, but they always leave me feeling like I ate the whole bag of chips.
Eating a whole bag of chips is the best.
12: You are seriously understating for the record your willingness to eat the whole bag of chips, my friend. Stay up all night reading La Cousine Bette and prove me wrong.
11. The Tom Reiss book is really great.
I loved the Count of Monte Cristo as a kid, but I remember being so confused by one of the plot points. The parchment with the instructions for finding the treasure is torn, but Dantes ingeniously reconstructs the text by measuring the letters and figuring out what words would have fit in the missing piece of paper. Am I misremembering this? I remember trying to puzzle it out, and then giving up and thinking well, maybe French words work differently from English.
It's impossible to write French without using a monospace font, even by hand.
What it comes down to with Balzac, I guess, is that he's a weird case where reading a good literary critic on Balzac is more enjoyable than reading the actual novels. There must be other people in that class, but it's not a huge one.
15: I feel like it made more sense than that but I don't remember the details. Maybe he already knew basically what was on the other half of the parchment and just had to rely on word lengths for a few specific blanks? Maybe it was the Abbe Faria decoding the parchment, and it seemed more plausible because he was a "nutty professor" type?
If I was reading it on paper, I'd get it out and flip back and check, but I'm on an e-reader, sorry.
14: This is such a preposterous scenario for me. If I'm still awake enough at midnight to read, the book would have to be enthralling.
I did read Cousine Bette. I think what I remember of it is from the Masterpiece Theatre production of it.
I liked Pere Goriot better.
HBO should do a series of La Comédie humaine. It could be bigger than Game of Thrones.
I reread Hunchback recently, in the elderly translation Project Gutenberg has. Excellent diatribes by the author on architecture and by evil priesty guy.
I still haven't seen the Disney version and am kind of mystified at what they could possibly have kept of the plot. Does the girl get the soldier? Does the hunchback leave mounds of dead at the base of the cathedral? Do they do justice to the goat? Went off and watched youtubes of the Esmeralda ballet solo instead.
Cousine Bette is mean. Possibly try Le Pere Goriot if you haven't already.
I liked Monte Cristo when I read it years back in English, well-done adventure story, at the time I wasn't all that sensitive to social nuances, and probably missed some of what Cyrus is getting at.
Part of what's striking to me about Hugo is the huge contrast with 18th century fiction which was written only 50 years earlier-- his writing is almost cinematic in lots of places, the scale changes from very intimate and focused to panoramic from chapter to chapter. Also it's a polemic novel intended to be more than just an entertainment or a satire, in common with Stendhal and Balzac who were contemporary; I guess it's that transition also the introduction of inner life to the books and a change of register from just something written to amuse. Somehow that change seems less dry to me on reading this than previously, an innovation that someone came up with and chose to add to what they were writing, rather than just being an existing technique that a talented writer chose to deploy.
Not sure if that makes sense-- maybe this is one of those cases where you internalize and understand something formerly understood as an abstract fact. Could also be that I'm just older, and I more often consider books as something a particular person made, the outcome of a process that took months while life went on around the writer, than I did when I was younger. There's benefit to considering a book's text to be an entity in itself of course, but somehow a more historical view of the circumstances of production for this book (I think an old-fashioned way to read) is working for me.
Also I like the duality of Frollo's being confined by his mindset which is of the cathedral just as Quasimodo is actually confined by Frollo to the physical structure, and the trauma that comes to both from having the outside world intrude. Frollo is both a spider and a fly, to echo an image H reuses a bumch of times. Plus writing an artistically ambitious book like this in service of preserving an old building, and embedding chapterlong rants and digressions about the physical form of 15th century Paris, both nice features.
17. The thing with B is the insane scale of that thing. He drank so much coffee, turned out so many interlinked books. Yes, any one of them has chapters that verge on caricature or melodrama, but there are dozens of the books. Not to disagree though that after the highlights of Comedie Humaine, the lesser books aren't exactly transfixing escape reading.
People, lourdes and I have credentials. Of course we've read Pere Goriot (and Illusions perdues and... I swear there was a third, but I forget). I'm just dragging him for eating Balzacian volumes of chips.
I went to land-grant schools. We only read James Patterson books.
22: It is still hard to combine adventure novels with novels with inner life. I was surprised at how bad 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was at being an adventure book, and how good Epipsychidion was ditto.
I can't remember what Richard Burton write about this, which is butterheaded of me as I remember liking the essays.
It is still hard to combine adventure novels with novels with inner life.
Which is why Murderbot is so good.
Ditto with 1 about Curtis Mayfield. So great and he's on so many of my playlists.