Originally posted by verismissimo
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What are you reading now?
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... and I'm sure I've commented on this on these very boards before now - but surely in the Verdurins Proust was shamelessly stealing from the Veneerings in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend ??
"Mr and Mrs Veneering were bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London. Everything about the Veneerings was spick and span new. All their furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, their plate was new, their carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new, they were as newly married as was lawfully compatible with their having a bran-new baby, and if they had set up a great-grandfather, he would have come home in matting from the Pantechnicon, without a scratch upon him, French polished to the crown of his head.
For, in the Veneering establishment, from the hall-chairs with the new coat of arms, to the grand pianoforte with the new action, and upstairs again to the new fire-escape, all things were in a state of high varnish and polish. And what was observable in the furniture, was observable in the Veneerings - the surface smelt a little too much of the workshop and was a trifle sticky."
... and for Dickens's Twemlow, Proust gives us, more cruelly, Saniette...
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Mandryka
Before plunging into my next 'biggie' (Andrey Bely's 'Petersburg'), I'm having a brisk canter through Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground.
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Originally posted by Mandryka View PostBefore plunging into my next 'biggie' (Andrey Bely's 'Petersburg'), I'm having a brisk canter through Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground.[FONT=Comic Sans MS][I][B]Numquam Satis![/B][/I][/FONT]
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Originally posted by vinteuil View PostThackeray: The Book of Snobs."...the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices..."
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Originally posted by Caliban View PostI just cycled past his house, on Albion Street, W2....
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Originally posted by vinteuil View Post... does it get a blue plaque? he was there briefly (1837, I think) before moving to 13 Great Coram Street (1838-1843), and then (after Paris and other wanderings) on to 13 Young Street (1846-1853), 36 Onslow Square (1854-1862), 2 Palace Green (1862-1863). I wonder if they all get blue plaques? Perhaps when the rain abates Caliban can do a bicycle run to determine this for the record...
No need - Albion Street has a blue plaque, that's how I know he lived there. http://openplaques.org/plaques/2821
Just round the corner from Sir Giles Gilbert Scott http://openplaques.org/plaques/240 and W.H. Smith http://openplaques.org/plaques/315
And WMT has blue plaques at Palace Green and Onslow Square too: http://openplaques.org/people/509"...the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices..."
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Originally posted by vinteuil View Post... I just thought the bicycle ride might do you good !
However, I know you have my best interests at heart!
PS: I see you said: after this rain abates..."...the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices..."
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Originally posted by EdgeleyRob View PostIt normally takes me around 3 to 6 months to read a book.
My spare time is almost always spent listening to music and I can't read and concentrate on the music at the same time.
I have however recently finished reading this for the second time.
I expect many on here are familiar with this super book.
I enjoy the Parry biography by Dibble book too. I also love Dibble's Stanford biography too and the biography by Paul J. Rodmell. If you enjoy reading about the composers/pupils at the RCM as I do, for the insights given I strongly suggest the 'A Rebecca Clarke Reader' by Laine Curtis on Indiana Univ Press.
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Richard Tarleton
Eleanor Perényi's 1974 biog of Liszt, picked up in a second hand bookshop. An excellently told tale, though she only goes up to 1861, and I see she had a spat in the New York Review of Books with Robert Craft who gave it a hostile review (largely it seems for not being a different sort of book). A musicologist she isn't, but she writes with great perceptiveness about Liszt and the French Romantics, and Liszt's women - Marie d'Agoult, Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein and George Sand, with whom he didn't have an affair but jolly well should have done, he'd have had a much more entertaining time than he did with the wretched Marie. It was Liszt who introduced her to Chopin.
I'd always assumed, vaguely, that Marie was a woman wronged, but on closer acquaintance (and on a reading of her correspondence) she was an appalling woman, utterly unable to appreciate Liszt's particular musical genius and totally resentful of it. She wrote a novel, Nélida (an anagram of her pen name Daniel Stern) which was a character assassination of Liszt (thinly disguised as a useless painter, herself as, er, a beautiful countess), which was nevertheless taken as factually accurate by Ernest Newman in his disgraceful book "The Man Liszt".
It has been observed that Liszt has been ill-served by his biographers - a genial but amateurish effort by Sacheverell Sitwell, and the above Newman, both of which I'd read previously. Alfred Brendel said there was no composer he'd rather meet.
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Resurrection Man
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