Summer in America means baseball, even if you aren’t a fan. The clip above is an artistic moment from a great baseball film, The Natural. I saw a clip from a Japanese game yesterday that showed a right fielder rifle the ball to the catcher at home plate, getting a runner out. The speed of that throw was thrilling–a little like the pitching portrayed above.
What else is going on this week?
Memorials: This week we honored the 80th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy. Of the 2,403 Americans killed on D-Day, 20 of them were from Bedford, Virginia, a community of 3,200. Over 40 Bedford residents were serving during the war, most in the Virginia National Guard. Their fallen were subsequently called the Bedford Boys.
This Stars and Stripes report has a list of the names of those who participated in the invasion.
War Correspondents: There’s a bed-and-breakfast in Chateau Vouilly, France, 20 minutes from Omaha Beach, that once housed the reporters who wrote the stories of the Allied troops advance. In 1944, it was a good, out-of-the-way spot, not too far from the action—for at least two months.
Every night, the hostess served the press corp milk and cookies. “On the tougher days, Hamel served glasses of Calvados, the famed local spirit made from distilled apple and pear cider. Reporters called it the ‘breakfast of champions.'”
Reading: About what novel did author Robert Louis Stevenson say this, “Many find it dull: Henry James could not finish it: all I can say is, it nearly finished me.”
Photo by Ben Hershey on Unsplash
R. L. Stevenson that’d be. As for what the book was: maybe something by George Meredith?
Thanks, I flickered on the spelling but didn’t look back to check.
Hm — so it was Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Well, what Stevenson and James had available may have been a translation into English of a French translation of the Russian original.
Do you think that would have changed James’s complaint about character?
I don’t know. But if one is struggling with a poor translation, one’s perceptions can be affected. I suppose it is likely that someone like James, whose experience of people seems to have been more limited than Dosty’s, might have felt the characters were too outlandish even if reading a better version. And maybe he was reading a decent translation.
When you say it that way, I’ve thought Dost.’s characters, at least in The Brothers Karamazov, to be outlandish. I didn’t read the whole book, but I remember wondering if certain interactions were meant to look a little loony as they did to me.
I think a key to reading Dosty is to think about Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s characters don’t talk “naturalistically” — he doesn’t try to make them sound like the people one encounters. He’s working with theatrical conventions of which he was a master. Dostoevsky is a dramatic novelist; he writes somewhat as if he were scripting plays. You might have noticed how he goes from “scene” to scene. He’ll skip over or summarize some passage of time, or ignore it, and then give us 40 pages almost in real time in which tension builds till someone faints or someone is punched, etc. He shouldn’t be criticized for not writing what he wasn’t trying to write, as some do.
That sounds fair. It’s been a while since I attempted The Brothers Karamazov, so I don’t remember why I wondered if someone was a little unhinged. I didn’t think that about anyone in Crime and Punishment. I should probably read it again.
Well, Dostoevsky usually doesn’t give a lot of attention to stable people. But if you read Brothers Karamazov, give plenty of attention to the Elder Zossima.