We are asked, ‘What is the matter?’ (Some sixty-something years later can the UK’s 2026 National Year of Reading propose answers?)

He waited while she closed the front door, then followed her into the sitting-room, the entrance to which was immediately on the right. The inevitable three-piece suite of furniture was grouped round the tiled fireplace in which was laid, and had obviously been so for some time, a fire. 

On the mantelpiece was a large clock, and on each side of it a couple of scrofulous china dogs; immediately above was a sun mirror. To the right was the television set, on the near wall a case filled with pre-television books. 

‘What is the matter?’ she asked hurriedly, as soon as they had sat down. 

Counsel for the Defence by Jeffrey Ashford.  

Best-selling British thriller, 1960.  

The National Year of Reading 2026 is a major UK initiative designed to combat declining literacy and book readership by presenting reading as a contemporary, essential activity with the potential to see it no longer outrivalled by its internet/TV competition. 

Led by the Department for Education and National Literacy Trust, the campaign is the first to unfold against a fully digital attention-grabbing economy, operating in the era of smartphones, streaming platforms and — critically — generative artificial intelligence. Except, rather than condemn this digital revolution, the campaign acknowledges it directly. 

The urgency of the initiative is grounded in the very latest evidence with survey data cited by the campaign indicating that only around one in three young people aged 8 to 18 report enjoying reading in their leisure time, and roughly one in five read daily for pleasure. 

The worthy aim is a sea change in reading habits with an ambitious agenda that requires coordinated, system-wide action rather than isolated interventions.

And yet . . . and yet . . . how pleasurable it must have been to guiltlessly light that fire set for us in the grate before the age of smoke abatement laws and, untroubled, to have curled up at the hearth with a good book before our surrender to the tide of digital saturation that now stifles this once time-honoured pursuit. 

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2014)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

 

Floreat amor ♡ Take heart

 Hold my hand as if you love me, stupid.

So where is that pride you have too much of ?

No stars lose their shine despite what you did

and flowers still bloom for fools out of love.

Catherine Eisner  

Photo credit : Ievgen Chabanov

 

See also

Faint Aroma of Performing Seals

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2013/05/joan-smith-and-faint-aroma-of.html

Found! Poésie trouvée (Part 6).

I have touched upon, in earlier posts, the peculiar jolt one is dealt when a specimen of poésie trouvée is stumbled upon.  

     So it was all the more surprising to discover such a specimen lurking in my own prose.

     Simply, it’s a paragraph from my novel concerning the fortunes of Klara and narrator Éveline who – against all expectations – find themselves falling very much in love.  

     As to rhyme, it’s an unconscious pairing one might say.

     A snatch of dialogue. Klara speaks first . . .

Two Graces.

Detail from Antonio Canova’s Neoclassical sculpture (1814), 

commissioned for Empress Josephine and now exhibited

in the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

(Source Wikimedia.)

        ‘We agreed. Agreed. For both of us.’

        Klara drew close to me.                

        ‘We are not looking for what we do not want. Because . . .’

        ‘Because we have found what we . . .’

        ‘Need,’ she pronounced throatily.   

        ‘Need.’

 

For more examples of poésie trouvée see my earlier posts . . .

That Cry in the Night

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2021/08/that-cry-in-night.html 

Immured Mustard Field

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2013/04/immured-mustard-field-found.html

The Unsought Text

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/poesie-trouvee-unsought-text.html

Ways of Seeing
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/way-of-seeing-ronald-searle.html 

A Touch of Fever

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/07/a-touch-of-fever-poisoning-of.html
 

 

 

A Reissue from the Harcourt Archives! Adhoc-ism: The Art of the Impromptu.

Reissued by Éditions Studio Harcourt in a facsimile of the now unprocurable first edition, Verity Askew’s popular standard work (1948) – Adhoc-ism: The Art of the Impromptu – remains an informed, entirely novel and exhaustive treatise on a neglected interwar cultural subcurrent, including new structures and patternings such as ‘Cut-ups’, Découpage, Papierausschnitte, Merz, ‘Flourishes’, Pataphysical Illusions, Conjurings and Happenings with an Appendix devoted to ‘past and present’ (interwar and circa mid-1940s) exemplars of this Dadaistic style. An edition to be cherished; to be had at all quality booksellers.

First edition. Original trompe l’oeil dustjacket (1948).

Revanchist Polonium: Vengeance Deferred. (Dramatic Irony. Part 2.)

Definition: Dramatic Irony.

A plot device in which apprehension of events or motives is the god-like privilege of the audience but not within the grasp of characters in the unfolding events who may, indeed, never survive the action of the drama to achieve such self-knowledge. 

 
----------------------

As I wrote in Dramatic Irony, Part 1: ‘It is not for me to glibly remind ourselves of how tragic events in our national life adhere to Aristotelian definitions of classic drama conducive to the terror and pity essential for the cathartic experience Aristotle prescribes to purge our congested emotions.’

Polonium was discovered on 18 July 1898 by Marie

Skłodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie, the result of

extraction from uranium ore pitchblende (Uraninite),

its identity revealed by its strong radioactivity.

It was named for Poland, Marie’s homeland.

Again, I simply juxtapose two events for spectators, god-like, to apprehend undercurrents of portents and their fulfilment.  

 

Portent 1. The September 7th 1939 entry in Comintern General Secretary Georgi Dimitrov’s Diary quotes Stalin’s very clear views about Poland: ‘Doing away with Poland in conducive circumstances would mean one bourgeois fascist state less.’

 

 

Scorched Earth.

It’s only now that we  – the onlookers who behold the distorting mirror of history – only now we who can see the fated pattern resolve itself in the looking glass.

 

Consider the tragic drama of betrayal that unfolded in Nazi-occupied Poland, in August 1944 – the Warsaw Uprising – when Polish partisans unaided defended their capital against the besieging German forces. 

 

Treachery? Yes. 

 

Calculated betrayal by their ostensible Allies. Yes.

 

Because on the 1st of August, the day of the Uprising, the Soviet advance was halted at the east bank of the Vistula by a direct order to the Red Army from the Kremlin. Hindsight let’s us give credence to the case that Stalin benefited from Soviet non-involvement in the failed relief of Warsaw, because future opposition to his military objective to eventually control Poland as a Soviet state was effectively removed by permitting the Nazis to destroy the loyal Polish nationalist partisans. This Soviet objective was completed indirectly when, in the aftermath of the Uprising, the Nazis enacted long-laid plans to raze Warsaw to the ground, destroying up to 90 percent of its buildings as an egregious act of reprisal following capitulation.

 

It was a scorched earth policy that played into the hands of their adversaries, the reinvigorated Soviet oppressors of Poland. (We remember Stalin’s threat, ‘‘Doing away with Poland in conducive circumstances . . . ’)

 

As Stalin foretold, dependence on Soviet hegemony required the total annihilation of the Polish Underground State, with the entire Polish population repressed or purged by operational groups of the NKVD, the USSR’s ruthless instrument of military counterintelligence and state security, and forerunner of the KGB. 

 

Victims of Polonium poisoning: Irène Joliot-Curie, the

daughter of Marie Curie who first isolated Polonium;

Alexander Litvinenko, Russian defector and former officer of

the Russian Federal Security Service, successor to the NKVD.   

 

Poison du temps : Divine Vengeance Postponed.

When we read of the depredations of the NKVD from their betrayal and subjugation of the Polish nation, how then can we interpret the well nigh mythical comeuppance meted out to those mutinous descendants of the NKVD – officers of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) – who betray their Kremlin masters?

 

For FSB defectors, the poison du temps is evidently Polonium poured from a deceptively innocuous teapot, the modus operandi for the despatch of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.  

 

And, if Litvinenko was the first to be publicly exposed as a victim of Russian state sanction by means of this sinister contrivance, then can we be certain that, since 2006, there have not been any number of other intended deaths as condign punishment hastened by the Curies’ Poland-inspired deadly poison at the hands of FSB-trained assassins? 

 

The biter bit?

 

The Robe of Nessus.

Should we then reconsider the tragic death of Marie Curie’s daughter Irène Joliot-Curie in 1956 as a mythological precursor of Litvinenko’s death? In that year of her death another national uprising in defiance of Russian dominance, in an echo of Warsaw’s fate, was viciously crushed by Soviet tanks and troops . . . Hungary. 

 

Portent 2. Irène became the first confirmed victim of lethal Polonium, having been accidentally exposed to hazardous levels of radioactivity when, ten years earlier, in 1946, a sealed capsule of the chemical element exploded in her laboratory, the tragedy occurring only two years after the razing of Warsaw. 

 

By birth Marie Curie, Irène’s mother, was a Varsovian. 

 

Like her mother, Irène received the Nobel prize (1935) for her researches into the phenomena of radioactivity, in her case profound discoveries that significantly advanced the efficient production of radioactive materials, the bedrock of new techniques in curative medicine. Yet, for Irène, the price she paid for the bestowal of that matrilineal wealth of knowledge was death.  

 

And should we seek correlatives to explicate this fatal chain of events then perhaps we should reflect on two myths. 

 

According to one account by an early Greek poet, Medea – sorceress and accomplished adept of pharmakeía (medicinal magic) – killed her children by accident then buried them alive in the Temple of Hera, believing this would make them immortal. Certainly, for Irène, immortality followed a tragic accident due to her mother’s arcane researches, with its aftermath crowned by the same Nobel laureateship that had honoured her mother.  

 

The Robe of Nessus: wrapped in embrace of fire.

 

Or should we seek further for an agonised protracted death of divine retribution then let us remember the tragic end of Hercules, who in retribution for infidelity in his amours receives the gift of the Robe of Nessus, raiment stained with the envenomed blood of the centaur Nessus whom Hercules had killed, which enwraps the warrior in an embrace of fire, whereat, to escape this unbearable unending pain, he builds a funeral pyre and immolates himself. 

 

Are there concordances here, one wonders, in the history of Polonium as an instrument of divine vengeance deferred; because, in the case of another treacherous warrior (according to the verdict of the FSB), the agony before death would be prolonged for three weeks of slow progression that is the penalty of acute radiation poisoning.

 

Polonium’s Three Weeks, therefore, is the measure for the slow retributory death of an officer of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation at the hands of his own treacherous fellow FSB servicemen.

Compare . . .

 

Poland’s Three Months was the period that followed the capitulation of Poland’s capital on October 2nd 1944 to Germany, while treacherous so-called Allies, the Soviet forces and their operational units of the NKVD, waited calculatedly on the east bank of the Vistula, during which time vengeful German forces demolished much of what was left of the city of Warsaw and deported 650,000 Polish civilians to labour camps, thus clearing adventitiously the stage for repossession of the city by the USSR to declare the nation as henceforth under the Soviet heel.

Revanchist Polonium . . . the rare gift of the expiatory ill-fatedness of myth.

 

•

 

See also

Two Untimely Deaths Foreshadow Aristotelian Dramatic Irony

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2014/12/two-untimely-deaths-foreshadow.html

 

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2014)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

 

Fourteen Years Past: Publication of ‘Listen Close to Me’

Today, from my publisher’s Facebook page:

 

Today. I wrote:

Yes, indeed. As I remember it, the cover’s facelessness was the more sinister for its expressing the ‘moral vacuum’ of the principal characters and even the indeterminateness of gender of at least two of them; that is, one is described by his lawyer father as having ‘no inheritable blood’ (!) and another described as having a ‘naïve unusedness’ of ‘no particular gender’, so your design does wonders in capturing those unknowable subtleties of appearance, for which – at that well remembered time – I was extremely grateful. Today, I wish you all at Salt another successful epoch of distinguished ground-breaking publishing and a wonderful new stable of literary discoveries for your next quarter century.   

See: 

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html

Vignette 6: Twenty-five words.*

He’d once sold cannabis to a troupe of Moroccan tumblers.

       ‘It was like selling refrigerators to Eskimos,’ he’d bragged, ‘and even the strong man wept.’

.

 

.

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

 

*THE LAW OF TWENTY-FIVE: ‘Of the quinary, or number five; that number five pertains to the Law. . . . accordingly the number twenty-five signifies the Law, because five by five — that is, five times five — make twenty-five, or the number five squared.’ 

Augustine’s Tractate 25 on the Gospel of John.