Dr David Vernon Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

Dr David Vernon

@KoenigRMHS Lovely little essay from M.Y., isn't it? For Mishima, I'd start either with Confessions of a Mask or The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea, but def. include the Sea of Fertility quartet if you're planning 4/5 this summer! Enjoy!

Dr David Vernon

Because I’m in that sort of mood, your top 9 novels, Twitter… 1. Nabokov: Pale Fire 2. Flaubert: L’Éducation 3. Austen: Emma 4. Mishima: Spring Snow 5. Tokarczuk: Books of Jacob 6. Proust: À l’ombre 7. Joyce: Finnegans Wake 8. Nabokov: The Gift 9. Lowry: Under the Volcano 🌋 https://t.co/ZOKQXHSz51

Dr David Vernon

@Wagnerian1979 In his brilliantly snarky book on the Bayreuth Festival, Frederic Spotts has a fine line somewhere about how for some people operas houses are not meant as 'places of cerebral activity'. Bit snooty, but a point well made...

Dr David Vernon

@MarkSav38056729 See the appendix annotated bibliography to my Wagner book. 😊 Treacherous Bonds and Laughing Fire: Politics and Religion in Wagner's Ring by @boulezian is superb. The late Bryan Magee’s Wagner and Philosophy excellent.

Dr David Vernon

Amid the furore from the usual banal inadequates and simple-minded fascists, many missed just how great a novel The Satanic Verses is, perhaps even Rushdie's finest. As a mesmerising study of identity and migration, disorientation and alienation, it is a true heir to Nabokov. https://t.co/CatDpWra8U

Dr David Vernon

Richard Strauss’s birthday tomorrow. Tell me your top five Strauss works. For me, today… 1. Tod und Verklärung 2. Daphne 3. Eine Alpensinfonie 4. Salome 5. Die Frau ohne Schatten https://t.co/ECSXOWgoSc

Dr David Vernon

Raymond Queneau’s ‘Cent mille milliards de poèmes’ has 10 sonnets, all with the same rhyme scheme, with each of the 14 lines printed on a separate strip, allowing them to be reconfigured into approximately 100,000,000,000,000 new poems. (A bit like BS Johnson's The Unfortunates.) https://t.co/BUkUVNsBOl

Dr David Vernon

Charles M. Schulz, creator of the Peanuts comic strip, was born 100 years ago today. Here is one of his finest efforts, from 1993, introducing the alarming but necessary verb ‘Mahlered’ into general usage… https://t.co/ApuEc9rQfa

Dr David Vernon

Lohengrin was first performed on this day in 1850, with Liszt conducting in Weimar on Goethe’s 101st Birthday. A work of staggering beauty and overwhelming emotional might, my recent book argued it is a truly revolutionary work, a musical and political prelude to the Ring. https://t.co/go2Yl1EMnX

Dr David Vernon

Coastal walk with Kierkegaard. Most of my favourite thinkers — Montaigne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche — are great writers too. And Søren K. is no different: a beautiful, engaging communicator, his prose full of metaphors, parable and irony. I love the opening to Fear and Trembling… https://t.co/ZLVVvCtOrS