Ummagumma

Note: A continuation of the previous post... “Stalingrad, a city that barely figured in the original German plan for Operation Blau , quickly became the psychological and emotional center of both sides’ military efforts.  Admittedly, the city had significant military value due to the weapons factories as well as its location on the remaining water and rail communications that connected Moscow with the Caucasus.  Yet, to the German leadership, the very name Stalingrad, identifying the city with the Soviet dictator and the beleaguered communist regime, seemed to give it a psychological and political significance with its actual military worth.  German propaganda centered more and more on the titanic struggle for Stalin’s namesake city.  As Army Group A’s advance into the Caucasus ground to a halt during the autumn, Stalingrad and the Volga River bend increasingly seemed to be the logical place to conclude Operation Blau with at least the appearance of success.” (page 166) So it was

Proof of purchase. The work of David Glantz has been of interest to me since the 1990’s.  Today he is perhaps the foremost authority on previously unavailable Russian documents pertaining to the Eastern Front of World War Two.  I own a number of his works on the Soviet military prior to and during the war.  Some of them are translations Soviet General Staff Studies of operations conducted during the Russo-German War . In addition to his own writings, Glantz teamed with military historian Jonathon M. House on two excellent histories I have in my library, When Titan’s Clashed (1995), a general history of the Eastern Front, and The Battle of Kursk (1999), one of the best accounts of that pivotal operation.  Earlier this century, Glantz and House wrote a series of highly detailed books on the campaigns surrounding the battle of Stalingrad, which I did not purchase due to other priorities.  But, in 2017, the two published Stalingrad , a single-volume 500-page overview of the inf

The crew awakens from hypersleep in their pods.  The ship's computer, "Mother," has detected a signal of unknown origin coming from the moon of a nearby planet.  The film will not look this clean and warm and inviting again. In the early summer of 1979, I had just completed my sophomore year of college and was at home with my parents working in a carpet mill.  That summer I dated a girl who was the daughter of friends of my parents.  We had a mutual attraction to a few things and one of them was movies.  I took her to see Alien at a big theater in Chattanooga and a fancy dinner beforehand.  It was fun.  She grasp my hand through half the movie, both of us transfixed and tense as we watched it.   Back then there were no CGI effects.  Everything had to be done with models and prosthetics and whatever else filmmakers could come up with.  That is one reason so many late-70’s films, in the science fiction genre in particular, feel a bit dated today.  The scares that see

In 2010, Julian Young gave us what I consider the best overall biography of Friedrich Nietzsche .  I used it, along with biographies by Safranski , Cates , and others, extensively in my Nietzsche blog .  A couple of years prior to that Young wrote Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion which caught my eye a couple of years ago.  It was one of those books I bought knowing I would read it eventually, but only recently have I had time to enjoy it. Young has some slightly unconventional ideas about Nietzsche’s philosophy.  At first blush it seems that the philosopher who proclaimed “God is dead” and who was so rabidly critical of Christianity might not want to have anything to do with ‘religion.’  But, Young argues, fairly conclusively in my opinion, that for all his concern with free spirits and the Ubermensch , Nietzsche nevertheless desired a communal solution to the problem of nihilism. One of the most interesting facts that Young points out is that the origins of Nietzsche’s revolut