tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33839382148521082442024-03-18T16:28:45.906-05:00Wuthering Expectations A Distinguished CrankologistAmateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comBlogger2590125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-87049511036418679802024-03-01T17:55:00.002-06:002024-03-01T17:55:54.766-06:00Books I read in February 2024 - if there is truth in poets' prophesies, then in my fame forever will I live<p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Persian literature in March: the epic <i>Shahnameh</i> in
Dick Davis’s mostly prose translation, plus the classical poets he translated <i>in
Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz</i>, plus some Rumi and at least
one contemporary Iranian novel, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s <i>The Colonel</i>
(2009).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe <i>The Conference of the
Birds</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s a nice syllabus.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">As for the past month:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">OVID<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Metamorphoses</i> (8 / 1567), tr. Arthur Golding<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Metamorphoses</i> (8 / 2004), tr. Charles Martin – those are
Ovid’s and Martin’s last lines up there in my title.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Ovid and the Metamorphoses of Modern Art from Boticelli
to Picasso</i> (2014), Paul Barolsky<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Many thanks to everyone who read along, commented,
corresponded, etc.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A great pleasure.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">POETRY<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Nones</i> (1951), W. H. Auden<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin</i>
(2018). Terrance Hayes<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">FICTION<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Return of the Soldier</i> (1918), Rebecca West<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Brideshead Revisited</i> (1945), Evelyn Waugh – muted
compared to his great earlier novels, although it has some outstanding scenes.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Folded Leaf</i> (1945), William Maxwell<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Mendelssohn Is on the Roof</i> (1959), Jiří Weil – a
fellow Twitterest told the story about how the Nazis wanted to pull down the
statue of Mendelssohn from the Prague opera house, but instead demolished
Wagner’s statue because he had the biggest nose.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A terrific story but obviously false,
although internet searching revealed that Prague tour guides tell it all the
time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The source, I discovered, is Jiří
Weil’s grim, ironic novel Mendelssohn Is on the Roof, about the workings of the
Final Solution in Prague.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Nazis are
ridiculous, even stupid, but they are also relentless and thorough, so guess
which statue, in the novel, gets it in the end.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The tour guides have tidied up the story a little too much.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Through the awful subject, a distinctly Czech
ironic stance, like Kafka or Čapek, was visible. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Gray Ghost</i> (2007), William G. Tapply –The <a href="https://bookaroundthecorner.com/2019/06/16/bitch-creek-gray-ghost-dark-tiger-by-william-g-tapply/">French title of this detective novel</a> is <i>Casco Bay</i> – hey, that’s where I
live.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Londoners and Los Angelenos are
used to fictional characters passing right by their home, but I am not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Guest Lecture</i> (2023), Martin Riker<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Le bureau des affaires occultes</i> (2021), Éric
Fouassier – a historical mystery guest-starring Vidocq, the great
super-criminal turned super-detective, best known now as Balzac’s <a href="https://www.librairie-gallimard.com/livre/9782221218136-balzac-le-cycle-de-vautrin-le-pere-goriot-illusions-perdues-splendeurs-et-miseres-des-courtisanes-honore-de-balzac/">recurring mastermind Vautrin</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I will reserve
comment until <a href="https://bookaroundthecorner.com/2024/01/14/reading-plans-for-2024-i-might-be-too-optimistic/">Emma of Book Around the Corner</a> reads the novel in July, except to
say that it was good for my French. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I have a little Portuguese novel going, too, slowly, but it
is not finished yet.<o:p></o:p></p><br /><p></p>Amateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-40356500726542950762024-02-29T20:47:00.000-06:002024-02-29T20:47:10.890-06:00Metamorphoses, cantos 7 through 10 - more Heroides, more gore, more of everything - What meen my dreames then? what effect have dreames?<p><i>Metamorphoses</i> is fluid, quick, and ever-changing. Let’s look at cantos VII through X, which have
their share of famous stories, stories famous, or as famous as they are,
because of <i>Metamorphoses</i>. Venus
and Adonis, Baucis and Philemon, Orpheus and Eurydice, Pygmalion. Icarus – I can’t read the Icarus story
without Breughel’s painting in my mind, and perhaps even Auden’s poem about the
painting. The episode is now layered
with art, as are those other stories – Shakespeare, Gluck, Shaw, and so many
others.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Plus these cantos contain the Medea story at length and
quite a lot of Hercules.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Large parts of
these stories will still be fresh and perhaps overpowered a bit by the versions
by Euripides, major sources for Ovid.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">A funny case is the hunt for the Calydonian boar, the second
all-star team-up in Greek mythology after the Argonauts, in canto VIII.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My understanding is that based on surviving
titles the Calydonian boar and the soap opera among the various heroes was a
popular source for Athenian playwrights, second to Homer as a source of plots,
but none of those plays have survived, nor have any epic poems on the
subject.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our main source is now Ovid, who
treats the heroes with contempt, disemboweling them or running them up trees:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal">And Naestor to have lost his life was like by fortune ere<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The siege of Troie, but that he tooke his rist upon his
speare:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And leaping quickly up a tree that stoode hard by,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Did safely from the place behold his foe whom he did flie…<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Golding, 205)</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Or how about Telamon, an Argonaut, and the father of Ajax:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>…
whom taking to his feete<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">No heede at all for egernesse, a Maple roote did meete,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Which tripped up his heeles, and flat against the ground him
laide. (206)</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Some heroics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So although
Jason and Theseus are in the hunting party, most of these heroes are
second-stringers, fathers of the better-known characters in the <i>Iliad</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nestor will return in Canto XII, telling
stories to the <i>Iliad</i> heroes, including one even more gory than the boar
hunt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ovid is brilliant in his
repetitions.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Ovid’s details, his mix of big and small, are marvels.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Baucis and Philemon are the kind old couple
who feed the gods, in disguise, when their selfish neighbors will not:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal">… the trembling old lady set the table,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">correcting its imbalance with a potsherd<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">slipped underneath the shortest of its legs;<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">and when the table had been stabilized,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">she scrubbed its surface clean with fragrant mint.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Martin, VIII, 291)</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Everyone who writes about this scene mentions the potsherd,
because it is delightful. But <i>Metamorphoses</i> is full of such things.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I’ll end today by noting the continuity of <i>Metamorphoses</i>
with Ovid’s earlier, youthful <i>Heroides</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He often gives his heroines monologues, or sometimes even letters<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Medea, who was in <i>Heroides</i>, has a great
one at the beginning of Canto VII. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Atalanta has one in Canto X. The incestuous
Byblis writes an impassioned letter to her brother that could almost be a
monologue in a grim John Webster play, except that the lines have too many
syllables:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal">What meen my dreames then? what effect have dreames? And may
there bee<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Effect in dreames?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The Gods are farre in better case than wee.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">For why?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Gods
have matched with theyr susters as wee see.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>(Golding, IX, 239)</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Maybe I can blast through the last five cantos this weekend.<o:p></o:p></p>Amateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-80856823757136042952024-02-15T19:49:00.001-06:002024-02-15T19:49:19.956-06:00Daryl Hine's Ovid's Heroines - I, who could a dragon hypnotize<p>An anti-Valentine’s Day book now, Ovid’s <i>Heroides</i>
(25-16 BCE, somewhere in there), a collection of fictional letters in verse written
by mythical heroines to their no-good boyfriends and husbands. Many end in suicide. Dido castigating Aeneas, Phaedra mourning Hippolytus,
spurned Sappho jumping off a cliff.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Although strictly speaking written as letters, many of the poems
edge close to monologues and interiority, thus their large influence on the
European novel and the English play.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Short,
punchy, and I believe fairly easy, every Latin student would have spent some
time with the <i>Heroides</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A number
of older translations are student editions, trots; I have only read <i>Ovid’s
Heroines</i> (1991) by Daryl Hine, which is poetry by a poet.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Here is miserable Medea, who mostly tears into unfaithful,
ungrateful Jason, but sounds like she is talking to herself here:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal">My magic arts are gone, enchantment fails,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Not even mighty Hecate avails.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Daylight I loathe, I lie awake all night,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Uncomforted by sleep however slight,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And I, who could a dragon hypnotize,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Cannot induce myself to close my eyes<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">With drugs that proved so potent otherwise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(p. 25)</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">She has not murdered her own children yet, but in a
Shakespearian touch seems to come up with the idea by overhearing herself – “My
anger has enormities in store, / Which I’ll pursue” (27).<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Hine puts the poems in “chronological” order, much like <i>Metamorphoses</i>
– quote marks because the chronology is a fiction – so the book moves from
Hypermnestra <i>not</i> murdering her new husband, a story we would have read
in Aeschylus if the sequels to <i>The Suppliants</i> had survived through many
other stories we know from Greek plays, including a Homeric section, Helen and
Paris flirting and Penelope begging Ulysses to come home:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal">Think of your father’s peaceable demise<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">If only you were here to close his eyes.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But me, a girl the day you sailed away,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">You’d find a crone if you returned today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(107)</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Ovid ends with Roman stories (Dido and Aeneas – he is so
often in competition with the older Virgil) and Greek romances, most notably
the two letters between Hero and Leander, I believe the first telling of the
complete story.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">See, Christopher Marlowe appears again, with another story
of horny teenagers, this time based on poems Ovid likely write when he was
himself a teenager:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How often I’ve caressed<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Your clothes, left on the beach when you undressed<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">To swim the Hellespont!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>(“Hero to Leander,” 125)</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Poor Hero.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal">The waves, subsiding, promise calm to come,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And soon you’ll find your route less wearisome.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(131)</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I guess it is not really the complete story, since the
reader has to know how it ends.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Heroides</i> sometimes feels like a practice run for the
more sophisticated and complex <i>Metamorphoses</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But its form is new and its little touches a
pleasure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The psychology is pretty good
for a teenager.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The verse – well, I will
have to learn Latin to judge that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hine’s
version is a lot of fun.<o:p></o:p></p>Amateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-70998964414322372672024-02-14T19:55:00.003-06:002024-02-14T19:55:59.171-06:00Ovid's Amores and Marlowe's Ovid - Love slack’d my muse<p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Since it is Valentine’s Day, I’ll riffle through <i>Ovid’s
Amores</i> (16 BCE), as translated by Peter Green in <i>The Erotic Poems</i>
(1982) and Christopher Marlowe as <i>Ovid’s Elegies</i> (1599).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A statement of purpose:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal">I, Ovid, poet of my wantonness,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Born at Peligny, to write more address.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">So Cupid wills: far hence the severe!<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">You are unapt my looser lines to hear.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Let maids whom hot desire to husbands lead,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And rude boys, touch’d with unknown love, me read … (II.1,
first six lines, tr. Marlowe)</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Or, in more modern language:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal">A second batch of verses by that naughty provincial poet,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Naso, the
chronicler of his own<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Wanton frivolities; another of Love’s commissions (warning<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To puritans: This
volume is not for you).<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I want my works to be read, by the far-from-frigid virgin<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On fire for her
sweetheart, by the boy<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In love for the very first time…<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(tr. Green)</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Those both seem good to me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Green may in some sense be more accurate, and certainly makes fewer
errors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With a poet at Marlowe’s level
“error” is not such a useful concept, although <i>Ovid’s Elegies</i> is an early work,
if that is a useful idea for a poet who died at 29.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Marlowe likely made his translation when he
was a teenager, is what I am saying, and I wonder if it began as a Latin
exercise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Few students would finish all
49 elegies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But Marlowe was perhaps our
most Ovidian poet, one conceptual artist looting another.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ovid may well have been a teenager when he
began the <i>Amores</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One horny teen of
genius responding to another.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal">Before Callimachus one prefers me far;<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Seeing she likes my books, why should we jar?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Another rails at me, and that I write<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Yet I would lie with her, if that I might.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Marlowe, II.4)</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Is this Ovid or Marlowe?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Ovid, introducing his book, says that “With Muse prepar’d, I
meant to sing of arms” (I.1), like Virgil, but “Love slack’d my muse, and made
my numbers soft” and anyway he knows he is better suited to love than war.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Ovid is thorough.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
covers the field.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In I.4 he begs his
girlfriend not to sleep with her husband, and if she does “be your sport
unpleasant.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One elegy is about another
kind of erotic failure:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal">I blush, that being youthful, hot, and lusty,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I prove neither youth nor man, but old and rusty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(III.6)</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And another, the most shocking is about physical abuse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The abuser feels terrible:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal">Bescracth mine eyes, spare not my locks to break,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">(Anger will help thy hands though ne’er so weak.)<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And lest the sad signs of my crime remain,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Put in their place thy keembed hairs again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(I.7)</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Of course that is the important thing to the abuser.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The shock, my shock, is the contrast of the
lightness of tone with the subject.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Ovid’s psychology seems right.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Marlowe’s verse in <i>Ovid’s Elegies</i> is immature, compared to
“Hero and Leander” and the perfect “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” but
it is full of great lines and passages.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He is sometimes tricky to untangle, which is never a problem with Peter
Green.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What a pleasure to have the
choice.<o:p></o:p></p><br /><p></p>Amateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-58437807826778644052024-02-05T20:16:00.001-06:002024-02-13T11:23:55.550-06:00Ovid's Metamorphoses, Canto 6 - the sexual assaults - Because the lewdness of the Gods was so blazed in it.<p>Back to Ovid.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">First, I have just begun Paul Barolsky’s <i>Ovid and the
Metamorphoses of Modern Art from Boticelli to Picasso</i> (2014), a work of art
history <i>about</i> Ovid written in the <i>spirit</i> of Ovid.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The book is of the highest interest, and is a
long way from the catalogue of paintings that it might suggest, again, much
like <i>Metamorphoses</i>, the catalogue of myths that is not like that at
all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many thanks to the real-life Ovid
readers who pointed me towards this book.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Second, Cantos 6.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Canto 6 in particular is a good place to discuss the sexual assaults in <i>Metamorphoses</i>,
all of the rape and attempted rape.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ovid,
among the most pro-sex writers of the Roman world, treats the rapes as terrible
crimes, whether committed by gods or men.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The number of assaults is perhaps wearing, but Ovid’s attitude is not so
far out of line with what I will presume to call ours.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is more of a fatalist, I suppose.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Canto 5 ended with the a chorus of women turned into birds
for daring to challenge the Muses to a singing contest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Canto 6 begins with Arachne challenging
Athena – Minerva – to a weaving contest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Minerva weaves a self-congratulatory piece that includes, hilariously,
another time she won a prize (for creating the olive tree).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Also, in typical Ovidian fashion, four bonus
metamorphoses, all of poor saps punished for challenging gods, are depicted in
the corners.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Meanwhile Arachne creates a tapestry showing eighteen
examples of various gods, transformed into bulls and horses and grapes (?) and
so on, raping women.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unwise
strategically, but outstanding as a form of protest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And Arachne does not even lose the contest:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not Pallas, no,
nor spight it selfe could any quarrel picke<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To this hir worke:
and that did touch Minerva to the quicke.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Who thereupon did rende the cloth in pieces every whit,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Bicause the lewdnesse of the Gods was blased so in it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Golding, p. 140)</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Arachne becomes a spider.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Ovid takes every opportunity to blaze the lewdness of the Gods, but
since he does not really believe in them he does not fear punishment.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The rest of the canto is nothing but horror: the slaughter
of Niobe’s children by Apollo, described with Ovid’s usual delight in gore (“a
second arrow punched right through his throat,” Martin, 200), then a glance at
he flaying of Marsyas, “entirely one wound” (Martin, 205), and ending with the
worst, and likely now most famous of them all, the nightmarish rape and
mutilation of Philomela by her brutal, barbarian brother-in-law.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Golding spends five lines, Martin six, just
describing Philomela’s severed tongue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pure
horror and cannibalistic revenge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have
seen people wonder why Shakespeare wrote <i>Titus Andronicus</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If we think of young Will wanting to outdo
his favorites, Ovid and Seneca, it is clear enough what he is doing.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Anyway, my main point is that although Ovid certainly writes
about sexual assault a lot, he does not excuse it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He may perhaps indulge in the horror.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">A paradox of his style is how it feels so light.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Terrible subjects in a light, quick, elegant
style.<o:p></o:p></p>Amateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-81907686575150308302024-02-01T17:54:00.001-06:002024-02-01T17:54:21.901-06:00Books I read in January 2024 - as long, indeed, as this book, which hardly anyone will read by reason of its length<p>The best book I read was Ovid’s </span><i style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Metamorphoses</i>, which will also be the best thing I
read in February.</span> I gotta catch up on my
posts.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">One big book
down, and as a result my list of January books is more sensible.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">TRAVEL, let’s
call it<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Black Lamb
and Grey Falcon</span></i>
(1941), Rebecca West – I will try to write this up a bit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I should find something in 1,150 pages to
write about. The quote up in the title is from here, obviously, p. 773 of the Penguin paperback.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal">FICTION<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Ten Nights
of Dream</span></i> (1905-8),
Natsume Sōseki<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Arrowroot</span></i> (1930) &<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Secret
History of the Lord of Musahi</span></i>
(1935), Junichirō Tanizaki<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Go Down,
Moses</span></i> (1942), William
Faulkner – the end of the great run.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Was
it Hollywood that got him, or the booze, or just the inevitable movement of
time?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Glass
Bead Game</span></i> (1943),
Hermann Hesse – a Utopian novel about a society, hundreds of years in the
future that puts the highest value on Bach and mathematics and pretends that
Modernism – heck, Romanticism – did not happen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>A huge Romantic himself, Hesse writes a spiritual sequel to Adalbert
Stifter’s <i>Indian Summer</i>, salvaging Germanic culture from Austro-Prussian
neuroticism and Hitler.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A strange book.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Watt</span></i> (1945 / 1953), Samuel Beckett –
meanwhile Beckett killed time in southern France carrying messages for the Resistance
and creating logic puzzles in the form of a novel.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal">POETRY<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Ceremony
and Other Poems</span></i> (1950),
Richard Wilbur<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Xaipe</span></i> (1950), E. E. Cummings<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Inward
Companion</span></i> (1950),
Walter de la Mare – Wilbur’s first book; late books by Cummings and de la Mare,
all a treat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I didn’t get to the Stevie
Smith’s book from 1950, presumably also a complete delight, or to Neruda’s <i>Canto
General</i>, presumably something less pure.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal">IN FRENCH<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Selected
Poems</span></i> (1934-88), René
Char – several years ago I read the right-hand pages, the ones in English.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This time I read the left side.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Le Seuil
Le Sable: poésies complètes, 1943-1988 </span></i>(1991), Edmond Jabès – before writing the mammoth <i>Book
of Questions</i> that made his reputation, Jabès published a series of
Surrealist, Max Jacob-like chapbooks in Egypt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Those make up <i>Le Seuil</i>, “the threshold,” I assume he means to his
major work of later decades.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I thought
they were petty good on their own terms, but I have a taste for that sort of
thing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wonder if Surrealist poems make
for bad French learning, since the whole point is to confuse context.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>Le Sable</i>, “the sand,” the small number
of words that make up the late poems of Jabès.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Trois
chambres à Manhattan</span></i>
(1945), Georges Simenon – a French actor, nearly divorced, picks up a
woman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He doesn’t like her, he loves
her, he becomes jealous, obsessive, submissive, and so on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s it, no murder, almost no melodrama,
just Simenon on love and sex and maleness, but without his addiction to
prostitutes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Readable but kinda dull.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> I have almost finished my Portuguese textbook and have begun an actual class. Reading will follow at some point.</o:p></span></p>
Amateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-46510630286911170092024-01-26T19:32:00.004-06:002024-01-31T21:27:44.486-06:00Some lesser works of Sōseki and Tanizaki - deep in the earth directly beneath Lady Kikyō’s toilet<p><a href="https://dolcebellezza2.wordpress.com/2023/12/31/japanese-literature-challenge-17-review-site/">Dolce Bellezza is running her 17th Japanese Literature Challenge</a>. Amazing, well done, etc.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I read some short works for it, which I will pile up here: three
short works by Natsume Sōseki, collected in a Tuttle volume that looks like it
is titled <i>Ten Nights of Dream Hearing Things The Heredity of Taste</i> and a
pair of Junichirō Tanizaki novellas paired up in <i>The Secret History of the
Lord of Musashi and Arrowroot</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sōseki
and Tanizaki <a href="https://wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com/2023/02/sosekis-kokoro-and-two-tanizaki-genre.html">are exactly who I read last year</a>, and quite possibly who I read
for many years more.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The translators, in the introduction, emphasize that the Sōseki
pieces are “lesser” although “not unimportant,” but I enjoyed them more than the
one other work of Sōseki’s I’ve read, the short novel <i>Kokoro</i> (1914), by
reputation a great work, I presume more for its culturally significant subject
than its art.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But perhaps these stories
are like <span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">é</span>tudes,
technical exercises no matter how catchy the melody.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“Ten Nights of Dream” (1908), for example, is a series of
ten dreams, each a few pages long, perfect newspaper fodder.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some pieces are pure surrealism, accumulations
of symbols, while others are little parables.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>A man dreams that he is watching a famous 13th century sculptor at
work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is told that the sculptor does
not create the image of a god, but rather finds the god within the wood, the Michelangelo
conceit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When the narrator tries to
carve a god, he botches it again and again, concluding that there are no longer
gods in the wood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>See, a little parable.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The dreamer spends the last dream knocking pigs into a
bottomless pit – “still the pigs, more pigs and more, kept grunting up toward
him” – before falling in the pit himself (63).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I have a strong taste for this type of thing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But any imaginative write can knock out fake
dreams, I know.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Similarly, “Hearing Things” (1905) is about an anxious man
who becomes hopped up on ghost stories and begins thinking ghosts are
everywhere:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p>“It’s all imagination,” he immediately went on, continuing
his conversation with Gen-san.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“You
think to yourself that they’re frightening, so the ghosts get uppity and then,
of course, they start wanting to come out” (110).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></blockquote><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">That’s the narrator’s barber, deflating him so that the
story can end happily.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The story is more
about the literary representation of the uncanny than about anything actually
uncanny.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So again, an amusing exercise.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“The Heredity of Taste” (1906) is the most interesting, a series
of <i>Tristram Shandy</i>-like digressions that end up telling the story of a
soldier killed in the Russo-Japanese war, which is treated tragically under the
narrator’s comic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And the lack of
jingoism was interesting.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p>It was a wonderful time when Kō-san waved the flag, but I’ve
been told that where he lies at the bottom of that ditch he’s just as dead and
just as cold as any other soldier.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(145)</blockquote><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Aiko Itō and Graeme Wilson translated the Sōsekis.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I have enjoyed – again this is just taste – Tanizaki’s historical
fiction, his stories about samurai and warlords, more than his contemporary
stories, and <i>Arrowroot</i> (1930) and <i>The Secret History of the Lord of
Musashi</i> (1935) were not exceptions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>Lord
Musashi</i> is about a samurai with a sadistic sexual kink, a common Tanizaki
preoccupation, this time involving severed heads, and more specifically severed
noses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I suppose the historical setting is
absolutely necessary, since such a story set in contemporary Manchuria would be
too disgusting to read.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tanizaki
pretends to have found unlikely original sources describing Lors Musashi’s sex
life while also explaining obscurities of the actual historical events.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p>In other words, Terukatsu now found himself deep in the earth
directly beneath Lady Kikyō’s toilet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>(74)</blockquote><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It is that kind of story, with the usual Japanese political
and military events caused by motives stranger than the norm.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the same page is a reference to another
story about “the beautiful Heian court lady who tantalized a suitor with a copy
of her feces fashioned out of cloves” which Tanizaki finally wrote up fifteen
years later in <i>Captain Shigemoto’s Mother</i> (1949), which I read last January.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Arrowroot</i> is a gentler thing, an example of the distinctive
Japanese genre of the literary travel story that dates back at least to the 9th
century <i>Tale of Ise</i><u>,</u> where characters visit beautiful or historic
sites in large part because of the poems or plays or stories about them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this case, Tanizaki wants to explore a
canyon which perhaps sheltered an exiled warlord but more importantly along the
way is able to see a <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>drum make of fox
skins that is featured in a famous Nōh play.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The narrator is perfectly aware that the drum he sees is not the real
thing, and the warlord cannot possibly have lived in the canyon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The “real” association is false, but the
literary side, the story, remains true.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The story is still the story.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The translator, Anthony Chambers, in a note about magical
Japanese foxes, writes that “[f]oxes are so partial to tempura and fried tofu
that they can be summoned by setting out these delicacies” (201).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Me too, me too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just try it.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Meredith, thanks as always for the push to read these Japanese
books.<o:p></o:p></p>Amateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-20739667370849458562024-01-21T20:29:00.001-06:002024-01-21T20:29:46.154-06:00Metamorphoses Cantos IV and V - gore, Pyramus and Thisbe, and a rap battle<p>Bacchus continues his reign of terror in Canto IV of <i>Metamorphoses</i>
by turning three sisters who refuse to believe in his divinity into what “we in
English language Backes or Reermice call the same” (Golding, 99) “[Or, as we
say, bats.]” (Martin, 140). How sad that
we lost the word “reermice.” But what is
new here is that the three sisters, before their transformation, tell stories
that also feature transformation, one after the other, the most famous of which
is Pyramus and Thisbe.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The Pyramus and Thisbe story is not a mythological story but
a tragic romance of the ludicrous sort, as Shakespeare saw perfect for
travesty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Charles Martin shifts his rhetoric
to emphasize the ridiculous side of the story (warning: gore ahead):<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“It was as when a
water pipe is ruptured<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">where the lead has rotted, and it springs a leak:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">a column of water goes hissing through the hole<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">and parts the air with its pulsating thrusts;<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">splashed with his gore, the tree’s pale fruit grows dark;<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">blood soaks its roots and surges up to dye<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">the hanging berries purple with its color.” (Martin, 128)</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This just-so story about why mulberries turn purple is the
bit of Ovid <a href="https://wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-story-of-what-had-happened-was.html">Willa Cather borrowed</a> for <i>O Pioneers!</i> (1913).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shakespeare for some reason omits theses
special effects (“With the help of a surgeon he might yet recover and prove an
ass”). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Somehow Arthur Golding’s
translation does not sound so silly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
Martin has <i>A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream</i> behind him; silly is the only way
to go.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The Canto ends with another romance, this time purely
mythological, the Perseus story, full of metamorphoses, not just everyone turning
to stone from Perseus’s super-weapon, but the creation of coral, another
just-so story tossed in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Perseus saga
shifts, in Canto V, to another parody of Homer and other epics, an insane scene
of mass slaughter as gory as a Hollywood action movie, and part of the joke is
that the scene goes on forever, ten blood-soaked pages in Martin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One poor schmuck dies when his sword rebounds
into his own throat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like an action
movie, it is not just the number of kills, but the variety.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Every fifth book of <i>Metamorphoses</i> ends with a <i>performance</i>,
in this case two, a song contest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Martin
shifts meters, letting one side rap and giving the other a loosey-goosey
irregular five-beat line that somehow feels closer to Golding’s long lines but
without the rhyme.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s how Ovid
delivers the story of Proserpina (another just-so, why there is winter).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The rap is not in today’s style, but more
like that of “Guns and Ships” from <i>Hamilton</i>, or maybe “Lazy Sunday.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The rappers, challenging the Muses
themselves, lose the battle and are turned into, what else, birds, magpies
according to Golding,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal">Now also being turnde to Birdes they are as eloquent<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">As ere they were, as chattring still, as much to babling bent.
(Golding, 135)</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Ten cantos left.<o:p></o:p></p>Amateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-18701145759367299992024-01-20T18:10:00.003-06:002024-01-20T18:11:30.399-06:00Ovid's Metamorphoses, Cantos II and III - or just III, it turns out - And Cole and Swift, and little Woolfe<p><a href="https://wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com/2023/12/ovids-metamorphoses-canto-i-of-shapes.html">A month ago I wrote about the first Canto</a> of Ovid’s <i>Metamorphoses</i>. Now I will move through the Cantos two or
three at a time, just leafing through the books, really, with luck getting at
what Ovid is doing. Cantos II and III
today.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Ovid established his cosmology and created the world in Canto
I.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now he is ready to do what he loves
best, turning innocent young women into plants.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Or water, or constellations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
turning innocent and less innocent men into stags and snakes, and writing
just-so stories.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The gods are highly human, impulsive and wicked, sometimes more
like impersonal, uncaring forces, and other times more like all-powerful
dictators.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The rulers, the philandering
Jove and the wronged wife Juno, so jealous and petty that she loses any
sympathy, are especially menacing, but really danger can come from any direction
at any time. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mere humans are also
generally terrible if they have any power at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s the ethos of <i>Metamorphoses</i>.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Canto III is full of the revenge of Juno.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is especially awful to Semele, the mother
of Bacchus.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She plays the Snow White
trick, visiting to her as “a crone / with whitened hair and wrinkle-furrowed
skin” (Martin, III, 101) to goad her into making a request from Jove that will
cause her death – “incinerated by Jove’s gift” (103).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s all Semele’s fault then, not Juno’s.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Little fetus Bacchus is of course unharmed, and, sewed up in
his father’s thigh, becomes the second child after Athena to whom Jove gives
birth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The gods live in a strange world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An entire series of Bacchus stories follow in
later Cantos, some familiar from our reading of Euripides.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ovid is adept at interweaving the mythic story
cycles, turning them into little sagas, into history.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">For example, earlier in Canto III Cadmus founds Thebes by
defeating a dragon and sowing the teeth to grow warriors from the earth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A series of Thebes stories, mostly tragic,
follow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Eventually (Canto IV) Cadmus and
his wife will themselves will be transformed into dragons. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They live in a cave on the Dalmatian coast,
occasionally terrorizing the locals until the 4th century when St. Hilarion makes
them immolate themselves, presumably converting them to Christianity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>See Rebecca West’s <i>Black Lamb and Grey
Falcon</i> (1943), her giant book about Yugoslavia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Without doubt it was Cadmus, it was
literature” (252).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She does not actually
see the cave, though, but takes the word of St. Jerome.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">Canto III – not sure why I am only pulling things from Canto
III – features another of Ovid’s modes, explicit parody, in Actaeon’s catalogue
of hounds, a Homeric pastiche, comic but grimly so, since the dogs are about to
tear poor Actaeon to pieces:</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
Blab, Fleetewood, Patch whose flecked skin with sundrie spots was spred:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">And Tawnie full of duskie haires that over all did grow,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">And Tempest best of footmanshipe in holding out at length.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">And Cole and Swift, and little Woolfe… (Golding, 68)</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And “shaggie Rugge,” Jollyboy, the entire pack.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wonder if Shakespeare was thinking of this
passage when he named King Lear’s little lap dogs.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Actaeon’s metamorphosis and death is gory and detailed, as
many of Ovid’s transformations will be, but I find Echo’s change to be the most
horrible:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">unsleeping grief wasted her sad body,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">reducing her to dried out skin and bones,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">then voice and bones only; her skeleton<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">turned, they say, into stone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Martin, 106)</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">More of that to come in <i>Metamorphoses</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More of everything.<o:p></o:p></p>Amateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-34254699868714206952024-01-14T20:19:00.000-06:002024-01-14T20:19:12.640-06:00The Best Books of 2024<p>For the last year and a half I read short books,
mostly, which was psychologically satisfying and anyway necessary to fit the
available energy and concentration. Now,
though, back on my feet, I hope, I am ready to read long books again.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Long, and I mean it, like Rebecca West’s 1,150 page <i>Black
Lamb and Grey Falcon</i> (1941), a novelistic tour through Yugoslavia mixed
with a fragmented Gibbon-like history of the region.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am almost halfway through without losing
much enthusiasm.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">My chronological drift has taken me into the 1940s, and I
plan to read a number of the major works of the decade.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nothing else I am likely to read comes close
to West’s monster, although <i>The Second Sex</i> tops 700 pages.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But in the last couple of years I passed over
a number of likely books because they were too long, so now is the time to gather
them up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is <i>A Glastonbury Romance</i>
(1932) really almost 1,200 pages?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Was
John Cowper Powys out of his mind?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Gertrude
Stein’s <i>The Making of Americans</i> (1925), under a thousand, seems almost reasonable, Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s <i>Journey to the End of the Night</i>
(1932) a breeze at 600, except I hope to read it in French, and <i>Finnegans
Wake</i> (1939) practically a novella, except that it is written in the style
of <i>Finnegans Wake</i>.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Yes, of course, this post is some kind of post-surgery overreaction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now I will read <i>Finnegans Wake</i>!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now I will read <i>The Tale of Genji</i>!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And so on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I am aware.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although last summer,
wondering what the first readers of <i>Finnegans Wake</i> saw, I read the first
four or five installments published in 1924 and 1925 under the noncommittal
title “Work in Progress” and found the idea of reading more plausible.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I greatly enjoyed my little immersion in Indian literature a
couple of months ago, where I mixed classical epics and poetry with modern
novels.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I want to do that again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Several times even.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">First: Persian literature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Davis_(translator)#">Dick Davis</a> has been publishing piece of Ferdawsi’s <i>Shahnameh</i> (1010)
for decades.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/541038/shahnameh-by-abolqasem-ferdowsi-translated-by-dick-davis-foreword-by-azar-nafisi/">latest version</a> (2016)
is just under a thousand pages; I doubt that is half of the entire epic, likely
the longest ever written by a single person. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Along with Ferdawsi I could read Attar’s <i>The
Conference of the Birds</i> (1177) and the poetry of Rumi (12th c.) and Hafez (13th
c.), all of which have been translated by Davis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe, looking at modern novels, I could try <i>My
Uncle Napoleon</i> (1973) by Iraj Pezeshkzad, translated by, let’s see, Davis
again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Any Persian expedition is likely
to become the Dick Davis show.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well, it
is a great lifetime achievement, and he is a fine poet in his own right, as I
know from his 2009 collection <i>Belonging: Poems</i>.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Second: Arabic literature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><i>The One Thousand and One Nights</i>, not necessarily such a long book
depending on exactly which texts are included in the translation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The 2021 <i>Annotated Arabian Nights</i> <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9781631493638">is a beauty</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am not sure what else I might
read.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A browse through the <a href="https://www.libraryofarabicliterature.org/">Library of Arabic Literature</a> will find something.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Naguib Mahfouz’s <i>Midaq Alley</i> is from 1947, so that is an easy
choice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wonder what his earlier novels
about ancient Egypt are like?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Third: Japanese literature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><i>The Tale of Genji</i> (11th c.) and <i>The Pillow Book</i> (1002) alongside
Ivan Morris’s <i>The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan</i>
(1964).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then move to <i>The Tale of
Heike</i> (14th c.) and some more recent works, more Sōseki and Tanizaki and
Kawabata, maybe.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Fourth: Chinese literature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>One of the early novels, like <i>Romance of the Three Kingdoms</i> (14th
c.), likely in some still enormous abridgement, followed by <i>The Story of the
Stone</i> (1791-2).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then, or alongside, some novels
from the 1940s, Eileen Chang’s <i>Love in a Fallen City</i> (1943) and Qian
Zhongshu’s <i>Fortress Besieged</i> (1947).<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">For example.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Let’s
say.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe these are the best books of
2024 and 2025.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or 2035.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No, look, one big book per month is twelve
books.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe I really get ten read, or
eight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s pretty good.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s not pure bluster.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">If anybody would like to recommend a Persian, Arabic, etc.
book, short or long, classical or contemporary, please do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If
anyone would like to read along with one of these beasts, please let me know.
They all seem like terrible readalong books, since they are exactly the books
where the pace should not be forced and the reader’s right to give up halfway –
a tenth of the way – through is paramount.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Still, let me know.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Now I need to get writing about Ovid.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Speaking of whom, if anyone wants to continue
reading Roman literature in my company, I am completely open to the idea.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Let’s say you have joined me with Plautus,
Terence, Lucretius, Ovid, Seneca the playwright, and Seneca the Stoic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We still have Virgil, lots of great lyric and
satirical poets, <i>Pharsalia</i>, <i>Satyricon</i>, Cicero, a shelf of famous
historians I have never read, and St. Augustine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lots of interesting things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Julius Caesar, I’ve never read Caesar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Let me know, let me know.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Thanks for indulging the silliest-sounding thing I have ever written here.</p>Amateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.com30tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-64212479550217509852024-01-04T19:20:00.001-06:002024-01-04T19:20:45.127-06:00The best books of 2023, in a sense - "Aren't you tired of reading?"<p>Last January seems even more distant than usual at this time
of year. It will likely not surprise
anyone that 2023 now comes with a strong feeling of Before and After. So I will indulge in the “<a href="https://ignaciosanchezprado.substack.com/p/my-favorite-books-of-2023-part-two">facetious and silly</a>”
exercise of identifying the best books I read in 2023. Sorting through the actual books of the year
is also a good hobby, but not mine.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I mean “best” in the sense that the books are the most imaginative,
artful, innovative, beautiful up to a point, linguistically rich or at least
interesting, and still generative of other significant works of art.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Obviously one can value other things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My list of favorites of the year would be
similar but somewhat different, including more silly stuff.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b>Plato’s dialogues</b> (4th cent. BCE), of which I read almost
all, were easily the best book or books I read last year, and I mean best as
literature, as invention and story-telling and linguistic play and all of
that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As the extended development of one
particular character, approaching the novelistic.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">A few other books – Lucretius’s <i>The Way Things Are</i> (1st
BCE) and Lucian’s <i>Satires</i> and <i>Dialogues</i> (2nd CE) – would make
this list on their own, but I am tempted to add everything we read as part of
the march through Greek and Greekish philosophy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The pre-Socratics, Diogenes, and Seneca were
all richer because they were part of the project, because they conversed with
Plato.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No, reading does not always have
to be a <i>course of study</i>, it does not always have to have a <i>syllabus</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes, though. Many thanks to everyone who read along with any of this. It was a real help to me.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The great highlights of my little post-surgery course in
<b>Indian literature</b>, in Sanskrit, Tamil, Kannada, and English, were the obvious:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Mahabharata</i> (2nd BCE – 2nd CE / 1973) in the
William Buck retelling<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Bhagavad-Gita</i> (added to the above at some point) in Barbara Stoler Miller’s
translation<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-indent: -0.5in;"><i>The Ramayana</i>
(2nd BCE – 2nd CE / 1972) in the R. K. Narayan retelling<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">All just thrilling stuff.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Narayan is explicit
that he compresses anything he does not find so thrilling the later classical
poetry and modern novels and Peter Adamson and Jonardon Ganeri’s <i>Classical
Indian Philosophy</i> (2020) became more interesting with the ancient epics behind
them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Vivek Narayan’s 600-page
counter-epic <i>After</i> (2022) would not exist without them, since the thing
it is “after” is the <i>Ramayana</i>.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The best <b>novels and the like</b>:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Little Novels of Sicily</i> (1883), Giovanni Verga, the
D. H. Lawrence translation<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Death of Ivan Ilych</i> (1886), Leo Tolstoy<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Ulysses</i> (1922), James Joyce – in its own category,
almost , although what tedium in passages, including in some of the most
brilliant, like the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter that parodies the bulk of English
literature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I last read this book I
could identify, I don’t know, the Dickens chunk, while now I could see almost
everyone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is some kind of progress, I
guess, in the study of literature, to be able to identify a Carlyle or Pater
parody.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Invitation to a Beheading</i> (1936), Vladimir Nabokov,
plus the most extraordinary of the last half of his <i>Collected Stories</i>, “Signs
and Symbols” and “The Vane Sisters” and so on.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Grapes of Wrath</i> (1939), John Steinbeck – a novel
written in many modes, which should have endeared it to postmodernists, except
that two of the modes, the sentimental and didactic, are low prestige.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or used to be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pynchon and DeLillo readers should revisit the
novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is more of a systems novel, an
omnibook, I remembered.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I enjoyed several
other more minor Steinbeck books last year, but none were like this one.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Ficciones</i> (1944), Jorge Luis Borges - fundamental<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Leaning Tower and Other Stories</i> (1944), Katherine
Anne Porter, especially the cluster of Miranda stories, “The Old Order.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Delta Wedding</i> (1946), Eudora Welty – the richness,
the fluidity, the insights.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>En attendant Godot</i> (1952), Samuel Beckett – somewhat different
in French than English.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Leopard</i> (1958), Giuseppe di Lampedusa<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Invisible Cities</i> (1972) and <i>If on a winter’s night
a traveler</i> (1979), Italo Calvino - the title quotation is from the last page of the latter.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Every one of these I had read before, although mostly long,
long ago.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Some <b>books of poems</b>:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>L'Art d'être grand-père</i> (1877), Victor Hugo – <i>The Art
of Being a Grandfather</i>, the great thunderer as an old softy.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>La jeune parque</i> (1917) and <i>Charmes</i> (1922),
Paul Valéry<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i>Poesias Heteronominos</i> (1914-34), Fernando Pessoa – a
collection of the various Pessoan personas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I wanted to read Pessoa in Portuguese and I did, even if I doubt I could
do it again right now,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe Alberto
Caeiro, the shepherd poet.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>A Marvelous World</i> (1921-52), Benjamin Peret –
Surrealism as a principle of life.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Autumn Journal</i> (1939), Louis MacNeice<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Transport to Summer</i> (1947), Wallace Stevens<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Poems of Paul Celan</i> (1947-76), tr. Michale Hamburger
– as if I understood these.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus</i> (2007), X. J. Kennedy<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>This Afterlife: Selected Poems</i> (2022), A. E.
Stallings<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Seren of the Wildwood</i> (2023), Marly Youmans – a
genuinely mysterious fairy tale poem, too mysterious for me to say anything
about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If Youmans, a longtime Friend
of the Blog, were more of an abstraction, as most authors are to me, I would
say she is in a “major phase.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Next up: the best books of 2024.</p><p></p>Amateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-90933551408085743032024-01-02T19:55:00.000-06:002024-01-02T19:55:09.897-06:00Books I read in December 2023 - No one’s worse than you, she says<p>Lots of short fantasy fiction this month, perhaps everything
in the first section except the May Sarton novel and Eugene O’Neill play,
balanced by a complementary pair of Holocaust memoirs.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">NOVELS, STORIES & A PLAY</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Ocean of Story</i>, Vol. 1 (11th cent.),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Somadeva, tr. C. H. Tawney, ed. N. M. Penzer
(“<a href="https://aaww.org/favorite-books-in-translation-asia/">Penzer is a maniac</a>”)<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Case of Charles Dexter Ward</i> (1927 / 1941),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>H. P. Lovecraft – the beginning of Lovecraft’s
comic masterpiece.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yes, also cosmic,
sure, why not, but mostly hilarious.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The English Teacher</i> (1945),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>R. K. Narayan<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>1984</i> (1949),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>George Orwell – decades ago I had not understood this novel as a response
to the Blitz.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To totalitarianism,
obviously, but Orwell also wonders if London will ever really be rebuilt, if
rationing will ever end.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a good
question.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Palm-wine Drinkard</i> (1952),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Amos Tutuola – another lively folktale
pastiche novel, like the Brazilian one, <i>Macunaima</i>, I read last month.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>A Shower of Summer Days</i> (1952),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>May Sarton – Sarton has caught my attention
as a Maine writer, but that was her old age.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>For some reason here, earlier, she wrote a quite good Irish country
house novel which is also, as my wife pointed out, a comic remake of <i>Elective
Affinities</i>.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Long Day's Journey into Night</i> (1956),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Eugene O'Neill – so much poetry quoted in
this play.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I last read it, let’s
say thirty-five years ago, what did I know about Swinburne or Dowson or
Baudelaire.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or anyone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had heard of Shakespeare.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Elric of Meliboné</i> (1972),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Michael Moorcock – funny, but not as funny as
Lovecraft.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Last read at least forty
years ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A friend collected the
Lovecrafts and Moorcocks, while I assembled Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray
Mouser books. An education in the classics.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Living End</i> (1979),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Stanley Elkin<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Wakefulness</i> (2007),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Jon Fosse<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Olav's Dreams</i> (2012),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Jon Fosse<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Weariness</i> (2014),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Jon Fosse – aka, the three novellas bundled together, <i>Trilogy</i>, or as it says at the top of every
odd-numbered page, <i>Triology</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
Dalkey Archive blurb claims a “rich web of historical, cultural, and
theological allusions” which was utterly invisible to me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I especially enjoyed the oblique murder story,
or more correctly the obliqueness of the murder story.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal">You’re awful, the Girl says<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">You’re the worst guy in the whole of Bj<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">ø</span>rgvin,
she says<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">No one’s worse than you, she says<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">No everything is awful, she says (p. 100)</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Dangers of Smoking in Bed</i> (2017),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mariana Enriquez – highbrow horror from
Chile.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is always interesting to see
what is going on in the literature of the South American south, even if the
recently resurgent genre is not really for me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It can’t scare me (see Lovecraft above) but it can still disgust me.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">POETRY<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Ovid's Heroines</i> (25-16 BCE / 1991),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ovid / Daryl Hine<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Ovid's Elegies</i> (16 BCE / 1599 CE),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ovid / Christopher Marlowe<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Owl and the Nightingale</i> (12-13 cent.),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>anonymous, tr. Simon Armitage<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Collected Poems 1921-1951</i> (1952),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Edwin Muir<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I hope to write about the Ovid books soon. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are not at the level of <i>Metamorphoses</i>,
but what is.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">MEMOIR<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Smoke over Birkenau</i> (1986),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Liana Millu<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Still Alive</i> (1992/2001),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ruth Kluger – please see <a href="https://eigermonchjungfrau.blog/2019/01/26/beyond-night-a-holocaust-remembrance-reading-list/">Dorian Stuber’s blog</a>
for notes on both of these books.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">IN FRENCH AND PORTUGUESE<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>La condition humaine</i> (1933),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>André Malraux<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Bacchus</i> (1951),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Jean Cocteau<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Rhinocéros</i> (1959),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Eugène Ionesco<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Still plugging away at <i>Bom Dia!</i>, my Portuguese
textbook.<o:p></o:p></p>Amateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-84302551249405047692023-12-18T17:00:00.001-06:002023-12-18T17:01:20.128-06:00Ovid's Metamorphoses, Canto I, "Of shapes transformde to bodies straunge"<p>Some notes on Canto I of Ovid’s <i>Metamorphosis</i> (8 CE). Just some of the things I am looking for or
enjoying while reading Ovid’s epic of “forms changed / into new bodies.” (tr. Charles Martin, 2004, p. 15). Or, per Arthur Golding (1567, p. 3 of the
Paul Dry paperback) “Of shapes transformde to bodies straunge.”</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I’ve been reading Charles Martin first, then Arthur Golding, who is difficult due to archaic words and twisty syntax but also his long fourteen syllable rhyming
couplets, which perhaps contribute to the twistiness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Golding is occasionally magnificent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Martin, in modern blank verse, is much
clearer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As I write about Ovid, I’ll hop
from one to the other.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Canto I begins, after Ovid’s brief statement of purpose,
with the creation of the world, an imitation of Hesiod, a metamorphosis on the
grandest scale, not the usual mode of the poem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“No kinde of thing had proper shape” (AG, 3), a violation of Ovidian
principles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The way Ovid describes Chaos
– “a huge rude heape” and so on (3) – will look familiar to anyone who read the
pre-Socratic philosophers with me long, long ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chaos resembles the featureless, motionless
sphere of <a href="https://wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com/2023/01/paradoxes-and-epistemology-early-greek.html">Parmenides and Zeno</a>, while its transformation by a surprisingly vague
and unnamed God seems borrowed from Empedocles and perhaps Lucretius’s <i>On
the Nature of Things</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Later, after
the great flood, Ovid describes the generation and evolution of animals in a
way that also sounds something like <a href="https://wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com/2023/01/heraclitus-and-empedocles-everything.html">the weird eyeball monsters ofEmpedocles</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As in Heraclitus, in Ovid “everything
flows.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Next up is the Golden Age, where Martin has the pre-agricultural
people living off of<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>fruit from
the arbutus tree,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">wild strawberries on mountainsides, small cherries,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">and acorns fallen from Jove’s spreading oak.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(19)</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin is staying close to Ovid’s text.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Golding has<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal">Did live by Raspis, heppes and hawes, by cornelles, plummes
and cherries,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">By sloes and apples, nuttes and peares, and lothsome bramble
berries,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And by the acorns dropt on ground, from Joves brode tree in
fielde.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(6)</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Raspberries, rosehips, cornelian cherries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is a great example of Golding’s tendency
to expand, but also, charmingly how on occasion he becomes very English, blending
Ovid’s Roman landscape with his own green and pleasant land.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Let’s see.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here’s the
monstrous Lycaon turning into a wolf, the first of so many human to animal
metamorphoses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ovid loves the details of
the transformation, a good part of <i>his</i> tendency to expand the old story,
adding “foam… at the corners of his mouth” (24) and so on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Note that the Lycaon story is narrated by a
character, by Jove.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ovid uses every
narrative device he knows, direct narration, speech, songs, stories within
stories (although not to the depths of <i>A Thousand and One Nights</i>), anything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The transformation of poor Syrinx into reeds
is told within the story of how poor Io turned into a cow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We met her on stage long, long ago in <i>Prometheus
Bound</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The transitions, the metamorphoses of one story into
another, are central to Ovid’s art.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
is not writing a catalogue but rather a single continuous story built from many
seamlessly linked stories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well, the
move from Io to Phaethon, where Phaethon is friends with Io’s son, seems thin
to me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But some of Ovid’s transitions
are themselves beautiful, marvels of storytelling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Related is how he ends cantos in the idle of
a story, the interruption just another way for the narrative to flow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The story has just begun, so I have to come
back to it.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I feel I have skipped a thousand interesting things, just in
the first Canto.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">With the holiday near, I will likely not write anything for
a couple of weeks at least.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have read
all the way through Canto II, so there is no need to worry about catching
up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Daryl Hine’s <i>Ovid’s Heroines</i>
and Christopher Marlowe’s youthful <i>Ovid’s Elegies</i> also kept me
entertained; I should write note about each of them in January.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ovid is my kind of fun.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Have a good holiday.<o:p></o:p></p>Amateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-67610163308184783602023-12-04T20:08:00.001-06:002023-12-04T20:08:22.751-06:00Let's read Ovid's Metamorphoses! And perhaps more.<p>Who would like to read Ovid’s <i>Metamorphoses</i> (8 CE)
with me? We have had some discussion of
this good idea, and I feel I am up to it now.
Up to <i>writing</i> about it.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Metamorphoses</i> is a compendium of Greek myths that feature
transformation, which turns out to be hundreds of pages worth of stories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ovid’s poem is not a catalog of any kind, but
rather an original weaving of the myths into a new form.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ovid enacts the title of the poem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A translation should <i>flow</i>.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The translations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
appeal of the 1567 Arthur Golding translation is it is the Ovid that Shakespeare
read.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I believe Jonathan Bate’s <i>Shakespeare
and Ovid</i> (1994) is the place to go for the details.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The George Sandys translation (1621-6), in heroic couplets,
is superb but sadly Shakespeare did not read it, so it loses the celebrity
boost.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is likely – a bit of trivia – the
first English book written in the Americas (Sandys was for a time treasurer of
the Virginia Company).<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">A 1717 version by many hands, including Dryden, Pope and
other great poets of the time, as well as some of the duds, sounds interesting and
was the default Ovid translation for a century but in my experience the
translations of this period, like Pope’s Homer, wander pretty far from the
original, and I would at least like to pretend I am reading Ovid.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Skipping way ahead, I have no opinion about the many modern
translations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Twenty years ago I read
some samples of Charles Martin’s flexible 2004 version which I liked a lot, so
I’m going to read that one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I am
sure several of the other options are good.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I would advise against the many 19th and early 20th century Ovid
translations written as trots for Latin students.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are likely better and worse, but they seem
like dull stuff.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ovid should be
translated by a poet.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">What should the schedule be?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><i>Metamorphoses</i> has fifteen chapters that typically fill thirty to
forty pages.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Normally I would read one a
day with some breaks, but three weeks seems too fast.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Let’s say I read a couple cantos a week.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps I will read Martin <i>and</i>
Golding, which will slow me down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Eight
weeks, with some slippage – December, January, maybe into February.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or is that too long?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Please advise.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I’ll try to write something once a week.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I also hope to fit in more – much of the rest of – Ovid, who
I suppose is my favorite Roman poet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The <i>Heroides</i> are a collection of monologues or
letters sent by Greek heroines (and Sappho) to their lovers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were written by a young, even teenage,
Ovid, circa 20 BCE.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They, too, were a
significant influence on Shakespeare, on his great heroines, and on the
European novel generally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Daryl Hine’s <i>Ovid’s
Heroines</i> (1991) is the obvious recommendation.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I have Peter Green’s thorough Penguin Classics book <i>The
Erotic Poems</i> (dated after <i>Heroides</i> and before <i>Metamorphoses</i>),
containing his great love elegies the <i>Amores</i>, as well as <i>The Art of
Love</i> – how to seduce – and <i>The Cure for Love</i> – how to break up, as
well as a fragment about how to apply makeup.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>180 pages of Ovid in a 450 page book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I said Green was thorough.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And I
remember the translations as good, but I plan to revisit <i>Amores</i> in
Christopher Marlowe’s remarkable translation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Marlowe was also likely a teenager when he did Ovid’s elegies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Teenagers and their love poems. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I have not read Ovid’s calendar poem, <i>Fasti</i>, or the poems
in exile, <i>Tristia</i> and the <i>Letters from Pontus</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Christoph Ransmayr’s enjoyable fantasy novel <i>The
Last World</i> (1988) explores this part of Ovid’s life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’ll see if I get this far.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why wouldn’t I, Ovid is my favorite Roman
poet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Except maybe for Horace.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Please advise about anything I mentioned, or missed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Good translations, a better schedule,
supplemental books, favorite essays on Ovid, tips for learning Latin fast,
anything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is all appreciated.<o:p></o:p></p>Amateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-91756625224275874402023-12-01T10:44:00.000-06:002023-12-01T10:44:42.072-06:00Books I read in November 2023<p>Recovery from surgery leads to a long list of books.
(Everything is going well, by the way, thanks).
My idea of a “comfort read” is a book on a subject about which I do not
know much – start me over at the beginning – thus my enthusiastic Indian
literature project, which is ongoing, more slowly.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I need to write up an invitation to read Ovid’s <i>Metamorphoses</i>,
and perhaps more Ovid.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Any minute now I
will write that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Please join me on <i>Metamorphoses</i>.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">INDIAN LITERATURE OF VARIOUS TYPES<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil
Anthology</i> (1-3 CE) &<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Speaking of Shiva</i> (10-12 CE),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>both tr. R. K. Amanujan – the pleasure is in
the variations in the formula; the latter is especially strange.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man</i> (1965),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>U. R. Ananthamurthy – an esoteric dispute
about the burial of a corrupt holy man leads to a number of outstanding
novelistic ironies.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Malgudi Days</i> (1982),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>R. K. Narayan – stories from the 1930s through the 1970s about Narayan’s
famous town.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More Narayan, easy to enjoy,
in my future.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Classical Indian Philosophy</i> (2020),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Peter Adamson & Jonardon Ganeri – written
at my level, the crucial thing, although I beg you not to test me. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Arvind Krishna Mehrotra</i> (2020),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Arvind Krishna Mehrotra – an Indian beatnik
gets more interesting.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>After</i> (2022),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Vivek Naryanan – “after” the <i>Ramayana</i>, an ambitious 600 page
poetic response to the great epic, like Christopher Logue’s <i>War Music</i>,
say, if not as focused or as strong.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Four of these books are from NYRB Classics or NYRB Poets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Good for them.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">FICTION<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Macunaíma</i> (1928),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Mário de<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Andrade – a surrealist picaresque
looted from German anthropologists’ collections of Amazonian folklore, mixed
with Afro-Brazilian traditions and modern Sao Paulo, the most purely Brazilian
book I will ever hope to read, and also the most foreignizing translation I have ever read, even more than <i><a href="https://wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com/2015/02/dirty-crockadillagigs-and-three-other.html">Leg Over Leg</a></i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So many birds, insects, plants, and whatever
else - so many non-English words - all explained in the notes.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Man without Qualities</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(1938),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Robert Musil – the 200 pages Musil <i>almost</i> published in 1938,
making it the last coherent narrative piece of his monster.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Burton Pike translation has 400 pages more of notes and fragments, containing some of Musil’s best writing, he says,
but I will never know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think the
action is in the satirical 800-page 1930 first volume, but some smart people
prefer the more mystical unraveling of late Musil.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>For Whom the Bell Tolls</i> (1940),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ernest Hemingway – this book was so famous,
the epitome of the serious novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Now?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wonder.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a mix of enjoyable kitsch, godawful
kitsch (the love affair, the “Spanish”), and quite good action scenes.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>H. M. Pulham, Esquire</i> (1941),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>John P. Marquand – another big best-seller, easy
to read, with lots of Boston and Maine detail, and a good narrator of the
perfectly reliable but utterly clueless type.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Bridge over the Drina</i> (1945),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ivo Andrić – centuries of history flowing
around a bridge that I could still visit today, often reading more like history
than fiction.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Delta Wedding</i> (1946),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Eudora Welty – rich, gorgeous, subtle.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Common Chord</i> (1947),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Frank O'Connor – doing his thing, writing
about his people.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Daughter of Time</i> (1951),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Josephine Tey – the recovery classic,
detection directly from the hospital bed, which is not where I read it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Soon after, though.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today the detective would have been sent home
after a few days, destroying the conceit.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Collected Stories</i> (1908-53),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Colette – I have been reading through Colette’s
short writings for years, in French, but I finally gave up on finding the last
few books, so I switched to English for about 60 pages.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The early work on the Cher<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">í</span>
character is worth reading.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you have
a taste for Colette, it’s all worth reading, easily.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Andrienne Kennedy in One Act</i> (1954-80),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Adrienne Kennedy – a new Library of America collection
of a writer about whom I knew nothing inspired me to learn something.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A series of one-act avant-gardisms concludes
with two stark adaptations of Euripides; how enjoyable.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Mort</i> (1987),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Terry Pratchett – about a tenth as many good lines as Douglas Adams, but
that many good lines justifies the project, the life. Plus he's good with endings.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Adventures of China Iron</i> (2017),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Gabriela Cabezón Cámara – the gaucho epic as
pan-sexual Utopia.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>This Is How You Lose the Time War</i> (2019),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone – perhaps the
worst blurbage I have ever seen. The short novel about time traveling enemies
who fall in love is neither “seditious” nor “dangerous” nor does it “ha[ve] it
all.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If I were not giving the book away
(as a gift, not because it is bad) I would tear off the covers.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">POETRY<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Body Rags</i> (1968) &<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Selected Poems</i> (1946-80),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Galway Kinnell<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Glass, Irony and God</i> (1995),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anne Carson<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Things on Which I've Stumbled</i> (2008),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Peter Cole<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Zeno's Eternity</i> (2023),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mark Jarman<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">CRITICISM<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Burning Oracle</i> (1939),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>G. Wilson Knight<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Ear Training</i> (2023),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>William H. Pritchard – perhaps my favorite living critic, with a new
collection of pieces going back to the 1970s, and not too many pieces that I
had already read in <i>The Hudson Review</i>.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">MEMOIR<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Diary of a Young Girl </i>(1947),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anne Frank – I thought this was the most famous
book I had never read, but that is not true anymore, is it?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Harry Potter is likely more famous.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I hate to think what else.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Les inconnus dans la maison</i> (1940),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Georges Simenon – <i>The Strangers in the
House</i>, a character study of an lonely alcoholic lawyer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A stranger is murdered in his house.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And the lawyer is also a stranger in his own house!<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Caligula</i> (1944) &</p><p class="MsoNormal"><i>Les Justes</i> (1949),
Albert Camus – laughable as a portrait of 1905 Russian anarchists but
likely an exact portrait of people Camus met in the French resistance.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>L'Équarrissage pour tous</i> (1950),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Boris Vian – in which Vian fails to “read the
room,” as we might say now, setting his anti-war satire in Normandy on D-Day,
just where and when the French are at their most anti-anti-war.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it all works out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Less outrageous than <i>Catch-22</i>, really.
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Tête de Méduse</i> (1951),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Boris Vian<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">A real sign of recovery, I have resumed my Portuguese study,
starting over with an outstanding textbook written by and for high school teachers
in southeastern Massachusetts.<o:p></o:p></p>Amateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-8911117520422419712023-11-01T10:11:00.000-05:002023-11-01T10:11:28.051-05:00Books I Read in October 2023<p class="MsoNormal">The five-day hospital stay breaking the month in half is likely invisible to anyone but me, but that is why the fiction list is so mystery-heavy, and for that matter so long. Many of these books, the post-surgery group, are not just short but light, well-suited for the invalid's tired hand. The invalid is feeling much better, by the way, in fact not much of an invalid, so perhaps I am ready for a heavier book.</p><p class="MsoNormal">I hope to get a little - or big - Ovid project going soon. <i>Metamorphoses</i> and the early <i>Heroides</i>, but them why not the rest. It would be pleasant to have company, so I will put up an invitation sometime soon.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">INDIAN EPICS & THEIR RETELLINGS<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Mahabharata</i> (2 BCE-2 CE), the 1973 William Buck
adaptation<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Bhagavad-Gita</i> (1 BCE), tr. Barbara Stoler-Miller <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Ramayana</i> (3 BCE-3 CE, maybe), the 1972 R. K. Narayan adaptation</p><p class="MsoNormal">Marvelous books I read 25 years ago, once again great pleasures. I will pursue this Indian literature line for a while. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">GREEK PHILOSOPHY<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Selected Essays and Dialogues</i> (1 CE), Plutarch - another book from 25 years ago. I find Plutarch to be a genial voice, not unlike his great descendant Montaigne.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">FICTION<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Death of Ivan Ilych</i> (1886) &<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Collected Shorter Fiction, Vol. 2</i> (1885-1906), Leo Tolstoy, the 400 pages or so I had never
read, plus the above. Lots of Christian
fairy tales, plus “The Forged Coupon,” a clever chain of sin.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Big Money</i> (1936), John Dos Passos - I love the <i>USA Trilogy</i> in theory, particularly its collage-like construction, but find it dull in practice. Or I find the more ordinary novellish parts - characters, story - dull, perhaps because so much of it is written like a medieval chronicle ("and then... and then... and then..."). I do love the potted biographies of the famous - Henry Ford, Frederick Jackson Taylor, William Randolph Hearst - turned into prose poems. Would an entire book of just those would become tiresome?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Rebecca</i> (1938), Daphne Du Maurier<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Third Man</i> (1950), Graham Greene - no zither, no kitten, but solid.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Investigation</i> (1959), Stanislaw Lem<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Wanderer</i> (1964), Fritz Leiber - an odd although Hugo-winning science fiction novel from one of my longtime favorite fantasy writers. It is an early "planetary disaster" novel, with characters all over (and off) the glove reacting to the catastrophe in different ways. I was surprised how goofy the book was in places. Leiber had perhaps been reading Vonnegut and Pynchon.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Wide Sargasso Sea</i> (1966), Jean Rhys<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>At the Bottom of the River</i> (1983), Jamaica Kincaid<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Black Book</i> (1993), Ian Rankin<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to
the West, a River to the East</i> (2003), Laszlo Krasznahorkai<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Forgery</i> (2013), Ave Barrera<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">POETRY<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>A Journey of the Mind: Collected Poems of Helen Pinkerton</i>
(1945-2016), Helen Pinkerton<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Mast Year</i> (2020), Katherine Hagopian Berry<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Old Orchard Beach Cycle</i> (2022), Robert Gibbons –
these last two are Maine poems by Maine poets.
We hit a bad patch in Maine last week.
It felt healthy to read some Maine poems.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">IN FRENCH<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>L'Art d'être grand-père</i> (1877), Victor Hugo<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>La Cantatrice chauve</i> (1950) &<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>La leçon</i> (1951) &<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Les chaises</i> (1954), Eugène Ionesco<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>La Répétition ou l'Amour puni</i> (1950), Jean Anouilh<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>En attendant Godot</i> (1952), Samuel Beckett<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p><p>A jolly little “French theater in the 1950s” run along with
the great late-period Hugo poetry collection. </p>Amateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-19954656961468338552023-10-14T15:33:00.000-05:002023-10-14T15:33:11.803-05:00My cancer - "It can’t be true! It can’t, but it is."<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal">Liver cancer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That
was a surprise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I knew something was
wrong, but I was not expecting that.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Since the diagnosis last summer, since it was known for a
fact that I had something serious, things have moved fast.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has been like boarding a train.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once in motion there is no way off.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I guess I have seen plenty of movies where
people get off of moving trains, often with bad results.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am going to stay on and do what my doctors
tell me.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Monday is my liver surgery, a major change of
direction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I wake up, my tumor will
be in the hands of the researcher who expressed almost too much interest in
getting a look at it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He can have
it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The subsequent year of immunotherapy
treatment is to keep the tumor from returning.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I have great doubts about sharing personal information of
any kind, much less medical information, with the internet, but my cancer is no
secret in my real life, and I wanted to explain why the schedule of my Greek
philosophy reading – no, not the reading, the writing – fell apart.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How fortunate to be reading Greek philosophy –
Cynics, Stoics, and others – at just this time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The perfect companions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But my
energy was not so good, and a lot of what was left went to health care
appointments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So, so many appointments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My writing suffered, and will likely do so
for some time.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">My doctors, by the way, have been superb, as have the nurses,
technicians, and everyone else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
insurance company has behaved itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No
medical horror stories, or even irritation stories, not yet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My greatest suffering, at this point, has
been the 900 calorie per day liver-softening diet that I am currently enduring,
although not for long.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Have pity on this
poor glutton.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Ivan Ilych, in “The Death of Ivan Ilych” (1886), worries
about the <i>cause</i> of his illness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The illness, which involves, the appendix, or maybe the kidney, sure
sounds like cancer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wish he had had my
doctors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He once heavily bumped his side
while hanging a curtain:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p>‘It really is so!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
lost my life over that curtain as I might have done when storming a fort.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is that possible?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How terrible and how stupid.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It can’t be true!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It can’t, but it is.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Ch. VI, tr. revised Maudes)</blockquote><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Of course, however comforting it would be to know, poor Ilych
has no idea.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had a brief discussion
with the surgeon about the cause of my cancer, ending in a shrug and a laugh.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who knows?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece is the only work on illness I have
deliberately sought out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I owe a debt,
though, to Nanni Moretti’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caro_diario">1993 anthology film</a> <i>Caro Diario</i>, specifically
to the extraordinary third part where he recreates his frustrating, circular
experiences with the Italian medical system (which does save him in the end –
he is now 70, with a new movie out).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s
because of Moretti’s film, backed by some family history, that led me to push
hard on my doctors to look for cancer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Be
your own advocate” is the phrase people use.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Yes, do it.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I will be out of touch – out of everything – on Monday, and
I have never been a recovering patient before so I have no idea when I might
respond to any well wishes, kind thoughts, crackpot advice, or angry
scoldings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many thanks, then, in advance
for any of that.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Now back to the problem that makes me fret the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>most: which books to bring to the hospital?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Amateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.com41tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-11304287962116575102023-10-13T19:54:00.000-05:002023-10-13T19:54:08.232-05:00But the Moon rescues others as they swim from below - a glance at the essays and dialogues of Plutarch<p>The great ragged Greek philosophy readalong ends with Plutarch,
famous for his extraordinary <i>Parallel Lives</i> but also the innovative
author of a large mass of essays and dialogues which picked up the title <i>Moralia
</i>(late 1st C.) along the way.
Plutarch was hardly an original philosophical thinker, but he invented
the familiar essay, and most readers of Montaigne will find Plutarch to be a
genial companion. Of course Montaigne
quotes Plutarch (and Seneca, and Lucretius) frequently.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Plutarch has retroactively become a “Middle Platonist,” one
of a number of 1st century Greek writers creating a Plato revival, preparing
for the eventual triumph of the Neoplatonism of Plotinus, who would be the next
logical person to read if I kept going.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I suggested the Oxford World’s Classics <i>Selected Essays and Dialogues</i>
(tr. Donald Russell) as a good place to see Plutarch in his more philosophical
modes, but now I see that my premise was false.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Plutarch was <i>always</i> in a philosophical mode.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He lived in a social world suffused with
philosophy, much like the community surrounding Socrates, except Plutarch’s
mental world also includes Stoicism, Epicureanism (the enemy), and other
movements we have encountered.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
although he himself is a priest at Delphi, as Greek a profession as I can
imagine, his world also includes Rome, as he will demonstrate in his <i>Parallel
Lives</i> where Roman history turns out to be a version of Greek history.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Essays like “Bashfulness” and “Talkativeness” are the
Montaigne-like essays.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The argument of,
say, “Talkativeness” is really a long string of examples of the dangers of the
vice, pulled from a masterful knowledge of Greek and Roman history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“These remarks are not meant as a
denunciation of talkativeness, but as therapy” (218).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Virtue, but of the practical sort.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">More impressive and difficult are Plutarch’s dialogues, modelled
on Plato but with innovations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Socrates’
<i>Daimonion</i>” is a highlight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Socrates openly said that he was sometimes warned against specific
actions by a <i>daimon</i>, a friendly spirit outside of himself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was never advised to do anything but only
warned <i>against</i> things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
Plutarch’s dialogue a number of Thebans and others, including an old friend of
Socrates, debate what he might of meant, complicating the concept of <i>daimon</i>,
climaxing in the remarkable “Myth of Timarchus,” a wild vision of the afterlife
where the soul and intellect are distinct, the latter actually being the outside
<i>daimon</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The stars are <i>daimones</i>
being pulled to the moon.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p>But the Moon rescues others as they swim up from below.
These are they for whom the end of Becoming has come.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The foul and unpurified, however, she will
not receive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She [the moon!} flashes and
roars at them most horribly and will not let them near her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They lament their fate and are borne away
down there once again, to another birth, as you can see.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(108)</p></blockquote><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">That’s up there with Plato’s late, weird visionary myths.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The discussion of the <i>daimon</i> is
intermixed with the story of a political conspiracy to overthrow the tyrant of
Thebes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The philosophical discussion is
part of what is really a piece of historical fiction (the conspiracy is 400
years in the past).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is what I mean when
I say the dialogues can be difficult – this is a dang complex text.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I tracked down <a href="https://penelope.uchicago.edu/misctracts/plutarchE.html">an old translation</a> of “On the ‘E’ at Delphi,”
a cryptic title.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Alongside the famous “Know
Thyself” inscription, Delphi had the an uppercase epsilon (the same as our E)
inscribed on the temple of Apollo. What does it mean?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Plutarch puts
himself in this dialogue but does not give himself the last word.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many theories are explored.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fans of Thomas Browne’s magnificent <i>The
Garden of Cyrus</i> (1658) will enjoy the long discussion of the meaning of the
number five; others may well be baffled.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Don’t miss the other Delphic essays, “Oracles in Decline”
and “Why Are Delphic Oracles No Longer Given in Verse?” or the short, heartbreaking
“A Consolation to His Wife,” on the death of his infant daughter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Don’t miss, if you like this book, the additional
essays in the Penguin Classics collection.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Don’t miss <i>Parallel Lives</i>, at least the best parts – the life of
Anthony! – whatever you do.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">So that’s the Greek philosophy readalong.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I meant to write more and for that matter
think more, but life interfered in a way that was almost ironic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Still, a success as far as it went.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many thanks to the people who helped me out
by joining in, on the internet or in real life.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Just a bit more about real life tomorrow.<o:p></o:p></p>Amateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-71171874654547431152023-10-10T19:32:00.000-05:002023-10-10T19:32:15.539-05:00Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and their Stoic self-help books - I shall not be afraid when my last hour comes<p>The curious thing about Stoicism is its long-lasting
survival in the self-help genre, curious at least until I read Seneca’s <i>Letters
from a Stoic</i> (1st C.) several years ago and discovered that it was a self-help
book, one of the founding self-help books.
The <i>Meditations</i> of Marcus Aurelius (170-180), which I read
recently, has a different format, more of a commonplace book, but is similarly
aimed at self-improvement.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I did not get much out of <i>Meditations</i>, but that is
because I <i>read</i> it, one page followed by another until I finished.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Written in fragments, it is more of a book to
keep handy and <i>consult</i>, perhaps randomly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What wisdom will pop out?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p>Remember that what is hidden within you controls the
strings; that is activity, that is life, that, if one may say so, is the man.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Never occupy your imagination besides with
the body which encloses you like a vessel and these organs which are moulded
around you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are like an axe, only
differing as being attached to the body.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>(Book X, 38, tr. A. S. L. Farquharson, Oxford World’s Classics)</blockquote><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Tough words, since I have been spending a lot of the last
few months imagining one particular internal organ – I will write about my
illness soon and be less cryptic – but the Stoics are generally bracing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cold baths, simple food, contempt for money
and success, a “tough it out” attitude towards pain and adversity, and
indifference about death, those are the Stoics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>One can imagine, for any illness, for example, times when a “tough it
out” pep talk is useful.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Still, it is an odd book to simply read, except for the
first chapter which is where the emperor lists what he learned from people in
his past: “modesty and manliness” from his father, “piety and bountifulness”
from his mother, and on like that through a dozen people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A smart exercise I can imagine encountering
in a contemporary self-help book, if I ever read such things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I did glance at a couple of Ryan Holiday’s books, since he makes
a lot of explicit use of the ancient Stoics, and was pleased to find that he
does not emphasize money and success – so much of the audience for these books is
the business crowd, desperate to increase annual sales by 10% – but rather how
to be happy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A real Stoic tells me how
to be <i>virtuous</i>, not necessarily the same thing, but I was impressed that
Holiday is not trying to make his readers wealthy.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Seneca is more my guy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He is the great Stoic hypocrite, since for the five years before Emperor
Nero came of age he was effectively the domestic ruler of Rome (a general
handled foreign policy) and became one of the richest men in the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then again when he gave it all up without
complaint when Nero took power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
letters, including the selection I read in the Penguin Classics edition (tr.
Robin Campbell), were written after his fall from power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are likely pseudo-letters, written for
if not exactly publication than at least dissemination among interested
readers.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I had better jump to Letter LIV, about ill health, and look
for wisdom.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p>Even as I fought for breath, though, I never ceased to find
comfort in cheerful and courageous reflections.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>‘What’s this?’ I said.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘So death
is having all these tries at me, is he?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Let him, then!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had a try at him
a long while ago myself.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘When was
this?’ you’ll say.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Before I was
born.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Death is just not being.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What that is like I already know.</blockquote><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The short sentences and conversational tone make Seneca
pleasant reading, as if a friend has written me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps they are artifacts of the translator;
I don’t know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“You can feel assured on
my score of this: I shall not be afraid when my last hour comes – I’m already
prepared, not planning as much as a day ahead” – now that is Seneca, that is
Stoicism.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">A pleasure of Seneca’s letters is that they are full of
ordinary Roman life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Letter LVI is about
how to deal with noise:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p>But if on top of this some ball player comes along and
starts shouting out the score, that’s the end!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Then add someone starting up a brawl, and someone else caught thieving,
and the man who likes the sound of his voice in the bath, and the people who
leap in the pool with a tremendous splash.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Apart from those whose voices are, if nothing else, natural, think of
the hair remover, continually giving vent to his shrill and penetrating cry in order
to advertise his presence, never silent unless it be while he is plucking
someone’s armpits and making the client yell for him!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then think of the various cries of the man
selling drinks, and the one selling sausages and the other selling pastries,
and all the ones hawking for the catering shops, publicizing his wares with a
distinctive cry of his own. (109-10)</blockquote><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I’m sitting at a window in ancient Rome.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Love it.<o:p></o:p></p>Amateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-83179057981183286952023-10-03T18:56:00.000-05:002023-10-03T18:56:30.621-05:00Lucretius brings to light in Latin verse the dark discoveries of the Greeks<p>During the Hellenistic period, Epicureanism and Stoicism replaced
Plato and Aristotle as the dominant philosophical movements (Plato would make a
big comeback; Aristotle would have to wait for the great Arabic philosophers). Both movements were popular in the Roman
Republic as well as in Greece. Thus
although Epicurus had, until recently, survived only in three letters preserved
by Diogenes Laertius, his ideas were preserved in one of the four (let’s say)
great Latin epics, <i>De Rerum Natura</i> (1st century BCE) by the mysterious
Lucretius, translated as <i>The Way Things Are</i> by Rolfe Humphries.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal">I am well aware how very hard it is<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">To bring to light by means of Latin verse<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The dark discoveries of the Greeks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">New terms must be invented, since our tongue<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Is poor, and this material is new.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Book I, p. 23)</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The ash-engulfed library at Herculaneum contained a
substantial collection of Epicurean texts, including at least one major lost
work by Epicurus, but I do not know if that text is in condition for amateur
readers to read.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I doubt I would enjoy
it more than I enjoy Lucretius.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">If I had kept to my schedule I would perhaps have walked
through each of the six books of Lucretius, from his dismissal of the gods,
absent from human affairs if they exist at all, through the surprisingly modern
sounding atomic theory, the origin of the world and everything else, ending
with a dramatic account of a plague in Athens that ends so abruptly one wonders
if the book is unfinished.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Sudden need<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And poverty persuaded men to use<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Horrible makeshifts; howling, they would place<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Their dead on pyres prepared for other men,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Apply the torches, maim and bleed and brawl<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">To keep the corpses from abandonment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Book VI, 236)</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">A grim end at least fitting the materialism of the book’s
philosophy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You’re on your own, folks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The last book contains numerous science-like
causes of natural phenomena, for example nine separate theories about how
lightning works.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An actual scientist
would care which theory is true, but all that matters to Lucretius is that the
cause is <i>not</i> Zeus or Jove or any other god.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A more common translation of the title is <i>The
Nature of Things</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nature is natural.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The most fascinating piece of pseudo-science is apparently
an innovation by Lucretius.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bothered by
the determinism of the standard atomic theory, he adds an element of randomness
or indeterminism, his famous “swerve.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Atoms, and the things made of them, like humans, move along their deterministic
paths until they don’t.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus free will
is possible, or at least something indistinguishable from free will.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I take the physics as mostly poetic, but it
sounds so modern, as if Lucretius intuited quantum theory.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>De Rerum Natura </i>barely survived to the Renaissance,
but once rediscovered it became a favorite.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Stephen Greenblatt somehow wrote a popular book about the early modern
love of the Swerve.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lucretius was a
favorite of Montaigne.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I will say the
same about Seneca and Plutarch in my next few posts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We are in Montaigne’s library.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Such a complex book, and this is what I have to say.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Good enough.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Some of us are in talks about an Ovid readalong later this year, taking
on another of the great Latin epics, my favorite of the bunch.<o:p></o:p></p>Amateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-10159447678535020232023-10-01T10:53:00.003-05:002023-10-01T11:05:47.123-05:00Books I Read in September 2023<p>Despite all evidence I hope to wrap up the Greek philosophy project within the next couple of weeks. A medical deadline approaches. That will help.</p><p>As usual, I read good books.</p><p> </p><p class="MsoNormal">PHILOSOPHY & SELF-HELP<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Letters from a Stoic</i> (c. 60), Seneca - good timing for some Stoicism.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">FICTION & A PLAY<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Collected Stories</i> (from roughly 1930 into the 1960s,
the second half of the book), Vladimir Nabokov<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>They Came Like Swallows </i>(1937), William Maxwell<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Joseph the Provider</i> (1943), Thomas Mann, concluding a
1,500 page monster.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Evidence of
graphomania.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Death of a Salesman</i> (1948), Arthur Miller<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969</i><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>(1978), Jorge Luis Borges, arranged and
rearranged.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The genial <i>New Yorker</i>
memoir that concludes the book is a great pleasure.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">POETRY<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Poems of J. V. Cunningham </i>(1942-82)<i><o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Selected Poems</i><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>(1944-73),
Jean Garrigue<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>A Wall of Two</i> (1947 / 2007), Henia & Ilona Karmel
& frankly Fanny Howe too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Please see
<a href="https://eigermonchjungfrau.blog/2021/04/27/it-screamed-in-its-own-blood-poems-by-henia-and-ilona-karmel/">Dorian Stuber’s 2021 review</a> of this book and these poems, many of them
literally written in the camps.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
story of how the poems, and the poets, survived is itself worth knowing.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Kid</i> (1947) &<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Skylight One</i> (1949), Conrad Aiken<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Pisan Cantos </i>(1948), Ezra Pound.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>High level Modernist kitsch, I fear,
including both Aiken and Pound.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">CRITICISM<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Situation and the Story</i> (2001), Vivian Gornick,
generous insights into essays and memoirs, more relevant to our moment than to
hers, even.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">WHAT IS THIS?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Selected Writings</i> (1913-48), Antonin Artaud, the 700
page Sontag selection, time well spent with an alien sensibility.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">IN FRENCH<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Journal, 1933-1939</i>, André Gide<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Notre-dame des fleurs</i> (1944), Jean Genet, real French
prison literature (although I read the less obscene 1951 revision) that with
its rich French vocabulary that included but went well beyond slang was on the
edge of my reading level. It was so hard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Between Genet
and Artaud, it was French Weirdo Month for me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That should be a regular event.<o:p></o:p></p>Amateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-28702020637850659422023-09-08T20:05:00.000-05:002023-09-08T20:05:12.264-05:00Lucian's satires - Frankly he's a blamed nuisance<p>The great 2nd century satirist Lucian was a great shock to
me at one point, twenty-five years ago when I got serious about classical
literature. I had never heard of him, partly
because of the odd historical artifact where what he writes is called “Menippean
satire” even though nothing by the Cynic satirist Menippus has survived. Menippus himself largely survives as a
character in Lucian’s stories.
Confusing.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Thomas More’s <i>Utopia</i>, Thomas Carlyle’s <i>Sartor Resartus</i>,
Jonathan Swift’s <i>Tale of a Tub</i> and my childhood favorite <i>Gulliver’s
Travels</i> are all direct, conscious descendants of Lucian.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most of fantasy and science fiction
literature is at least distantly Lucianic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>When I read Arisosto’s <i>Orlando Furioso</i> and watched a character
fly to the moon, I knew where I was in literary history.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Not that I recommend reading Lucian to learn about literary
history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The outrageous, inventive “A
True Story”; the sharp “Dialogues of the Dead”; the various angry attacks on
philosophers Lucian thinks are con artists, as in “The Death of Peregrinus” –
these all stand on their own.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s still
pretty funny.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Lucian was not himself a Cynic, but I thought he would be
instructive because his heroes are so often Cynics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Menippus, across a number of pieces, travels
to heaven and hell, reacting as a Cynic might.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Menippus often features in the “Dialogues of the Dead” as the voice of
uncommon sense, although sometimes Diogenes fills the role, as here where the
dead Diogenes is sending messages back to the living, to Menippus, for example:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p>DIOGENES: Tell him that Diogenes says, “Menippus, if you’ve
had enough of poking fun at things up there, come on down here; there’s much
more to laugh at…<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Especially when you
see how the millionaires and the pashas and the dictators have been cut down to
size and look just like everyone else – you can only tell them apart by their
whimpering and the way they’re so spineless and miserable at the memory of all
they left behind.” (194)</blockquote><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">As for the rest of the philosophers:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote>DIOGENES: You can tell them I said they could go to the
devil. (195)</blockquote><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The Cynics enjoy Hades because they had nothing to lose in
the first place but can still wander around mocking everyone’s pretenses.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p>CROESUS: We keep remembering what we left behind, Midas here
his gold and Sardanapalus his life of luxury and I my treasure, and we moan and
groan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whenever we do, he [Menippus]
laughs at us and sneers and calls us slaves and scum.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And sometimes he interrupts our moaning with
songs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Frankly he’s a blamed
nuisance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(212)</blockquote><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Wealth and pleasure are not just of no value in Lucian’s
dialogues, but are actually (future) punishments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I haven’t touched on “Philosophies for Sale” or the fierce
assaults on phony philosophers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I will
just say that it has been useful to have read some of these people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As with any satirist, Lucian is funnier when
I know what the heck he is talking about.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The <i>Selected Satires of Lucian</i> translated by Lionel
Casson was my go-to Lucian (and the source of the page numbers), not that there
is anything wrong with Paul Turner’s <i>Satirical Sketches</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I also poked around in the old Loeb volumes,
in particular reading the rest of the journeys of Menippus and finishing up the
“Dialogues of the Dead,” all well worth reading.<o:p></o:p></p>Amateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-69814988037069007412023-09-06T20:04:00.004-05:002023-09-06T20:04:56.516-05:00"Socrates gone mad" - my hero Diogenes the Cynic<p>He lived in a jar, owned a staff and a cloak and nothing
else, and was a sarcastic pain in the ass.
He took the example of Socrates to its limit. Plato is the one who called him “Socrates
gone mad,” but in a sense he is just the logical result of thinking through how
Socrates lived. It is the integrity of
Diogenes the Dog, the Cynic, that is hard to distinguish from madness.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote>I am Athens’ one free man. (#13)</blockquote><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">He often seems like a<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>proto-hippie.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The quotations are
all from Guy Davenport’s <i>Seven Greeks</i>, which I find the most fun place
to read about, or read, Diogenes, his surviving works in thirteen pages with no
sources or doubts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some are likely jokes
or misattributions from later Cynics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There were never many Cynics, but it was clear enough who they were, ethical
descendants of the legendary Diogenes.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote>In the rich man’s house there is no place to spit but in his
face. (#56)</blockquote><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The curious thing is that Athens, perhaps feeling guilty
about Socrates, seemed to like Diogenes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In general, Roman Cynics would insult the emperor once too often (e.g.,
once) and be exiled to Greece, where they were adopted by one or another city.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I suppose they were thought of as holy fools,
allowed to say and do things that other people could not.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote>I pissed on the man who called me a dog.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why was he so surprised? (#73)</blockquote><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I love the performance art of Diogenes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He would beg money from statues, since the
result was the same as if he begged from people. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He wandered the marketplace in the daytime
with a lamp, “looking for an honest man,” or more literally “a human being,” a
hopeless task. He refuted the Platonic Academy’s definition of man as a “featherless
biped” with his famous plucked chicken, a kind of deconstructionist joke.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I mean, he wasn’t the one who introduced the
idea of feathers, which is what any comedian would latch onto.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People seemed to find Diogenes funny.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote>I am a citizen of the world. (#7)</blockquote><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Or perhaps a “cosmopolitan” is a citizen of the cosmos.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In context the concept is negative, a
rejection of the narrow citizenship of Athens, but over time it has become something
positive, if empty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I worked for a while
at a liberal arts college that actively encouraged students to think of
themselves as citizens of the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
amused me that this was an idea that went back to crazy Diogenes.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I greatly enjoyed William Desmond’s <i>Cynics</i> (2008), a guide
to the movement for college students, bizarrely well written for such a book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The nine hundred years of Cynicism affords
lots of good stories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Eventually
Christian asceticism, the hermits, stylites, and monks, replaced Cynicism for
good.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Asceticism is a natural, if rare,
human impulse, and a healthy society finds a role for its ascetics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mockery, prayer, something.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Diogenes and his followers did benefit from Mediterranean
privilege.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am thinking of the scene in
<i>Walden</i> where semi-Cynic Henry David Thoreau spends a day desperately
trying to recover the axe he dropped in the pond.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If all he had in Massachusetts were a jar and
a cloak, he would freeze to death.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
New England Cynic has to own a lot more stuff.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Tomorrow I’ll turn to the great satirist Lucian.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Amateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-82213376373377746432023-09-05T15:30:00.000-05:002023-09-05T15:30:24.397-05:00Books I Read in August 2023<p>As I suspected my energy for writing in August was diverted
to more important things. Plenty of energy
to read, though.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">With a respite in September, I should soon be able to write
a bit on the Greek philosophers I have been reading.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Cynics, Epicureans, and Stoics work well
as a cluster.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then later a bit on
Plutarch and the little philosophy project is a wrap.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">PHILOSOPHY<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Meditations</i> (c. 180), Marcus Aurelius<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Philosophy in the Hellenistic & Roman Worlds</i> (2015),
Peter Adamson<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">FICTION<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>A Universal History of Infamy</i> (1935) &<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Aleph</i> (1949), Jorge Luis Borges<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Invitation to a Beheading</i> (1936), Vladimir Nabokov<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Man Who Loved Children</i> (1940), Christina Stead –
all right I see why some readers can’t stomach this book, with its intensely
annoying title character (and the mother is not much better).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I loved it, but I don’t blame anyone who gets
a little ways in and says “No.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Wide Net and Other Stories</i> (1943), Eudora Welty<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Leaning Tower and Other Stories</i> (1944), Katherine
Anne Porter<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>If on a winter's night a traveler</i> (1979), Italo
Calvino – I may have mentioned an upcoming trip to Italy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well, that ain’t happening.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I’ve had a great time pawing through
Italian literature this summer, whether revisiting a masterpiece like this one
or:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>1934</i> (1982), Alberto Moravia – laughing through a
piece of nonsense like this one, which may be a good-bad book, most enjoyable
as it becomes increasingly crazy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How
are Moravia’s other books?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I picked this
one because of the time period in the title.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">POETRY<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>You Will Hear Thunder</i> (1912-66), Anna Akhmatova<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Poems</i> (1935) &<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Earth Compels</i> (1938) &<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Autumn Journal</i> (1939) &<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Plant and Phantom</i> (1941) &<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Springboard </i>(1944) &<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Holes in the Sky</i> (1948), Louis MacNeice – I was going
to read the superb <i>Autumn Journal</i>, and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>then why not his other poems of the 1930s, and since I enjoyed those so
much why not his poems of the 1940s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
is not a great way to absorb a poet – my retention will likely be terrible –
but I had a good time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The dangers of a
giant, unwieldy <i>Complete Poems</i>.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>With Teeth in the Earth</i> (1949-85), Malka Heifetz
Tussman – many thanks to an anonymous commenter for recommending this charming
Yiddish-American poet.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">IN FRENCH<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Journal, 1928-1932</i>, André Gide<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Le Képi </i>(1943), Colette – four late, long short
stories, all good, all in the English <i>Collected Stories</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Always a pleasure to hang out with Colette.<o:p></o:p></p>Amateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-19582809842989291302023-08-01T08:39:00.000-05:002023-08-01T08:39:00.061-05:00Books I Read in July 2023<p>How embarrassing that I did not write a thing this month,
but I promise I had a good excuse. Posts
on Cynicism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism will appear this month, I swear, or at
least hope. My eventual excuse this month will
be, I am afraid, even better.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Still, I read.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">PHILOSOPHY ADJACENT<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Way Things Are</i> (1st c. BCE), Lucretius<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Selected Satires</i> &<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Dialogues of the Dead</i> (2nd c.), Lucian<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">FICTION<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Little Novels of Sicily</i> (1883), Giovanni Verga<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Ulysses</i> (1922), James Joyce – unlike thirty years
ago, I just more or less read the novel like a novel, not that there was not
plenty to look up.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Death of the Heart</i> (1938), Elizabeth Bowen<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Ficciones</i> (1944), Jorge Luis Borges<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Leopard</i> (1958), Giuseppe di Lampedusa<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Gee, these are good books.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">POETRY<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">A little Holocaust poetry unit on the syllabus.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Selected Poems</i> (1921-71), Jacob Glatstein<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Poems of Paul Celan</i> (1947-76), Paul Celan<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology</i> (1995),
just the poetry section<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Tradition</i> (2019), Jericho Brown<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">MEMOIR<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Periodic Table</i> (1975), Primo Levi<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">IN FRENCH<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>La Pharisienne</i> (1941), François Mauriac<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Thomas l’obscur</i> (1941/50), Maurice Blanchot, the
short version, perhaps the most abstract novel I have ever read.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Paysages et Portraits</i> (1958), Colette – posthumous,
and Colette had some good stuff in the drawer.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">No Portuguese study this month.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>See above for the reason.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps it will resume in the fall.<o:p></o:p></p>Amateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.com18