I will be in London in early March, so my reading has been v v British, more so than usual. If only I wanted to write anything.
NOT SHAKESPEARE AND ALSO SHAKESPEARE
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595?), William
Shakespeare
Every Man in His Humour (Italian version) (1598)
&
Every Man in His Humour (London version) (1616), Ben
Jonson – discussed here.
The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599), Thomas Dekker – More of
London on the London stage. I will write
this one up momentarily.
Poems (???, earlier than 1618 anyway), Sir Walter
Ralegh
Nothing Like the Sun (1964), Anthony Burgess – Shakespeare
via Joyce via Burgess, with everyone enjoying their puns. Not quite my Shakespeare, but convincing
enough. My recent reading demystified
Burgess’s novel – oh, he read G. B. Harrison’s Elizabethan Plays and Players
(1940), just like I did. The quotation I
the title is from Ch. IV, p. 26. Young
Shakespeare has been drinking.
FICTION
Men at Arms (1952), Evelyn Waugh – The British at
war, but it is the Phoney War, when no one knew what was going on. Easily worth reading for its humor and
details, but post-war Waugh is a more conventional writer than the author of,
for example, the outrageous Put Out More Flags (1942).
The Sound of the Mountain (1949-54), Yasunari
Kawabata – please see this post.
The Kindly Ones (1962), Anthony Powell – More of the
same. The war begins in the next novel,
thus my turn back to Waugh. Addendum: more of the same, but the first long chapter moves back to the author's childhood, and could with tiny changes be published as a separate novella. It is easily my favorite part of the series so far.
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), P. D. James – A
fine Cambridge-set mystery often taught by Rohan Maitzen.
POETRY
The Shield of Achilles (1955), W. H. Auden
For the Unfallen (1959), Geoffrey Hill
IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE
L'Ignorant (1958), Philippe Jaccottet
O Hóspede de Job (The Guest of Job, 1963),
José Cardoso Pires – Perhaps about the exhaustion of a dictatorship. Not available in English. Possibly slightly too hard for me but I
fought through it. The Ballad of Dog’s Beach (1982) is easy to recommend
to readers of Leonardo Sciascia and similar anti-mysteries.
Les mots (The Words, 1964), Jean-Paul Sartre –
Sartre’s childhood memoir, with long sections on his love of reading and
writing. The classics came from his
stern grandfather, rather more trashy stuff from his indulgent mother. In a different life he would have been a pulp
adventure writer. Sartre, the adult, is
often a repulsive character, but the childhood version is a sympathetic,
charming little fellow.
I also read, while listening, the lyrics to Caetano Veloso 1968 and 1969 albums, both titled Caetano Veloso. The former is especially rich in classics. A valuable exercise I should do more often.
My Modern Library edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream has a footnote explaining the names of the amateur theater troupe. The Nick Bottom section says "Bottom the core onto which the weaver's yarn was wound, or a ball of thread; did not have modern sense of "arse"". Does that seem plausible? It's hard to believe Shakespeare would have made that bottom/ass pun by accident.
ReplyDeleteMy current practice is to assume that if it looks like a dirty joke, it is.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I just read this line in Edmind Crispin's The Moving Toyshop, from 1946:
ReplyDelete"The house which he inhabited (along with a daily slut who came to cook his meals and make a pretence of cleaning), stood a little apart from the rest of the row, and boasted something in the way of a garden;" etc. (Ch. 13)
Somehow I acquired a copy of The Words (in English) without much love for Sartre and have never read it. This encourages me.
ReplyDeleteYes, jolly, sympathetic little Jean-Paul, who would have guessed. It is his own account, sure, but it is credibly about a real, if odd, childhood.
ReplyDelete