Lifetime Reading Plan

Virgil's Aeneid: Last Thoughts

2011-12-21T05:36:00.000-05:00

I'm still thinking about the Aeneid.

The ending of the book has left my mind reeling. As I looked into interpretations of the final scene, I found that almost all traditional literary critics seem to emphasize the piety of Aeneas (meaning his sense of responsibility to fate and his homeland, rather than religious piety) rather than his passion, even at the end of the book. It is Turnus that is portrayed as the out-of-control person.

I was not completely convinced.

1. Perhaps the killing of Turnus is Virgil's articulation that responsibility, not emotional self-control, is more important. When one's duty conflicts with passion (as in the case with Dido), passion is wrong. When duty dovetails with one's passions, there is nothing wrong with it. That is, is this really a story about passion versus stoicism--or just a story about living up to your fated role, no matter what (in this case, of founding the Roman Empire)?

2. What does Aeneas do next? Does he regret killing Turnus in anger? And does he return the body to Turnus's family as the young man requests, allowing him to have an honorable death? If Virgil is assuming that Aeneas thought what he did was both "pious" (killing Turnus) and compassionate (sending the body back), does that change how we feel?

3. Perhaps the reason this book has remained so relevant is because there is room for the reader to interpret in a variety of ways. The text makes room for interpretations which Virgil might never have considered.

4. Or perhaps Virgil intended to teach us that people are complex and that what is "right" (or even what is desired) is not always easy to ascertain.

What do you think?

Winter Solstice

2011-12-20T06:00:00.009-05:00

Rage, Rage, against the dying of the light.
--Dylan Thomas

Solstice Bread, made by my partner David and our son

Virgil's Aeneid's Road of Hatred

2011-11-22T12:57:00.001-05:00

In the final chapter of Virgil's Aeneid, our hero faces a conflict between passion and duty that is quite different from the one in faced in chapter 4. As the battle rages on between the Romans and the native peoples of Italy, Aeneas, "ferocious in armor," confronts Turnus, who has killed Aeneas's best friend on the battlefield.

After long battle, Turnus realizes that he has been vanquished by the more-powerful Aeneas. He lowers his eyes in defeat and begs Aeneas to save his life, or at least send his dead body to his family. Says Turnus, "I stretch my hands to you, so the men of Latium have seen me in defeat. Lavinia is your bride." That is, the land of Italy is now Rome. And then he continues: "Go no further down the road of hatred."

Luca Giordano, Enea vince Turno

Aeneas pauses for a moment, swayed by his natural desire to be compassionate. But at that moment, he looks down at Turnus's body and sees his dead friend's sword-belt. He calls it a "keepsake of his own savage grief." All of Aeneas's sense of reason and duty fly out of him as passionate anger takes over. Aeneas, "flaring up in fury, terrible in his rage," plunges his sword into the body of Turnis below him. "Turnus' limbs went limp in the chill of death. His life breath fled with a groan of outrage down to the shades below."

So ends the Aeneid.

(All quotes in today's post are from the the Fagles translation.)

In my last post, Aeneas leaves Dido in Carthage, despite his love for her and her pleas for him to stay with her. It is only by abandoning his passions in the name of duty and self-control. But here at the end of the epic, in its very final sentences, Aeneas gives in to his passionate rage and kills Turnus.

Instead of some wrapped-up Disney movie ending, we get the kind that sends us to the cafe for long conversations about what it all means.

In general, Virgil's epic glorifies the war, despite his acknowledgment that war always requires sacrifice. Although it is possible that a cool-headed Aeneas might have decided that the risk of letting Turnus remain alive might have been too great a threat to Rome. But Aeneas is not at all cool headed in this moment of slaughter. And at least if we are to believe him, Turnus accepts that he has lost and is ready to accept his defeat completely in his desire to create peace. Aeneas cannot accept this move. Losing the people he loves--certainly Turnus and perhaps Dido as well--causes such deep sorrow for Aeneas that he can no longer respond with compassion and humanity.

When he rejects the voice of passionate love, Aeneas causes the death of his beloved Dido.

When he listens to the voice of passionate anger, Aeneas causes the death of not only Turnus but he cuts off all chance of true peace.

Out of Aeneas's uncontrolled rage comes Empire. Is Empire ever created in any other way?

Virgil's Aeneid: Passion versus Responsibility

2011-11-19T08:56:00.000-05:00

Peter Paul Rubens, Dido and Aeneas

My favorite chapter in Virgil's Aeneid is Book 4. Here is the great love affair between Aeneas and Queen Dido of Carthage, with whom he found refuge from the storms at sea after he left Troy. Like Aeneas, it has been Dido's fate to leave her original home in order to found a new homeland for herself and her people. While hearing Aeneas tell the story of the end of the Trojan war and his subsequent journeyings, Dido falls in love with him.

In some ways, Dido echos characters like Calypso and Circe in Homer's Odyssey. Just as they did, Dido serves as a love interest who delays the hero's fated journey towards home. But Virgil gives Dido a kind of emotional depth which is totally lacking in Homer's women. Her love for Aeneas becomes a desperate passion, and we are meant as readers to see her great pain and identify with it. Of course, the depth of her feelings are not quite "real": the goddesses Venus and Juno have collaborated to curse her so.

And Aeneas certainly loves Dido back, although perhaps without quite as much of the goddess-inspired self-destructive passion that burns in Dido.

One of the most beautiful scenes in book four is when Dido and Aeneas, along with the other Tryians and Trojans, are out riding horses. An enormous rainstorm blows in, then turns to hail. All scatter and seek shelter.

And Dido and the Trojan leader make their way
To the same cave. Earth herself and bridal Juno
Give the signal. Fires flash in the Sky,
Witness to their nuptials...
...No longer is Dido swayed
By appearances or her good name. No more
Does she contemplate a secret love. She calls it
Marriage, and with that word she cloaks her sin.

When the gods hear of Aeneas's love affair with Dido, they immediately reprimand him. Jupiter, pointing out that "he seems to have quite forgotten, in his infatuation, the cities given him by Fate," sends Mercury to tell Aeneas that "in sum, he must sail." If he would not fulfill his responsibility for his own glory, he must do it he must for his son and for the future of Rome.

When Aeneas heard Jupiter's command, he realized that despite his love for Dido, his greater responsibility was to found Rome. "He bristled all over, speechless, astounded,/ And he burned with desire to leave that sweet land,/ in awe of the commandment from the gods above." More than any personal passion was Aeneas's responsibility to live obedient to the laws of Fate. He begins to prepare his fleet to set sail.

Dido is furious. As this Moreau pen-and-ink illustrates, she confronts Aeneas:

Traitor! Did you actually hope to conceal
This crime and sneak away without telling me?
Does our love mean nothing to you? Does it matter
That we pledged ourselves to each other?
Do you care that Dido will die a cruel death?
...
If you had at least left me with child
Before deserting me, if only a baby Aeneas
Were playing in my hall to help me remember you,
I wouldn't feel some completely used and abandoned.

Comments Virgil, "Cruel Love, what do you not force human hearts to bear?"

Although Aeneas expected Dido to be upset upon hearing that he planned to leave Carthage, Aeneas seems quite shocked by the depth of her fury. While he acknowleges that Dido has "earned [his] gratitude," he denies marrying her. And he feels that rather than giving in to his own passion, his greater duty is to obey the gods, to honor his son's inheritance, and to live up to his destiny to found Rome. He concludes, "So stop wounding both of us with your pleas. It is not my own will--this quest for Italy."

Things do not end well for Dido: "Dido, worn down by grief, went mad." She prepares a funeral pyre to rid Carthage of everything Aeneas had touched. She throws herself upon it with a sword given to her by Aeneas. And as she is about to die, she looks upon the clothes he used to wear and upon their "familiar bed."

Aeneas unfurls the sails of his ship and pulls away from shore, watching the flaming pyre from sea.

(all quotes from the Lombardo translation)

Virgil's Aeneid: Finding a Way

2011-11-15T08:29:00.000-05:00

My current journey into the classics was in many ways sparked by one book. In the course of my education, I had never read the Aeneid, nor did I even know the main plot of Virgil's story.

When my 12yo homeschooled son begin to read the Homeric epics, I felt no compunction to read either of them with him. I more or less knew what he was getting into. Back when I was eighteen, I read the Odyssey on my own and enjoyed it thoroughly. Although I had chosen to refrain from reading the military adventures of the Iliad, I knew its basic plot.

But when my son picked up the story of Aeneas and his quest to found Rome, I realized I didn't have a clue. I decided I should read the book alongside my son. And eventually, it inspired me to take my own journey--one through the classics of literature with an emphasis on all those ancient Western texts I never learned.

I read the Lombardo translation of the Aeneid while my son read the Fagles translation. Both are beautifully done. Often I compared the two writers' translations of particular passages--and more or less alternated which I thought was most beautiful or most readable. Either translation would be a fine way for a young person or adult to approach the epic for the first time, although the supporting references seem slightly stronger in the Fagles. And don't miss the fine audio version of the Fagles translation read by Simon Callow. If you are sharing this story with a young person, try the beautifully illustrated youth version by Penelope Lively.

When I opened the book for the first time, I found myself struggling to follow some of what Virgil was saying. I generally think of text as a transparent door into another world. But barriers in the Aeneid keep that door a bit shaded. References to Roman names kept me turning to the glossary, especially as the book started--and also in book six (the underworld scene).

After just one afternoon of reading, I was stunned to realize how many stories and names and phrases in our culture come from Virgil's Aeneid. From the Aeneid comes everything from the idea of rumors "flying" to specific phrases like "Greeks bearing gifts." (The story of the Trojan horse, not mentioned in the Iliad, is told fully here.)

I was also surprised to realize how incredibly poetic the book is. I did know that Virgil used the Homeric rhythm of dactylic hexameter to write his epic, but the more I thought about the idea of borrowing a meter developed for the Greek language to write a long work in Latin, the more I realized how conscious of the rigors of language Virgil must have been. What I did not expect was the beauty of similes, the depth of images, and the deep emotions expressed.

What struck me the most was the degree that Virgil's Aeneid seemed so intensely modern at times. Yes--like Homer, Virgil assumes that the drama acted out by the central human characters is often because the script is constructed by the gods. But the range of emotions played out by the characters--especially Aeneas and Dido--is stunningly immediate.

"Wars and a man I sing" begins the Fagles's translation of the Aeneid. With this phrase, Virgil announces his homage to Homer: the Aeneid is a book that echos the both Homeric epics: the Iliad ("wars") and the Odyssey ("and a man"). In contrast to Homer, however, we here have not the Greek side but the Trojan.

By connecting his nationalistic myth to the Homeric epics, Virgil gives a sense of inevitability to the founding of Rome. He places the Aeneid into the long flow of time--both literally and literarily. Rome starts feeling like a grand culmination of the great history that came before.

The first six books track the story line of the Odyssey. Aeneid recounts the story of the end of the Trojan war as well as his travels afterwards. While Odysseus winds his weary way home, Aeneas travels into the unknown, fated to found a new homeland. The last six books in the Aeneid track the Iliad, with Aeneas slaughtering the native people of Italy in order to found the Roman Empire. (Manifest Destiny, anyone?).

In my next post, I'll share my thoughts about the first section.

Making a Republic--at St. Johns

2011-11-01T08:45:00.000-04:00

Roger Martin's Racing Odysseus: A College President Becomes a Freshman Again is the real-life story that reads like many an adult dream. At the age of 61, Martin takes a sabbatical from his academic job to enroll as a freshman at St. John's College in Annapolis. St. John's is sometimes called "the great books college"--where all students read the classics of Western culture from Homer and Plato in the first year to Tolstoy and Hegel the senior year. Instead of lectures by professors, there are seminars with tutors. Instead of majors, everyone studies the same basic curriculum. Instead of competitive grades, there are discussions with advisors. If you don't know about this school already, just check out their reading list and see if you don't start dreaming about being 18 with a clean slate ahead of you.

Martin's assumptions about the slate ahead of him at 61 are reduced not only by his age but his experience of a very serious illness (metastatic melanoma) a few years before his time at St. Johns. Even more than most of us, he needs to see his place in life as part of the long flow of time and also one that allows personal growth. "I needed to prove to myself that I still had a future," writes Martin. "That even in my sixties I cold grow into a different person" and "learn new things." Reading timeless books made him timeless in its own way. "In short, I discovered that my life wasn't winding down," he says, but rather "in many ways it was just beginning, with a refreshed sense of commitment and confidence in what I could be."

Yes--the entire book is about as upbeat as this final realization of his. And there are times when Martin's incessantly positive style kind of grates on my way-too-serious personality. There are moments that Martin seems to avoid giving any criticisms at all of the college, perhaps for fear of offending the school or its students. At the same time, I found Martin's story of his time at St. Johns charming--and the detailed information about the education at the college absolutely fascinating.

Martin's story chronicles how his personal life intertwines with both his academic studies and his extracurricular activities at the school. Although he shies away from any significant discussion of the literature he is reading and discussing in the college seminars, he does suggest how their main themes connect to the life he builds outside the classroom.

Perhaps the most direct connection is one he makes when reading Plato's Republic. Martin decides in his first days on campus to fully embrace the freshman experience and go out for crew. As he explains, the college encourges all students to go out for any sport--ideally one in which they are have no experience but would like to try, even if they were not athletes in high school. Even though he calls himself the "old fart" in the boat and worries that he might hurt his team, Martin gives his all and finds that the students with whom he studies and plays have truly turned into a community. Just as they have seen in their reading of Plato around the seminar table, the students have combined scholarship and physicality to create whole beings. Plato would argue that they will be neither too savage from only physical training nor too "soft" from only receiving education in the arts. Instead they will be both courageous and "cultivated." (This post is not the place to analyze how Plato's assumptions might be gendered, but I'm not prohibiting you from thinking about that question.) And according to Martin, the students also learn through their athletic competition that it is through their work together--the work of each one of them, regardless of his or her position--that they build their little Republic.

I very much enjoyed Martin's book. It is a quick read--and while it is not one that will make you flex your intellectual muscles, it offers both an inspiring story of an individual's reckoning with mortality, an impassioned defense of a true liberal arts education, and a lens into a fascinating world.

Happy Halloween!

2011-10-31T09:28:00.000-04:00

Back to books tomorrow, but here's a little silliness to tide you over:

The Jack-o-lanterns are made from sushi rice which we cooked with shredded carrot and then formed into balls. My son meticulously cut out the faces from sheets of nori. For the stems, we used some food picks shaped like leaves, but you could easily use a little piece of green bean or something. We got the idea for the pumpkin onigiri from the blog Happy Little Bento.

The severed fingers are hotdogs (which we got at the Amish farm where we buy our meat) with a few slices here and there--very easy and quite, well, disarming.... Directions can be found at Adventures in BentoMaking.

The rest of the lunch box (a stainless steel container from LunchBots) is packed with raw sugar snap peas, a little lettuce, and a bloody dipping sauce.

Lunch is usually a lot less exciting around here!

New to My TBR Pile

2011-10-24T07:00:00.004-04:00

While on our beach vacation, my family spent a bit of time in a wonderful independent bookstore just steps from the ocean: Browseabout Books. The store is large--full of souvenir/giftshop stuff on one side, but on the other a much larger selection of books than I expected from a beach bookstore.

I sat for a few minutes reading the introduction to the Penguin edition of Charlotte Bronte's Villette--a novel I have not yet read but now have on my nightstand. Since I had been thinking about Bronte all weekend, this novel seemed like a must-read. Although Browseabout did not seem to have the Modern Library Villette, I'm eager to read A.S. Byatt's introduction to the novel in that edition.

I then stumbled across a new edition of the plays of Sophocles, translated by Robert Bagg and James Scully.

Although I carried Bagg and Scully out of the bookstore before I have poked into it thoroughly, I'm thrilled to see that Christopher, who blogs over at ProSe, is quite pleased with this translation. After braving a bit of carsickness to have a peak at it on the way home from the beach, it looks fantastic. (Have any of the rest of you looked at it yet?)

Incidentally, Christopher's blog was one of the first book blogs I found when I started searching for people who were committed to reading classic literature. I immediately loved the way he combined deep analysis of what he read with a discussion of his personal and emotional responses. (His passion for Thomas Hardy led me to read a little bit of that author before I started my project.) Then Christopher got busy and he took a bit of a blogging break. Then I did. Recently he's left some really thoughtful comments on some old posts here at the Lifetime Reading Plan. They've helped convince me that it is time for me to come back to the blog and begin to write about what I'm reading again--more frequently than once every week, or two...or three.

In one of those comments, Christopher let me know that Stephen Mitchell planned to release his own translation of Homer's The Iliad. Lucy Pollard-Gott, author of the fabulous Fictional 100: Ranking the Most Influential Characters in World Literature and Legend, was also kind enough to steer me towards this new translation. Thank you both so much!

I'm so excited to read this edition! Homer's The Iliad completely caught my imagination in a way I never expected, and I also adored Stephen Mitchell's introduction to the Gilgamesh epic. But before I allow myself to dive in (perhaps in early January?), I'm planning to complete some other reading projects--from some Greek drama to a couple of Victorian novels and even to a bit of 21st-century experimental poetry. Stay tuned.

* * *

As much as fiction calls to me, there are times in my life when nonfiction takes over almost completely. I'm about halfway through Richard Heinberg's The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality about the current global economic and environmental crises. It is not an easy read--intellectually or emotionally--but it is both important and thoughtful. Some of Heinberg's writing (perhaps especially his Powerdown about possible responses to resource depletion such as Peak Oil) is really quite lyrical as well.

I'm also loving the work of Bill McKibben. Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (about the links between social structure, environmental destruction, and resource depletion) is a wonderful place to start--although I first discovered McKibben's writings back in 1999 or so when I read his Maybe One: A Case for Smaller Families right as my son was born. I read it because I wanted to convince my partner David that we should have only one child--a decision I made for myself when I was eight years old. I finished McKibben's memoir/study with a much deeper sense that my personal choices mattered. Whether or not you agree with McKibben's specific argument about having smaller families really doesn't matter. The book gently but forcefully calls us to live up to our ideals and think about our responsibilities to the world. It was a life-changing book for me.

Like Heinberg, McKibben combines the skills of a visionary thinker with those of a careful and inspired writer. Both require a great deal of attention, and both will leave you thinking for months.

Doctors without Borders

2011-10-22T07:00:00.018-04:00

My husband (a physician) and I (a historian with a PhD) were eager to pick out books to enjoy on our recent beach weekend. Although I certainly appreciate the independent bookstores in our area--especially the marvelous Politics and Prose--I must say that as a non-driver, I was a bit addicted to the chain bookstore within walking distance of our house. And this time, due to big work projects that each of us were engaged in before our little vacation, David and I were both rushing around like mad as we packed. A quick bookstore run was really all we had time for. Alas:

Turning

2011-10-21T07:00:00.008-04:00

My family recently spent a lovely weekend along the Delaware shore. It was a weekend of reconnection after an especially busy few weeks, full of reading and writing and thinking, and full of lots of really fantastic beer at our favorite brewpub.

For several years now, we've had the very unorthodox tradition of spending part of the Jewish high holidays at the beach. Although our commemoration of the holidays is not religious, we are still moved by the personal reflection these holidays encourage.

One of the central metaphors of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is the idea of turning--the turning of one year into the next, the turning away from our pasts and into what we can make of our future, and the turning to our highest selves. David and I chose to focus on this idea during one of our beach days, following the traditional religious practice of offering our apologies and our forgiveness to each other--for hurts we knew about as well as hurts of which we were unaware. We exchanged vows to help each other become our highest selves, but also to be patient with each other as we stumble toward those goals.

Photography by our son; Sweater knitted by me!

* * *

When I think about how two people try to balance personal reflection, sometimes-conflicting moralities, and a deep commitment to each other, I can't help but think of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. I read the novel for the first time when I was just about the age of our 12yo son. I was deeply moved by the shy and plain Jane who fought her passionate self in order to do what she felt was right, no matter what others thought of her. So much of my personality--a shy but bull-headed woman who is definitely overly moralistic, fiercely outspoken with the people she loves most, and usually non-confrontational and polite to strangers--is a mirror image of what I saw in Jane Eyre. I have no idea if I loved the novel because I saw in Jane much of what I saw in myself, or if I loved the book so much that I made myself in Jane's image.

My husband did me the very great honor of reading Jane Eyre this year (after resisting my almost constant badgering for almost twenty years). He loved it--and saw much in it that I had not seen in my many, many rereadings. I've loved getting to talk more about this book I have loved so deeply for so many years. I'm eager to read it again soon.

My son, meanwhile, is currently gobbling up The Eyre Affair and its sequels. I am thrilled to hear him laughing aloud at the literary jokes!

* * *

In the evenings at the beach, the three of us watched my favorite film version of Jane Eyre: the BBC miniseries starring actress Ruth Wilson. (My husband knows Wilson from her current role on our beloved mystery series Luther. If you don't know the series and have Netflix streaming, go watch season one right now. Or check it out: you'll appreciate the captions.)

Although both my son and my partner enjoyed the miniseries, I think David was pretty disappointed with some of the changes it made from the book. I love Wilson as Jane Eyre. And I adore Toby Steven's Rochester--both unpleasant and completely loveable. (Personally, I don't see what Jane sees in Rochester in the Mia Wasikowska version--although I do like Judi Dench as Jane Fairfax.)

Somehow, I think all of our thoughts about turning should not really be leading us to think about the turning of books into movies...

* * *

In the next couple of posts, I'll talk a bit about the books we brought along and what I am making of my current reading.

Banned Books

2011-10-03T07:00:00.001-04:00

This weekend was our local library's second annual celebration of banned books. While librarians projected illustrations from books onto large screens, people from the community read aloud from classic children's stories.

One gentleman read from a version of "Little Red Riding Hood" challenged because Red was taking alcohol (a bottle of good red wine) to her grandmother. One woman did a dramatic reading of a scene from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe--an explicitly Christian-themed book--challenged because of its discussions of mysticism. Our state senator read from one of my very favorite books from childhood, Norton Jester's The Phantom Tollbooth--which was effectively banned when a librarian in Boulder, Colorado took it off the shelves and stored it in the locked reference collection because the librarian deemed it "poor fantasy."

Many people read picture books--some of which I knew and some which were new to me. Have any of you seen William Steig's book The Amazing Bone? The story is utterly random, hysterically charming, and very sweet. A parent wished to have it excised from public libraries because it features the use of tobacco by animals.

Although most of the readers were adults this year, three young people read as well. One girl read a favorite scene from Harry Potter and shared her undying passion for the whole series. Another read from Elizabeth Speare's Sign of the Beaver, a 1984 Newberry Honor book challenged because of its use of the word squaw to refer to an American Indian woman. My 12yo son read from Katherine Paterson's gorgeous Bridge to Terabithia, a book which has been challenged many times in many places for many reasons. The section my son read tells what happens when a nonreligious girl goes to church with her friend. The scene is gently written, extremely respectful of belief and non-belief, but also deeply probing.

The Banned Books Reading was a joyful celebration. People rolled their eyes at some of the reasons books have been challenged. In other cases we realized how much fear there is of beliefs and questions different from our own. I've never heard of this kind of commemoration before but am sure it must be done elsewhere as well. Does your town or library acknowledge Banned Books Week? How do you celebrate?

A Path Full of Brambles

2011-09-26T19:13:00.001-04:00

Ever read books not assigned to you in class? Write about them on your blog? Or maybe read about books on other people's blogs? If so (and of course it is so, since you are reading this book review), consider yourself officially gifted.

Lisa Rivero is one of my homeschooling gurus. Her early book, Creative Home Schooling: A Resource Guide for Smart Families, is full of ideas and insights which have shaped my family's experiences as my son has grown from a brilliant and kind small boy into a brilliant and (mostly) kind young man. Her newest book, A Parent's Guide to Gifted Teens: Living with Intense and Creative Adolescents, is not about homeschooling per se. Instead, Rivero attempts in her newest book to help parents deal with the difficulties that their gifted children may present to them.

I wrote a post not that long ago about the books I read in preparation for my son's upcoming homeschooling year--and I want to assure those of you who have absolutely no interest in this subject that I have no intention of letting this blog become a homeschooling blog.*

I hesitate to use the word "gifted" at all since it has such negative meanings in popular culture. It sounds like bragging. Many of us who love learning (pretty much one of the definitions of gifted) have been taught not to brag about what comes to us more from the combination of good genes and good opportunities than from personal hard work. Many people believe the word "gifted" is a label only adopted by people who want to set themselves off as better than others. But that is not at all the truth which Rivero is trying to talk about.

What I love most about Rivero's work is her exploration of the way that giftedness is no sign of superiority. Instead, it is a sign of difference, of weirdness, even (at least in experience) of abnormality: "I have heard more than one parent complain that it is tempting to say that his child suffers from giftedness rather than he is gifted. Maybe this helps to explain how hard it can be, for both child and parent. People who insist that being gifted is a walk in the park don't understand that the park, while beautiful and extensive, is also wild, often pathless, and filled with brambles."

The "unpath" through the brambles of the park can lead us through that darkness and into a place of growth. That is exactly what I am learning--through the experience of homeschooling a gifted child, as well as through this project and its accompanying blog. Summer has been a time when I've let go of the practice of both, to some degree. Now--as the Jewish High Holidays come and autumn starts to seem real--is our time to reenter growth: mine, my son's, and the growth we do together.

*If you found this post because of your interest in homeschooling, or if you are fascinated by the experience of having a gifted student at home full time, you might be interested in checking out my 12yo son's blog about his experiences growing up homeschooling: The Education of a Young Man. As of now, he posts extremely irregularly. Learning to write is one of his educational goals this year, so things may pick up.

Celebrating Book Bloggers

2011-09-13T09:22:00.000-04:00

This post is a day late for the BBAW "Community" celebration day--but for those of you who have stuck with me this long slow summer, you must not be surprised by my tardiness! As autumn really gets underway, I promise to be a more consistent blogger and reader.

I've been inspired by so many of you that I hardly know where to begin. Some of you write posts full of thoughtful ideas. Some read amazing lists of fabulous fiction, causing me to overload my library hold shelf on a weekly basis. Some of you are stunning writers. All of you make me want to read more books. And sometimes that desire is a disadvantage: too often I pick up another novel rather than pick up this laptop with plans to write a new post!

First of all, thanks to the first book blogger I ever found, Amanda at Dead White Guys. I had been googling to see if anybody wrote about their non-school-based educations and stumbled across her hilarious and clever blog. Of course, I laughed as I read many of her back posts and then immediately subscribed to her blog and twitter feed. I do find it a bit ironic that my very first "model" of a classics blog was a brilliant parody of what I had in mind to write. She mocks overly-earnest readers--but secretly I think she may be one of us herself.

Other classic bloggers I love are Allie at A Literary Odyssey, Rebecca at Rebecca Reads, and Jillian at A Room of One's Own. All three are thoughtful critics who build their posts from a combination of the intellectual and the personal. Their lovely writing and gentle rigor will completely draw you in.

Amateur Reader over at Wuthering Expectations sets a sometimes-ferocious model for careful reading, heady analysis, sophisticated humor, and patient mentorship. Emily at Evening All Afternoon, Frances at Nonsuch Book, and Teresa and Jenny at Shelf Love all think creatively, write gorgeously, and bring up issues which leave me thinking for days.

Special thanks go to Lucy at Fictional 100. Her fascinating book about her beloved fictional friends (the central characters of lasting literature) and her inspiring blog are reason enough to gain her a mention here. But what I am even more indebted to her for is her unbelievable Twitter support (@Fictional100). She has asked the right questions, introduced me to thoughtful people, and patted me on the back when I needed it most.

There are so many other blogs I love. Special mention goes to Thomas at My Porch for giving us a book blog full of insights and analysis but also full of the beautiful stories of everyday life, with real characters living out their own real plots. PJ Grath gives us something similar--lovely photographs, lots of great book talk, and a deep sense of real life--over at Books in Northport. Finally, Beverley at Pomo Golightly (a blog I found back in my knit blogger days) keeps me dreaming about a simpler, more honest, and more beautiful world.

Thanks to all of you--and thanks to all the rest of you who read, write, and share your thoughts with me. You make me a better reader.

Short-listed!

2011-09-07T14:31:00.010-04:00

I am honored to announce that the Lifetime Reading Plan was nominated in the category of "Best New Blog" for this year's celebration of Book Blogger Appreciation Week! I would love it if you would hop over there and put in a good word for me. You can vote by clicking at the bottom of the nomination page or at the main voting page.

If you are new to my blog, you might check out some of my favorite posts:

1. Gilgamesh: The Art of Becoming Civilized

2. Trollope's Rachel Ray

3. Waugh's The Loved One

You can also learn more about me and my project here in my introductory post, "Surrounded by Books".

Indexing the Great Books

2011-08-29T12:19:00.000-04:00

Mortimer Adler, one of the scholars who compiled the Great Books of the Western World, felt the series needed an index, or (as he called it) a Syntopicon. He chose what he thought were the 102 greatest ideas in the history of the world, then hired recent college graduates--eventually a staff of more than one hundred workers--to sift through the Great Books for any allusions in the texts they could find. Among his "great ideas" were Love, Rhetoric, Time, Truth, and Tyranny.

At the time--and ever since--people have questioned his categories. Some complained that Sex, Money, and Power had been ignored. Although War was a category, Peace was not. And there was a lot more Sin than Virtue. Even with the limited number of categories, the Syntopicon eventually reached a length of more than 2400 pages, covered by two thick volumes. A reviewer named Dwight MacDonald wrote a review of what he jokingly called "The Book-of-the-Millennium Club" and trashed the index. "One has the feeling," he claimed, "of being caught in a Rube Goldberg contraption."

When a reporter saw the above picture, originally printed in Life magazine, he was struck by how much the cards stuck in their boxes resembled headstones--"as though Professor Adler and his associates had come to bury and not to praise Plato and other great men."

You can find more about the process of indexing the Great Books of the Western World in Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books, which I reviewed in my last post.

A Great Idea

2011-08-27T07:21:00.001-04:00

Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books is a very readable account of a what the author calls the very "icons of unreadabliity": the Great Books of the Western World. This fifty-four volume series of classics was developed by scholars at the University of Chicago and was formally launched in the spring of 1952. Although it is hard now to believe, a million households bought the books from door-to-door salesmen with the hope of identifying with a shared intellectual heritage and participating in a national conversation about enduring ideas.

Beam begins his "undidactic history" with Robert Maynard Hutchins, "the 'boy wonder' appointee" to the presidency of the University of Chicago, who put together the Great Books with the help of "his brilliant, Hobbit-like sidekick, Mortimer Adler" (who was "an unholy pain in the neck.") Although there is much evidence that Hutchins and Adler were genuinely committed to the democratization of the classics, Beam points out their "irrepressible intellectual hucksterism." He argues that these "Great Bookies" (and the marketers at the press) targeted the insecurities of poorly educated Americans in an effort to sell them expensive sets of books they would never read. (Want to impress your boss? Want to attract the attention of a well-educated female?)

Although I enjoyed reading Beam's snarky little book, I remain unconvinced that Hutchins and Adler were primarily motivated by money. Yes: after the books were published, hucksters carried the volumes from door to door around the country and often lied to clients in order to make a sale. But Hutchins and Adler were deeply committed to the study of the classics (which they taught both in college classrooms and in the community) from long before the idea of the published series arose.

Beam frequently laughs at people who still seem devoted to these works or even believe that someone would read them. But he also makes it clear that many of these people are quite genuine in their commitments. In fact, Beam gets bitten by the classics-reading bug himself.

This is not a book that requires a lot from the reader, nor is it particularly thoughtful. Beam does not help me come to terms with my own desire to read the canon, nor does he help me comprehend my deep hesitations about this project. But the history of the publication of this series is an interesting one.

My vote: Skim the library's copy.

Hello? Is this thing on?

2011-08-23T09:04:00.000-04:00

This has been a long hot summer. The oppressive heat of our un-air-conditioned house has left me staring into space rather than reading great books and writing blog posts about them. When I have deigned to pick up a book, it has often been a light contemporary novel or memoir rather than an ancient classic. Add to that the fact that I was dealing with a personal issue (which is in a much better place) and all the reading it required to understand what was going on.

And now I'm up to my eyeballs planning our 7th grade homeschooling year. Although we've taken a fairly unschooly approach in the past, following our son's interests and abilities as any given day suggests, this year we plan to be much more focused and directed. We're trying to decide whether to homeschool through our son's high school years--and I think we need to figure not only how to make sure he is prepared for college work (and that our record keeping is adequate for college admissions) but that we can work together intensely with some semblance of civility and joy.

As we think about the upcoming year, I've read (and reread) some fascinating books about educating children. An old favorite is David Albert's And the Skylark Sings with Me - Adventures in Homeschooling and Community-Based Education. I read it just about every August, right before our school year starts.

The story of how Albert's two daughters were educated at home, Skylark is inspiring and thought provoking. The author seeks to allow his daughters' gifts (and the girls are gifted in different ways) to develop as fully as possible, with as much freedom as possible. Even within that freedom, the girls develop a deep sense of responsibility, direction, and relatively traditional academic values. Some of my friends resist the story because they feel that the Albert family is special and the girls are so precocious that his book is unrepresentative. Others dislike the fact that the book is not a how-to book in any way. Reading the book this year, I loved it just as much as ever--but I must admit that I was disappointed to remember that the book ends right as his elder daughter reaches the age my son is now. Although the critics are right to say that readers cannot extrapolate from Albert's story to make specific choices about our own children's education, I have always loved the model of his general approach to homeschooling and child-rearing. Now that my son seems to have entered a whole new world, I would love to have Albert hold my hand as I grow to understand my own 12yo.

Another book I love is Grace Llewellyn's The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education. When I first read the book many years ago, I dreamed of those future years when my son would take control of his own education and become as devoted to learning for learning's sake as Llewellyn clearly is. In fact, perhaps this is the perfect book to follow Albert's. Like Albert, Llewellyn is committed to a true life of an active mind combined with radical freedom. But instead of talking about how parents can foster that freedom-education in their children's lives, she talks directly to teenagers about how they can create it for themselves.

Llewellyn lists all sorts of inspiring and thoughtful idea about things to do, subjects to study, and books to read. Sometimes, though, some of the suggestions seem a bit too new-agey or too deliberately "deep and meaningful." A bigger caveat: sometimes the author is so anti-school that I'm turned off, personally. And that profoundly anti-school attitude makes little sense to youngsters who have been homeschooled from the beginning.

A more traditional academic path is taken by high schooler Kendall Hailey in her memoir The Day I Became an Autodidact. Because of this book's relevance to my own adult project, I plan to review in much more detail at a later date.

You see what a hippie-nerd I am. I'm drawn to both child-led freedom education and to the formal rigor of academia. That combination of commitments is what makes this blog project so appealing for me, what makes these particular books so relevant to my life, and also what makes homeschooling such a great pleasure.

But I do read books that challenge my general approach. I'd heard vicious accounts of the uber-popular family memoir by Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother--and knew I would hate the author's beliefs about child rearing. Perhaps partly because I was expecting something so awful, I was actually pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed her short book. I am contemplating getting my son to read this as well, just so he knows how the other half lives.

Rather than believing in child-led education and nurturing freedom, Chua supports what she calls Chinese parenting. She feels that it is not only a parent's right to force a child to follow a particular path but a parent's responsibility. Only by pressuring a child to work very hard, she argues, will that child develop into an adult capable of serious dedication and success. Sometimes she uses blackmail, shame, and other parenting techniques that make me queasy in an effort to get her two talented daughters to develop their gifts.

What I found persuasive is the author's articulation that requiring more from a child is fundamentally a sign that a parent believes the child is capable of more, of better. Letting a child get by with a half-hearted attempt at something, or letting a child give up before exerting serious effort, teaches the child that he or she is not capable. These insights are sprinkled throughout Chua's very funny narrative. Although she ends the book still supporting "Chinese parenting," the reader sees the author struggle with the limits or problems of her child-reading style. And throughout, as she recounts those queasiness-inducing parental behaviors I mentioned above, she is self-deprecating and even humble in her own sarcastic way.

* * *

The weather has cooled off here is DC--kind of odd for August, I guess, so probably temporary--and the school year is starting anew. Time for me to get back to my classics reading! The next few posts will be discussions of books about books, plus reviews of a few random summer reads I want to mention. After that: Greek Drama! Please join me.

Howard's End is on the Landing

2011-08-08T07:00:00.014-04:00

I love the title of Susan Hill's memoir of reading: Howards End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home. Like the author, I arrange my books in a less-than-obvious way sometimes. Being able to find them might be only by luck of memory: Homer and Herodotus filling the "now" shelf in the study (smack between the books published by friends, family, and self on the shelf above and knitting patterns on the shelf below), Dickinson in the piano room, Austen and the Brontes in the living room, Yeats and Keats having a party with Anne of Green Gables and Little House on the Prairie on the basement shelves, Shakespeare in my son's room, and Orion magazine (with its great review of The Bird Sisters) in the bathroom. Maurice and Aeschylus on my bedside table.

Hill's book is a collection of very short, very loosely interconnected stories. I had high hopes given the evocative title and the charming cover--but honestly, I did not love this book. The essays were light and generally fairly enjoyable, but they did not come across as especially thoughtful or insightful. I might have enjoyed the book more if I had read a chapter here and there in odd moments instead of in one big gulp. If you're planning to read it, keep it stashed in your car so you can read a few pages while waiting for someone, or next to your bed for a little insomnia relief.

Some of the essays seem more like name dropping than like critical or appreciative reading. I don't mean that Hill tells us much about the authors she mentions. That might be interesting and even useful. But just telling us that she met someone? Not so much. For example, Hill tells us that she met Iris Murdoch but "can only remember the Iris I knew, not closely, not well, but with honour and respect and with singular affection." No real details to flesh out who that Iris was. (One of the better essays is on Anthony Trollope--and I can't remember whether or not Hill mentions that she never had the pleasure of meeting him...)

Other essays seem to have a lot of potential--and just as they seem to really get going, they end abruptly. And sometimes Hill just names books on her shelves without really mentioning actually reading them, much less what she thought of them. Honestly, many of these essays feel like rushed blog posts put up on busy days.

There are a few gems. I find Hill's chapter about Virginia Woolf far more thoughtful--about Woolf and about Hill herself. Her discussion of Roald Dahl also has a flash of insight when she analyzes why Dahl's books are beloved by children and hated by so many adults. Finally, Hill's discussion of reading carefully ("Slow, Slow, Slow-Slow, Slow") raisea interesting questions for me that I hope to address in a future post.

I also like this paragraph:

Books help to form us. If you cut me open, will you find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me? ...So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA.

I've never read any fiction by Susan Hill before. Have any of you? I'd love to hear how this book compares to her other writing.

The Whole Five Feet

2011-07-26T07:15:00.000-04:00

I recently discovered Christopher Beha's marvelous The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everthing Else. His book is a beautiful example of personal memoir informed by the reading of classic books. Beha does not set out to guide us in our own reading of specific texts (as do such authors as Fadiman and Murnighan). He does not even talk in great detail about many of the books he reads. But he gives us a gentle and moving story of the way great literature can help us grow and confront the real circumstances of our lives.

Beha challenges himself to read his way through all of the Harvard Classics in the course of one year. Throughout his life, Beha had looked at the matching books on his family's shelves, occasionally reading the introductory material or skimming through a book here or there. Originally published in 1909, the books were published to allow working class people who could not afford to attend college an opportunity to receive a comprehensive liberal education. Although Beha attended elite private schools and an Ivy League university, he had not actually read many of the texts that lay before him. And so he sets out to work his way through the volumes, in order with no skimming. (Interestingly, the books do not seem to be arranged in any logical order--beginning with Benjamin Franklin, moving through Plato and Milton to Emerson then back to Aeschylus and Sophocles, etc.)

As Beha writes near the end of his book, The Whole Five Feet is not the story he was intending to write when he first set out. "The book I intended to write was essentially a comedy, about a feckless, somewhat lost young man who shuts himself away from the modern world and its cultural white noise," he writes, "in order to immerse himself in classic literature." He had imagined that "the young man might learn a few easy lessons, and we could all share some laughs along the way."

Fortunately, "the story line [of his life] didn't cooperate." Instead, Beha found himself living through "a loss that couldn't be assimilated into a comedy" (discussed in thoughtful detail throughout the book) as well as a minor event in his own life that echoed a previous serious one. The experiences of his year were not easy ones for him, but they led to a much deeper book which resonates with wisdom. There is not an ounce of petty or snarky thinking in this book.

What I like best about this book is Beha's absolute refusal to draw simplistic answers from the books he read. Instead of pat answers to the dilemmas he was facing, the author is led to complex and thoughtful questions. The literature comes alive, rather than being stuffed into little moralistic doses to be administered only as necessary. The classic books are no cure--in fact, “all the knowledge in the world is small recompense for the things we can’t possibly know.” But wonderful books open our minds to new worlds, new possibilities, new perspectives, and new ways of understanding.

Summer Book

2011-07-18T07:00:00.001-04:00

Since my son was born a dozen years ago, I've loved sharing books with him. Together we've read beautiful picture books, classic children's fiction, exciting adventure books, and most recently some adult classics (like The Great Gatsby, which we reviewed together). One of our favorite reads for years was Tove Jansson's classic Finn Family Moomintroll series, with all its gentle zaniness.

I only recently learned that Jansson also wrote for adults. The marvelous New York Review of Books Classics series has released a few of her novels, including one I've been reading about on a lot of book blogs: The Summer Book. What a quiet, lovely book! It is a book without an intense plot--just a series of lyrical meditations that follow a young girl and her grandmother across their transformative summer on a remote island. What informs the vignettes is a fact just barely mentioned: that the six-year-old girl's mother has just died.

The two people struggle to learn how to live together and love one another. The grandmother is "a little cranky" (as it says on the back cover) as she gives up some of her solitude to care for her granddaughter. Young Sophia is a whirlwind of childhood desires and concerns--and readiness to take care of those around her. These are two amazingly well-drawn characters who see intimately real and alive.

The introduction the the NYRB edition--a text by Kathryn Davis which is almost as lyrical and gentle as Jansson's own--points out that The Summer Book was written when Jannson was sixty years old, one year after her own mother had died. The author inhabits both characters, the grandmother and grieving daughter, allowing the book to have a depth of empathy even as it describes simple, everyday events without a drop of sentimentality.

The plot of this book is all but nonexistent. If you're in the mood for a rollicking adventure, don't expect to find it here. But if you are a reader who is moved more by characters, language, and emotion than by plot, you must go read this book. Highly recommended.

Shaken--and Stirred

2011-07-16T07:00:00.002-04:00

"A true literary work, no matter with its genre, is one that makes us see the world or ourselves in a new way. Most writers accomplish this through an imaginative and original use of language, which is why literature has been defined as writing that needs to be read (at least) twice. Great books tend to feel strange. They leave us uncomfortable. They make us turn their pages slowly. We are left shaken and stirred."

--from Michael Dirda's Bound to Please: An Extraordinary One-Volume Literary Education

Aesop: The Moral of the Story

2011-07-15T07:00:00.003-04:00

I don't know how I missed it growing up, but Aesop's Fables are some of the earliest literature we have. In the early fifth or sixth century BC, Aesop was--at least according to the limited sources we have--a slave in ancient Greece. He was also a fabulous storyteller. There is some debate about how much Aesop actually wrote, partly because of internal discrepancies in the fables and partly because of their similarities to fables in Sumerian and Akkadian tradition.

Many of us grew up with versions of Aesop sitting on our nightstands. But as the introduction to my Penguin edition says, "The animal stories which parents still buy in quantities for their children's birthdays bear little resemblance to the real Aesop fables." Instead, his animal tales were used to negotiate with his contemporaries and win points in arguments--not teach ethical standards or moral actions. Many of his best known works were one-liners used at drinking parties!

Reading through the complete Aesop, I was overwhelmed by the oddity of some of the tales and the morals drawn from them. Some are shocking and appalling. Others are just random. Many are quite dark and brutal--not at all the light and humorous tales I was expecting. Sanitized versions of Aesop's fables are so often used to teach morality that the idea that these tales expound something so intensely opposite of morality is hard to accept. Is it possible that our ideas about kindness to the weak is all historically constructed?

Here's one fable that I find quite powerful, given that the traditional interpretation is that Aesop was a slave:

A pigeon, kept in a dovecote, boasted loudly of her fertility. Hearing this, a crow said to her: "Hey, friend! Stop boasting like that. For the more children you have, the more you should lament slavery."

* * *

If you explore your library's collection of illustrated Aesop's Fables, you'll find a great variety of incredible editions. In fact, the artist whose name is most associated with children's illustrations, Randolph Caldecott, created pictures for one version back in 1883. So did artists known for very different kinds of art, such as you will find in an edition with drawings by Alexander Calder.

One magical edition is Aesop's Fables: A Classic Illustrated Edition which compiles illustrations from almost 30 different artists--all pictures used to accompany editions over the course of more than one hundred and twenty years.

My favorite illustrations of the fables are Jacob Lawrence's pen-and-ink illustrations. One of my favorite artists, Lawrence was a twentieth century African American artist whose work is often colorful and playful while also deeply rooted in politics and history. Reflecting the intensity of some of the fables rarely included in children's versions, Lawrence's Aesop illustrations use bold, severe, and tangled drawings to accompany the stories. (Although the artist reflects the darkness of some of Aesop, both the stories and illustrations in this version are all completely appropriate for young children.)

Sappho...and Beyond

2011-07-13T07:02:00.003-04:00

Thank you for your patience and your kind thoughts during my extended break. Now: back to Ancient Greece!

Sherod Santos recently published Greek Lyric Poetry: A New Translation, a fabulous collection of poems by a variety of ancient Greek poets.

Early in Santos' book is a selection of Sappho poems. His translations are lyrical and ornate compared to some of the plain, direct versions of her work. Sometimes I find that more ornamented style to be effective with those little fragments that have survived from Sappho's originals. When we have very little remaining, it feels fairly comfortable to add a bit of decoration. But often--especially with the longer fragments--I'm put off and wish for the plainness, the directness of Sappho's speech really holds it on. Santos' poetry, while beautiful, seems to compete with that other kind of beauty the Lesbian poet offers us.

Here is the start of his version of that famous poem I talked about recently:

     He must feel blooded with the spirit of a god
     to sit opposite you and listen, and reply,
     to your talk, your laughter, your touching,
     breath-held silences.

There are a few phrases in his translation that leave me breathless: "when you return from Crete, meet me at the apple grove, our little temple, its leafy alter incensed with the mineral scent of your soapy hair." The specificity of the line makes it seem intensely real and immediate, and the use of senses other than sight and hearing makes the image lush.

Even Santos' brief but thoughtful introduction is written in this lush style. One of my favorite sections explains how Sappho is the heir to what comes before:

To read Sappho is to gaze across the every-widening gulf of history into the flickering lucidities of an interior life, a scattered dialogue of self and soul that seems to begin where Penelope [from the Odyssey] left off, in a brooding meditation on love and loss--the anguish of separation, the intense carnality of the loved one's presence, the rattled, nerve end wait for love's return--all the keen desiderata of a heart ensconced dead center in the sway of any given moment.

* * *

The best thing about Santos' book are all the poems by Greek lyricists unknown to me.

Many of the male poets seem to accept that the proper topic for writing is war. But unlike Homer who believes a man should come home carrying his shield or on it (that is, fighting bravely instead of running away from battle, even if one was to die), here we see poets challenging that idea:

     The Shield

     Some half-cocked Thracian swaggers about
     raising up before his men my blazoned shield,
     the one I abandoned near a blackthorn tree.
     So? It's not my head he's ragging them with,
     and any old shield can replace that one.

    --Archilochus

Like Sappho, Archilochus seems to be talking about a very specific person, talking about the real experiences confronting him, rather than the almost mythological heroes of Homer's epics. This is definitely the first text I have read in my lifetime reading plan that seems to directly confront the politics and culture of the state. And this, perhaps, is a major step toward the modern. Much of ancient literature (ie, Homer) exists to justify national power. Other ancients, such as Sappho, discuss a very separate private world. But here with Archilochus, we have the roots of the subversive. A huge step.

A Good Hard Look

2011-07-11T09:45:00.002-04:00

"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."
--Flannery O'Connor

Recently a new kind of genre has begun to develop where authors use real historical actors as their central characters and real historical settings as their backdrops. These books are not traditional historical fiction. Instead, authors try to reanimate these historical actors in new stories and situations as a way to explore underlying motivations and personalities. In other words, these books use fiction to search for the deepest truths about history and people.

Some of the novels that come out of this genre are consciously playful. Although I doubt I'll ever actually read the actual book, just the title of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter makes me howl with laughter. Clearly the author was trying to amuse readers. But at the same time, this book seems like a serious engagement with deep themes in history and literature. By creatively twining Lincoln's real experiences in the fight over slavery with a fictional modern zombie fantasy, Seth Grahame-Smith turns one kind of political leadership into another and therefore has the freedom to explore the larger truth of Lincoln's commitments.

Some of my favorite examples of this new genre--or is it not new?--are the reanimations of literary authors. Whether it is Emily Dickinson or Earnest Hemingway or Louisa May Alcott, I'm fascinated by the possibility that fiction may be able to give us special insight into fiction writers.

When I found out that Ann Napolitano was trying to do exactly this kind of analysis of one of my very favorite writers, I started counting down the days to publication of her novel about Flannery O'Connor. And finally the day has arrived!.

Although I loved Flannery O'Connor's stories the very first time in late high school, I had no idea where they came from. They were funny and bitter and grotesque. I'm afraid I did not see "the heart laid bare" then at all.

Later, when I found a marvelous collection of her letters, it fundamentally transformed what I thought about O'Connor. I began to see that she struggled with issues of the right way to live--and the importance of moral courage--more than any other writer I'd read (including Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre). What I had originally taken almost as sarcasm and cruelty on her part was in fact a deep attempt to understand what she might have called the action of grace in the world, the sword of truth that pierces us until we are fully open to change. She was showing that what hurts us the most is the only thing that can forge us into the people we need to be.

Napolitano has written a stunning tribute to O'Connor. I love the balance in this book between O'Connor's style and Napolitano's own voice. She never tries to appropriate the original author's style, but she remains committed to the same explorations that O'Connor makes. A Good Hard Look is full of the same kind of flawed and quirky characters that populate O'Connor's writing. Perhaps most importantly, deep humor combines with a very serious engagement with the issues of honesty and moral courage.

Napolitano tells us that O'Connor's perception of the world was sometimes "like a magnifying glass burning a hole through a sheet of paper." It is that perception that makes O'Connor feel so dangerous and so uncompromising. She burns those around her--and us her readers--as she points out that we are (and that she is) as fragile, deluded, and self-righteous as her crazy characters. Napolitano is far gentler and less confrontational a writer than Flannery O'Connor is. But by the end of A Good Hard Look, we are stripped bare and left with the same sorts of questions that O'Connor asks: how can accept the truth without flinching or denying it? What are the gifts that pain gives? How can we let go of our defenses and live honestly, vulnerably, fully?

Napolitano's A Good Hard Look a book to come back to again and again as we spend our lifetimes trying to answer those questions.

Thank you so much to Trish and the team at TLC Book Tours who shared this wonderful book with me.

A Brief Break

2011-06-28T07:11:00.005-04:00

I ended my last post by saying I would be back with details about my vacation reading--and here it is, almost a week later, and there is no post. My apologies.

A few hours after I wrote that previous post, I received some sad and upsetting news. I'll be fine--please don't worry--but I would like a bit more time to heal without responsibilities to this blog.

Book discussion will resume next week, probably on July 5th. Thanks for your patience.

Music in the Mountains

2011-06-22T16:30:00.000-04:00

Happy sigh. This week my family is at violin camp, located in the beautiful mountains of south-west Virginia. This is our second year here, and we hope there will be many more summers in our future. For me and for David, this is pure vacation--a magical week full of no job responsibilities, no cooking responsibilities, no cleaning responsibilities, and a constant soundtrack of beautiful music. For my son, there is a lot of hard work learning new music, a lot of joy performing with new friends, and a lot of fun as the kids play soccer on the quad after the evening concerts.

One of my favorite events at camp is the annual talent show. Participants can perform any "talent" (or un-talent) that they would like, other than playing their instruments in the normal way. Here is my son's talent show skit, which you might especially enjoy if you are the parent of a young musician:

* * *

Tomorrow, back to books. I'll post about what I am reading here in the mountains.

Sappho's BFF

2011-06-18T07:47:00.001-04:00

In these days when my brain has been so Sappho-addled, I attended one of my husband's office parties.

Let me say up front that his office mates are brilliant and interesting people--but they are not (in general) the wonderfully strange, obsessed nerdy types with whom I usually associate. When I get together with my own colleagues, we rarely mention anything that the average 21st-century American would ever think to talk about. If someone speaks 21st-century to us, a lot of us have no clue what he or she is saying. I'm pretty lost when people start talking about what was on television last night--much less what new techno gadget to acquire, or what the newest lingo is.

(It is ironic that I am confessing my luddite status on a blog, is it not?)

One case of this current-culture blindness on my part is my ignorance of the whole Silly Bandz craze. You know those shaped rubber bands kids stack up on their wrists these days? (No? Just trust me. I only learned when someone offered my son one.)

But back to this office party full of normal people:

One of my husband's coworkers, the mother of two daughters, held up her wrists and showed us her newest acquisitions, found in a local gas station on the way to the party...

...rubber band shapes, words turned into art--difficult to puzzle out in the original, then twisted away from recognition completely, and stacked together in ways giving meanings perhaps not intended by their creators.

And I thought immediately what I know you must be thinking right now:

this is exactly what happened to Sappho's words! It is the hidden echos, our own efforts to stretch those words into something meaningful to us now, that gives her poetry such power. It is the twisted stacking of mutilated words, made into something delicate but strong. It is the crystal color of her words, so flexible that they can be shaped to our own modern minds and bodies, yet still holding the powerful snap of their original meaning.

(And as I gradually realized that all these nice people were wondering politely what the hell I was talking about, I immediately thought you all of you, all my new BFFs who understand such thoughts and obsessions...)

Stung with Love

2011-06-17T06:21:00.001-04:00

In my reading of these various translations of Sappho, I've been struck by the difference in not just translations of the poem but in the introductions. One especially comprehensive commentary can be found in Aaron Poochingian's Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments. The introductory essay is especially strong in its discussion of the historical context in which Sappho wrote as well as in its analysis of the history of Sappho interpretation.

In addition to the strong introduction, Poochigian provides specific commentary on each poem--significantly more detailed than in any other edition I have seen. In most translations, the footnotes are about translation issues or are explanations of little-known references. Here, however, we get full literary analysis. And the analysis is on set on facing pages--in what I think of as Shakespeare style. (Did you grow up with those paperback editions with notes on the even pages?)

Although I love the volume's introduction and its notes, I'm not bowled over by Poochigian's translations. As I have read Sappho over these last two weeks, I've grown to love the illusive and incomplete echoes of her poems that are still extant. Poochigian, on the other hand, wants to heal the rifts: "I confess that, though Sappho's remains are usually fragments that are themselves fragmentary," he writes, "I have done my best to create a sense of completeness." As he says, "I wanted my translations to be real poems in their own right."

In his efforts to emphasize the fact that Sappho did not write in free verse, the translator rejects using free verse translation. Translators who do so "betray her poems by their very nature," says Poochigian. Although the forms Sappho used to not convey into English, he chooses to use a form that would emphasize the fact that Sappho's poems were actually songs. He therefore uses rhyming English lyric.

Sweet mother, I can't take shuttle in hand.
There is a boy, and lust
Has crushed my spirit--just
As gentle Aphrodite planned.

Personally, I find Poochigian's use of rhyme heavy or clunky--not at all consistent with the almost ethereal echoes I've come to love in the more open translations of Sappho's fragments.

Here is another example--a part of one of Sappho's most famous verses:

That fellow strikes me as god's double
Couched with you face to face, delighting
In your warm manner, your amiable
Talk and inviting

Laughter--the revelation flutters
My ventricles, my sternum and stomach.
The least glimpse, and my lost voice stutters,
Refuses to come back.

Compare this even to William Carlos William's strictly paced version and we see something that, at least to my ears, seems flat. But--although I'm increasingly drawn to the open weave of translations that acknowledge the tatters (such as Carson's), I'm intrigued by the idea that what Sappho's original readers may have heard was much closer to the tightly bound songs presented by translators (such as Poochigian). What do you think? Where do you fall?

Anybody else know of other translations to check out?

Vanity Fair by William Thackeray

2011-06-15T07:30:00.003-04:00

I am way behind. Today is the check-in for Allie's Vanity Fair read-along over at A Literary Odyssey, when we are supposed to have read roughly half the book. I clock in at only about a tenth--but I am about to have what I hope will be a week full of heavy reading. More details over the weekend.

From the little I have read so far, Thackeray is fabulous! I'm not sure I would have appreciated the author's sarcasm and satire back when I fell in love with Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice in my high school years. But for me now, a woman in her early 40s, Thackeray hits my funny bone--and my moral balances--in exactly the right way.

There is so much to talk about in the book already! I promise to address some of those issues at the end of the month when the read-along finishes. But for now, I want to talk about the illustrations rather than about the author's words.

William Makepeace Thackeray wrote Vanity Fair for serial publication complete with his own illustrations. Some of the pictures are amazing, and some of the pictures seem almost awkward to a modern eye. Due to their mixed quality--and the fact that Thackeray was content to have the novel published without the illustrations during his lifetime--many publishers choose not to print the pictures. Penguin, for example, publishes an edition with a fabulous introduction but no images. The editor argues that since "they never approach the degree of mastery displayed by Thackeray's writings" and are in some cases are "embarrassingly bad," the illustrations can "by no stretch of the imagination... be considered worthy accompaniments to a great work of literature. I understand the point, but I disagree. Penguin is one of my very favorite Classics publishers, but in this case I was eager to find a different imprint. If the illustrations had been made by an artist unconnected with Thackeray, I might find it easy to accept the decision to axe the pics. But when the author drew them himself? I wanted to see them!

The Oxford World Classics edition, equally well introduced and in the same price range as the Penguin edition (although harder to find in US bookstores), includes images of all the original illustrations. I encourage you to consider purchasing the Oxford and also finding a way to read the intro to the Penguin version.

This frontispiece (reproduced inside both the Oxford and the Penguin) fascinates me. In reference to the illustration, the Oxford says, "Harlequin ruefully regards his own face in a cracked mirror, to the background of the towers of the church at Ottery St. Mary, where Thackeray spent happy childhood holidays."

Although I have not gotten far enough in the book to state for sure what theme is being illustrated here, my "reading" of the picture is that the vanity which comes from looking at one's self in the mirror (and one's masked self at that) is in direct contrast to the symbol behind of religion, community, and family.

* * *

Of course, how an author portrays his or her characters is what almost always draws me to a book. So far, I am loving both the sassy but not-so-nice character of Becky Sharp and the gentle William Dobbin. Thackeray tells us that Vanity Fair is "a novel without a hero"--but, at least in the modern interpretation, both Sharp and Dobbin seem like potential heroes to me so far. The author helped redefine what a "hero" is. Instead of the Greek ideal of Achilles or even Odysseus, we have characters with complex personalities. Sharp is smart and clever, strong and sarcastic, and out for herself. Dobbin is both pathetic and noble, a new kind of gentleman. I'm eager to see what comes next!

Sappho, "as long as you are willing"

2011-06-14T08:13:00.000-04:00

If you have any interest in the general issue of translation, Sappho's writing is a perfect piece of literature with which to start your explorations. Try to check out and compare a few different versions. Why Sappho? First, the total volume of Sappho's writing that has survived is tiny--making the comparison of several translations a project that won't take you much more than a few hours. Another reason it is such an excellent project is because the translations differ from one another quite enormously. As Anne Carson says, reading Sappho is fundamentally an exercise in imagination. You can see--in the various versions discussed in the previous posts and here--how much translation is an art rather than a science.

Although his version first came into print in 2002, I have just discovered that Stanley Lombardo has translated Sappho's poems. Having very much enjoyed his translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, I was very eager to see how he would treat Sappho. Similar to Mary Barnard, Lombardo makes Sappho's fragments read like poetry. Similar to Carson, he is more forthcoming about the the limits of the text we have extant. He also tries to be reflective of the original rhythmic phrases. On top of that combination of strengths, this version also includes a wonderful critical introduction by Pamela Gordon. (My favorite quote from the intro: "An extensive bibliography seldom satisfies a longing to speak with the dead.")

Lombardo's recreated poems are both sharp and fragile--almost brittle, even, in their luminosity. Using language like "quenched desire," "trembling," and "climax," he seems to get at the intense physicality of Sappho's poems about love without treading into too-modern wording. One fragment leaves me breathless: "earth embroidered with flowers."

Pamela Gordon writes in her introduction that one of the most rewarding way to read Sappho is for us "to read an individual fragment as though we were reading a note in the bottle. Each fragment comes to us against the odds and across the centuries, and none arrives with any original instructions about context or meaning. All we know is that the sender is Sappho (though occasionally we are not even sure of that), and some of us are certain that we are the right recipient." I am sure the latter us true for me.

* * *

Another wonderful contemporary translation of Sappho's work is Willis Barnstone's Sweetbitter Love: Poems of Sappho. (He has a newer paperback edition called The Complete Poems of Sappho which I gather is the same translation.)

In some ways similar to Lombardo's book, Barnstone's volume begins with an excellent introduction which places Sappho in historical and literary contexts. His poems attempt to be true to the originals, but Barnstone is not nearly as concerned with producing a literal translation as some others, such as those I discussed in my previous post. He cares more about allowing Sappho to speak with a voice that can be heard, with at least some of the power it had in the ancient world. "I go partway in reflecting the abused Greek text," he says, but typically he "limit[s] the mirror so the English can live."

I love how Barnstone shapes puns in English that try to reflect some of the depth of the Greek. For example, here is the translator's version of "Words with Virginity":

Virginity, virginity, where have you gone, leaving me abandoned?
No longer will I come to you. No longer will I come.

And here is Barnstone's translation of the new-to-us Sappho poem, found in 2004:

Growing Old

Those lovely gifts of the fragrant-breasted Muses,
girls, seek them eagerly in thrilling song of the lyre.

Old age has grasped my earlier delicate skin
and my black hair has become white,

my spirit turned heavy, my knees no longer
carry me nimble for dancing like a fawn.

About these thing I groan. What can I do?
For a human not to grow old is impossible.

They say Dawn, dazzled by love, took Tithonos
in her rose arms to the utter end of the earth.

Once beautiful and young, time seized him
into gray old age, husband of a deathless wife.

Barnstone states his hope that more library time sifting through papyrus fragments--and more technological advances such as the use of infra-ray technology to reveal texts, might possibly turn up more Sappho as the years progress. What a gift--and how ironic that it is through the most modern of means that we may more closely approach the ancient.

Sappho: If Not, Winter

2011-06-13T08:35:00.000-04:00

Although I love Mary Barnard's poetic translations of Sappho, there are many other interesting choices available for the reader. I'll spend the next few posts talking about some of the options available. Today I will focus on a few translations by authors who say they place an emphasis on being accurate. In the next post, I'll look at a few translators they are more concerned to create poems which the authors consider accessible to modern readers.

* * *

Anne Carson's If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho is a fascinating version which emphasizes the fragmentary nature of what we have from Sappho. When I first saw Carson's book on the shelf, I was stunned. How on earth could there be a 400-page edition of Sappho fragments?!

Carson does not give us a long introduction, but in the few pages she offers, she gives a beautifully provocative statement: "Even though you are approaching Sappho in translations, there is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp--brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure."

Carson's volume presents each fragment of Sappho's poetry on one page with a facing page in the original Greek. Most of the gaps and guesses are marked very clearly with space and brackets. Some of her translations are drop-dead gorgeous--but, by my lights, sometimes the poetry gets interrupted with Carson's efforts to be more faithful to the texts we have (rather than the feel of the poems as they might have felt at the time). If you are interested in approaching the text as an historian--or as a detective--or even as a poet you might find this translation to be perfect. Personally, I found Carson's interpretation fascinating and stunningly gorgeous in places, but I am very glad I had seen Barnard's translation first.

For a beautiful review by a reader who loves the poetry of Carson's version, check out Emily's discussion over at Evening All Afternoon. As she writes, "I think my love for this book is due in equal measure to the stunningly beautiful translation of the parts of the poems that remain, and the spaces of silence where the papyrus has failed. And don't miss Jason's review which contains the most brilliant sentence I think I've ever read: "I have never had a relationship with a piece of punctuation like I've now developed with the square bracket."

There are times when Sappho fragments seem almost too...um, well, fragmentary...to justify a two-page spread:

      they became [
      for not

or

]
      sinful
      ]

At the same time, there is something absolutely wonderful about actually seeing almost everything extant from Sappho. Our understanding of her writing style builds with each fragment we read, and our ability to to that "imaginal" work which Carson describes becomes a terrific game.

The title fragment is a wonderful example of the suggestive possibilities. For me, the phrase "if not, winter" started resonating with the idea of unrequited love. Instead of the narrator basking in the joy and sunshine of returned affection, the world turned dark and cold. Of course, you might imagine this fragment in a wholly different way.

My favorite imaginings came from one of the last pages, which include several single-word poem fragments. I loved putting the following bits together in my mind. I didn't know they made Cel-Ray back in Sappho's Day!

      189
      soda

      191
      celery

      192
      gold anklebone cups

* * *

David Campbell's Greek Lyric: Sappho and Alcaeus gives us an even less poetic version. If you are interested in experiencing the emotional pleasure of Sappho's poetry, this is NOT the translation for you. But if you are interested in seeing behind the scenes and experiencing the intellectual puzzle that is the translator's art--and especially the complications a Sappho translator faces--this book is an incredible source. See if you can find a copy in the library to glance through.

An example of what Campbell presents:

           22
          ...task...lovely face...unpleasant...otherwise winter...pain(less?)...I bid you, Abanthis,
          take (your lyre?) and sing of Gongyla while desire once again flies around you, the lovely one

And this short section also has two footnotes directly beneath discussing translation issues (one even questioning whether a new poem might have started at "I").

Another example:

          58
          ...(fleeing?)...(was bitten?)...(you of many names?)...gives success to the mouth...

* * *

I suppose too much accuracy leads us to abandon Truth.

* * *

Another kind of accuracy that translators seek to match is Sappho's poetic style. Paul Roche in his The Love Songs of Sappho (Literary Classics) acknowledges the difficulty of replicating the meter of the poet's Greek because Greek and English have inherently different sounds. "Confronted with the perennial challenge of transferring the perfection of one language to the perfection of another," he writes, "I have done my best to get near not only to what Sappho said but the way she said it."

Trying to create in English the exact metrical patterns of Sappho's Greek lines would seem strained and strange. They work only in the Greek. "When a poetry is stripped of its original music," says the translator, "a completely new set of sounds and rhythms has to be found." Roche has emphasized the ancient poet's use of both tight form and deep richness by creating his translations with assonance, alliteration, and a loose rhyming pattern. Here is his version of one of the poems I've quoted before:

I More than Envy Him

He is a god in my eyes, that man,
Given to sit in front of you
And close to himself sweetly to hear
     The sound of you speaking.

Your magical laughter--this I swear--
Batters my heart--my breast astir--
My voice when I see you suddenly near
      Refuses to come.

My tongue breaks up and a delicate fire
Runs through my flesh; I see not a thing
With my eyes, and all that I hear
    In my ears is a hum/

The sweat runs down, a shuddering takes
Me in every part and pale as the drying
Grasses, then, I think I am near
      The moment of dying

* * *

It is astonishing to me how different these poems feel in their different translations. What do you think? Which ones do you find yourself drawn to? Perhaps this gets to the question of why we are reading ancient literature in the first place and what we hope to gain from it.

Sappho: Advice

2011-06-10T09:34:00.000-04:00

If you are squeamish
Don't prod the
beach rubble.

--Sappho

from Mary Barnard's translation

* * *

You can hear some of Sappho's poetry read in her original Greek here.

And you can get the above quote on a t-shirt from Shimer College.

Sappho the Lesbian

2011-06-08T07:00:00.002-04:00

One of the few things we know about the poet Sappho is that she was a Lesbian.


Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene by Simeon Solomon (at the Tate)

Uhm...that is...she lived on Lesbos, a Greek island off the coast of what is now Turkey.

Of course, what most of us grew up hearing is that she was a lesbian Lesbian--but on that lower-case adjective, we're a lot less certain. Certainly the way Sappho's sexuality has been portrayed over the centuries gives us a much more complex picture. She has been portrayed as a sex-crazed heterosexual prostitute, a suicide that leaped to her death because her love for a specific man was unrequited, a school marm, a cult leader, and a virgin. Take your pick.

Sappho was probably married, although some scholars suggest that the name for her husband implies her marriage was all a big joke. (Could she really be married to someone named "Dick All-Cock from the Isle of Man," as one scholar questions?) Her poems indicate she had a daughter, although some scholars suggest that her references are in fact to a young lover.

And some of her poems are about heterosexual love, as is this one, translated by Mary Barnard:

12. It's no use

Mother dear, I
can't finish my
weaving
You may
blame Aphrodite

soft as she is

she has almost
killed me with
love for that boy.

--translated by Mary Barnard

I love the sweet freshness of this poem. It conveys the emotions of a first crush so beautifully. But just because Sappho says she is talking about a boy doesn't mean she was in love with a real boy. Just as Hesiod might have been creating a fictitious narrator, Sappho could have been assuming a different persona. Since it is believed that many of her poems might have been performed at weddings, this interpretation seems quite feasible. We just can't know what a love poem means about the feelings of its author.

Many of Sappho's poems are about a particular group of women. And interestingly, many of these poems are much more erotic--about both bodily pleasure and bodily desire. Look at this example, translated in that late 1950s by the incomparable William Carlos Williams:

Peer of the gods is that man, who
face to face, sits listening
to your sweet speech and lovely
          laughter.

It is this that rouses a tumult
in my breast. At mere sight of you
my voice falters, my tongue
is broken.

Straightway, a delicate fire runs in
my limbs; my eyes
are blinded and my ears
          thunder.

Sweat pours out: a trembling hunts
me down. I grow paler
than dry grass and lack little
          of dying.

Certainly, the intensity of this poem (or any of the others like it in the collection) does not prove that Sappho loved women any more than the first example proves that she engaged in relationships with men. And even if it did prove she had female lovers, that would not make her a lesbian (or bisexual) since those are constructions of sexuality that arose more than two thousand years after her death.

Nevertheless, I think it is hard to deny that Sappho's poems saw that women were sexual beings, full of beauty and passion and longing. She imagined that both emotional and physical desires could be fulfilled in a variety of ways without censure or disapproval. What a modern--and yet eternal--vision!

Perhaps it is exactly that idea that women can have desires that really sets the poems of Sappho apart from those of most of the men writing in the ancient world. The poet-narrative feels great desire--and expresses it in her poems as love for other women. Although this seems to be very clear evidence that Sappho was (at least in a loose ahistorical way) a lesbian Lesbian, I can also imagine that it might have been less threatening to see a woman being an active lover of other women than a woman being an active lover of men. Whatever the choices that Sappho made, and however we interpret the choices her narrator made, the poems that we have of Sappho's give strength and a sense of eternal tradition to women who love women today.

* * *

For more about Sappho's life and her changing reputation over time, see these fascinating books:
The Sappho Companion (a fascinating compendium of writings about Sappho over time)
Sappho Is Burning (a difficult read but a thoughtful and very scholarly book)
Sappho's Immortal Daughters (an erudite and highly readable study)

The Poetry of Sappho

2011-06-06T07:00:00.003-04:00

After the success of Homeric epic poetry in Ancient Greece, a new kind of writing began to bloom: lyric poetry. One of the most famous lyric poets in ancient Greece was Sappho. Sappho's poems use her own voice to tell the story of her own experiences. She insists that daily life and love are every bit as worthy of poetry as the martial splendors and stories of gods found in earlier epics.

Originally, lyric poetry was poetry sung to the accompaniment of a lyre, and possibly performed with the help of mimes and dancers. Soon, however, lyric came to mean short, personal and immediate poems which could use a variety of meters. Sappho wrote with what translator Mary Barnard (1958) calls a "fresh colloquial directness." Maurice Bowra says Sappho's language is "ordinary speech raised to the highest level of expressiveness." And Dudley Fitts argues that both Sappho's work and Mary Barnard's translation "is stripped and hard, awkward with the fine awkwardness of truth." Paul Roche says her poems have a "sharpness and jewelry of sound": "plain and ornate at the same time, in the same line, in the very same phrase."

Only two complete poems of Sappho's still exist--and one of the two was found only a couple of years ago. A few others seem very close to complete. Others poems are merely fragments. A few are bits of Sappho's work quoted in later authors' texts. Many poems were found on degraded papyrus--many of which had been torn into strips to make wrappings for mummies, or were faded and then turned into usable paper. Some of these were preserved only because they were in very dry ancient trash heaps in the deserts of Egypt.

A century ago, archaeologists began to collect these postage-stamp size bits of ancient papyrus and sent them to England. As Jeanette Winterson writes while channeling the spirit of Sappho, "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY POEMS? When I turn the pages of my manuscripts my fingers crumble the paper, the paper breaks up in burnt folds, the paper colours my palms yellow."

Some of Sappho's poems present an impressionistic view of nature. I love these lines (translated by Mary Barnard) personifying the morning light:

3. Standing by my bed

In gold sandals

Dawn that very

moment awoke me.

and these about the evening light:

24. Awed by her splendor

Stars near the lovely

moon cover their own

bright faces

when she

is roundest and lights

earth with her silver

* * *

Several extant fragments show Sappho confronting with the issues of mortality--the issue with which both Gilgamesh and Achilles struggle. Just as the two men come to understand, Sappho knows that while her body will die, her memory will live on. That is, the body is mortal but nevertheless the self can become immortal.

60. You may forget but

Let me tell you

this: someone in

some future time

will think of us

and, more obviously:

100. I have no complaint

Prosperity that

the Golden Muses

gave me was no

delusion: dead, I

won't be forgotten

Gilgamesh hoped to be remembered as the great king of a great city. Achilles knew he would be remembered as a magnificent warrior-hero. But Sappho knows that she will be remembered because of her poetry. As she writes in fragment 9, "Words which I command are immortal."

* * *

In the next post, I'll discuss Sappho the Lesbian.

Foreshadowing in the Stream

2011-06-05T16:06:00.000-04:00

Please excuse me for the delay in the appearance of this post. The tominis got me off track...

It wasn't more than a few pages into Earnest Hemingway's Islands in the Stream when I realized what was going to happen. For those of you who don't want to hear any details about major events in the story, this is probably not the post for you. Come join me again tomorrow for spoiler-free discussions of ancient poetry.

Still here?

As I mentioned in Thursday's post, Thomas Hudson is a man trying to come to terms with grief. That grief is the death of his sons--something we only learn about at the end of the first section and the beginning of the second. Although the fact of their deaths does not happen earlier, the reader knows the deaths are coming because of Hemingway's clear foreshadowing. Nevertheless, there was a twist in my expectations which left me fascinated.

Hemingway lets us know from the very beginning that something bad is coming. When Hudson is talking to the barkeep (who pours all those tominis and other drinks), they come up with a plan for large new paintings--of waterspouts overcoming fishermen, of hurricanes, of the sinking of the Titanic:

"Don't be shocked by its magnitude. You got to have vision, Tom. We can paint the End of the World," he paused. "Full size."

"Hell," Thomas Hudson said.

"No. Before hell. Hell is just opening."

This End of the World--a personal End--is almost exactly what unfolds for us in the painting that is the next 400-plus pages of Hemingway's novel.

In another early scene, Hudson's writer-friend Roger tells him of the death of his younger brother David many years before. When the two boys were out on the water, their canoe flipped and both were plunged into the cold water. "'I tried to go down after him. But I couldn't find him,' Roger said. 'It was too deep and it was really cold.'" He confesses to Hudson that he'd never gotten over his guilt and sorrow about his brother's death--and he'd never been able to talk about it. Instead, he turned to the world of writing novels not worth a damn, as he says. It was an escape, a way to run away from his pain.

Hudson tries to convince Roger that he could write a great novel if he confronted his grief. "You told me a hell of a good novel tonight if you wanted to write it," says Hudson to Roger after he shares the story of the drowning. "Just start with the canoe."

"And end it how?"

"Make it up after the canoe."

* * *

It seemed clear to me by this point that someone loved by the artist was going to be coming to his end via drowning. When Hudson's sons come and one is scared of going goggle-fishing but eventually agreed to go, I bit my nails during the entire scene. When they are chased by a hammerhead shark, I knew we were at their deaths. Then, when Hudson's son David catches an enormous fish and tries to reel it in for hours in the hot sun, I realized he'd be the goner. Gosh, even his name was the same as Roger's dead brother. I kept wailing to my own David (my partner) that watching David trying to catch the big fish was like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

Right as young David pulls the thousand-pound fish to the surface, the men realized that the fish was only attached to the lure by a thread of flesh, and then by nothing. "It was no good. The great fish hung there in the depth of the water where it was like a huge dark purple bird and then settled slowly. They all watched him go down, getting smaller and smaller until he was out of sight." One of the men jumped into the water in an attempt to save the fish--that is, get the hook back into the fish so David could pull him out. But the fish was comdemned to sink into the deep cold water.

Just as the tension on the fishing rod was released as the exhausted fish fell through the water, I suddenly felt free of the unbearable pressure of waiting for death of one of the sons. The foreshadowing was about the fish's death! While in a way I felt like Hemingway was manipulating my emotions, I also saw that he was using a fascinating literary trick, making two parallel but radically different drownings seem equivalent because of their potential impact on the living.

So all was well in the story, the family goes to the bar and pulls an almost sweet hoax on the patrons, and finally the boys board the plane to go home. Hudson is sorry to lose them now that he has experienced the humor and love that have pervaded his home during the summer.

And then, I turned the page. Hudson receives a telegram that two of his sons have died in a car accident while riding with their mother. I turn a few more pages, and his other son dies while at war.

OK--so there will be a paragraph missing here. I had hoped to say something interesting about how this sudden tragedy works in the book, but I'm afraid I'm almost speechless. Please let me know what you make of it. It seems to me that there is a sort of horrible relief which occurs when we are waiting for the worst to happen. But Hemingway strips that away from us, leaving us with no defenses in place as we confront the shock that Hudson has, in its sudden and pure grief.

Hudson can't deal with his grief, closing off even more than Roger. Eventually, he loses everything except his sense of duty, and finally he loses even that. Islands in the Stream is a heartbreaking book. Despite its weaknesses (discussed in my first Hemingway post), it is well worth the read.

How to Drink Like Earnest Hemingway

2011-06-03T11:16:00.003-04:00

I mentioned yesterday that Hemingway's Islands in the Stream is full of alcohol-soaked moments. While there are a lot of food references as well, the beverage descriptions are much more appealing. Which would you choose: a peanut butter and onion sandwich or one of these:

Thomas Hudson took a sip of the ice-cold drink that tasted of the fresh green lime juice mixed with the tasteless coconut water that was still so much more full-bodies than any charged water, strong with the real Gordon's gin that made it alive to his tongue and rewarding to swallow, and all of it tautened by the bitters that gave it color. It tastes as good as a drawing sail feel, he thought. It is a hell of a good drink.

One character late in the book calls this drink a Tomini. The Hemingway Cookbook agrees. To Have and Have Another: The Hemingway Companion (what a perfect name!) calls their versions of the drink the Green Isaac's Special and the Hemingway Tom Collins.

HOW TO MAKE A HEMINGWAY TOMINI:

2 ounces of gin
juice of one lime
dash or two of Angostura bitters
about 4 ounces of coconut water*

Mix the ingredients with ice and serve.

*Coconut water is the liquid inside a fresh coconut, not coconut milk. It is sometimes available in cans or bottles. If you buy it that way, make sure it is not sweetened.

No Man is an Island

2011-06-02T14:17:00.003-04:00

Since I've been talking about mysogyny in literature recently, I thought I would pour myself a little Earnest Hemingway.

This long Memorial Day week I've been in South Florida celebrating the 50th wedding anniversary of my in-laws. The plan was to head to Key West with David's brother, his partner, and the celebrating couple.

Key West! Excitedly, I began to pick out the perfect books to take. And I eagerly planned a visit to the Hemingway Museum, with its cat drinking fountain made out of a urinal from Sloppy Joe's bar.

At the last minute, our trip plans fell through. We instead are staying at my in-law's house, about an hour north of Miami. I'm afraid no great literature was born in this land of retirees from New York, faux-Italian gated housing developments for "active adults" in Disney clothes, lots of great bagel places, and multicolored lawn statuary in varying scales. "In Fair Verona FL where we lay our scene..." The natives here don't write. They watch television repeats and go out to eat at 4:30 pm. (Do you sense that I am a bitter and disappointed person?) I definitely need a little of whatever Hemingway is pouring in the picture above. And a good book.

* * *

So I opened the Hemingway I had packed: Islands in the Stream.

I know they tell you no man is an island--but what do you know: this man IS an island. The trajectory of the book follows the main character as he becomes completely cut off from his emotional attachments. Thomas Hudson becomes lonelier and more internal as each page passes.

Islands in the Stream was published posthumously. The smooth, connected narratives that appear in the other Heminway novels are not here. Instead of having Hemingway's final draft, we have three stories assembled by his last wife and his publisher. The three sections trace the experiences Thomas Hudson has in Bimini, in Cuba, and on a gun boat fighting Germans off the SE coast during World War II. Although they do not weave together particularly well, the disconnect between the stories is surprisingly effective--perhaps because they are separated by events that create a disconnect for the character. (Tomorrow I'll talk a bit more about what those disconnects are, but I'll keep today's post free of details some of you might construe as spoilers.)

The first section chronicles Thomas Hudson's life on his island in the Bahamas. Hudson has created for himself a regimented and productive life, but he lets go when his three sons come to visit him for the summer and makes connections with them instead. The relationships between the boys and their father are beautifully portrayed. They tease each other, laugh together, appreciate each other's beauty and strength, and learn to grow together. The humor comes out loud and clear--not something I expected from Hemingway. This section strikes me as most polished; it is a well-organized narrative told in fluid prose. I find it both the most accessible and also the most exciting.

The second section takes us to Cuba. Although I struggled a little with the incessant talk about cats and gin and fishing and more gin, I must say this section made me thirsty. Here we are introduced to Honest Lil, a character I came to love even though I have no idea why she is in the book. Honest Lil treads perilously close to being a caricature, but Hemingway pulls off his portrait without quite crossing that line. The other female character in the book is in part two. Hudson briefly reconciles with his first wife at the end of the section, but their love for each other does not seem to be enough to make up for the friction between them.

The third section is by far the weakest in my opinion and almost seems to just peter away. Thomas Hudson has been utterly submerged in depression and grief, but at the same time he is almost completely successful in smothering his emotions. Instead of the heavy doses of gin that got him through the second section, he now turns to duty. The way he finds to confront his demons is by committing to do the job that he is responsible to do--whether or not he cares about it, and whether or not he risks his life.

I fall hard for characters who make an effort to grow and change during the course of a book. (I fall hard for real people who make that kind of effort in life, too.) Thomas Hudson tries to do the right thing, to be good, in different ways throughout the novel. In the first section, we see him try to be a good father and unite with his boys. In the second, he tries to be a good lover and unite with his ex-wife. And in the third, he tries to serve his country and his crew. Hemingway is playing off characterizations that we've seen as early as Homer's Iliad. But what is uniquely modern, I think, is that although Thomas Hudson tries to turn things right, his attempts to be good all end in failure. Instead of growth at the end, we see him shutting down.

Back to Hemingway tomorrow, then on to Sappho on Monday.

Hesiod's Theogeny

2011-05-28T07:00:00.001-04:00

In my last two posts, I've written about Hesiod's Works and Days. Another short "epic" (referring only the meter, not the more modern meaning of epic) by Hesiod is Theogony, an interpretation of the beginning of the world. The poem begins with a long introduction which serves as an invocation to the muses to speak through the poet and tell the stories of origins.

Once the introductory hymn concludes, we begin to read about creation in terms that remind me of the Hebrew Bible: "In the beginning there was Chaos, the abyss." But soon the texts part ways. Hesiod stresses the importance of sexual reproduction in the invention of the world: "From the abyss were born Erebos and dark Night. And Night, pregnant after sweet intercourse with Erebos, gave birth to Aether and Day." In fact, those creations conceived without sex seem dangerous and evil: "Then [Earth] gave birth to the barren, raging Sea without any sexual love" says one line. Another reads, "Sleeping with no one, the ebony goddess Night gave birth to Blame and agonizing Grief."

A great deal of Theogony is simply a listing of the generations of the gods and goddesses. Often it reads like a section from Genesis. But in Hesiod we get some excitement: mothers and fathers "mingling in love" rather than just strictly begatting.

This positive view of sexual reproduction reminds me of the civilizing effects of sexual intercourse in Gilgamesh. I'm looking forward to tracing how that storyline changes as I read through the literature that follows.

* * *

Hesiod contains some beautiful language. "From his massive hand [came] a whirlwind of holy flame," writes Hesiod about Zeus. "And the earth that bears life roared as it burned, and the endless forests crackled with fire, the continents melted and the Ocean streams boiled, and the barren sea." I love the intensity and rhythm of this kind of poetry.

* * *

Well--that is the best part. Much of Theogony is even more misogynist than Work and Days. It is so icky that I don't want to go into much of it. Perhaps this quote will suffice:

"They were stunned, immortal gods and mortal men, when they saw the sheer deception, irresistible to men, from her race is the race of female women, the deadly race and population of women, a great infestation among mortal men, at home with Wealth but not Poverty. It's the same as with bees in their overhung hives, feeding the drones, evil conspirators. The been work every day until the sun goes down, busy all day making pale honeycombs, while the drones stay inside, in the hollow hives, stuffing their stomachs with the work of others. That's just how Zeus, the high lord of thunder, made women as a curse for mortal men."

* * *

Enough! It is time for a woman to speak for herself. After finishing with Hesiod, I'll be reading Sappho.

Hesiod: Voice of the Poet, Voice of the Narrator

2011-05-27T07:00:00.003-04:00

Hesiod, detail of a mosaic by Monnus

Stanley Lombardo's translation of Hesiod contains a marvelous introduction written by Robert Lamberton. I'm especially intrigued by a pair of facts he points out: In Theogony, the author introduces himself as Hesiod--a narrative style we don't really see in Gilgamesh or Homer's epics, and one that is the precursor to modern first-person narration. And in Work and Days, the author emerges "as an individualized human being with a story and a characteristic, idiosyncratic view of the world"--in other words, as a character himself.

Is his writing autobiographical? When Hesiod speaks of his father and brother Perses, is he recounting the truth of his own life enough that we can use the information in our efforts to understand Hesiod's background?

In Work and Days, Hesiod gives Perses a long speech about his family and behavior. It is important to realize that this is very much a constructed speech which he never would have given in real life--especially since he is presenting family history that his brother would have of course already known. Instead this speech is designed to be heard or read by an audience. In other words, as Lamberton says, "Not only Perses, but Hesiod himself, if first and foremost a fiction."

Although it is tempting to take his words as accurate historical information, it is equally possible that his whole story of inheritance "can very easily be imagined as pure invention, a fiction that has no relationship to the real world."

So Hesiod uses some devices that work against a literal reading. They make for something almost universal or mythical in tone. But throughout his writing, Hesiod also uses very specific details that make his work have the ring of truth, of autobiography. Is the narrator the same as the poet? Not really. Are the facts that the narrator speaks the facts of the poet's life? We have no idea.

This emergence of the individual narrator is a central development in western literature--one that Lamberton argues succeeds in "personalizing the speaking voice and inventing a narrator with an identity and a personality." Perhaps it is that construction that sparks the almost-confessional lyric poetry about to come on the scene. Fascinating.

Hesiod's Works and Days

2011-05-26T07:00:00.006-04:00

Hesiod, a beloved poet in ancient Greece, was a contemporary of Homer's. Although his reputation has not remained nearly as strong as his peer's, Hesiod's writings are our oldest primary sources for much of Greek mythology. His work includes Works and Days and Theogeny, which are usually published together in one slim volume. I'll talk about the first today and the second in an upcoming post. Since I enjoyed his translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey so much, I read Stanley Lombardo's 1993 translation of Hesiod and found it quite readable.

Addressing his ne'er-do-well brother Perses, Hesiod in Works and Days seeks to teach us that an honest life consists of working hard to the end of one's days.

In imitation of Hesiod's direct style, Lombardo uses some colloquial or contemporary language that some readers might resist, while others might find it charming. For example, when the translator is introducing Eris (the goddess of strife), he writes, "She's a mean cuss and nobody likes her, but everybody honors her, this ornery Eris. They have to: it's the gods' will."

Works and Days begins with an explanation of "why life is hard"--that is, why human beings now have to work for a living. Hesiod explains using a story: Zeus was irritated when a mortal man being stole fire and Zeuss decided to get even. "I'm going to give them Evil in exchange for fire," said Zeus, "their very own Evil to love and embrace."

And what is that evil? Woman.

He sets out to create Pandora, the world's first mortal woman, out of clay. The gods give Pandora a beautiful figure, a host of feminine talents, "a bitchy mind and a cheating heart." She is then sent to Epimetheus (a mortal) "where she was a real pain for human beings." In addition to Pandora, Zeus sends Epimethus a jar of gifts. Epimetheus, despite advice to the contrary, accepts the gifts. Out of great curiousity, Pandora opens the jar. Out pour sorrows and evils--enough to blanket the earth and fill the seas. Only Hope remains in the jar.

Why was hope in the jar of sorrows and evils? That question kept me awake for an hour last night. (I swear it started to make sense just as I fell asleep, but when I awoke I had forgotten how.)

The story of Pandora is astonishingly similar thematically to the story of Adam and Eve in the Hebrew Bible. Eve, like Pandora, is a seductress who seeks more knowledge than God apparently wants humans to have. Like Pandora's gods, Eve's god puts knowledge deliberately in her path. And both Pandora's and Eve's quests for knowledge lead to the beginning of human sorrow and pain. There is one difference: the Hebrew god supposedly creates Eve to be a companion for man, while the Greek gods create Pandora to be a punishment for man.

Hesiod suggests that the human fall from our paradisal state was gradual. At first, humans lived with Chronus in the Golden Age where they had no need for work. All was provided for them by the abundant earth. This race of humans were replaced by the people of the Silver Age--those who lived with Zeus and spent almost their entire lives as infants. This race was replaced by the people of the Bronze Age--strong war-like humans who eventually destroyed themselves.

The Age of Heroes follows--the time from which come the noble Achilles and Odysseus. And finally, we come to the Iron Age, where men must labor in misery and desperation. It is the age of deceit, disrespect, and unhappiness. The best course is to fight evil through hard work and steady routines.

Hesiod's generally snarky tone is beautifully summarized by what is perhaps his most famous quote. He states that his hometown is "bad in winter, godawful in summer, nice never."

* * *

Hesiod's poetry does not have the same resonance today that Homer's epics do. Homer's exegesis of character is what makes his two epics so powerful. Hesiod's language is not as glorious, nor is his social analysis as relevant today.

On the other hand, there are certainly historical reasons to read Hesiod. One idea from Hesiod that has shaped the way we envision human history is the idea of a "golden age" from which we have quite literally "descended." Interestingly, we often pair the idea of a golden age with the idea that things were harder in the past. Our grandparents may have had to walk uphill both directions to school, in deep snow all year 'round--but their world was a better one. Perhaps we've combined Hesiod's proposal that hard work makes a better life with his idea of a golden age?

Hesiod does have pages of clever advice. Reading him I thought of Shakespeare's Polonius and his "neither a borrower nor a lender be" speech. A few examples:

"Be sure to invite the fellow who lives close by. If you've got some kind of emergency on your hands, neighbors will come lickety-split, but kinfolk take a while."

"Don't be tiresome at a potluck dinner:
It's good entertainment and cheap at that."

"Give's a good girl, but Gimmee's a goblin."

"Don't piss standing up while facing the sun."

And, in the spirit of Hesiod's misogyny:

"First, get yourself a house, a woman, and a plow-ox
(A slave woman, not for marrying, one who can plow.)"

"Don't wash in a woman's bathwater,
Which for a time has a bitter vengeance in it."

"Don't let a sashaying female pull the wool over your eyes."

Hm...wool...must go pull out my knitting so I can do some more effective sashaying...

Seeds of Mortality and Immortality

2011-05-25T07:00:00.106-04:00

Photo by Shimon Sandler

I find the "Hymn to Demeter" one of the most interesting and appealing poems in the Homeric Hymns. The story is well known. Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, is the mother of Persephone. After her abduction by Hades (done with Zeus's permission), Persephone is forced to live in the underworld as Hades's wife. Demeter is heartbroken. As she searches for her missing daughter, she allows the fertile earth to go barren. Nothing grows. Mortals can make no sacrifices to the gods, for there is nothing to sacrifice.

Zeus, Persephone's father, eventually convinces Hades to allow Persephone to return to her mother. Hades says that she can only go back if she has eaten nothing while in the underworld. But during her time there she has eaten a few pomegranate seeds--and therefore must spend four months of each year with Hades rather than on earth.

The myth of Persephone is often used to explain the Earth's seasons. While Persephone is with her mother, Demeter makes the earth come alive and the fruits of the soil bloom. When Persephone must be with Hades, Demeter weeps and the earth enters winter and barrenness.

In the Homeric Hymns at large, the long stories about male gods deal explicitly with their births. Interestingly, the two stories about female gods--this one about Demeter and also the story of Aphrodite--deal with the fertility and sexuality of the goddesses instead of their births--that is, their ability to cause birth. Specifically, the poems address how Zeus tries to control--not always completely successfully--the power that the goddesses have because of their fertility and sexuality. As we see in this story, Zeus is so desperate to have life come back to the earth that he must allow Demeter to have a say in what happens to her daughter.

I'm fascinated by images of mortality interwoven with sexuality in this story. Persephone eats food not designed for the gods--that is, meant for mortals. Eating like a human condemns her to "die"--at least for a season, just as the earth does. Persephone eats against her will: when she is symbolically raped as Hades forces his seed into her ("most unwillingly" says Persephone in the Diane Rayor translation, he "put into me" the seed).

Effectively, the rape of Persephone turns her at least partly into a kind of mortal. She must confront death, at least a partial death, again and again. But Persephone shares something else with humans. It is through sexual reproduction--instituted when the man shares his seed with the woman--that mortals achieve their own sort of immortality. For Persephone, it means she must be in the land of the dead for one third of the year. For us, it is instead a blessing. Our children's children continue even after we are gone, making our own immortality as cyclical and halting as Persephone's.

Comparing Translations

2011-05-23T07:00:00.076-04:00

As I mentioned in my last post, there are multiple translations of the Homeric Hymns. I've gotten a chance to peek through several attempts. From what I've seen, my two favorite editions are the ones by Diane Rayor and Sarah Ruden. Both volumes have luscious poetry and very smart introductions that explore not only the historical context but the themes and politics of the Hymns.

Here's a section from the beginning of the "Hymn to Demeter," as translated by each author:

1. From Diane Rayor's translation:

I sing of the revered goddess, rich-haired Demeter,
and her slim-ankled daughter, whom Hades snatched
(far-seeing, thundering Zeus gave her away)
while she and Ocean's deep-breasted daughters played,
far from the golden blade Demeter, who bears shining fruit.
She picked lush meadow flowers: roses, crocuses,
lovely violets, irises, hyacinths--and a narcissus
Gaia grew as a lure for the blossoming girl,
following Zeus' bidding, to please Lord of the Dead.
Everyone marveled at the bewitching sight,
immortal gods and mortal folk alike:
from its root blossomed a hundred sweetly
scented heads, and all wide heaven above,
all earth, and the salty swell of the sea laughed.

2. From Sarah Ruden's translation:

Here I sing fearsome, lovely-haired Demeter
And her trim-ankled child seized by Aidoneus.
Far-seeing, thundering Zeus had sanctioned it.
Gold-sword, bright-grain Demeter did not know.
The girl played with the Sea's deep-bosomed daughters
In a lush field, picking hyacinth's, bright violets,
Irises, crocuses, roses--and the narcissus,
Which the earth grew to trap the flower-faced girl,
By Zeus's tactics, for the hos of many.
Gods whose life never ends and mortal people
Were dazzled by the flower when they saw it.
From a single root a hundred blossoms flourished
And smelled so sweet the whole wide sky above it
Laughed, and the whole earth and the salt sea laughed.

I am really glad I'm looking at both translations. This passage is completely approachable, as is the vast majority of the poetry of the Hymns--but the two translations emphasize different images. Rayor' makes me hear "the Ocean's deep-breasted daughters"--because of her rhythmic, almost onomatopoetic translation?--in ways that Ruden's "Sea's deep-bosomed daughters" doesn't.

On the other hand, Ruden's "bright-grain Demeter" seems much more immediate than Rayor's "golden blade Demeter"--again, perhaps partly because of the sharpness of the rhythm. The two stresses next to each other--"bright" and "grain"--definitely put an emphasis on the phrase. Rayor's translation seems like a formulaic metaphor (very Greek) where Ruden's seems poetically literal. The literal is far more appealing (or surprising, as Iser might say) to me, even though the formula might be more faithful to the original. The translator Apostolos N. Athanassakis, whose translation is admired by scholars searching for a faithful rendition, uses the very formulaic "mother of the golden sword."

In my next post, I'll talk a bit about the larger themes of the "Hymn to Demeter" and try to compare it a bit to some of the other themes that weave throughout the Homeric Hymns as a whole.

Starting the Homeric Hymns

2011-05-20T16:49:00.004-04:00

As you may have noticed if you've been reading this blog over the last two months, I went a little overboard on my odyssey through the Odyssey. I read the epic itself but also several modern versions and updates. While I found them fascinating, I must admit that I've been feeling a little burned out on Homer. It has taken me a couple of recovery side books as well as a lot of knitting and film watching to finally get on to the next book on my Lifetime Reading Plan list: the Homeric Hymns.

Unlike Homer's classic epics the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Homeric Hymns are primarily stories about the ancient Greek gods. While gods certainly appear in these big epic narratives, the main plots deal with the experiences of human beings. Homer spends the stories contemplating Achilles's heroism and Odysseus's long journey home. Both of these mortal men have interactions with the gods throughout the stories, but it is their own growth as humans that moves the reader.

In the Homeric Hymns, on the other hand, we have a collection of short poems--sometimes very short--about the birth of various gods, about their strengths and powers, and often about their relationships (and struggles) with the head god Zeus. If you want to brush up on your Greek mythology, this collection of stories is an excellent place to start. Also unlike the Iliad and the Odyssey, each of the poems is a clear homage to a particular god, celebrating his or her power and asking him or her to favor the speakers in whatever lies ahead.

We know very little about who wrote the Homeric Hymns, how they were performed, or even when exactly they were written. Although Thucydides believed that Homer wrote these poems, very few people then or now seem to agree with him. They were probably written by a variety of poet-performers--and sung or recited aloud at a variety of celebrations or rituals. Many of the hymns seem to be introductory material to invoke the gods before a larger presentation. Some are long enough that they might have been solo performances. Most scholars seem to agree that the poems were written sometime during Homer's era, but they differ in opinion about whether they come slightly earlier or slightly later.

While the poems do not have the psychological resonance for me that I got from Homer's big two epics, I am very much enjoying the poetry of the Homeric Hymns. Below you'll find links to five different respected translations of the Hymns. Although I adore almost every book I've seen put out by either Penguin Classics or Oxford World Classics, in this case I have not actually seen either translation. Personally, I have been reading Ruden, Rayor, and Athanassakis. All three editions have strengths to recommend them. I'll talk a little next time about a few of the differences between them.

Please join me next time when I start a brief discussion of the Hymns. I hope you can find a translation of this very short little book at your local library or bookstore and read along with me. If any of you have additional suggestions or comments about translations, speak up!

Playing Shakespeare

2011-05-19T10:36:00.002-04:00

In 1984, the director John Barton of the Royal Shakespeare Company led nine workshops for actors. During the sessions, called Playing Shakespeare, the actors discuss how they interpret and perform Shakespeare: how they read the words, understand the rhythm of the poetry, contemplate motivation, etc. Luckily for us, the workshops were all filmed--and they are available on Netflix.

The most incredible thing about the documentary is the range of actors who participate. Seeing a young Ben Kingsley or David Suchet is only matched by watching Judi Dench or Patrick Stewart in other episodes. What I love is that we get to see them not only act but think aloud about how they are acting, try out other styles, and see how the collaboration between great actor and great director can work.

One of my favorite scenes is in the first episode, when Ian McKellen tries out the beginning of The Merchant of Venice: "In sooth, I know not why I am so sad." His very first performance of the line is wonderful--but then director asks him to try it in differing moods or emotions: sadly, humorously. Then Barton asks the actor to consider the character's motivation. What does the character want the line to accomplish? Barton suggests options: he wants to explain himself, he wants to avoid explaining himself, to make light of his sadness, to try to put an end to the conversation. McKellen tries them all out. By focusing on motivation rather than emotion per se, a great deal of depth began to come out. This type of acting allows the actor to "make a connection between the mouth and the brain, and maybe the heart," as McKellen says.

The episodes are full of little insights into Shakespeare, big "ah ha!" moments into the whole world of early English drama, and a view of a world I could never have imagined: that which goes on in the weeks and months before the curtain rises.

Highly recommended--including for those of us who do not know a whole lot of literary history. I've been watching the episodes with my partner David and our 12yo son--all of us fairly inexperienced in serious literary scholarship, to say the least--and all of us are loving it.

The Fictional 100

2011-05-17T15:32:00.001-04:00

Lucy Pollard-Gott's The Fictional 100: Ranking the Most Influential Characters in World Literature and Legend is a fabulous book of short essays about the friends we make as we read. "We have all felt the tug of fictional characters on our lives," Pollard-Gott says. "From Hamlet to Holden Caulfield, Scrooge to Superman, Romeo and Juliet to Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, they are as much a part of our lives as our family, friends, and next-door neighbors." Our relations with fictional characters sometimes last a lifetime: "Befriending us as children and inspiring us as adults, they can even be the object of our first love. As we imagine relating to them in their worlds, we can expand our vision of ourselves and the possibilities that life offers."

Of course, after reading that quote, I started to think about the fact that all my first crushes were indeed on fictional characters. In third grade, I fell in love with Jo (from Little Women), swept up by her ability to create whole worlds in her head and on paper. I loved the message that what Jo lived in her real life was worthy of a novel--and of course the subtler message that what Louisa May Alcott lived in her own life was worthy of a novel. Then a year later, I fell in love again, this time with television character John-Boy Walton. Perhaps what drew me to him was exactly what drew me to Jo: the recognition that what is ordinary and plain can nevertheless turn into powerful stories if we only keep our eyes and ears and minds open.

Pollard-Gott's book ranks the hundred most influential characters in order of their influence. Of course, such a ranking is completely subjective. I promise that some of the characters who most influenced your own life will be missing. Nevertheless, the author's choices are both obvious and inclusive. Her decisions were influenced by not only characters' global popularity but also on the ways they have influenced more contemporary literature and culture.

Since in the last few months, I've spent way too long lately reading about how the characters of the Homeric epics resonate and play across the centuries, I was thrilled to see Odysseus in second place on the influence list. Pollard-Gott recognizes that Odysseus's true battle began only after the Trojan War. His journey to heroism--unlike Achilles's--is to "stay alive and win his homecoming."

Although in Homer's epic Odysseus returns to Ithaca and Penelope, "his numerous admirers through the centuries, both readers and writers, have always wanted to get him on the move again." as Pollard-Gott cleverly says. "His wit, endurance, and resourcefulness are equal to any challenge, but what good is such abundant capability if he is left cocooned in a tranquil home with no dangers to overcome?"

Although his journey is a classic model for literary journeys throughout the following centuries, Odysseus gives us "precious little gist" for readers to understand or identify with the character psychologically. Unlike more contemporary characters, Odyssseus is almost devoid of any internal dialogue of self-reflection. Although this fact may make the character seem one dimensional, it also encourages us to use this man of action to model our modern odysseys on his, on this man of twists and turns who at the same time is always pointing towards home.

Pollard-Gott's insights into Achilles are also fascinating. She points out that he is in many ways the first flawed and tragic hero--and therefore an early model for Hamlet among others. Achilles, the author claims, is a man whose intelligence is clouded by his passion. In opposition, Odysseus clouds (or constrains) his passion through the use of his intelligence.

The author observes that Agamemnon's theft of Achilles's concubine parallels Paris's theft of Helen from Menelaos, Agamemnon's brother. I'd never put these together--but once I read Pollard-Gott's analysis, I can't imagine seeing it any other way.

Pollard-Gott points out that the works of Homer have been of central importance for many years: "Of 1,596 ancient Greek books which archaeologists have found preserved on Egyptian papyri, half were copies of the Iliad or the Odyssey or related commentaries." Astounding.

I have only read a handful of the character essays in The Fictional 100 so far. Each essay has been an absolute joy: an accessible appreciation of the place a particular character plays in our lives, as well as a fairly scholarly analysis of the role of that character throughout literature. I'm looking forward to reading more essays as I read the classic books in which they appear, I promise to share some of the Pollard-Gott's insights as I proceed.

Highly recommended.

Lady Susan by Jane Austen

2011-05-14T07:00:00.005-04:00

This month, the Classics Circuit is staging a duel between those favorite nineteenth-century authors Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. I've always been a strong Austen fan--loving Emma, Sense and Sensibility, and all of her other novels since I discovered them in eighth grade.

Quite recently, I discovered there is more the the Austen oeuvre than I realized. In addition to the canonical six novels, there are two incomplete novels and one short completed novel. The short work, Lady Susan, is fascinating historically and literarily, but it is not nearly as successful in the end as the better-known novels.

Although it is not entirely clear, most scholars seem to believe that Lady Susan was written as early as 1794. In many ways, Austen's later novels are among the very first of a distinctively nineteenth-century English novel. But Lady Susan feels much more like it came from an earlier era.

First of all, it is an epistolary novel. Although Victorian novelists including Anne Bronte used letters to convey a plot, the style was far more common during the 18th century. To the modern reader (or at least to this modern reader), the narrative seems stilted and strange. Perhaps our own distance from relationships carried on via extensive letters makes it harder for us to accept learning so much about others from the correspondence of friends. Or perhaps it is just hard to accept from Austen--that intimate, natural writer we've known for so long.

Secondly, the characters in Lady Susan are morally less complex. There is good and evil--or at least the goodness or evilness of characters are quite obvious and unambiguous. I love how Austen characters like Emma or ~~Colin Firth~~ Mr. Darcy are flawed individuals, subject to growth and change and maturation. Lady Susan, on the other hand, is pure evil. While some of the other folks in the story are drawn a little more subtly, they are still almost caricatures in their basic responses: "Oh no!"

While I don't think Lady Susan is nearly as good as Austen's other novels, I did enjoy it very much. Partly, it is just a joy to see Austen fresh again. For so long, my experience of her work has only been as rereads of books I have read so many times before (or sometimes rewatches of a variety of filmed versions of these books I have read many times). I thought I would never be able to experience Austen truly through the eyes of the adult, since each time I pick up one of her novels I am immediately transported back to high school. The idea of getting some Austen that I haven't grown up on is delightful--even when I realize that the book might not repay numerous rereadings.

Lady Susan made me think of other books. First, in some ways Austen explores some of the same territory in Northanger Abbey. Although that text is tongue-in-cheek about the overly romantic novel-based worldview of its heroine, Lady Susan in some ways is the gothic/romantic schlock Northanger Abbey is mocking. And how Austen is that? The idea of a woman looking back to her earlier prejudices and realizing how immature and thoughtless she'd been? Hm. Sounds familiar.

I also kept thinking about William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair. I'll confess right off that I've never read Thackeray, only seen a couple of film interpretations of the book. But Lady Susan immediately made me think of Becky Sharp. Given that Lady Susan was not published until late in the nineteenth century, I think it is highly unlikely that Thackeray was aware of the echos--but the idea of asking readers to sympathize and identify with a flirtatious and dishonest woman seems ahead of its time.

So Lady Susan is a must-read for us Austenites--and definitely fascinating for anyone who is interested in the historical development of either novels in general or the role of women in fiction. If you love the sensational literature of the nineteenth century in general, you might see links as well. (I say this having not read a drop of sensational literature yet, but planning to soon....) Enjoy!

But if you love Austen just for the subtle character development and manners of Austen's more popular novels, you might give this book as pass. Reread Emma instead.

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Frances of the blog Nonsuch Book steered me to the gorgeous new Penguin "Threads" editions. I love the Emma cover! Click through to her post to see the back cover of this book as well as the Threads editions of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden and Anna Sewell's Black Beauty.

The Gap

2011-05-13T16:09:00.002-04:00

A little more than a week ago, Jillian (of the wonderful blog A Room of One's Own) asked her readers to recommend texts on literary theory. In her comments, Katherine Cox mentioned a series of Yale lectures available for free online. I am in the midst of trying to finish knitting a wool sweater before it gets to be too hot and humid to knit--and onscreen lectures are just what I need to keep me occupied while I stitch.

This morning I've been watching the fourth lecture, where Professor Paul Fry talks about the work of Wolfgang Iser. Iser, one of the founders of reader-response theory, is especially fascinated in the hermeneutics of reading. That is, he is interested in that conversation that goes on between the author and the reader. The meaning of a text happens in a "virtual" place where the author's ideas and the reader's ideas come together. This place is a place of uncertainty, of flexibility, of openness. There are an infinite number of readings as individual readers come to a book, filling in the gaps between their previous understanding and the text, each in their individual ways.

Prof. Fry states that the "gap" between text and reader is not merely an abyss of unknowing. Instead, it is a place of great productivity. Fry suggests the gap in reading is parallel to the workings of a spark plug. In order to make electricity come into being, the points of contact must be "gapped" or kept apart at a precise distance. The space cannot be too small or too large in order to ignite.

I love this metaphor. When I read a book whose ideas are too far removed from my understanding, I wind up feeling alienated or overwhelmed. On the other hand, if an author does not go beyond what I already have experienced, it is likely to bore me and be quickly forgotten. Iser suggest that there must be "a violation of expectation" that requires the reader to do a bit of work. A book that creates that perfect gap between text and this reader--the place that encourages the electrical currents in my brain to ignite--has the potential to surprise me, open my eyes and transform me.

Eudora Welty's Circe

2011-05-12T20:00:00.000-04:00

I have loved Eudora Welty's stories since I was in high school. What has always appealed to me most about her writing is Welty's emphasis on gentle but biting portrayals of a wide variety of characters. Reading stories like "Why I Live at the P.O."--long a very favorite of mine for reading aloud--reminds me of my grandmothers telling stories about their ridiculous neighbors and friends, all deeply loved and appreciated for all their eccentricities.

Welty is also a consummate storyteller. She has the rhythm of someone entertaining their family members, telling stories while shelling peas from a big wicker basket. The stories are often the everyday adventures of those slightly larger-than-life characters. We recognize their foibles and their strengths as our own.

In short, Welty's stories are completely accessible for a small-town southern girl. But now that I am becoming a better-educated big-city adult, I am beginning to see far more in her stories than I appreciated when I was younger. In addition to her wonderful voice and amazing characters, Welty's stories are full of allusions to classical literature. I mentioned in a previous post how "Why I Live at the PO" rewrote a story from the New Testament. What I realize now is how many of her stories play of ancient mythology. She even titled one of her story collections The Golden Apples--an image I have discussed before. I am eager to read her stories again now that I can catch some of these allusions. The mythological weight of some of her stories (like "A Worn Path" with its main character named Phoenix, or "The Petrified Man" with Medusa) certainly came across to me, but the fact that Welty deliberately situated her creations in conversation with the ancients completely passed me by--as stunned as I now am by that blindness of mine.

In most of her fiction, allusions to classical mythology are below the surface. Perhaps the only exception is a story written late in her career: "Circe" in The Bride of the Innisfallen. Although this is not one of my favorite Welty stories, it is a fascinating step outside of the author's more typical approach. Here, she gives voice to Circe, the character from the Odyssey who turns Odysseus's men into swine. Homer tells the story from a point of view that allows for the ommission of Circe's understanding of events. Welty retells the story, emphasizing the feminine roles and limitations of her central character. The story begins with an interruption: "Needle in air, I stopped what I was making." Circe, unlike Odysseus, is unable to make her own Odyssey because of her responsibilities to home.

Welty's retelling of a story from the Odyssey made me think of Margaret Atwood's work. Although their approaches are radically different, both Atwood and Welty attempt to retell classical myth from the perspective of women. Both, whether they intend it or not, root their stories in contemporary gender politics. Welty is writing at a time and place of more traditional ideas about gender, while Atwood wants to express a more explicitly feminist ideology. Despite this difference, the act of reclaiming female characters from classical literature, no matter what one's perspective, is both playful and thought-provoking.

I would love to understand why I was less taken by both myth-rewriting works--both Atwood's and Welty's--than I am by their other writings. Are they just weaker? Are the authors taking bigger risks? I certainly appreciate the idea intellectually, but I don't find either text especially satisfying.

Are there earlier feminine rewritings of classical myths? Does Woolf do anything, for example?

Pulling a Penelope

2011-05-10T11:10:00.000-04:00

In an effort to delay a real post for yet another day, I thought I'd share with you the lovely ~~funeral shroud~~ shawl my 12yo son is weaving for me for my mother's day present:

Luckily, he doesn't undo his work while I'm sleeping!

IS THAT A DAGGER I SEE BEFORE ME...

2011-05-07T07:00:00.021-04:00

or are you just happy to see me?

Yep--yesterday was Sigmund Freud's birthday. What a perfect time to discover an essay in Stephen Marche's How Shakespeare Changed Everything detailing how Shakespeare influenced Freud. "From Shakespeare through Freud came the idea that a healthy sex life is an unrepressed sex life," writes Marche. "Was there a more powerful, a more vital, a more influential idea in the whole of the twentieth century?"

Marche goes on to explain that the "humanistic, unembarrassed approach to desire" was ahead of his time--and perhaps ahead of our time--in his open ideas about sexuality. The most successful part of the essay, I think, is Marche's discussion of the complications of gender identity in the bard's plays. Because of the theatrical tradition of boy actors playing female characters, "transvestitism is always in the background" of the plays. But Shakespeare plays around with that convention until we get dizzy. "How can you play Twelfth Night, with a woman dressed as a man (who is really a man dressed as a woman) and a woman falling in love with a woman who is dressed as a man (who is really a man), without taking into account the charged effects of its role-bending sexuality?"

Or as I wrote about in the post TransShakespeare a while back (when talking about As You Like It), "you have a male actor playing a female character (Rosalind), playing a male (Ganymede), playing a female (mock-Rosalind). And when Phoebe falls in love with Ganymede, it was actually a male actor showing love to a male actor, even though on stage it was a female character showing love to a female character."

Does this kind of twisting gender play lead to Freud, or just leave the staid psychoanalyst baffled?

What Marche is referring to most directly when he links Shakespeare and Freud is how the Oedipus story gets reworked in Hamlet. According to Marche, the original Greek telling of Oedipus has the desire to kill one's father and sleep with one's mother expressed openly. In Hamlet, Shakespeare has that desire "hidden, repressed." Our repressed desires "return to haunt us like the Ghost that haunts Elsinore." Hamlet, in short, "is the original neurotic."

My ideas about this book have not changed after reading these additional essays: The book isn't particularly scholarly and Marche absolutely overreaches in his arguments--and yet I have not had such good nerdy fun reading a book in a long time. See if your library has a copy!

The Weird Sisters, by Eleanor Brown

2011-05-04T17:13:00.002-04:00

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown tells the story of three adult sisters who return home to be with their parents while their mother undergoes treatment for breast cancer. The three young women are in three radically different positions. Rose, the eldest, feels responsible for her family and refuses to leave her aging parents to go visit her fiance in London. Bean has come home from the big city after getting in trouble at work. And Cordy's hippie ways have been interrupted by an unexpected pregnancy. As they come together again after years on their own, the sisters heal their previous rifts and their confront their own personal demons. Although they are already out of college and fully independent, all three of the sisters have a lot of growing up to do.

In many ways, the plot sounds like a fairly traditional example of "chick lit"--a label that many readers may see as an enormous condemnation. Although I'm not a reader of chick lit (unless you count the novels of Austen, the Brontes, Woolf, and Welty), I don't condemn the genre. Plenty of people who dismiss chick lit would howl at some of the trash I read to unwind. (Just because I love reading the classics doesn't mean I'm turning in all the volumes on my mystery shelf.)

Still, for those of us who like to be a high-falutin' in our reading, it is worth noting that The Weird Sisters goes far beyond that genre of popular fiction aimed at women. First of all, the emotional fallout of the plot is fairly sophisticated. Brown's prose, with a few exceptions, is fluid and poetic. Perhaps most interestingly, she uses an unusual narrative technique--first person plural--which is surprisingly successful. All in all, I enjoyed the book quite a bit.

Of course, my favorite part is the conceit of using Shakespeare references throughout the novel. The sisters are the daughters of a Shakespeare scholar who spent so much of their youth quoting Shakespeare at them that they can't go through a minute without a line or reference to explain their circumstances. Even their names are inspired by Shakespeare: "It's unlikely that our parents ever looked up any of our names in one of those baby name books. The Riverside Shakespeare had obviously been the repository of choice." Rose is named for Rosalind in As You Like It, Bean is Bianca--named for the character from The Taming of the Shrew, and Cordy is Cordelia from King Lear. As children, their father would play sonnet round-robins where each would compose a line until the sonnet was finished. As the author writes, "The game did...make us good at extemporaneous iambic pentameter, not that this is a skill that benefits one much in any world other than our father's." Their father, of course, uses the magic he finds in his books to conjure a world apart from the craziness of modernity--much as Prospero does in The Tempest. It is only when the storm of the mother's illness forces real life to the fore that all the members of the family come to a point that they can grow beyond their caricatures.

The book is very much not a retelling of any Shakespeare play or theme. You won't leave this novel with a new lens into the bard's oeuvre. Strangely enough, it is the intense seriousness of the Shakespeare allusions that bothers me most about this book. The incredible humor and silliness that so many Shakespeare folks have--as seen by folks as diverse as the Reduced Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare Geek, and Bardfilm--is utterly missing in the sisters' dialogue. I must say I missed the wit.

I definitely recommend Brown's The Weird Sisters--but don't go in thinking you're going to get something you are not. Instead, appreciate the author's exploration of the meanings of both sisterhood and emotional growth.

Thanks to Amy Einhorn Books of the Penguin Group for sending me a copy of The Weird Sisters for review.

Tea and Bookishness

2011-05-03T13:24:00.001-04:00

On Sunday afternoon, Thomas of the blog My Porch hosted a glorious tea party for a few DC book bloggers--complete with homemade scones with clotted cream and jam; delicate tea-sandwiches with salmon, cucumber, and cress; and pots of loose-leaf tea. Frances of Nonsuch Book, Teresa of Shelf Love and I all enjoyed his gorgeous library, his adorable pup, his fabulous cooking, and his generous hospitality that had us all comfortable and laughing in no time.

After we enjoyed our afternoon feast, we pulled out the bookish board game that Frances brought: It Was a Dark and Stormy Night. Playing in pairs, each team circled the board to different locations (Shakespeare, Poetry, Nonfiction, Literature from 1900-1950, etc.). The other team would then read the players the first line of a book from that genre. Then the first team would have to guess the author or book title. We had a terrific time--both when we knew the answers and when we were completely stumped. Teresa is a fabulous reader and I especially loved hearing her recite the snippets of poetry (including Dylan!). Frances and I were hoping that the fact we both have children would swing the game our way, since one of the categories is Children's Literature.

Be sure to check out Frances's post about the party, too--complete with a picture of our game. I can't wait to acquire my own copy and play it with my "literary-first-sentences"-quoting father. He'll cream us all...

Thanks again to the lovely folks I had the pleasure to meet this weekend! Here is to many more.

How Shakespeare Changed Everything

2011-05-01T08:46:00.005-04:00

Stephen Marche's How Shakespeare Changed Everything hits the bookshelves next week. I was lucky enough to receive a review copy from HarperCollins during the Bard's birthday week. With all the festivities going on for my son's concomitant birthday (including a co-ed slumber party where the guests were giggling and playing sleeping bag tag at 3AM), I've spent most of the week staring into space unable to think, much less read. But Marche's book has been filling the little reading time I have this week just perfectly. It is light reading, funny, and fascinating all at the same time.

"William Shakespeare was the most influential person who ever lived," begins Marche. I must admit I'm usually irritated by such hyperbole, but the author makes a good argument that the bard at least belongs high on the list. Our view of humanity is shaped by the stories Shakespeare told and the characters he developed. Our very language is saturated with Shakespeare's words. And this seems as true today in our changing world as it did centuries ago. As Marche writes, "The ground keeps falling out from under us. Only Shakespeare keeps landing on his feet." He concludes:

Shakespeare may reflect the dazzling beauty of the world and everything in it, of men corrupted by ambition or lust, wives triumphant and defeated, love of all shapes and all kinds and all degrees of force, death by surprise or by expectation, funny drunks, sexy middle-aged women, lovely falling leaves, guilty bloodstains, but he is himself is swallowed in the reflection, a dark origin to a vast illumination. His art was to reflect the world as accurately as possible, and he achieved his goal by becoming as beautiful and surprising and mysterious and unfathomable as the world itself.

As a historian of the US South who writes about the racial politics of the Jim Crow system, I am especially intrigued by the first chapter of How Shakespeare Changed Everything. The author makes clear that Othello uses racist stereotypes and storylines. It also depends on its society's disgust at biracial marriage (as shown by many lines, including "an old black ram is tupping your white ewe"). And Othello's racial background is used to explain his downfall. As Marche states, "Othello is a man whose inherent barbarism undies his civilization.... The inner truth of Othello is the unavoidable savagery of his blackness."

Nevertheless, as the author points out, "for most of its history, the problem with Othello was that it wasn't racist enough." The relationship between Othello and Desdemona was an interracial romance played out for all to see. And while white audiences could imagine the "black brute" raping and murdering innocent white women, they did not want to see or even imagine love crossing the color line.

Despite his downfall, Othello is a character of dignity--of nobility even--who commands our respect. Having a black character with both power and dignity created a huge challenge for racist audiences in Jim Crow America. And the idea of having the role played by a black actor was an even bigger challenge in a world of segregated theaters and legal discrimination. Into this position stepped Paul Robeson in 1930, "bringing the idea of a dignified black man and the possibility of racial love to the widest audience he could reach. Robeson claimed that playing Othello set him free--and his role was, argues Marche, a major step towards the Civil Rights movement.

The fact that Shakespeare endowed his character with such deep humanity makes us identify with him, no matter what our sex, race, or religion. "The fragility of civilization may have been an idea that Shakespeare saw as peculiarly relevant to a Moor living in Venice," says the author, "but it is equally relevant to everyone here and now. We all have a barbarism we are trying to clamp down." I would love to see Marche expand this argument beyond the paragraph it gets. One of the elements of our own barbarism is the racism of our society.

Although I was fascinated by the history Marche presents and by his larger argument of how Othello's meaning changes over time, I find the essay to be fundamentally flawed. Marche draws a link between the Shakespeare play and the OJ Simpson story--which, while a stretch, he almost manages to pull off by cleverly comparing the handkerchief from Othello and the bloody glove of the OJ case. Then he argues that Obama's campaign replayed the Othello story of the noble outsider who came to lead the Republic at a time of crisis. Summarizes the author, "That's the 2008 election in a Hollywood pitch: Othello with a black wife." I don't buy it, and Marche doesn't even really try to back up his argument. It winds up seeming like pure ridiculousness. But when Marche stretches just a little too far, it makes the book highly amusing and thought-provoking.

I'm very much looking forward to the chapter on place of The Merchant of Venice in Nazi Germany. I'm also fascinated to find out "how Shakespeare changed our environment" via starlings in New York's Central Park. I suspect this book will be on my nightstand for the next week or so as I read one or two short essays each evening.

The Birthday Boys

2011-04-27T13:39:00.000-04:00

I mentioned yesterday that my son's birthday falls on the anniversary of Shakespeare's baptism. Luckily, my now-12yo boy loves the bard with all his heart and completely embraces their connection. This year, I arranged a few Shakespeare presents for him:

We discovered a VHS copy of The Reduced Shakespeare Company - The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) in our local library, many years ago. We checked it out over and over, eventually illegally copying the library's copy onto our own videotape. Well--we've come clean and now own our own DVD copy now.

My family loves the ridiculously nerdy slapstick of the RSC. As the show starts, one of the actors tells us that the company is "proud to prevent the complete works of William Shakespeare"--and the laughs and groans get more intense as they work their way through the plays. Othello is performed as a rap, Titus as Emeril's cooking show, and the histories as a football game. The comedies are reduced to one medley of a play with a very long and very funny title. Finally, the performance ends with Hamlet in several iterations--the last not only at lightening speed but backwards.

If you haven't had the great pleasure of being introduced to the Reduced Shakespeare Company, go check them out right away. If you can't find the DVD in your library, you can check it out from Netflix.

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A couple of years ago, my son and I were thrilled to be able to attend the Folger Shakespeare Library's performance of Macbeth. The Folger, a theater I've discussed before, is one of our favorite venues. And their production of Macbeth was one of our favorite productions there. Directed by Aaron Posner and Teller (from that famous duo of magicians Penn and Teller), the production combined subtle illusion with astounding (and sometimes gory) imagery.

A new Folger edition of the Shakespeare text has been released which includes a DVD of the live show.. We are thrilled--partly because A. and I both want to see it again, and partly because we are eager to show it to David (who was unable to see the live play with us). I have high hopes that the Folger will produce other DVD/text editions--including, perhaps, the incredible version of The Comedy of Errors staged earlier this year.

Right now my son is learning his lines for a children's performance of Macbeth at the Shakespeare Theater Company in DC. We've been talking a lot recently about the Folger performance as he prepares for his part and are looking forward to a viewing of the DVD this weekend.

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One more bit of Shakespeare silliness: Shakespeare in a Box: Taming of the Shrew contains instructions to put on your own version of a Shakespeare play with friends and family at home. All the living room's a stage! We haven't tried it out yet, but the kit has excellent reviews of Amazon. We've already thought of a few friends who might find this right up their alley.

The kit comes with director and technical director cards which explain how to cast the play, direct it, stage it, and create basic sets and sound effects. It also provides cards for each of the major parts along with a summary of the characters and ideas about how to play them. It also comes with multiple copies of an abridged version of the script. Finally, the Shakespeare in a Box kit comes with props: a cheap wig, a plastic flute, and Groucho glasses--all modeled here by my son:

(There is also a "Shakespeare in a Box" kit for Shakespeare in a Box: King Lear.)

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See his shirt in that picture? I think he might have received it for his last birthday. We found it in the Folger Library's small gift shop. Don't you love the rebus?

The Prince’s Cry

2011-04-26T06:00:00.011-04:00

Today is my son's 12th birthday. Inconceivable.

Photography by Doris Favale

A. is an amazing kid--a young man who has helped me grow as I watch him mature. He is a reader, a fencer, a violinist. He bounds up and down the stairs with the joy of a toddler, understands human motivation in a very mature way, loves to brag about his ability to eat spicy food, and keeps me laughing with terrible puns that remind me of my father's sense of humor.

Every year on this day, I think about his birth at home, which I wrote about several years ago on my old personal blog. This is a day of celebration for him but also for me.

A.is also a lover of all things Shakespeare--and all things Princess Bride. In honor of the anniversary of my son's birth and of Shakespeare's baptism, I want to share with you a sonnet my son wrote to celebrate:

The Prince's Cry

“Who’s there?!” The ghost of my father tonight appears
To me in the dark as I walk—perchance in dreams.
“Inconceivable!” you say, consumed with fears.
(Methinks that word means not what you think it means.)

You poisoned my father and stole his throne and his crown.
I tried to forget his death by taking a lover.
But in her pain, she fell in the river and drowned.
And you didn’t care: you married the queen, my mother.

I must avenge my father’s death most foul,
Oh my uncle, who hath torn this house in two.
I’ve learned to use my sword and duel with skill.
And I have planned what I now say to you:

“Hello, my name is Hamlet the Dane,” quoth I.
“You killed my father--so now prepare to die.”

Spring!

2011-04-20T15:36:00.000-04:00

I hope you all enjoy are enjoying the warmer temperatures, beautiful blossoms, and pollen as much as I am.

For the last several weeks, I've been committed to reading and writing about an unrelated topic--and I'm afraid that project has kept me from being active in the blog world. I'm itching to get back to fiction soon--and to posting more regularly and commenting on other people's blogs.

See you all next Tuesday. Happy Passover and Easter!

Golden Apples

2011-04-18T07:24:00.003-04:00

In Greek mythology, the story of conflict during the wedding of Peleus and Thetis is used to explain historical conflict in real human history--such as the Trojan War. According to the story, Eris was angry that she had not been invited to the marriage celebration. To get even, she planted seeds of discord at the party by throwing a golden apple into the celebration. The fruit was labeled "To the fairest." The Greek goddesses began to argue about which woman deserved the prize. Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite each made arguments that they were the fairest and deserving of the apple.

Trojan prince Paris was called in to judge the contest. Hera offered him political power if he chose her. Athena offered him wisdom and skill in battle. Aphrodite offered him the love of the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen. Paris handed the golden apple to Aphrodite. As the story goes, Paris stole Helen away from her Spartan husband and took her to Troy, thus starting the Trojan War.

* * *

To celebrate the story of the Golden Apple, my family made a special dessert last night, inspired by the incredible cookbook by Francine Segan called The Philosopher's Kitchen: Recipes from Ancient Greece and Rome for the Modern Cook. I've loved looking through this book full of fascinating stories connecting the history of ancient Greece with modern culinary adventures.

These are not utterly authentic ancient recipes by any means, but what Segan looses by deviation from history she more than gains by presenting practical and tempting dishes inspired by a culture long gone. I'm eager to try many of the recipes in the book, from Cherry Lasagna to Pea Souffle.

Perhaps best of all is the "Menus and Entertaining" chapter at the end of the book. Here there are historical discussions of the ancient ideas about feasting and entertaining as well as ideas for modern celebrations. How about having a party to celebrate Plato's birthday? Perhaps an outdoor picnic complete with Olympic games (including "ant chariot races" and "hot dog javelin hurling")? Or how about a vegetarian feast to usher in the beginning of spring?

The recipe for Golden Apples is quite simple and a tremendously showy dessert for company:
1. Peel and core a relatively small apple
2. Roll the apple in honey, then roll in a mix of brown sugar and spices
3. Cover it with a square of store-bought puff pastry
4. Stick a cinnamon stick into the center
5. Paint the pastry with egg wash
6. Bake for about half an hour in a 400 degree oven.
7. Garnish with a mint leaf.

I suggest making more than one Golden Apple for your party, just to prevent conflict...

The Lost Books of the Odyssey

2011-04-15T06:00:00.038-04:00

I found that Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey: A Novel is a much more serious work of literature than The Penelopiad or No Man's Land. I also found the book to be both more thought-provoking and more appealing than most of the other books about the Odyssey which I've been reading lately. Although I loved Walcott's modern epic variation, Omeros, Mason's book is significantly more accessible than Walcott's. Readers who have read Homer's The Odyssey recently will most fully appreciate the author's humor and adventurous exploration.

Mason begins his novel--a book which is not a retelling but instead an expansion of Homer's original--in medias res. While Homer himself is known for this technique of starting a story in its middle, Mason takes the technique to its extreme and throws chronology into some alternative mathematical reality.

The book is a series of vignettes, spanning the original epic's stories and themes. Sometimes the vignettes seem more about play than about truth--that is, they are exploratory, sometimes even contradictory. Various elements in the vignettes come together in explosive, insightful ways. Although I stress again that this book is highly accessible, The Lost Books is also a complex read at times. Stories fold on top of stories, twisting into new meanings as the book progresses.

Rigorous thought about the nature of authorship, the complex and shifting relationships that exist between husbands and wives, the meaning of commercial culture, the collisions that happen between power and beauty, and the deep meaning of time circle through non-traditional takes on stories about the guest-host relationship, the start of the Trojan War, the fate of Penelope, as well as the role of the gods.

In many ways, Mason turns The Odyssey inside out in the same way a Talmud scholar might investigate the Bible: looking for secret meanings which might be held in each word and in space, considering how and why particular stories were collected (or not collected), and imagining why the stories were put in a particular order. While Mason makes it clear that his book is a novel, this tone of treating a classic work so respectfully and so seriously--and yet so playfully at the same time--makes Mason's novel resonate for me very deeply.

Highly recommended. Thanks to Picador for sharing a review copy with me of this marvelous book.

The World of Pride and Prejudice

2011-04-13T08:02:00.000-04:00

Recently my family watched the hysterical Lost in Austen, a British television series which we found on Netflix. It is the story of Amanda, a 21st-century Londoner, who travels back in time through a door in her shower to the world of Pride and Prejudice.

On the other side of that door is the home of the Bennets. Amanda more or less switches roles with Elizabeth (who is meanwhile visiting modern London). Brash Amanda, obsessed with the book Pride and Prejudice, enters the 19th-century scene and tries to make the Bennet's lives conform to what she knows from the book should happen. Unfortunately she succeeds only in tangling them up. There are some surprising "revelations" along the way--some of which might make Jane Austen roll over in her grave, and all of which are quite amusing. I was expecting a pat and obvious ending, but Lost in Austen ends with a lovely twist instead that leaves the viewer thinking about all the layers of fiction and responsibility that this show presents.

Much of the movie--with the deliberately-out-of-place exception of Amanda--feels as lush and proper as the Firth/Ehle BBC film version. There are even several references to Colin Firth, including one wonderful scene parodying this clip.

Although Lost in Austen is in many ways a romantic sit-com, it feels deeper that that. For those of us who are Austen fans from birth, this is a playful adventure. If you are very familiar with the book Pride and Prejudice and have seen the Firth movie, you'll appreciate the silliness--and the seriousness--of Lost in Austen.

Graphic Novels and the Classics

2011-04-11T14:45:00.001-04:00

I should acknowledge right up front that I am totally new to graphic novels. As a person who was never interested in comics even as a child, I really had no desire to explore the genre of graphic books at all. But one day while I was wandering in the library, I stumbled across a few graphic versions of classic novels. I was intrigued and picked up a few to look through. I thought I would start with one of my very favorite books: Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

The Marvel graphic novel version of Pride and Prejudice has a wonderfully clever cover. Mimicking teen-fashion magazines, it advertises themes like "Bingleys Bring Bling to Britain" and "How to CURE your BOY-CRAZY SISTERS!" The art throughout is appealing (although quite often I was bothered by portrayals of women who seemed to be wearing 1980s makeup) and the language of the text sticks to the spirit of Austen's language.

Believing that girls often stand outside chatting when their male friends enter the comics shop, the writer-adapter of this GN, Nancy Butler, believed that a "girl book" could encourage more girls to read graphic novels. I don't particularly care whether or not girls start reading more graphic novels, honestly. What I do care about is whether or not they come to experience true Jane Austen books. Butler believes the Marvel adaptation can do exactly that. She argues that young readers will be introduced to the characters and might "be tempted to investigate the actual book." I have my doubts about their ability to enjoy the Austen novel if their expectations are shaped by this light read.

But Butler's next argument, that adult readers who already love the novel might enjoy revisiting "their favorite characters in a graphic format" is undoubtedly true. While I would prefer to reread the book, flipping through the graphic novel was a quick, enjoyable way to relive favorite moments. In some ways it felt like watching a BBC adaptation--although the graphic novel adds the humor of playing an old classic off a modern art form. Austen and other classic authors seem to respond beautifully to this kind of adventuresome play--as the success of the Classics-Zombies books also shows. As Butler (who has also has also produced a Marvel version of Sense and Sensibility) says, "You don't update a classic; you give it free rein."

Although I'm intrigued with the idea, the concept of seeing my favorite books turned into graphic novels or comic strips really doesn't appeal to me in the end. What do you think? Do you have any favorite GN classics to recommend?

Oscar Wilde's The Ideal Husband

2011-04-07T06:00:00.027-04:00

Photo by Scott Suchman

My son and I went with other homeschoolers yesterday to see the Shakespeare Theater's production of Oscar Wilde's The Ideal Husband. Although I have not read the play, my family recently saw the very funny film adaptation starring Rupert Everett, Julianne Moore, Minnie Driver, and other favorites. We all laughed our way through the film. So when we entered the theater this morning, I was expecting a light-hearted romp more or less along the lines of the movie. As the curtain rose on an absolutely magnificent set, there was nothing to shake my initial assumptions.

During the first act, the play seemed subdued--much more than I expected from Wilde. I made the assumption that the performance was off to a slow start. But as the second act developed, it became clear that the directors had made a decision to override (to a degree) the comedic elements in the play in order to emphasize the seriousness of the moral questions raised in the play. Although the plot line is of course the same basic plot as we see in the movie, lines that are delivered as ironically or as trite amusements in the film are here explored with incredible emotional depth.

Don't get me wrong: Wilde's play is full of witty dialogue ("To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance") and there is a great deal of superb comedic acting in this production (especially by Floyd King and Cameron Folmar). Still, the humor of the play does not in any way mask the seriousness with which the characters address questions of whether it is acceptable to be deceitful in one's private relationships (including to one's spouse), when it might be acceptable to hide one's past in one's public position, and how the two venues intersect. One could say the theme of this play more than any other is "the importance of being earnest."

This production of The Ideal Husband addresses the importance of honesty about one's own flaws and missteps, but it also hammers home the idea that it is dangerous for us to believe that our spouses are perfect and always moral. Wilde emphasizes the necessity for the granting of true forgiveness in the face of genuine apology. And he offers us a portrait of how a marriage between two loving people can weather a breach of trust and arrive at a place of true healing.

The Great Gatsby

2011-04-04T06:00:00.191-04:00

I am lucky to live in a family of serious readers. My partner David, while not a particularly bookish person growing up, now reads a great deal of nonfiction and fiction, for work and for pleasure. Our homeschooled son, now almost twelve, has for more than two-thirds of his life been as obsessed with books as I am. Although the three of us talk about our reading almost every evening, we’ve never planned these discussions in advance.

Reading about Amanda and Jason’s family book club was an inspiration to create our own. We’ve structured our book club a bit differently because of the age of our child, the size of our family, and our personal interests and needs. Because A. is reading some emotionally complex books for his banned book club at our local library, we had already been thinking of reading a few of the texts as a family in order to talk about the difficult issues. So this month, we decided to discuss F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Fitzgerald is one of the central figures writing during what is sometimes called America's "Lost Generation"--this month's theme for the Classics Circuit. We are thrilled to be participating this month as a family, sharing some of the thoughts that came out of our first family book club discussion.

* * *

My son and I had a bit of discussion before David joined. Listen in for a moment:

Me: What did you think of this book? Did you enjoy reading it?

A: Yes, I did. Absolutely, old sport. I thought it was very interesting how Fitzgerald provokes thoughts in his readers. I'd never really read books where I saw major symbolism before, and that was a new experience for me.

Me: Can you talk about some of the symbols you saw and what you thought about them?

A: The green light at the end of the dock! I think someone at one of Papa's meetings used the same idea recently. It seems to be referring to the quest for the American dream. Another one of my favorite symbols is the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg. There are a lot of ways to interpret it. In my book group, someone said it could be the watchful eye of God.

Me: What do you think of the eyes on the cover? I've heard that many editions of the book use this picture and that Fitzgerald knew the illustration before he completed his novel.

A: Well, they could definitely be referencing the doctor's eyes. Because of the lips on the face, it seems like they may be a woman's eyes--maybe Daisy's. The figure is crying. It is kind of funny that the tears look like an exclamation point. The tears also look kind of like Long Island where the story takes place. At the bottom, a city seems to be portrayed. The bright lights show there is a lot of excitement there.

Me: Interesting! I thought it was a fairground. It made me think of the line in the book when Gatsby wants to go to Coney Island, in his car, late one night. I like your idea that it shows excitement, the high life.

A: Is there anything you see in the book now that is different from the way you read it when you were in ninth grade?

Ah, yes--I read this book many years ago. And I still have that 9th grade book, full of my notes and underlinings. The doctor's eyes drew my own attention back then:

See that round early-teen-girl handwriting? Yikes. Still--it is much more legible than my writing these days. Who knows what I will make of my book notes in another thirty years.

(Comment at the bottom of the page: the billboard with the picture of the eyes "takes place of god in wasteland." )

I think the biggest change in my understanding of the book now is that I struggle more with Gatsby's relationship with Daisy. Does he love her? Did he ever love her? I used to be sure he did when he was young, and sure as an adult he was trying to get back that love. Now I feel more that he wants to win her to prove that he has reached success in his life. She seems to me no more than a trophy representing the rich life--one who speaks with the voice of money and can be collected just as easily. My partner David does not get this impression at all, and I think my son is a little young for any real insight on this question. Any thoughts from y'all?

* * *

In our full conversation, we circled around a couple of questions--approaching them from different angles and debating meanings. One central facet of our discussion was whether any of the characters are sympathetic. Our son responded with frustration to the question, "Everybody and nobody! That is such a complex question that I don't know how you could expect a straight answer."

While he has a point, we weren't about to let the issue rest. We agreed that Tom Buchanan was the least sympathetic. David suggested that our condemnation of Tom might be greater now than it was when Fitzgerald was writing the book in the mid-1920s. Eugenic thought and Jim Crow racism were the background to his perspectives and his attitudes might have seemed more acceptable then. Our son A. pointed out that the other characters did not seem to accept Tom's views as normal at all. I was torn; Daisy and Nick simply laugh at Tom's ideas--not explicitly reject them or seem disturbed by their implications.

Daisy starts at the beginning of the book as a mostly sympathetic character. We are hopeful that she will find true love in the book and escape from evil Tom. By the end, however, our opinion of her has changed. She seems self-centered, blind to other people's needs, and shallow.

Is Gatsby the character with whom we are to identify? That seems impossible. He is distant at the beginning, drawn larger than life in the middle (perhaps deserving the superhero title of "The Great Gatsby"), and committed to goals we don't respect. On the other hand, Nick (the narrator) tells us that Gatsby is worth far more than the "whole damn bunch" of Toms and Daisys and their ilk. His hope for the future seem to be what the narrator admires--but it is this commitment to building his future that encourages Gatsby to lie about his past and engage in illegal or unethical acts in order to make that dream come true.

My family came to no conclusions beyond what A. suggested at the beginning: that the characters all embody both good and bad--and in the process gain both our sympathy and our contempt.

The lesson Fitzgerald appears to be telling us is that the wealth and the quest for more wealth leads to spiritual or ethical ruin. Although the author seems to say that reaching for a dream is a noble goal, reaching for the American dream--that is, in this book, the search for unbridled wealth--is fundamentally destructive. Tom and Daisy, divorced from any higher goals of humanity and immersed in a fishbowl of money, "smashed up things and creatures then retreated back into their money, or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." Nick ends the book by realizing that he must leave the glittering disconnection of New York. He decides to move back to his Midwestern home--a land of honesty and plainness, a place where people take responsibility for the harm they cause.

But is the corruptive power of the high life what Fitzgerald meant for us to see in this book? The first-person narration makes it easy for us to conflate the character of Nick with Fitzgerald. But the author's real similarity is not with Nick. The better fit is Gatsby. Like the character of Gatsby, Fitzgerald grew up poor, fell in love with a rich girl who would not marry him for monetary reasons, and eventually made money enough to allow him to get the girl. Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda watched their lives spiral more and more out of control in the years after the publication of The Great Gatsby. Their lives became as explosive as Gatsby's.

Interestingly, Nick idealizes Gatsby even as he rejects much of what defines him. Perhaps this book was Fitzgerald's attempt to analyze both the dangers and the magic of the life he had chosen to embrace.

Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad

2011-04-01T06:00:00.007-04:00

I am almost reluctant to write this review of Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus--for two main reasons. First, I love many of Atwood's novels--especially Cat's Eye which I read as a young woman. Second, many bloggers I admire very much, from Trisha and Mel to Nymeth and Caribousmom, were much more impressed with the book than I am.

Rather than being amused by Atwood's attempts at humor, I found many of her lines annoying and artificial. When the dead Penelope is narrating her story to modern audiences, for example, she says what is supposed to be hip: "In your world, you don't get visitations from the gods the way people used to unless you're on drugs." This kind of talk made Penelope seem like a trivial character to me rather than a voice from the past I wanted to spend my time listening to. I expected Atwood to use her deep insights to turn Penelope into a fuller character, not draw her into a comic strip. Similarly, the rapping maids come out with ridiculous lines like "Word has it that Penelope the Prissy was--when it came to sex--no shrinking sissy!" This kind of portrayal I find to be so surface level as to be demeaning.

Although I disliked this book fairly intensely, there were many insights and lines I was drawn to. My favorite: Odysseus "had a reputation as a man who could undo any complicated knot, though sometimes by tying a more complicated one."

* * *

I've been thinking about my displeasure at what I see as Atwood's derision of Homer's epic. Do I dislike her novel so much because of my desire to take classic literature "seriously"? When I read the Literary Blog Hop's question of the week (about whether a book's status as a classic affects our enjoyment or perception of a book), it made think about why I had so many problems with this book. I feel called to work hard to try to understand what people have found valuable in great literature over the centuries. Can I just not take a joke when an author pokes fun of those works?

I think the answer is that I do like literary joking around. For example, I love works that turn Shakespeare on his head to make us laugh--as I have said before and will say again. I can't quite figure out what the difference is here. It feels like Atwood is dismissing The Odyssey rather than playing with it or building on it. Does that make any sense?

I would love to hear your thoughts. Anyone who loved the book want to make a spirited defense of it?

The Nearer Home, The Deeper Our Fears Increase

2011-03-30T06:00:00.033-04:00

In Omeros, Derek Walcott takes themes from both the Iliad and the Odyssey to build a new and resonant story. Achilles sets out on an unlikely odyssey: a fishing expendition off the coast of Saint Lucia in the West Indies turns into a journey across the centuries to his ancestral homeland on the coast of West Africa. They journey through unfamiliar lands, across the boundaries of space and time.

I sing of quiet Achile, Afolabe's son...
whose end, when it comes, will be a death by water.

Throughout this book, different characters and communities (including Africans living in Santa Lucia, Indians, and British colonials) struggle with the meaning of being displaced from their homelands and with their tentative efforts to find their homes again. As Walcott writes:

The nearer home, the deeper our fears increase,
that no house might come to meet us on our own shore.

The large tragedies of Black slavery and the destruction of American Indian communities are paired here with, as Walcott writes, "the interior, unwritten epic fashioned from the suffering of the individual in exile."

Those of you have been reading my classics posts know that I was shocked by my love for The Iliad and somewhat disappointed by The Odyssey (which I had read once before). In many ways, Omeros combines the more appealing plot line of The Odyssey with the depth I found in The Iliad--leaving me profoundly unsettled and also deeply moved when I closed the book.

Walcott's writing here is gorgeous--luminous poetry throughout, with gentle unobtrusive rhymes. It begs to be read slowly, aloud--listened to, thought about. Omeros is a beautiful tribute to Homer and an intensely powerful work of literature in its own right.

An Odyssey Through The Odyssey

2011-03-28T06:00:00.002-04:00

This week, I'll be posting about a few modern books inspired by Homer's The Odyssey. Do you have any favorite examples? Please give me your suggestions in the comments!

I'll start off with a non-fiction book sometimes called a literary travelogue: Scott Huler's No-Man's Lands: One Man's Odyssey Through The Odyssey. After Huler reads James Joyce's Ulysses more or less on a dare, he decides to read Homer's epic. He already knew the basic story, as most of us in this culture do, since "its content creeps into our minds through back channels, like the symphonies we learn by snatches as background music in Bugs Bunny cartoons." But only as a mature adult does Huler really read the story of Odysseus. He is stunned by its power to speak directly to him. As he writes, "by the time I finished, I felt the book had sought me out, that my need for The Odyssey had manifested itself and brought the book to me." He continues, "I came to see the passage of Odysseus from Troy to Ithaca as a metaphor, a series of adventures in which Odysseus demonstrates what he needs to learn--or unlearn--to live his life."

Huler became so obsessed with Homer's epic that he decides to make his own journey through the Mediterranean and explore the history of the epic. "I wanted to go where Odysseus went," he writes, "to learn what Odysseus learned." Like Odysseus, the author travels without knowing exactly what is coming next, letting the winds (metaphoric winds in Huler's case) carry him where they may. Like Odysseus, his travels keep him away from his wife. His desire to be back home is clear and profound--but he also admits to the wanderlust and excitement that also tempts Homer's hero. (Huler doesn't have quite the same kind of temptations in his path. As he says, "depressingly few goddesses demanded my sexual favors.")

The author's odyssey is of course rambling and shallow compared with the magical and magisterial journey taken by Odysseus. Nevertheless, the two both learn lessons about the deep ties of home and family. Odysseus traveled for years and was "so weary of travel and excitement that he hopes to never leave home again." Huler hopes for the same commitment: "I aspired to even a tiny piece of Odysseus's weariness, his gladness to be through with adventure, to be home at last..., Wouldn't it be grand to feel so complete, so finished?" The author returns home from his trip to his pregnant wife June--about to give birth to a little boy. He promises that together they will embark on their next adventure: raising their child.

I enjoyed this book very much and found Huler's personal take on Homer to be a fascinating way to approach the text. Sometimes he stretches the parallels between his odyssey and Odysseus's journey a little too much. Sometimes I was irritated that Huler left his pregnant wife and talked about the temptations of other women (just as I was irritated by Odysseus). But overall, I found his insights into Homer creative and thoughtful, his narrative appealing, and his efforts to make ancient literature seem relevant to our lives today highly laudable.

The Literature of the Ouija Board

2011-03-26T10:34:00.002-04:00

Picture by Jessie Terwilliger

I've been having a grand time reading Paul Collins's wonderful book Sixpence House (which I will discuss in an upcoming post). Today I want to share a story he tells about Patience Worth. "Her name is forgotten today," Collins begins, "but at one time she--or her spirit, at least--was very famous indeed."

In the early years of the 20th century, Caspar Yost claimed that he had discovered "a new poet and novelist; or rather, ... a very old poet an novelist." Using a Ouija board, Pearl Curran--a St. Louis housewife--communicated with the spirit of Patience Worth, a Puritan woman who, as Collins writes, soon became "a veritable Oprah's Book Club in spirit form."

During the 1920s, a whole Patience Worth industry arose. Worth authored a series of novels and poems, all written via Ouija board, and all of which were extremely popular. As Collins writes, "People believed it--even, amazingly, after Patience Worth wrote a Victorian family melodrama. Considering that neither Victorians nor novels had existed in Worth's day, this was an impressive achievement indeed."

I love Collins's snappy sarcasm--but his telling of this strange story is also full of insight. He points out that Worth's popularity emphasizes how much we want to believe that "all writers are somehow vessels for Truth and Beauty when they compose." He compares this to our desire to imagine characters who develop their own will and "take over a book." But as Collins points out, "The reality tends to involve a spare room, a pirated copy of MS Word, and a table bought on sale at Target. A character can no more take over your novel than an eggplant and a jar of cumin can take over your kitchen."

I am thrilled to find that there is an entire book about the Patience Worth story, written by Irving Litvag: Singer in the Shadows: The Strange Story of Patience Worth. I think this must go on my Halloween reading list. This definitely gives a whole new meaning to the genre of "spiritual" writing!

Classics for Pleasure

2011-03-24T10:30:00.000-04:00

In his introduction to Classics for Pleasure, Michael Dirda acknowledges that many people believe that classic books are "difficult, esoteric, and a little boring." We grow up being told they are as good for us as cod-liver oil.

But in reality, Dirda says, classics are classics not because they somehow improve us but because "people have found them worth reading, generation after generation, century after century. These books "speak to us of our own very real feelings and failings, of our all-too-human daydreams and confusions." And they connect us and our emotions with the parallel feelings of people thoughout the history of humanity.

Dirda relates that he found a copy of Clifton Fadiman's The Lifetime Reading Plan when he was young boy. The book shaped his future reading profoundly: "This Fadiman guy made great books sound just as exciting as Green Lantern comics or the latest Tarzan paperback."

After working his way though most of The Lifetime Reading Plan, Dirda began to branch out in his reading and discover many more classic books that he seeks to share with his readers. "Classics for Pleasure deliberately ignores most of the authors discussed in that [updated, more multicultural] 1997 Fadiman-Major edition," says Dirda. "It seemed more useful--and fun--to point readers to new authors and less obvious classics." The entries in Dirda's book proceed to do exactly that--introducing readers to authors from Edward Gorey and Italo Calvino to S.J. Perelman, from Elizabeth Gaskell to Eudora Welty.

Dirda's entries are not simply listings or summaries as Fadiman's are, or as Murnigan gives us. Instead, they are mini-essays which explore larger themes and make his observations personal. He connects the books to each other, across time and place, allowing them to have a conversation.

This book is not so much as an introductory guide as a lovely exploration of ideas--perfect before or after one has read the books discussed.

Shakespeare Behind Bars

2011-03-22T06:00:00.002-04:00

As I nurse my sore and purple toes, I've been reading haphazardly and watching films on Netflix. One movie I especially want to share with you is the extremely moving Shakespeare Behind Bars. This documentary tracks inmates of Kentucky's Luther Luckett maximum security prison as they prepare for a performance of Shakespeare's The Tempest. It is a profoundly heart-wrenching and thought-provoking film which I highly recommend.

The inmates are brought together under a prison program run by an open-hearted teacher/facilitator who not only helps them understand Shakespeare's language and themes but explore their own identities and their own pasts. The characters in The Tempest share a surprising amount with the prison inmates. Like Prospero, many of the incarcerated men suffered from abuse or cruelty which led at least in part to the rage that allowed them to commit the crimes for which they were imprisoned. They too are isolated on an imprisoning island, removed from the outside world. Just as Prospero must let go of his defense mechanisms in order to reintegrate into society.

Many of the men involved in this production of The Tempest are facing parole hearings in their very new futures. As they struggle to make sense of their anger and their guilt, as well as their ability to imagine themselves within the framework of humanity, they turn to the bard's words to help them grow. What they eventually find through their work with the Shakespeare play is a script for redemption.

As Prospero declares in his final lines,

As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

Interlude

2011-03-21T10:11:00.001-04:00

I just returned from a wonderful weekend in the midwest--meeting an adorable young man who was far more interesting than the books I brought for the weekend. This 7-month old baby is my fictive nephew--the son of a dear friend who is (at least as far as my parents and I are concerned) a part of our family.

What a joy to watch B. begin to point at our noses, sit up so confidently, and work on learning to crawl! My son loved playing Scottish tunes on his violin while B. danced in his doorway jumper, keeping the beat. I loved reading to him from his assorted board books. (His favorites this weekend were a 3-page rhyme about pandas and a one-word-a-page color book with pictures of babies on each page.)

I'm afraid we had a little fun at his expense, too--dressing him up with a cabbage-leaf hat as we prepared dinner:

Unfortunately, as the visit ended, I tripped while emerging from the bathtub and seem to have broken a couple of toes. They are swollen and purple--and elevated and iced. I'll be spending the day on the couch with a couple of light books.

My brain right now is mush--from the combination of cuteness overload (good) and toe pain (bad). I hope to be back to bookish blogging very soon.

Beowulf on the Beach

2011-03-19T06:00:00.002-04:00

Jack Murnighan's Beowulf on the Beach is a terrific introduction to reading the classics outside of the classroom. His writing is quick, hip, and immensely readable. What I like best is the author's emphasis on reading literature for the joy it brings. As Murnighan writes, "Once you open yourself to the humor, drama, adventure, sex, poignancy, elegance, tragedy, and beauty of the great books, you'll see why they've long been considered among the most inspiring and engaging things ever written. He continues, "I want you to feel these books in your heart, in your soul, and maybe even below the waist." Yes--Murnigan is the same guy who wrote The Naughty Bits: The Steamiest and Most Scandalous Sex Scenes from the World's Great Books--but this book is a lot more than that. It is "an attempt to show you what's in the great books that make them really matter."

Make sure you don't miss "Tips on Reading Classics," a short section at the end of the book. (In fact, I suggest reading it immediately after you finish the brief introduction.) Although his advice is simple, it will really help you organize your reading.

Although he does not refer to the concept by name, Murnighan encourages us to join the Great Conversation. "Put yourself in dialogue with some of the most brilliant minds, sensitive hearts, quick wits, vivacious spirits, and wise teachers the world has ever known," he says. "The greatest men and women of all of history are speaking to you--and you can hear them."

The majority of Beowulf on the Beach is a compendium of annotated books, listed in chronological order. Murnighan includes offers a basic introduction the the author and the context in which the book was produced, a brief discussion of plot, and even a discussion of sections to skip or skim. His reviews are funny, irreverent, and utterly charming.

A couple of examples:

1. He calls the Iliad the "origin and apex of virility lit." What a wonderful coinage to add to "chick lit"!

2. When talking about the Odyssey, he says that Penelope's rowdy suitors are turning Odysseus's house in Ithaca "into a Cornell frat."

Finally, I like Murnighan's take on choosing which texts he uses in his book. As he points out, it is hard to choose what is the most influential or iconic books of all time. So he started his selection by asking people what they "felt kind of bad about" never reading seriously. In other words, "communal remorse dictated [the] first list." He then added a few additional items that critics and scholars have placed "among literature's finest achievements." He also included books that "carve out corners of literature that no one else occupies."

One could quibble with Murnighan about his choices. Perhaps because I read Fadiman so recently, I noticed the relative absence of classic Asian books. But unlike Fadiman, Murnighan never suggests that his desire would be for a complete list. "As to the so-called Great Books debate, i.e. whether we teach the dead white guys are keep opening up 'his-story' to other voices, call me a conscientious objector. He loves the classics, but he loves any books that help any individual reader feel connected to books and to life.

He makes a point that I find remarkably compelling: of course it is true that comic books or postmodern novels can be just as significant as Shakespeare or one of the other "great books"--but it is equally true that we can enjoy reading Shakespeare just as much as we enjoy reading the contemporary stuff. I think many readers of my generation believe that the classics are dry and useless, something boring only to be endured in the classroom. Beowulf on the Beach heals us from those assumptions and gives us a great path for enjoying these books.