Armored Assaults on Hot Fudge Sundaes

Surprised By Joy

2010-03-26T23:29:00.003-04:00

Hey, guys, Serena and I both read something on the Iditarod reading list! Totally by accident! And I'm working late and need a diversion, so.

If you're feeling cynical, E.M. Forster isn't for you. But if you're feeling depressed about how cynical everybody else is, oh my god, Forster is going to change your tiny world. He is the kindest author I've ever read. He finds something to love in every one of his characters, something worthy in them, and he emphasizes that. They could be stupid or brutish or cruel or histrionic, Forster doesn't care. He cares that they're stoic, or that they aspire to be more than they are, or that their antics are heartfelt.

I'd been thinking for a while about people who make everyone around them feel special, and the idea that that kind of attitude is really fake. My conclusion is something like this: it's not fake, because it's not pretending people are special in ways that they aren't special. It's finding what's special about every person, and concentrating on that, concentrating on what they do best or what makes them worthwhile. I formulated this theory before starting Howards End, and it's pretty much all I've been able to think about while reading it.

Well, that and "Really, Eddie? ANOTHER description of the English countryside? Jesus."

Tiny Resurrection, For All You RSS Readers

2009-06-24T00:06:00.003-04:00

So it's a good thing the internet exists, because I think if I blather on about the Elgin marbles to anyone else within swatting distance, I might be in trouble.

BUT THE ELGIN MARBLES. YOU GUYS. THE ELGIN MARBLES.

Quick recap: in 1816 or thereabouts, Lord Elgin of Britain got the then-rulers of Greece, the Ottoman Empire, to let him chisel a bunch of marble slabs off the Acropolis in Athens. He also snagged some sculptures and stuff, all ancient, gorgeous marble work. All from the Parthenon. Important: Though they are called the marbles, they are not marbles that you keep in a bag but instead big works of art made of marble.

Now Greece wants them back. Really, really bad. This is a nationalist thing, and having your greatest art treasures stolen by colonial invaders can't be great.

So, in today's installment of IMPRESS YOUR FRIENDS WITH KNOWLEDGE OF ESOTERIC CRAP, here's a summary.

GREECE: Give us back our damn marbles.
BRITAIN: Oh you mean the Elgin marbles?
GREECE: We call them the Parthenon marbles.
BRITAIN: Well, good then, but they're in our lovely British Museum and they're quite happy there. Millions of tourists. Come visit if you like, but wipe your feet.
GREECE: THOSE ARE OUR MARBLES, YOU THIEVING SONS-OF-RATS.
BRITAIN: It's not as if you have a decent museum to put them in anyway. They'll just sit by in some potty old shed and no-one will ever look at them.
GREECE: Well, you ... hmm. Hold on.

GREECE: OK, how do you like THIS museum?!
BRITAIN: Hm. It's pretty nice actually. I like the glass bits.
GREECE: GIVE US BACK OUR DAMN MARBLES.
BRITAIN: Nope. Can't.
GREECE: I hate you.
BRITAIN: If we give you these, you'll want all the others and then the only thing we will have is that stupid Banksy that he put in here for a joke.
GREECE: I am going to hold my breath until I die unless you give me the marbles.
BRITAIN: But, really, it's just going from one museum to another, so what's the difference?
GREECE: Hey, Egypt, let's go steal Westminster Abbey and see how they like it.

There was an actual demonstration in Athens. A PROTEST. With SIGNS. All about how THEY WANT THEIR ART BACK.

I think that's pretty great.
I don't know what they should do about the marbles, but 1) The British Museum didn't give back works they got that were looted by Nazis, so they won't be swayed by emotional appeal, and 2) The Greeks are being very pointed with their museum -- they use the marbles they have left and fill in the rest with these stark white plaster castings of the real things, with the color distinction yelling "LOOK WHAT SHOULD BE HERE! BOMB BIG BEN."

There's no need to get so angry...

2009-04-06T10:19:00.001-04:00

Remember this post from a few months ago about Virginia Heffernan's entirely mean and uncalled-for "review" of Sarah Vowell's latest book? The review that basically read: "Whatever, the book sucks, but OH MY GOD YOU GUYS I HATE SARAH VOWELL SO MUCH. SO MUCH. WITH HER STUPID LIBERAL POLITICS AND HER STUPID ACCENT AND HER STUPID BEING REALLY SUCCESSFUL AND LIKEABLE. FML."

Well, now I think it's clear: Virginia Heffernan needs to go to anger management. Cause she wrote another article — I'm really not sure why the New York Times keeps publishing these rants, but okay — about how much she hates her iPhone.

HATES IT. Hates its STUPID LITTLE SCREEN that you have to TOUCH and the stupid ADJUSTING TO TECHNOLOGY and the stupid OH GOD WHAT AM I GOING TO WRITE ABOUT? THE NEW YORK TIMES WANTS ANOTHER VITRIOLIC PIECE OF RIDICULOUS. OH GOD MY LIFE IS SO HARD. SO HARD, EVERYONE. NOBODY KNOWS THE TROUBLE I'VE SEEN. NO NOT EVEN JESUS.

In other, less obnoxious news, I am sort of thinking about going to grad school a little bit. More on that later.

Well... balls.

2009-03-30T11:29:00.002-04:00

"Emory University plans a 40 percent cut in the number of new Ph.D. students it will enroll this fall. Columbia University is planning a 10 percent cut. Brown University has called off a planned increase in Ph.D. enrollments. The University of South Carolina is considering a plan to have some departments that have admitted doctoral students every year shift to an every-other-year system. These cuts are exclusively for Ph.D. programs."

FML.

In other news, I think I need to shift my focus from the Iditarod to actual grad school preparation. It's getting to be about that time. Will you still love me if I blog about GRE study and program entrance requirements? That seems so boring. But I don't have enough time to do all these different things.

Damn it.

2009-03-28T11:38:00.002-04:00

I missed this when it was published two weeks ago, but hee!

But Blumenthal is definitely wrong. Madoff would be in the 8th circle, the one punishing fraud.

“It’s not a poem about ‘you did this, you get this,’ ” Mr. [Robert] Pinsky says. “It’s about the mystery of how you hurt yourself. It’s like the Talmud says: the evils others do to me are as nothing compared to the evils I do to myself.”

It's certainly lending Madoff's crimes a grand scale, isn't it?)

blogging FAIL

2009-03-24T11:33:00.002-04:00

I don't even use Twitter, but this is about where we're at right now:

I've been re-reading a bunch of cantos in the Musa translation, because it makes so much more sense to me. It's time-consuming, though, and hasn't much inspired me to blog.

I've also been talking to people about grad school and trying to do some basic research. I feel so unprepared for all of this. I've heard of people quitting their jobs just to prepare for grad school. Yeah, Things I Absolutely Cannot Do.

I have some neat grad school-related things that I might get to do for my job, though. More on that soon, I hope!

Post-It: This is ridiculous

2009-03-17T11:09:00.000-04:00

Depressing news, in Fiona's ongoing life crisis:
Even a chimpanzee can make a plan for the future. But I can't seem to.

Now that you're depressed, check this out.

Roberto Benigni reads Dante aloud as a performance piece that he's toured around Italy. It will make everything better:

Ha.

2009-03-17T10:00:00.002-04:00

I was going to title my post, "This has officially become ridiculous," but then I saw that Fiona had scheduled a post with the title "This is ridiculous" for the same day, so I guess that's out. No matter.

Let me tell you what is truly ridiculous: I have, on my person, four different translations of the Purgatorio.

I know. This is out of control. But you see, as I mentioned last week, I'm having trouble with Merwin's translation. There are no summaries/arguments at the beginning of the chapter, and the notes are few and terse. I just feel like I'm missing so much.

So I took a lunch break and went to the used bookstore by my office. Now I have the Ciardi translation, because I know for sure I can follow it; the Mandelbaum, because as we all know by now, I like Mandelbaum; and, randomly enough, the Musa, because it's a Penguin edition with excellent notes. (That guy on Amazon seems to like him, too.)

I should not be spending so much money on used books, especially the Purgatorio. No one even likes the Purgatorio! But there's no point reading it, I don't think, if I can't make heads nor tails of it. And we'll be done with translations soon enough.

(The bookstore also had the Palma Inferno, and I took a moment to read some of it, and it was just beautiful. Oh well.)

I'm looking forward to getting a look at these translations and letting you know how it goes. I've made painfully slow progress with Merwin, so I'm hoping I'll be able to read faster now, too.

"Time does not bring relief; you all have lied"

2009-03-16T10:42:00.004-04:00

Daylight saving time gets me thinking about clocks and hours and all that business by which I live my life.

Timing is extremely important in the Divine Comedy too. There have been a hundred million commentaries written on the thing, and somewhere along the way people figured out not only the exact dimensions of Hell, but the exact position of the stars in the sky at any given moment. Each canto has a specific time attached -- Dante's journey through the afterlife is meticulously timed.

So I started to wonder...how?

They didn't even have mechanical clocks in Europe until what, 1270? 1280? And the Comedy was written less than 50 years after that, so timekeeping wasn't all that important. They certainly wouldn't have had clocks in houses -- just church bells, set to local noon. Because it didn't matter what time it was anywhere ELSE. Each town just set the clock to noon when the sun was highest and then forgot about it. I think in a lot of the Western World they would still have been using temporal hours* instead of 60-minute hours.

So I asked Robert Hollander about it** and he referenced a passage from Paradiso:

Then, like a clock that calls us at the hour
when the bride of God gets up to sing
matins to her bridegroom, that he should love her still,
when a cog pulls one wheel and drives another,
chiming its ting-ting with notes so sweet
that the willing spirit swells with love,
thus I saw that glorious wheel in motion,
matching voice to voice in harmony
and with sweetness that cannot be known
except where joy becomes eternal.(X.139-148)

He then cited another scholar who claims this is the first literary reference to a mechanical clock. Apparently this scholar (Scott) thinks Dante might have seen one in Milan. Obviously this passage isn't about a clock in a room, since that would be ridiculous. It's probably about a town clock tower.

Another theory I have is about Italian time, which is a system of 24 hours beginning at sunset. Apparently it was useful for people whose day of work needed to end at sunset because they didn't really have access to artificial light. First of all, it was used in Italy until the 1700s, and second -- look at the Comedy! It makes sense! He starts at sunset in the dark wood, near to the time an Italian hour cycle would be starting!

So that's my theory. But really I'm just struck by how odd it is that commentators have been so hung up on the timing in Dante, when exact time mattered so little in the 14th century.

*OK, so you tell time by putting a stick in the ground and watching the shadows it casts based on the position of the sun. When the sun is right overhead, it's noon. So originally the way to divide time into hours was to see how long it took for the shadow to get a certain amount longer. Thing is, at different times of the year, that would take more or less time. That's a temporal hour -- it varies in length depending on the time of year.
**So last week I sent a fangirlish "I just love your Dante translation" e-mail to Robert Hollander, the translator I liked so much. Ever since then we've been corresponding back and forth about Dante -- he's really nice and helpful, and likes the idea of the Iditarod.

also

2009-03-12T13:11:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I feel like the Melvin of the Literary Iditarod.

Sometimes? Always.

mea culpa

2009-03-12T11:52:00.007-04:00

I think I owe John Ciardi an apology. I was all like, "Oh, terza rima, that's original. Focus on the POETRY, John Ciardi." And then I'd get all mad when he'd do that thing where he'd annotate a line by saying, "Yeah, um, this isn't actually in the Italian, but I needed to make a rhyme here, so let's pretend that Dante said this, ok?"

But looking at other translations, it seems like Ciardi didn't change the literal meaning very much, and I... I miss the rhyme. I'd forgotten how much I enjoy structure in poetry. Really, I'm a little ashamed of myself. I memorized "Kubla Khan" when I was twelve because I loved the way it sounded. I am rather fond of Tennyson. Why did I think that I wouldn't want my Dante to be structured?

Let's look at a couple of examples. Here's the canto ending I mentioned liking in Ciardi a while back:

But now the Poet already led the way
to the slope above, saying to me: "Come now:
the sun has touched the very peak of day

above the sea, and night already stands
with one black foot upon Morocco's sands." (IV.136-41)

And here's that same set of lines in W.S. Merwin's translation*:

And already the poet had begun
to climb ahead of me, and he said, "Come now.
See: the meridian is touched by the sun,

and on the shore night has set foot on Morocco." (IV.136-41)

(I believe Esolen's translation of these lines is fairly similar to Merwin's. Perhaps Fiona can give that version in a post or in a comment, just for comparison. What? You don't find translations fascinating? Well, I do.)

Anyway. Don't get me wrong. I like the Merwin translation. There's a certain delicacy, an awareness of diction, that is maybe missing in Ciardi. But there's something about the structure of Ciardi's phrasing, particulary in these canto endings, that Merwin's less formal verse lacks. And I miss it.

One more example. Here's the Pia episode that I quoted last week, in Ciardi:

A third spoke when that second soul had done:
"When you have found your way back to the world,
and found your rest from this long road you run,

oh speak my name again with living breath
to living memory. Pia am I.
Siena gave me birth; Maremma, death.

As he well knows who took me as his wife
with jeweled ring before he took my life." (V. 136-143)

And here are the same lines in Merwin:

"Oh when you are back in the world again
and are rested after the long journey,"
the third spirit followed upon the second,

"pray you, remember me who am La Pia.
Siena made me, Maremma unmade me;
he knows it who, with his ring taking me,

first had me for his wife with his gem." (V.130-136)

Which translation presents Pia in a more poignant, more memorable way?

On the plus side, Merwin has the original poem on the facing pages. I don't know Italian, but I have a decent command of Spanish, so I can piece out a little. Just for fun, here's Pia in Dante's original:

"Deh, quando tu sarai tornato al mondo
e riposato de la lunga via,"
seguitò 'l terzo spirito al secondo,

"ricorditi di me, che son la Pia;
Siena me fé, disfecemi Maremma:
salsi colui che 'nnanellata pria

disposando m'avea con la sua gemma."

----------------------------------------------

*Merwin, W.S., transl. Purgatorio, by Dante Alighieri. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.

"Where will it end, Daria? Where will it end?"

2009-03-09T13:28:00.003-04:00

I don't even know what to say about these articles anymore. I was raised to believe that I could do anything I wanted -- that I was, yes, a special and unique snowflake. You hear that from a lot of grad students, that you have to be someone who really believes that she can do it.

I just don't know if I can believe that. My parents always told me that I could be anything, and my professors encouraged me to think about grad school. But these days... I don't know. I already felt uncertain, short on confidence, and now things are worse than ever.

I don't want to give up on what I care about, but I don't want to delude myself, either.

I think I need a nap.

Who shall be true to us/ When Daylight Saving Time broke the entire world?

2009-03-09T11:30:00.002-04:00

I apologize for my title, which manages to combine the worst elements of not literary and not witty. I blame Daylight Saving Time and its shameless attempts to destroy everything that is good and true in the world, like sleeping in on Sundays.

Here are some fractions and orts of news, a Monday medley of I'm Too Exhausted to Write a Real Post.

1. As Fiona mentioned, we had to return our previous copies of the Commedia, and I now have Merwin for the Purgatorio and Esolen for the Paradiso. For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to try multiple new translators. So far this is turning out to have been dumb, and I miss Ciardi more than I would ever have expected. For one thing, he put little "arguments" at the beginning of each chapter, such as you'll find in Paradise Lost. This is brilliant because Dante can be hard to follow, and it's useful to know what to expect. No such luck with Merwin. He also doesn't explain anything. I know I complained about Ciardi's long, often tedious notes, but Merwin has hardly any notes at all, and there's so much now that I don't understand. I'm even missing Ciardi's rhyme scheme more than I would have expected -- more on the differences between translations later.

2. From IHE today:

Gaps in disciplinary pay are not new to higher education... some humanities disciplines remain stuck with salaries much lower than counterparts across the quad. The median salary for a full professor of English, for example ($79,854, across sectors), is less than the median for an assistant professor of business ($84,025). Instructors in English or in philosophy have median salaries below $40,000 at public institutions, while instructors in law and legal studies earn over $60,000 at public institutions.

What's this you say? English professors are among the very lowest paid? I'm shocked! SHOCKED I tell you!

3. I've mentioned the executive director of the MLA, Rosemary Feal, at least once before. Tomorrow I am going to be attending a meeting with her, as well as with the MLA's president and vice president. With luck I will learn some useful and interesting things. I'd better, since the meeting is scheduled for 8am, so I'll be interrupting my normally rigid 8am plans (hit the snooze button, hit the snooze button again, curse, turn the alarm off, walk blindly into my bedroom door, stub my toe, curse again, trip on the carpet...).

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****It has come to my attention that the block quote formatting comes out SUPER weird in Google Reader. Yet another reason to click on our actual blog every single day! That, and to comment on our new format, and maybe offer us your html expertise because we're not very good at this game.

Drop Kick Me, Jesus, Through the Goal Posts of Life

2009-03-09T10:45:00.000-04:00

One thing that I think we've both made clear we find difficult to stomach is Virgil's consignment to Limbo. But it's even more infuriating, this damnation by default, when you consider the Harrowing of Hell.

The Harrowing of Hell is a part of Christian Doctrine wherein Jesus went to hell and hung out for a bit and preached the gospel or something after he died. But not, apparently, to convert any sinners. According to Virgil via Dante (in Canto IV), he went down to get some very specific individuals.

"I was a novice in this state,
When I saw hither come a Mighty One,
With sign of victory incoronate.
Hence he drew forth the shade of the First Parent,
And that of his son Abel, and of Noah,
Of Moses the lawgiver, and the obedient
Abraham, patriarch, and David, king,
Israel with his father and his children,
And Rachel, for whose sake he did so much,
And others many, and he made them blessed;
And thou must know, that earlier than these
Never were any human spirits saved."*

So Jesus goes down into Hell to grab some Hebrew forefathers. It's not even clear that Virgil knows exactly what happened here and how roundly he was cheated. Seriously, what makes Noah and Adam more holy than any other righteous person who lives before the birth of Christ? OH RELIGIOUS DOCTRINE, YOU PAIN ME.

It's a good thing I don't subscribe to any of this or I think it would keep me up nights.

But seriously, could he just not carry all the good people up so he just picked the ones who were important in the Bible? SOCRATES WOULD BE A VALUABLE ADDITION TO HEAVEN TOO.

*This is from some random internet translation since I no longer have an actual translation of the Inferno. Stupid library, always wanting their books back. Sorry, baby, I didn't mean that, you know I love you. In other news, we have both switched translations: I grabbed the Anthony Esolen translations of Purgatorio and Paradiso, and Serena has the W.S. Merwin Purgatorio and the Esolen Paradiso. More on that anon.

Oh! And...

2009-03-06T14:50:00.000-05:00

So, remember when I was annoyed that Cato, a suicide isn't consigned to the seventh circle of Hell? Turns out there's a reason. First of all, he's just a gate guardian in Purgatory — there's no intimation that he ever actually gets to go to Heaven.

Secondly, Dante was careful to only put Christian suicides in the seventh circle of hell, on the logic that pagans might not be offending their religions by committing suicide. So it's all okay! You didn't know Jesus anyway!

Anyway, talk of Cato always makes me think of this.*

*There are no time markers, but you want the man near the end making the amazing squinchy face and saying "You have lost Rome!"

"I always have a quotation for everything. It saves original thinking."

2009-03-05T09:34:00.007-05:00

Dorothy Sayers (in her introduction to the Purgatorio) has this to say:

"Persons who pontificate about Dante without making mention of his Purgatory may reasonably be suspected of knowing him only at second hand, or of having at most skimmed through the circles of his Hell in the hope of finding something to be shocked at."

Basically she operates on the theory that the true Dantean scholar will love the Purgatorio most, because it is the glue that binds the Dantean universe together and because only the true Dante scholar can love it. It is not so flashy as its brethren.*

Sorry, Dorothy Sayers. Maybe I am not cut out for this after all. I promise that I did not love the Inferno out of prurience or a wish to appear erudite. It just sang, and the Purgatorio doesn't. I appreciate the structure of it, I do. And I'm still near the beginning. Perhaps it will grow on me.

Maybe it's (surely not) that Hollander is no longer my translator. Much as I loved her introduction, Sayers' translation is certainly harder to parse. Man, she is a badass though. That tattooed man on the Metro yesterday who looked like he ate broken glass for breakfast would cower, COWER in the face of terza rima.

So in conclusion, Dorothy Sayers, I will try harder. Don't be disappointed in me.

*Also, is there some sort of Dante secret society? Maybe the password to the clubhouse is written on the hundredth page of every edition of the Purgatorio, along with instructions for initiation rites. Also, what would such a society be called? All I can think of now is the Dantettes, and that's definitely a girl group.**
**"Stop! At the gates of Dis!
So your sin can be assessed."
Or Francesca da Rimini (lustful denizen of the second circle whose husband murdered her and her lover) could sing "My Husband's Back (and We're Headed Straight for Hell)."

"As he well knows who took me as his wife"

2009-03-04T10:00:00.002-05:00

Either Dante or Ciardi is great at these memorable canto endings. Here's another one that really gets me, at the end of Canto V (The Late-Repentant, Class Three: Those Who Died by Violence Without Last Rites). The souls here all want Dante to remind their living friends and relatives to pray for them, since the prayers of the devout can shorten their time in ante-Purgatory. (The indolent, you see, who for whatever reason delayed repentance till the end of their life, must wait -- as they made God wait -- before entering Purgatory.)

So anyway, Dante is surrounded by these souls:

A third spoke when that second soul had done:
"When you have found your way back to the world,
and found your rest from this long road you run,

oh speak my name again with living breath
to living memory. Pia am I.
Siena gave me birth; Maremma, death.

As he well knows who took me as his wife
with jeweled ring before he took my life." (V. 136-143)

Effective, right? Ciardi writes that Pia "has been traditionally identified as Pia de' Tomolei of Siena, who married a Guelph leader and was murdered by him. The identification is doubtful, however" (p. 212 note to l. 140).

Whoever she was, wow. What a way to be immortalized.

little night feet

2009-03-03T12:00:00.002-05:00

Dante has this habit of using impossibly convoluted descriptions of the sky and the stars to make points about time, direction or geography. His bombast is nearly impenetrable, and his tenuous grasp of geography makes it all the worse:

The sun already burned at the horizon,
while the high point of its meridian circle
covered Jerusalem, and in opposition

equal Night revolved above the Ganges
bearing the Scales that fall out of her hand
as she grows longer with the season's changes:

thus, where I was, Aurora in her passage
was losing the pale blushes from her cheeks
which turned to orange with increasing age. (II. 1-9)

Ciardi helpfully points out, "The bit of erudite affectation in which Dante indulges here means simply, 'It was dawn' " (p.194, note to II. 1-9).

And just in case you were wondering:

To understand the total figure, one must recall the following essentials of Dante's geography: (1) Jersualem is antipodal to the Mount of Purgatory. Thus it is sunset at Jerusalem when it is sunrise on the mountain. (2) All the land of the earth is contained in one half of the Northern Hemisphere. That is to say, there is no land (except the Mount of Purgatory) anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere and of the total circle of the norther Hemisphere (360 degrees) only half (180 degrees) is land. Jerusalem is at the exact center of this 180 degree arc of land. Spain, 90 degrees to one side, is the West, and India (Ganges), 90 degrees to the other, is the East.
Every fifteen degrees of longitude equals one hour or time. That is to say, it takes the Sun an hour to travel fifteen degrees. Thus at sunset over Jerusalem it is midnight (six hours later) over India, and noon (six hours earlier) over Spain. The journey, moreover, is conceived as taking place during the vernal* equinox, when the days and nights are of the same length. Thus it is "equal Night' (line 4).
Finally, when the Sun is in Aries, midnight is in Libra (the Scales). Thus the night bears the Scales in her hand (i.e., that constellation is visible), but Libra will no longer be the sign of the night as the season changes, and thus it may be said that the Scales will fall from her hand (i.e., will no longer be visible.

That's very helpful, Ciardi... or at least, it would have been if I'd cared at all about what exactly Dante was getting at there. The text is full of similar passages and notes; I won't quote all of them because I know you wouldn't read them. Nor do I blame you.

Ok, maybe one more example. Just trust me that the entire book is filled with these sorts of things:

Virgil was quick to note the start I gave
when I beheld the Chariot of the Sun
driven between me and the North Wind's cave.

"Were Castor and Pollux," he said, "in company
of that bright mirror which sends forth its rays
equally up and down, then you would see

the twelve-toothed cogwheel of the Zodiac
turned till it blazed still closer to the Bears
--unless it were to stray from its fixed path. **

If you wish to understand why this is so,
imagine Zion and this Mount so placed
on earth, the one above, the other below,

that the two have one horizon though they lie
in different hemispheres. Therefore, the path
that Phaethon could not follow in the sky

must necessarily, in passing here
on the one side, pass there upon the other,
as your own reasoning will have made clear."

And I then: "Master, I may truly vow
I never grasped so well the very point
on which my wits were most astray just now:

that the mid-circle of the highest Heaven,
called the Equator, always lies between
the sun and winter, and, for the reason given,

lies as far north of this place at all times
as the Hebrews, when they held Jerusalem
were wont to see it toward the warmer climbs." (IV. 58-84)

I'll spare you Ciardi's notes on all this, because I can't imagine why anyone would care. Suffice to say that they're approximately nine million paragraphs long and contain this hilarious diagram of the earth with Zion, the equator, the path of the ecliptic, Purgatory, and the "celestial horizon of Purgatory and Zion" all carefully marked.

There is, however, at least one of Dante's little digressions on time and geography that I find utterly delightful. At the end of a conversation with the indolent Belacqua in Canto IV (Ante-Purgatory: The First Ledge -- The Late-Repentant -- Class Two: The Indolent) (hell of an ordering system they've got there, eh?), Dante is reminded that he must keep going:

But now the Poet already led the way
to the slope above, saying to me: "Come now:
the sun has touched the very peak of day

above the sea, and night already stands
with one black foot upon Morocco's sands." (IV.136-41)

Ciardi clarifies:

It was now noon at Purgatory. It must therefore be midnight in Jerusalem. Dante believed Morocco to lie exactly 90 degrees west of Jerusalem (in the same longitude as Spain) and 90 degrees west of midnight is six hours earlier. Hence, it is six o'clock there and night would just be beginning. (p. 207, note to ll.136-140)

I love these lines so much! I picture Night wearing a lone black sock, like maybe the other one got eaten by the dryer. Or Night coming "on little cat feet" (this is the first poem I remember learning -- I think we read it in kindergarten). Carl Sandburg, 'fess up. Did you borrow from Dante?

--------------------------------------------------
*My edition is old and full of typos; the text here actually reads "venal Equinox." Which is a hilarious image and could be a good name for a band.

**Apparently this line is Dante's idea of what passes for humor. Horrifying.

Post-It: Deep Thoughts

2009-03-02T15:15:00.010-05:00

Do you think we could add Transmetropolitan to the booklist so that it'd be ok that I spent the entire bus trip back from New York reading that instead of the Purgatorio?

No?

Damn.

"If a man does not know what port he is steering for, no wind is favorable to him"

2009-02-24T13:47:00.006-05:00

OK, I am waaay behind Serena on starting the Purgatorio, because I had to slog through a 71-page introduction. But I have finished! There are things to say:

Well, really just one thing: I don't know what I'm doing with my life. STOP, this is relevant, I swear. I don't know what I want to do and I don't know how to figure out what I want to do, and I hate it. Because I don't have any goals. I'm good at achieving goals when I have them, but I don't know how to get one, and I can't just assign myself one at random so I'll feel good about having an accomplishment. That'd be like cheating at solitaire or something.

Oh, but I miss achieving goals.

Anyway, so the difference between Purgatory and Hell?

The people in Purgatory have a goal! All their punishments seem light because they've got something they're working toward and they know they'll get through it. Whereas the punishments in hell are both neverending and frustratingly circular. Oh, and everyone in Purgatory is always happily focused on God, while everyone in Hell is self-obsessed.*

So thanks a lot, Dante. Like I wasn't worried enough about drifting through my post-college years, now you have to come along and be like "Hey, that's exactly what Hell is like! Ha!"

In other news, even though this translation is definitely inferior to the Hollander, it'll be nice to read something in terza rima**. Oh, and I am excited for the middle of the story, which is where great epics are made or broken. The second bit of a great trilogy is always best (with a few exceptions), and always most difficult to pull off.

Nora Ephron is wise: "[This story] has a happy ending, but that’s because I insist on happy endings; I would insist on happy beginnings too, but that’s not necessary because all beginnings are intrinsically happy, in my opinion. What about middles, you may ask. Middles are a problem. Middles are perhaps the major problem of contemporary life."***

*Fourth circle: Bloggers.
**And Sayers actually sticks to the terza rima hardcore: rather than ABA CDC she's gone with ABA BCB, if that makes sense.
***It's from Heartburn, which is NOT on the Iditarod but is not without merit either.

from worse to bad?

2009-02-23T11:52:00.003-05:00

After that uplifting start to the week, it's back to our regularly scheduled litany of depression.

Today's contenders for the title of Cranky Curmudgeon Ruining My Morning:

1. Thomas H. Benton at the Chronicle, who has written two different pieces about why you should NEVER EVER GO TO GRAD SCHOOL GOD WHAT ARE YOU CRAZY?! The man really seems hell-bent on crushing my fragile hopes and dreams.

2. Tedra Osell at IHE thinks that Benton hasn't done enough to send me into a crisis of anxiety and self-doubt, so she adds her two cents.

Is this one of those situations where I just have to ignore everything everyone tells me?

Neither Benton nor Osell addresses the person who is currently working in the media and thinking about applying to graduate school. These days, going from the media to the academy is only going from the fire into the frying pan, no?

the most relevant photos yet!

2009-02-23T10:00:00.004-05:00

Normally we post photos with only the faintest claim to relevance, if any. This is because blogs with no pictures are a bit boring, especially to those of us with very, very short attention spans.

Today, however, it is my pleasure to bring you a most timely set of photographs.

I take my studies ever so seriously. I am as inspired and humbled by Dante as Dante is by Virgil. Or... something.

Note to self: Dante is off the list of Historical Figures with Whom I'd Like to Have a Beer.

I told Fiona we were at Madame Tussauds.*

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Madame Tussauds is breaking this man's heart. It's shocking.

Post It: Dante, If You're Going to Make Rules ...

2009-02-20T16:32:00.004-05:00

Speaking of Cato the Younger being in Purgatory (I'm still in the introduction to my version of the Purgatorio, but more on that later when I am not swamped), anyone else think it's odd that Cato is there at all? Since he, you know, COMMITTED SUICIDE?

Just sayin', Dante. Isn't there a circle of hell for inconsistent poets?

Romeo and Juliet it ain't...

2009-02-20T15:00:00.007-05:00

Normally I would leave the business of anecdotes to Fiona, since it's really more her domain than mine. But since we've only read translations so far, I can't get into the language as I would otherwise be inclined to do; I can remark on my fondness (or lack thereof) for the work of a certain translator, and guess at the extent to which the translation mirrors the original -- but as I have, you know, small Tuscan and less Greek, I'm reluctant to go too deeply into word choice or sentence structure.

And so! From the opening of the Purgatorio, I bring you an anecdote.

For whatever crazy Dante reason, Cato of Utica is charged with guarding the shores of Purgatory. At first he thinks Virgil and Dante are escapees from hell, so Virgil explains their situation, concluding,

"We do not break the Laws: this man lives yet,
and I am of that Round not ruled by Minos,
with your own Marcia, whose chaste eyes seem set

in endless prayers to you. O blessed breast
to hold her yet your own! for love of her
grant us permission to pursue our quest

across your seven kingdoms. When I go
back to her side I shall bear thanks of you
if you will let me speak your name below." (Canto I, ll. 76-84)

To which Cato replies rather brusquely:

"Marcia was so pleasing in my eyes
there on the other side," he answered then
"that all she asked, I did. Now that she lies

beyond the evil river, no word or prayer
of hers may move me. Such was the Decree
pronounced upon us when I rose from there.

But if, as you have said, a Heavenly Dame
orders your way, there is no need to flatter:
you need but ask it of me in her name." (85-93)

I'm resisting a Brady Bunch joke here because, to be honest, I never watched that show, so it'd seem like too cheap a shot. Instead, let's find out who Marcia was. Ciardi has the goods:

The story of Marcia and of Cato is an extraordinary one. She was the daughter of the consul Philippus and became Cato's second wife, bearing his three children. In 56 B.C., in an unusual transaction approved by her father, Cato released her in order that she might marry his friend Hortensius. (Hence line 87: "that all she asked I did.") After the death of Hortensius, Cato took her back.
In Il Convivio, IV, 28, Dante presents the newly widowed Marcia praying to be taken back in order that she may die the wife of Cato, and that it may be said of her that she was not cast forth from his love. Dante treats that return as an allegory of the return of the strayed soul to God (that it may die "married" to God, and that God's love for it be manifest to all time). Virgil describes Marcia as still praying to Cato. (p. 190, note to l. 78)

I sort of expect Dante to romanticize things, but it sounds like Ciardi might be airbrushing this story a little himself. According to Wikipedia, that bastion of accuracy,

Hortensius was an admirer and friend of Cato’s, and he was eager to be more closely related to Cato and his family. ...[A]n alliance with Cato seems to be the chief reason for Hortensius, nearing 60 years old, to request to be married to Cato’s daughter Porcia, who was only about 20 years old at the time. However, because Porcia was already married to M. Calpurnius Bibulus and the age difference was so great, Cato refused to give his consent. Hortensius immediately suggested that he marry Marcia instead because she had already borne Cato his heirs. Due to Hortensius' ardor, Cato acquiesced, but only on the condition that Marcia's father, L. Marcius Philippus, approve as well. With Phillipus' consent obtained, Cato divorced Marcia, thereby placing her under her father's charge. Hortensius promptly married Marcia, and she bore him an heir. After Hortensius' death in 50 BC, she also inherited much of Hortensius' considerable wealth.

At the outbreak of the civil war in 49, Marcia and her children moved back into Cato’s household. Plutarch asserts that Cato remarried Marcia after Hortensius's death, whereas Appian's histories relate that Cato merely reestablished her in his own household.

Well that's... significantly less romantic than I'd hoped. Facts are always ruining Dante's great stories. (From the way Ciardi put it, I was sort of imagining that Marcia'd married Cato out of, whatever, family reasons, duty, but then cultivated this burning and reciprocal passion for his good friend Hortensius, and Cato, let's say, pulled a Francisco d'Anconia -- oh, yeah, I went there -- and stepped aside out of love for the two of them, then remarried Marcia after Hortensius' death so she wouldn't be lonely/poor. Yeah... no.)

Additional exciting Marcia facts:

--Marie Hamilton* suggests that "during the Middle Ages... Marcia was proverbial for virtue" (362), possibly because in Lucan's Pharsalia "on the occasion of her return to Cato she asks permission to share his anxieties and sorrows" (364).

--This, then, would be why she gets a mention in Chaucer's The Legend of Good Women:

Penalopee, and Marcia Catoun
Mak of your wyfhod no comparisoun.

--Way, way more about Marcia as the figure of an obedient woman here. This article is actually super-interesting, but this post is already sort of out of control.

----------------------------------------------------
*Chaucer's "Marcia Catoun." Modern Philology, Vol. 30, No. 4 (May, 1933), pp. 361-364. The University of Chicago Press.

anxieties

2009-02-19T11:38:00.002-05:00

It might be that I'd already read the Odyssey and the Oresteia, and that Beowulf came across as such a clear precursor of Tolkien that it wasn't exactly new.

I like to lay the blame at the feet of Robert and Jean Hollander, who translated my Inferno.

Whatever the reason, the Inferno is the first book on the Iditarod that made me sit up and take notice. It felt like something I could study and read for years and always stay interested, and it made me see why all the medievalists I know scoff at just about everyone who isn't a medievalist. You know that contented sigh that comes after you finish a great book, and you see WHY it's great and you feel a tiny connection to the whole of Western history and everyone else who has read and loved and seen the significance of that particular book? I got that. I've never read anything like this -- it's so complex and gorgeous. The only thing it ever made me think of was Donne's poetry. But those are tiny complicated bites, and this is this monster of a book. Imagine what it must be like to sit down and try to do a new translation.

Not to be all middle-school book review ("This was the best book I've ever read!!!"), but go read it, if you haven't.

Oh, and the best part? I don't want to read the Purgatorio and Paradiso, because I have a different translation of those, and I don't want to hate them for not being the Hollander. But I have a feeling I might.

This is Dante, right? This has been around for centuries, no way it's totally ruined even by a dunce of a translator trying too hard to stick to terza rima when all we care about is the suffering and the stars.

Right?

Post-It: No way, Dante. No. Way.

2009-02-17T18:58:00.004-05:00

I finally finished the Inferno. Toward the end there I was pretty sure Dante made it that long so that the reader could experience what it is like actually to be in Hell. Then I took a look at the Purgatorio and the Paradiso and I decided that Dante was just a cruel and spiteful man.

I'm thinking of slipping a lotus into Fiona's drink and telling her we already finished the entire Comedia and we can move on with our lives.

Post-it: A Brilliant Idea

2009-02-17T08:42:00.001-05:00

So a local theatre company is currently running a sort of dance theatre version of the Divine Comedy, and I was scheduled to go see it. Let's see how oblique I can be about this: One aspect of my job enables me to see plays for free pretty much whenever I want to. In this particular instance, I had planned to go with another person who has the same job to see Divine Comedy, using his spare free ticket instead of getting one of my own. But then he didn't end up going and therefore I missed the allotted "night of free tickets," and while I could still go, it feels weird to actually pay to see a play.

I might still go.

Anyway, a friend of mine (go read her blog!) did see it. And she said that, while it was intriguing, the actor playing Virgil sounded very similar to Will Arnett.

Meaning she spent the entire production wondering what the Divine Comedy would be like with Gob Bluth leading Dante around. On a Segway. Muttering about his "illusions."

excuses, excuses

2009-02-16T16:09:00.004-05:00

It's not clear what Fiona's excuse is. As for me, I have been taking a break from Dante to read my uncle's book, because the guilt of not having done so was really getting to me. The book is basically a super-liberal hippie fantasy of JFK surviving Dallas and using the political capital from doing so to remake America into the country my uncle would like it to be. Imagine MLK as Secretary of State, RFK as VP, the end of conflicts with Cuba and the USSR, etc.

My uncle being who he is, he gets very into the political nitty gritty, so the book doesn't have much of a plot beyond, you know, "Here's how this could be done, and here's how THIS could be done, and...". It's basically a blueprint for fixing America starting in 1963. Luckily, he's a good enough writer that I don't find this as irritating as I'd expect; the book is actually rather gripping. (I knew that I enjoyed his writing, but it's been a while.)

And hey, if I ever run into David Ignatius at a party, we'll have something to talk about.

I've also been distracted by my new computer. There's really no way to rationalize the dent this sucker put in my savings account, but I tried anyway. I'm on my computer a lot, including doing a significant part of my job from home (because I edit the next day's articles every night), and using Dave's old desktop was making me miserable (it dies, inexplicably, two or three times a day). My old iBook lasted a long time (I had a 2004 model that I purchased used in 2005, and it survived into the early part of 2009), and I have every hope that my new MacBook will last me well into graduate school.

Anyway, I'm almost done with Unafraid, so I'll be back to regular blogging shortly. And maybe more frequently, now that using a computer isn't such a damned trial.

Dante was kind of a vindictive little dude

2009-02-11T20:06:00.004-05:00

Since we are both ladies who work in the general vicinity of the news, it's nice to sometimes be able to bring you, our devoted and loving readers, something that's topical ... AND somehow related to the Iditarod.

Ta-da! The New York Times took time out from its busy CEO-defending schedule to publish this article, which you should read because it's cool, but which I will summarize here for those of you who are afraid of links: Ahem. The Catholic Church is bringing back indulgences! It's not quite a return to the medieval, because they're not allowed to sell them per se. Rather, donations to charity can earn indulgences for church members.

For those of you rolling your eyes and opening up a Wikipedia tab, here's how it works. Catholics confess their sins, but they still have to do time in Purgatory to make up for all those sins before they can get into Heaven. Indulgences are a thing the church can give you that will reduce your time in purgatory. They come in two varieties: partial, which gets you out of some of your time, and plenary, which gets you straight into Heaven until you commit some other sin. Oh, and you can buy them for dead people too. Well, not buy them. Anyway, apparently a lot of modern Catholics have never heard of them, because THEY HAVE NEVER READ THE INFERNO, APPARENTLY. The church did away with indulgences in the '60s, but they definitely had them in Dante's time. In fact, there is a whole bolgia in the 8th circle of hell for priests who sold them. The practice is called simony ("the more you know!"), and the guys who committed it are in these sort of hellish baptismal fonts, upside down, and when other simoniacs they go in the same fonts and eventually the souls get sort of hammered down into the rock of hell.*

Oh, one thing to know about indulgences: if you go to hell, they don't help you at all.

On another note, Dante was the most creative, sick dude who ever lived. Seriously, he could be a villain in one of those horror movies where the crazed psychokiller thinks of ever more horrible, tortuous ways to do away with his victims.

Actually, that would be kind of a sweet movie.

*Heh. Reality show name?

funny, I don't remember that part of the Odyssey

2009-02-11T10:00:00.004-05:00

So Ulysses/Odysseus is in hell, and I think we're all ok with that. According to Ciardi, Circle Eight: Bolgia Eight is for the Evil Counselors. Ciardi describes these as "men of gift who abused their genius, perverting it to wiles and stratagems" (Intro to Canto XXVI, p. 134). "Seeing them in Hell," Ciardi continues, "he [Dante] knows his must be another road: his way shall not be by deception."

Since Fiona's edition seems to say (confusingly enough) that no one's sure what sin is being punished in Bolgia Eight, I'll give you the rest of Ciardi's explanation:

Here the Evil Counselors move about endlessly, hidden from view inside great flames. Their sin was to abuse the gifts of the Almighty, to steal his virtues for low purposes. And as they stole from God in their lives and worked by hidden ways, so are they stolen from sight and hidden in the great flames which are their own guilty consciences. And as, in most instances at least, they sinned by glibness of tongue, so are the flames made into a fiery travesty of tongues.

Now. As for Ulysses. He and Diomede(s) share one "great flame which splits away/ into two great horns" (XXVI.52-3), " 'united in pain as once they were in wrath' " (57), as Virgil explains.

I don't see a problem with Diomede(s) being in hell, either, although for rather unfair reasons. I wrote pages and pages of thesis about what a d-bag he is in Troilus and Cressida, so that's my strongest impression of him, but of course everyone in that play is more or less unbearable; that's sort of the point. And since Dante's Diomede(s) predates Shakespeare's by a couple of centuries, it's obviously unfair to blame the former for the sins of the latter. But I still do a little.

I feel like Diomede(s) was a jerk in Chaucer, too, although it's been a while.

Anyway. Back to Ulysses.

The real surprise is not that he is in hell, but how he got there. Fiona mentioned in her post Monday that he died at sea, which is not how it's supposed to go -- as I recall, it is prophesied in the Odyssey that if he does all his sacrifices and everything right on his final, post-homecoming journey (where he must go deeply inland, "to a race of people who know nothing of the sea"), then he will die "a gentle, painless death, far from the sea...".

Dante tells a very, very different story.

Virgil's Ulysses seems to say that he never went home at all, after Troy. Or maybe he did.:

As if it fought the wind, the greater prong
of the ancient flame began to quiver and hum;
then moving its tip as if it were the tongue

that spoke, gave out a voice above the roar.
"When I left Circe," it said, "who more than a year
detained me near Gaeta long before

Aeneas came and gave the place that name,
not fondness for my son, nor reverence
for my aged father, nor Penelope's claim

to the joys of love, could drive out of my mind
the lust to experience the far-flung world
and the failings and felicities of mankind.

I put out on the high and open sea
with a single ship and only those few souls
who stayed true when the rest deserted me.

As far as Morocco and as far as Spain
I saw both shores; and I saw Sardinia
and the other islands of the open main." (XXVI.81-99)

Uh... what? I'm sorry, Dante, you've completely lost me. "When I left Circe," so like immediately, like Ulysses didn't even make a pit stop in Ithaca first? Or more like, "when I left Circe, I was full of wanderlust and all that stuff, so AFTER I stopped by Ithaca to kill all the suitors, THEN I went on another journey."

As far as I can tell, there is no way to tell which he means. And apparently the Hollander translation doesn't clarify that either.*

So leaving aside this little mystery, let's talk about Ulysses' death. He's on this voyage, whenever that took place, and, as Fiona mentioned, he encourages his crew to keep going even though it's clearly unwise to do so:

"With this brief exhortation I made my crew
so eager for the voyage I could hardly
have held them back from it when I was through;

and turning our stern toward morning, our bow toward night,
we bore southwest out of the world of man;
we made wings of our oars for our fool's flight.

That night we raised the other pole ahead
with all its stars, and ours had so declined
it did not rise out of its ocean bed.

Five times since we had dipped our bending oars
beyond the world, the light beneath the moon
had waxed and waned, when dead upon our course

we sighted, dark in space, a peak so tall
I doubted any man had seen the like.
Our cheers were hardly sounded, when a squall

broke hard upon our bow from the new land;
three times it sucked the ship and the sea about
as it pleased Another to order and command.

At the fourth, the poop rose and the bow went down
till the sea closed over us and the light was gone." (XXVI.112-31)

That's a whole lot of confusing, right there. And it doesn't get better, either. Here are a couple of Ciardi's (not very helpful) notes. For line 118, "we raised the other pole ahead," he offers,

i.e., They drove south across the equator, observed the southern stars, and found that the North Star had sunk below the horizon. The altitude of the North Star is the easiest approximation of latitude. Except for a small correction, it is directly overhead at the North Pole, shows an altitude of 45 degrees at North latitude 45, and is on the horizon at the equator. (p. 138)

Thanks for nothing, Ciardi. And here's the last note he gives for this passage, for line 124: "a peak: Purgatory. They sight it after five months of passage. According to Dante's geography, the Northern hemisphere is land and the Southern is all water except for the Mountain of Purgatory which rises above the surface at a point directly opposite Jerusalem."

So... Ulysses and his men... sailed to Purgatory, where their ship sank and they all died.

No, seriously. What?! Dante, did you even read the Cliff's Notes for the Odyssey? You didn't, did you. Oh, I see how it is. Your precious Virgil told you what happens, so you totally didn't even need to read it. You're gonna ace your Homer test, for sure.

Ciardi does have a note that sheds a little light on this, when he explains why Virgil speaks to Ulysses rather than allowing Dante to do so:

Dante knew no Greek, and these sinners might scorn him, first, because he spoke what to them would seem a barbarous tongue, and second, because as an Italian he would seem a descendant of Aeneas and the defeated Trojans. Virgil, on the other hand, appeal to them as a man of virtuous life (who therefore has a power over sin) and as a poet who celebrated their earthly fame. (Prof. MacAllister suggests another meaning as well: that Dante [and his world] had no direct knowledge of the Greeks, knowing their works through Latin intermediaries. Thus Virgil stood between Homer and Dante.) (p. 138, note to 72.)

"No direct knowledge of the Greeks." Why, you don't say.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*yo: so in your version

does it sound like ulysses never went home after the trojan war

or like he set out again?

because mine is very, very ambiguous

Enviado a la(s) 13:27 del martes

Fiona: "not tenderness for a son, nor filial duty toward my aged father, nor the love I owed penelope that would have made her glad, could overcome the fervor that was mine to gain experience of the world and learn about man's vices and his worth"

yo: sooooo

'cause mine says "when i left circe"

Fiona: "and so I set forth on the open deep with but a single ship, with that handful of shipmates who had not deserted me"

yo: but it doesn't say anything

Fiona: dante knows SHIT about ulysses

yo: about whether or not

he want back to ithaca first

DANTE YOU ARE USELESS

so yours is ambiguous too, yeah?

Fiona: oh yeah I have that part too

about circe

but it's like

he totally could have gone home

yo: or not

right??

Fiona: and then his tenderness and whatever couldn't KEEP him there

yo: WHAT THE HELL DANTE

Fiona: I hate you dante

also

shipmates that had not deserted him

welll they're all DEAD

FUCK OFF DANTE

hahaha

yo: haha

Fiona: you should copy this conversation and put it on the blog

yo: ok

Exciting times in the western world

2009-02-10T18:17:00.000-05:00

ALSO:
Since once again we've got a book with a specific date, that sounds like an excuse for a party. According to my text, Dante's journey begins either on March 25 or on April 8.

Let's say March 25, since my little brother will be in town for our medieval Italian adventure.

Invitations to be dispatched shortly.

This is sweet!

2009-02-10T11:18:00.003-05:00

Fiona is good at finding things. Check out all this free GRE-related stuff she turned up. I know I shouldn't be afraid of the GRE, since I tend to test well, but I am. I'm terrified of it.

I don't know why. Maybe because they average your scores, so if you screw it up the first time, it will haunt you forever? Or maybe because I just feel so much pressure on the whole topic of grad school?

I don't know. But I'm really glad that there are all these free resources!

Update: There is a ton of stuff on the ETS site as well. I had no idea you could just download all these things.

On the downside, Kaplan's free tests don't include the writing section, rendering them somewhat useless. I mean, I can see how it'd be good to take a practice test under actual test conditions... but then how do I prepare for the writing test??* My life is pain.

------------------------------------
*By reading all the free tutorials, you say? Details, details.

He could talk the wings off a demon

2009-02-09T10:38:00.001-05:00

Good news: Ulysses is in Hell.

RIGHT? The guy was such an ass in the Odyssey, I'm glad he's there now. With the false advice-givers. Or something. According to one of my notes on the eighth bolgia of Malebolge*, no-one is really sure what sin is being punished here. But one of the guys says something about giving false advice. Does that mean intentionally bad advice? Does that mean evil advice? No-one is sure. Oh well. Anyway, these guys are encased inside flames (which makes me think of this) and their flames sort of...do the talking for them...

As the Sicilian bull that bellowed first
with the cries of him whose instrument
has fashioned it -- and that was only just --
used to bellow with the victim's voice
so that, although the bull was made of brass,
it seemed transfixed by pain,
thus, having first no course or outlet
through the flame, the mournful words
were changed into a language all their own.
But once the words had made their way
up to the tip, making it flicker
as the voice had done when it had formed them,
we heard it say: 'O you at whom I aim my voice...' (XXVII.7-19)

All that stuff in the beginning is about an Italian tyrant, Phalaris, who created a special kind of torture. He had Perillus (heh.) make him a big hollow bull statue in which he basically roasted people alive. And their screams sounded like the bellowing of a bull! Oh, Phalaris, you're so clever. Ahaha. Aha. You sick jerk. Oh, and the first victim was Perillus, just on principle.

The notes are also full of that stuff -- talking about how this or that hellish punishment was based on a real thing they used to do in Florence, crucifying people upside down in holes and then filling in the holes so they suffocated**, or putting them inside giant crucibles with lead capes on so the lead melted onto them. Ugh.

Anyway, back to Ulysses. He talks about his adventures on earth and his death at sea -- and his final rallying cry to his sailors to keep going into unknown waters:

'O brothers,' I said, 'who in the course
of a hundred thousand perils, at last
have reached the west, to such brief wakefulness
of our senses as remains to use,
do not deny yourselves the chance to know --
following the sun -- the world where no-one lives.
Consider how your souls were sown
you were not made to live like brutes or beasts
but to pursue virtue and knowledge.' (XXVI.115-120)

And he won me over. God, I hate Ulysses, and with this one speech I'm thinking WHY IS THIS GUY IN HELL?? LOOK AT THAT SPEECH.

At the very least, you'd think he could sweet-talk God.

*The eighth circle of Hell ... the bolgias are ten ditches, each containing people who committed a different sin, but they're all sins to do with fraud.
**I thought the point of crucifixion was a long, slow death? No? Huh.

"Useless...useless." Thanks Boston Corbett.

2009-02-08T11:29:00.005-05:00

You know, I never understood those people who spent their lives trying to figure out which passenger slept in which stateroom on the Titanic.

But hey, it looks almost useful compared to the apparently large number of people who have tried to figure out the geography of Dante's Hell.

No, seriously. The passages concerning Dante and Virgil turning left or right, or scaling or descending some slope...these have huge notes attached explaining how this scholar or that one figured out the shape of hell from these. I'm sad there's no tiny and detailed map in the front of my book.

But really, did people just get bored of studying everything else about the poem and turn to this, which seems so insignificant? Does anyone glean anything new and meaningful from the Inferno simply by knowing that hell is shaped like a bowl (or whatever. It's not shaped like a bowl. Ignore me.)

and here it had always been my impression that once you caught the rooster you could stop running

2009-02-03T13:36:00.007-05:00

Fiona and I both grew up in what is technically known as "the sticks," but my childhood was rather the more rustic; I lived well outside of town, such as it was, in a crumbling stucco disaster with an overgrown back yard -- and, ok, an overgrown front yard, with an overgrown hedge to match -- full of animals.

Appropriately enough, given the town where we lived, my upbringing combined the hick and the hippie. Highlights of each summer included the solstice party (a long weekend wherein a group of old hippie friends brought their families to camp out in the middle of the woods and partake in hippie activities such as hunting for arrowheads and roasting a wild boar) and the rodeo.

There were actually a number of rodeos in the various crummy outposts of California's rural northwest, but the best was definitely the Orick Rodeo. The highlight -- for me, between the ages of say, five and twelve -- was the Animal Scramble.

The full awesomeness of the Animal Scramble is difficult to convey. Imagine a large, dusty, rectangular arena. On one long side is a row of bleachers crowded with the salt of the Californian earth: hicks, farmers, and cowboys of every description. (And, on at least one memorable occasion, the driver of my elementary school bus.) The other side is backed with giant ads for beer, feed stores, and trucking companies. At one end are the pens into which the broncs and the bulls are crowded, and a small, high box where the announcer sits.

That end was where they would line up the kids. At the other end, the trucks came in. They unloaded chickens, ducks, geese, maybe some other small livestock -- was there occasionally a little goat? -- and always, of course, the greased pig. (I never went after the greased pig. That was for big, strong kids.)

The concept is pretty simple. Let the little kids go, then the big kids a few minutes later. Whatever you caught was yours to keep -- or if you didn't want it, you could sell it at the auction right after. Sometimes only for a dollar, sometimes for more, but it always sold. Imagine all those little kids, squawking poultry cradled to their chests. Like these guys. Whether my mom let us keep the chickens (inevitably chickens: I've always been slow, and I never caught anything exciting) or said we had too many already and made us sell them, it was always a time to savor.

So there you are, clutching your rooster, the sweet taste of victory on your lips.

In Dante's time, apparently, things were a little different.

The Sodomites, for their "violence against nature," run eternally in circles on the burning sand, under a rain of fire. After talking a while with Dante, the scholar and statesman Ser Brunetto Latino returns to his punishment:

...He turned then, and he seemed,
across that plain, like one of those who run

for the green cloth at Verona; and of those
more like the one who wins, than those who lose. (XV.119-22)

Ciardi explains, "On the first Sunday of Lent all the young men of Verona ran a race for the prize of green cloth. The last runner in was given a live rooster and was required to carry it through the town" (p.80, note to l.121).

I think I prefer the Animal Scramble.

"Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest ladies. Snakes. Spiders. Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Pain. Death."

2009-02-03T10:30:00.001-05:00

So Hollander is very into the contemporary politics in the Inferno. I didn't really know about these, but it stands to reason. I mean, if you were writing a book about hell, don't you think you would make sure some people you hate got punished roundly? So there are plenty of Florentines Dante would have known/known of in the poem. I mean, Italy was pretty crazy when he was alive (feuds between families, rule by the pope vs. rule by an emperor, etc.), and he had lots of enemies to stick it to.

The best is when the person clearly being castigated in the poem is not identified, as in this passage, from the first circle, which is where the neutrals hang out. These guys didn't really do anything wrong, but they don't get to get into Heaven because they didn't do much GOOD either.:

After I recognized a few of these,
I saw and knew the shade of his
who, through cowardice, made the great refusal.

At once with certainty I understood
this was that worthless crew
hateful alike to God and to his foes.

These wretches, who never were alive,
were naked and beset
by stinging flies and wasps

that made their faces stream with blood,
which, mingled with their tears,
was gathered at their feet by loathsome worms. (III.58-69)

But WHO WAS THAT MASKED MAN? Hollander notes an argument between scholars who think it could be Pope Celestine V (who gave up the position after a very short reign and was succeeded by a Pope Dante hated), but other people think it's Pontius Pilate or Esau. There are so many notes like this, noting the arguments that have been made about these things since the Comedy was published. The sheer number of commentaries on the poem is sort of mind-boggling. There are very few works, classic or not, that have gotten this kind of attention. Much less that have been so lauded from the moment they were published. According to Hollander, at least 10 commentaries on the poem have survived from the first twenty years after Dante's death. TEN. I can't even wrap my mind around that. (Maybe we could trade them for a lost Euripedes play? No? Darn.)

And we come to what is, so far, my favorite passage. He's in limbo, hanging out with Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan, and Virgil:

After they conversed a while,
they turned to me with signs of greeting,
and my master smiled at this.

And then they showed me greater honor still,
for they made me one of their company,
so that I became the sixth amidst such wisdom. (IV.97-102)

The notes on this tercet are awesome. Hollander talks a bit about the discomfort people feel with Dante including himself in this group, especially since before the Inferno he hadn't published much of substance (except the Vita Nuova), so he had very little upon which to hang his self-important little Italian hat. To anyone reading it, it's clear that he's a major poet. But I like my authors with a liberal dose of angst and self-hatred. Right, F. Scott?

However, Hollander clearly thinks he belongs in the group of poets in which he places himself, claiming: "It was a dangerous gesture for him to make. It is redeemed by his genius." (n. IV.102)

As William Goldman said (not about Dante, but it seems apropos):
"You had to admire a guy who called his own new book a classic before it was published and anyone else had had a chance to read it. Maybe he figured if he didn't do it, nobody would, or maybe he was just trying to give the reviewers a helping hand."

the worst thing that has ever happened. no, seriously.

2009-02-02T10:00:00.004-05:00

I'm not a religious person, what with my dad being a nonpracticing Jew and my mom being a nonpracticing... Protestant? (She's so nonpracticing that I'm not even clear on what it is that she's not practicing, although I'm fairly sure that her family went to church when she was growing up. Uh... Mom?) But I digress.

I know religion often makes no sense to people who aren't religious. Especially old school religion. And we all know that the Catholic church has been associated with its fair share of The Crazy (although I won't say it's cornered the market; Scientology is a stiff competitor). And of course the Inferno was written a bazillion years ago, so I was expecting a lot of bizarre and offensive stuff, like the special place in hell for The Gays. I was braced, let's say. But one story, in particular, keeps coming back to haunt me.

We're in Circle Seven, Round Two: The Violent Against Themselves. This includes the Suicides and the Squanderers and Destroyers of Goods (yeah, Dante has some strange classifications). So we're pretty deep into Hell -- these are big-league sinners.

Ciardi gives these handy little blurbs at the beginning of each canto, outlining what is going to happen (lots of spoilers, but it helps keep me from missing anything). Here's what he has to say about the Suicides:

The souls of the Suicides are encased in thorny trees whose leaves are being eaten by the odious Harpies, the overseers of these damned. When the Harpies feed upon them, damaging their leaves and limbs, the wound bleeds. Only as long as the blood flows are the souls of the trees able to speak. Thus, they who destroyed their own bodies are denied a human form; and just as the supreme expression of their lives was self-destruction, so they are permitted to speak only through that which tears and destroys them. Only through their own blood do they find voice. And to add one more dimension to the symbolism, it is the Harpies -- defilers of all they touch -- who give them their eternally recurring wounds. (Intro to Canto XIII, p. 67)

Pretty brutal punishment, right? Let's meet one of these suicides, Pier delle Vigne. Here's what Ciardi tells us about him (the Wikipedia has a bit, too): "A famous and once-powerful minister of Emporer Frederick II. He enjoyed Frederick's whole confidence until 1247 when he was accused of treachery and was imprisoned and blinded. He committed suicide to escape further torture" (note to XIII.58, p. 69).

Now. Here's what Pier delle Vigne has to say for himself:

"I am he who held both keys to Frederick's heart,
locking, unlocking with so deft a touch
that scarce another soul had any part

in his most secret thoughts. Through every strife
I was so faithful to my glorious office
that for it I gave up both sleep and life.

That harlot, Envy, who on Caesar's face
keeps fixed forever her adulterous stare,
the common plage and vice of court and palace,

inflamed all minds against me. These inflamed
so inflamed him that all my happy honors
were changed to mourning. Then, unjustly blamed,

my soul, in scorn, and thinking to be free
of scorn in death, made me at last, though just,
unjust to myself. By the new roots of this tree

I swear to you that never in word or spirit
did I break faith to my lord and emperor
who was so worthy of honor in his merit.

If either of you return to the world, speak for me,
to vindicate in the memory of men
one who lies prostrate from the blows of Envy." (XIII. 58-78)

THIS POOR MAN IS IN THE SEVENTH CIRCLE OF HELL. Do you know where Dido is? Yeah, Dido, the SUICIDE. Oh, she's in the second circle, with the Carnal, buffeted eternally by winds. That's it. Because Dante has a soft spot for romantics, and, you know, she died for love.

Look. I like Dido. She made some very, very poor decisions, but Aeneas treated her like shit, and she totally didn't deserve that. I cried when I got to the part in the Aeneid where she kills herself. I cried actual physical tears. It's incredibly sad.

But why the hell is she in the second circle when poor Pier What's-His-Face is down here in the seventh? He was loyal! He died because he was being tortured! All he wants is to clear his name!

That is some bullshit, right there.

Speaking of Dante and religion and all of this being bitterly unjust, here's a little conversation I imagine between Virgil and God:

Virgil: Hey, God, what am I doing here in Hell? I was a pretty good person, right? Not too carnal, not too gluttonous, never betrayed anyone... and I'm only in the first circle after all, which isn't so bad. But seriously, I was virtuous, so why am I here at all?

God: Oh, yeah. You were born too early. No Jesus, no Heaven. Sorry.

Virgil: ...

in which Cerberus is icky, times three

2009-02-01T22:15:00.009-05:00

I have to say, I envy Fiona her Hollander translation (although the name Hollander now reminds me of Roy Den Hollander -- I'm sorry, Robert and Jean Hollander, it's not your fault). I have the John Ciardi translation (mine is the 1977 Norton edition), and I can't say it's doing a whole lot for me. I would have preferred the Palma or the Mandelbaum -- I've mentioned that I enjoyed Mandelbaum's Aeneid -- but we're very limited in which editions we can obtain, since we really can't afford to buy all the books that we're reading, and -- this is sure to shock you -- the DC public library doesn't have a fantastic selection. (At least we still have a number of libraries. I'm looking at you, Philadelphia.)

Leigh recommended the Palma. I'm dying to read it. Meanwhile, here's a sample of what Fiona is reading compared to what I am reading. Let's look at Canto VI of the Inferno, describing Circle Three, the Gluttons.

Here's Hollander, which Fiona has:

With my returning senses that had failed
before the piteous state of those two in-laws,
which had confounded me with grief,

new torments and new souls in torment
I see about me, wherever I may move,
or turn, or set my gaze.

I am in the third circle, of eternal,
hateful rain, cold and leaden,
changeless in its monotony.

Heavy hailstones, filthy water, and snow
pour down through gloomy air.
The ground it falls on reeks.

Cerberus, fierce and monstrous beast,
barks from three gullets like a dog
over the people underneath that muck.

His eyes are red, his beard a greasy black,
his belly swollen. With his taloned hands
he claws the spirits, flays and quarters them.

The rain makes them howl like dogs.
The unholy wretches often turn their bodies,
making of one side a shield for the other.

When Cerberus--that great worm--noticed us,
he opened up his jaws and showed his fangs.
There was no part of him he held in check.

But then my leader opened up his hands,
picked up some earth, and with full fists
tossed soil into the ravenous gullets.

Here, just for the sake of comparison, are the same lines from Mandelbaum (via Google Books, which doesn't have a preview of Palma, sadly):

Upon my mind's reviving--it had closed
on hearing the lament of those two kindred,
since sorrow had confounded me completely--

I see new sufferings, new sufferers
surrounding me on every side, wherever
I move about or turn or set my eyes.

I am in the third circle, filled with cold,
unending, heavy, and accurséd rain;
its measure and its kind are never changed.

Gross hailstones, water gray with filth, and snow
come streaking down across the shadowed air;
the earth, as it receives that shower, stinks.

Over the souls of those submerged beneath
that mess, is an outlandish, vicious beast,
his three throats barking, doglike: Cerberus.

His eyes are bloodred; greasy, black, his beard;
his belly bulges, and his hands are claws;
his talons tear and flay and rend the shades.

That downpour makes the sinners howl like dogs;
they use one of their sides to screen--
those miserable wretches turn and turn.

When Cerberus, the great worm, noticed us,
he opened wide his mouths, showed us his fangs;
there was no part of him that did not twitch.

My guide opened his hands to their full span,
plucked up some earth, and with his fists filled full
he hurled it straight into those famished jaws.

And then here's what I'm reading, the Ciardi translation:

My senses had reeled from me out of pity
for the sorrow of those kinsmen and lost lovers.
Now they return, and waking gradually,

I see new torments and new souls in pain
about me everywhere. Wherever I turn
away from grief I turn to grief again.

I am in the Third Circle of the torments.
Here to all time with neither pause nor change
the frozen rain of Hellen descends in torrents.

Huge hailstones, dirty water, and black snow
pour from the dismal air to putrefy
the putrid slush that waits for them below.

Here monstrous Cerberus, the ravening beast,
howls through his triple throats like a mad dog
over the spirits sunk in that foul paste.

His eyes are red, his beard is greased with phlegm,
his belly is swollen, and his hands are claws
to rip the wretches and flay and mangle them.

And they, too, howl like dogs in the freezing storm,
turning and turning from it as if they thought
one naked side could keep the other warm.

When Cerberus discovered us in that swill
his dragon-jaws yawed wide, his lips drew back
in a grin of fangs. No limb of him was still.

My Guide bent down and seized in either fist
a clod of the stinking dirt that festered there
and flung them down the gullet of the beast.

Look. I appreciate why translators want to maintain something of the rhythm or the rhyme of the original. But when one -- as Ciardi does -- tries so hard to keep exactly to the rhyme (of something, let's remember, written in a different language), I think that the sacrifice in terms of diction, descriptive power, and original meaning is just too great. Not that I know which of these translations sticks most closely to Dante's Tuscan. But I think in terms of the power of its language, the impact upon the reader, Ciardi's translation is at too great a disadvantage. It comes across as flatter, less immediate than the other two. I don't know. I'd rather read good poetry than rhyming poetry, particularly when it's a translation.

(I'm all for stylistic rigor in the right place. The right place is Coleridge.)

If translations are really your thing, here's a cool thing on Amazon where some random guy gives a succinct description of a number of different translations.

"L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle."

2009-01-29T22:35:00.003-05:00

Let me first say that I prefer my translations the old-fashioned way: original work on the left, translation on the facing page.* It's especially important with Dante. If you're not looking over every so often and reading the verse out loud in Italian (even if you have no idea what it means), well, there goes approximately 22% of your pleasure in reading Dante.

Really! Italian is like that. I also feel this way about Spanish poetry: it's just not the same unless you say it in the original language. And even if you don't speak Italian, Dante is ridiculously easy to sound out.

And why, class, does Fiona feel comfortable with it?

Well, it is supposedly unfair to claim (as many have) that Dante invented modern Italian. It's a very romantic notion. His real contribution was bringing his dialect (Florentine/Tuscan) of Italian into the literary tradition in such a major way that he rendered all the other dialects of Italy inferior. Italian exists in its modern form largely because Dante was so important. Without him, the Roman or Milanese dialects might have eventually won out when Italy decided "Hey, it's pretty stupid that we don't have a unified language isn't it?"

It's easy to forget what a literary rock star Dante was, even in his own time. Personally, he was kind of a hermit -- but this is not by any means a guy who had to wait till after his death to be recognized. Scholars began writing commentaries on the Commedia pretty much immediately, and they haven't stopped yet. People waited for the last installment, the Paradiso, like it was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

I've only just begun reading (he's in the middle of a dark wood and there's a leopard), but I'm excited. If I recall, this is a very political poem, so hopefully there will be lots of Guelph/Ghibelline conflict in the subtext and I'll tell you all about it.

*for the Inferno I am reading the Hollander translation. Once I get to Purgatorio, I'm not sure if I will try to continue with this (i.e. make another library trip) or if I'll switch to the Sayers translation. We'll see.

flotsam; jetsam

2009-01-29T19:05:00.001-05:00

1. Hee. Scott M. sent me this parody, A. E. Housman's Fragment of a Greek Tragedy. Being sent things related to the Iditarod pleases me very much. My mom sent me a bunch of musty old classics from her bookshelves, and Fiona's dad sent me an advice manual about becoming a professor (thanks, Tom!).

2. This review really makes me want to reread The Histories, which we are not reading for the Iditarod, but which is utterly delightful. I recall that he described and endorsed the system of one town wherein the most beautiful girls were auctioned off as wives to the highest bidder; the proceeds from this were then used to pay other men to take the plainer girls as wives. I love this idea. It is so practical, and everyone wins. Beauty becomes a communal asset! I defy anyone to come up with a better way to get all the young folks married off.

things that will slowly drive me insane

2009-01-27T19:00:00.006-05:00

Just for those of you who haven't read it (and, I don't know, have an aversion to the Wikipedia), here's a very quick recap of the plot of the Oresteia.

1. Agamemnon: Agamemnon comes home from the Trojan war, after being away for ten years. His wife, Clytaemnestra, has been resentful of the fact that he sacrificed one of their daughters, Iphigeneia, at the outset of his journey, apparently because Artemis would not provide the necessary winds without a sacrifice. Also, she -- Clytaemnestra -- has been getting it on with Agamemnon's cousin, Aegisthus, for some time. So when Agamemnon gets home, she coerces him into walking on some fancy tapestries, or something, because I guess this qualifies as hubris and will put him out of favor with the gods? Then she kills him while he's in the tub (not classy). Then she kills Cassandra, whom he'd brought back with him as a slave.

2. The Libation Bearers: Some uncertain number of years later, Orestes, -- the son of Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra -- who has long been elsewhere, returns to Argos and reunites with his sister, Electra, whom he finds mourning at their father's grave. They agree that their father was awesome and their mother sucks, and they hatch a plan to kill her. Orestes heads to the palace in disguise and proceeds to kill Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra.

3. The Eumenides: The Furies, who traditionally punish those who kill their mothers,* are after Orestes. Apollo tells them to cut it out, because the murder was justified and he told Orestes it was ok. The Furies are pissed about this, and Athena comes in to mediate. She ends up holding a little trial for Orestes; the jury is tied, so Athena breaks the tie in Orestes' favor. The Furies are pretty much shitting bricks until Athena, in essence, convinces them to use their power for good rather than evil. And they all lived happily ever after, the end.

Ok. So that's all very well and good, and you probably didn't need all that background, but there it is just in case. HERE IS THE PART THAT IS BREAKING MY BRAIN.

During the whole Apollo-Orestes-Furies disagreement, Orestes summons Athena to come help out. And in she comes:

Enter ATHENA, armed for combat with her aegis and her spear.

ATHENA
From another world I heard a call for help.
I was on the Scamander's banks, just claiming Troy.
The Achean warlords chose the hero's share
of what their spear had won -- they decreed that land,
root and branch all mine, for all time to be,
for Theseus' sons a rare, matchless gift.

Home from the wars I come, my pace unflagging,
wingless, flown on the whirring, breasting cape
that yokes my racing spirit in her prime. (The Eumenides 408-16)

Really, Athena? You just came from the Trojan war, just now? Because I am pretty sure it ended YEARS ago. Like, before Agamemnon came home. I mean, I don't think he bailed before the job was done, or anything. Are you a very, very slow traveler? Is there a hole in the space-time continuum?

Athena, I never ask you where you really were when you come home at four am and claim you were "just out with friends." I respect your privacy, Athena. So why would you lie to me? It hurts me when you lie.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
*I love the exchange during which they explain this duty to Apollo:

APOLLO
Authority -- you? Sound out your splendid power.

LEADER
Matricides: we drive them from their houses. (The Eumenides 207-8)

How's that for a company slogan? Matricides: we drive them from their houses!

mush!

2009-01-27T11:41:00.005-05:00

Guys, I have to say, the Iditarod is a much slower process than I had anticipated. We started in early December, and I should easily finish the Oresteia on the Metro up to the gym tonight (Fiona has already started the Inferno), but that's, what, three books in almost two months? And other than Small World, I really haven't read anything else.

Meanwhile, I have all these new books that I want to read. And these. And some others. Seriously, it's out of control. The free book situation is killing me. Worse yet, my uncle has a new book and I have no excuse not to read it since my dad sent me a copy. And a few of my friends have writing projects that I have sworn to read that are rotting on my hard drive.

As a child I read constantly, often several books at a time. I was the kid who'd get in trouble for reading during class, who'd be so engrossed in a novel that I'd fail to hear the bell at the end of recess, who'd miss the point of every social occasion and make a beeline for the host's bookshelf. Adults would tell me, "Oh, I used to read too, when I was younger, but now I just don't have time." And I would think, how is that possible? Who doesn't have time to read?

It seems unreasonable. I don't do that much with myself. I go to work, I exercise, I take a shower, have dinner, do my editing, and the next thing I know it's midnight or one am and I've got to get to bed. Fiona squeezes in reading time by staying up late late late, but I'm a much less energetic person than she is, and I really need my seven-to-eight -- if I get less than six hours of sleep, I'm essentially useless, I barely function (it's not at all clear how I got through college).

The only time I find to read is on the metro, which I take when I'm going to the rock gym, so a couple of times a week. And sometimes on weekends I have a spare hour or two.

This is shameful. I need to do better, but I don't know how.

"We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing..."

2009-01-26T10:30:00.001-05:00

Not to denigrate one of the great dramatic works of human history, but the Oresteia (mostly the Eumenides) is an awful lot like a Thanksgiving pageant.

After all, it reminds everyone of our noble origins. The characters go through tribulations (banishment! starvation! religious persecution! curses on one's house!) and it leads them to forge some of the founding principles of their culture. In the end, everyone sings. Democracy is awesome, you guys. Also when the Pokanoket share their corn.

"Listen my children, and you shall hear
Of the trial of Orestes by a jury of peers
He killed his mother but that ain't no crime
And Apollo was in favor of it at the time
The main point is justice and mercy and such
You can't be concerned with revenge. There's too much
Of that nowadays, kids, but you must resist.
Cause that way democracy cannot exist."

It's a celebration of cultural values, displayed in a simple and ritualistic way. But the Oresteia doesn't have any children with papier-mache muskets (and for that we are truly thankful.)

Tiny addendum, somewhat relevant

2009-01-25T22:25:00.004-05:00

Serena's talk about Oedipus made me think of a monologue which I love and often quote, and which I believe she and I have discussed though I would not swear to it. I have discussed this one with a LOT of people. It's from Richard Greenberg's Three Days of Rain, which should have won the Pulitzer in 1998 (damn you, Paula Vogel! Not really...):

PIP: No, I mean, it's just, like ... if some oracle told you were going to kill your father and marry your mother, wouldn't you just never kill anybody and stay single? ... And then, if you did inadvertently kill somebody, in the heat of the moment or something, and later started dating? Wouldn't you be smart enough to, like, avoid older women? I mean, to me the moral of that story is not your destiny awaits you. To me it's ... you know ... Do the Fucking Math.
WALKER: You must publish.

"Agamemnon is the king!"

2009-01-25T20:09:00.008-05:00

Fiona always pronounces Aeschylus "ess-keh-lus" and I had always heard "ees-keh-lus." I looked it up to see which was preferred and I found a hilarious nightmare. If you have JSTOR access, check out this article; if you don't, carry on pronouncing it whichever way you always have, because it doesn't seem to matter either way (rather like "edd-i-pus" versus "eed-i-pus). Academics always gotta be fighting about something!

Anyway. Reading The Libation Bearers (the second of the three plays that make up the Oresteia) made me wonder about the Electra complex, which I had heard was the female version of the Oedeipus complex. This seemed sort of unfair to me, because in Aeschylus' version, at least -- I haven't read the Electra plays by Sophocles or Euripedes, although now I feel like I should, but not in these dreadful old versions that you can get for free online -- Electra doesn't do anything nearly as drastic as Oedipus (I don't think that she does in anyone's version of the story).

Appropriately, it seems like the Electra complex isn't as big a thing, anyway. According to Wikipedia,

The idea is based largely on the work of Sigmund Freud, who uses the Oedipus complex as a point of reference for its elaboration. The term, however, was introduced by Carl Jung in 1913. Freud himself explicitly rejected Jung's term, because it "seeks to emphasize the analogy between the attitude of the two sexes," and continued to use the [term] feminine Oedipus attitude in his own writings.

That's very good of Freud, since it doesn't seem reasonable to saddle poor Electra with all the baggage of Oedipus -- she doesn't appear to be in love with her father at all, though she does want her mother dead (come to think of it, I always thought Freud's terminology was a bit hard on Oedipus, too, since in the story he actually goes to great lengths to avoid killing his father and marrying his mother, rather than having some messed-up complex wherein he wants to do those things, although honestly if I were Oedipus and aware of that prophecy, which he was, I think I would've married a much-younger woman and avoided killing anyone at all, just to be on the safe side, but then there would be no play, I guess).

I will grant that Electra speaks of her father and her siblings with a degree of intensity that is rather off-putting, at least to my judgmental modern taste. When she and Orestes are reunited, she says,

You light to my eyes, four loves in one!
I have to call you father, it is fate;
and I turn to you the love I gave my mother --
I despise her, she deserves it, yes,
and the love I gave my sister, sacrificed
on the cruel sword, I turn to you.
You were my faith, my brother --
you alone restore my self-respect. (ll.240-247)

Hmm... yeah. Both she and Orestes are reeeeally into Agamemnon:

ORESTES
Dear father, father of dread,
what can I do or say to reach you now?
What breath can reach from here
to the bank where you lie moored at anchor? ...

ELECTRA
Then hear me now, my father,
it is my turn, my tears are welling now,
as child by child we come
to the tomb and raise the dirge, my father. (322-25; 336-39)

Can we talk about this? One line about Iphigeneia "sacrificed/ on the cruel sword," with nary a mention of who was doing the sacrificing, and then they're both worshiping their father like he's the second coming? (Anachronism, schmanachronism.)

It's not clear to me whether Clytaemnestra's hatred of Agamemnon is a product of his having killed Iphigeneia, her desire to replace him with Aegisthus, or both. Or maybe neither. But you'd think, at least, that Orestes and Electra would feel a shade more ambivalence about the dude who killed their sister so that his ships could sail. Is that so much better than what Clytaemnestra did?

Speaking of family ties, man, I had forgotten how disturbing the description of the sacrifice is. (I wonder if it's this bad in other translations?) It's hard to blame Agamemnon for how sexual these lines sound, since they're spoken by the chorus, but I want to blame someone:

"My father, father!" -- she might pray to the winds;
no innocence moves her judges mad for war.
Her father called his henchmen on,
on with a prayer,
"Hoist her over the altar
like a yearling, give it all your strength!
She's fainting -- lift her,
sweep her robes around her,
but slip this strap in her gentle curving lips...
here, gag her hard, a sound will curse the house" --

and the bridle chokes her voice... her saffron robes
pouring over the sand
her glance like arrows showering
wounding every murderer through with pity
clear as a picture, live,
she strains to call their names...
I remember often the days with father's guests
when over the feast her voice unbroken,
pure as the hymn her loving father
bearing third libations, sang to Saving Zeus --
transfixed with joy, Atreus' offspring
throbbing out their love. (Agamemnon 227-47)

Is there any way that this scene could not have been intended to sound profoundly sexual? It's hard to think Fagles would've added all that reeking innuendo just for kicks. I wonder what the intention is there; that is, what purpose is served by making Agamemnon sound like a child molester as well as a murderer. Leigh Walton? Anyone?

Although, speaking of scenes that sound closer to PG-13 than you'd think would be necessary, let's go back to Electra one more time. Here she is at Agamemnon's grave:

What kindness, what prayer can touch my father?
Shall I say I bring him love for love, a woman's
love for husband? My mother, love from her?
I've no taste for that, no words to say
as I run the honeyed oil on father's tomb. (The Libation Bearers 87-91)

Well, shit. Maybe Jung was onto something after all.

"The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future too."

2009-01-25T12:28:00.002-05:00

Man, you get into the Oresteia -- and yes, I've read it before, but still it is surprising -- and you understand why drama ever got off the ground. This is so raw. I don't quite know which bits are Fagles and which are Aeschylus, but this text is achingly gorgeous is a way you just don't see in modern drama. Or when you do it rings false.

I'd like a few words more, a kind of dirge,
it is my own. I pray to the sun,
the last light I'll see,
that when the avengers cut the assassins down
they will avenge me too, a slave who died,
an easy conquest.
Oh men, your destiny.
When all is well a shadow can overturn it.
When trouble comes a stroke of the wet sponge,
and the picture's blotted out. And that,
I think that breaks the heart. (Agamemnon, ll. 1345-1354)

Not to say that it's primitive.

I mean, it kind of is. But it has a level of dramatic sophistication that's also unexpected. The Greeks are the first we have, and as such we assume they only understood this visceral power of drama and the basic structures of things. But Aeschylus does nuance too! Look at the scene in which Electra discovers Orestes by following his footprints. That could be in Shakespeare. Or O'Neill, for that matter.

(O'Neill looooves Aeschylus. Witness Morning Becomes Electra, which actually is the Oresteia but set in the 19th century. Unfortunately, O'Neill didn't have Aeschylus' knack for saying a lot in a very short time. Witness O'Neill's NINE-ACT PLAY, "Strange Interlude." Which is all very well, but the Oresteia is a far better illustration of the different stages of womanhood when women are battered by fate and it is not NINE ACTS LONG. EUGENE.)

Speaking of that, I KNOW that if you've ever read the Oresteia you've been upset by this too, but REALLY we begin the tradition of democracy by proving that mothers aren't parents, but more like gardeners?

The woman you call the mother of the child
is not the parent, just a nurse to the seed,
the new-sown seed that grows and swells inside her.
The man is the source of life (Eumenides, ll. 666-669)

Thanks Aeschylus. Thanks a lot. I hope that resolved your mother issues right there.

"Like a body wholly body"

2009-01-22T22:16:00.006-05:00

Another factor in my shameful posting delinquency is the death of my laptop. I think it needs new parts, for which I am deeply reluctant to pay. I have this old desktop, but it is not only extremely uncomfortable to use, but also itself very dicey -- as a matter of fact, it just died as I was typing that. Way to prove my point, desktop. Anyway, my home computer situation is distinctly unreliable right now. And I am feeling whiny about that, as you can probably tell. Sorry.

Man. And that introductory essay -- which I finally finished -- was embarrassingly awful. I felt like I should read it because I don't have easy access to a lot of scholarship on the works that we're reading, and besides, the authors are two very respected classicists... but wow. Here's an example:

The Agamemnon coils, tightens; the light in the dark is strangled off at last. The Libation Bearers plunges out of darkness towards the light -- the disaster that plunges us into darkness once again. The Eumenides sweeps us through a phantasmagoria of light and dark, of darkness breeding light, until the night brings forth the torches of our triumph, like the torches of that Fury Clytaemnestra, "glorious from the womb of Mother Night." Night and day are mother and daughter, suffering and the illumination it can bring. For the energy of the Furies is as great with order as the energy of Dionysus. They are his wild maenads gathering moral force. They are the Mean Dynamic. ("The Serpent and the Eagle," 81)

Seriously, Robert Fagles? No, the entire essay is like this. Here's another choice quote: "Athena is both the Victor and the spirit of the loom; and as her citizens raised her robe to the wind, like a sail to buoy forth their ship of state, it may have symbolized the fabric of Athenian society, resilient and controlled, which they bestowed upon posterity" (91).

Yes. "Like a sail to buoy forth their ship of state." And I thought Seamus Heaney's introduction to Beowulf was bad. I had no idea. None. I'm not sure whether to blame W.B. Stanford or to chalk it up as another case of poets-can't-write-prose syndrome. (Wikipedia calls Fagles a poet, and his obituary in the NYT mentions that his B.A. and Ph.D were in English, but I'm not really sure whether he wrote much apart from his translations. Either way, they count as poetry, because they are beautiful and poetic and not super-literal anyway.)

Fiona said that the writing reminded her of graphic novels, and I can totally see that. The diction is very intense and very, I don't know, all-encompassing, like it's trying to say everything that can be said about the Oresteia, but compressed into 84 pages. Eighty-four interminable pages.

When I finished the essay and started Agamemnon, I realized that it's the same version we read in Hum 110. Going through the syllabus archive, I see that Reed first used the Lattimore and then the Lloyd-Jones before settling on the Fagles, perhaps because they don't use his Iliad or Aeneid. In any case, I wish we'd chosen a translation that I hadn't already read (you may have noticed that I enjoy comparing), but it doesn't much matter. I just wanted to re-read it because I felt like I didn't remember it particularly well.

One more thing about the introduction -- well, I could say a lot more, but it's almost midnight and I still have real work left to do. The authors use a ton of quotes throughout. For some they cite sources; for others they just use quotation marks and, I don't know, assume the reader gets it? So of course half the time I don't. But. "The Furies will generate life; Athena will lead that life to social victory. Together they express a 'blessed rage for order' " (85).

This refers to a very famous, very excellent Wallace Stevens poem that you may know already; if you don't, you should read it because it is amazing. It's probably on our booklist, but you can go ahead and read it now.

More soon.

penance

2009-01-21T14:00:00.007-05:00

We are extremely sorry about our lack of blogulation this past week. The inauguration and related activities ate up all of our time, and although we actually did bring our copies of the Oresteia to read while we waited for the swearing-in to start, it was just impossible to get any reading done in that massive crowd, not to mention the freeeeezing cold, which is much worse when you have to stand totally still because there is no room to move.

As penance, Fiona has promised to tell some historical anecdotes about inaugurations; meanwhile, here are photos of us headed to an inaugural ball. After this we'll return to the Oresteia. Seriously. We are very sorry.

Illustrations make everything better

2009-01-14T11:52:00.005-05:00

One of my excellent brother's friends liked our title and drew us a picture.

No seriously, how sweet is this?

Note that the sundae has totally taken one of them out already.

(Now I want ice cream. Darn it.)

also: tiny thoughts from my tiny brain

2009-01-13T16:32:00.007-05:00

I wonder if Virginia Heffernan is as irritated by Kate Beaton as she is by Sarah Vowell. You know, with all her [Beaton's] silly, accessible jokes about history and literature, and her pop culture references. Or is does Kate Beaton get a pass because she doesn't really pretend to be educational? Because if that's the case, we're in the clear!

P.S. Horrible thought: maybe Kate Beaton gets a pass just because she is so goddamn funny. If that's the reason, I fear we are boned.

wait until you're older, dear, and maybe you'll be glad that you're a girl

2009-01-13T11:35:00.005-05:00

So I finally gave up on the introduction to the Oresteia. It was making me want to die. I'm all for introductions, and I'm all for criticism, but this begins as an introduction and then goes on to describe each scene in each play and make a lot of lyrical statements about matricide and when I start to wish that Metro had an in-train magazine so I could read that instead, you know something has gone terribly wrong.

But before I abandoned it (over 60 pages in! I tried, oh god. I'll go back and finish it later, after I've been able to, you know, enjoy the play), I saw that Fagles and the other one were referencing all those other Greek myths where women kill their husbands, as you would if you were writing about Clytemnestra. And there are some great ones:

The women of Lemnos make an appearance in the Argonautika — the Argonauts land on their island and get a whole lot of sex because there are no men on the island. The deal is that the women forgot to pay homage to Aphrodite, and she cursed them with "an evil smell." So their husbands wouldn't have sex with them, and went to get new women. When they came back, the wives killed them all. (Except one, who hid her father fromthe other women inside a chest!) Aeschylus also talks about them in The Libation Bearers, thus:

First at the head of legendary crime stands Lemnos.
People shudder and moan, and can't forget —
each new horror that comes
we call the hells of Lemnos.
Loathed by the gods for guilt,
cast off by man, disgraced, their line dies out. (614-619)

Definitely. Killing your husband for being an adulterer is way worse than killing your daughter so that the winds will change and your ship can leave. No question.

Also, the Argonauts came and thewomen got lots of sex and had more kids! So their line didn't exactly die out, did it, Aeschylus? Eh? Eh? Wanna fight?

The other story is one that Aeschylus dramatized in The Suppliants, but that I first saw as Big Love (no relation), an adaptation by Charles Mee. Basically, fifty brides, all sisters, are on their way to Egypt to marry their cousins (as decreed by their father) but they don't want to. So they escape! To Argos! Where they ask the King for help, but he demurs until he can ask his people. And the people say 'yea' and the women are saved. That's the play we have. Apparently they've reconstructed the rest of the trilogy, and in it the Argive king is killed and the daughters are forced to marry, except then they all kill their husbands. Except one, whose new husband respected her wish to not have sex. Hey guys, respecting women is awesome! And life-saving. Hint hint. Anyway, all the other women are absolved, and eventually Hypermnestra's husband kills her father for being responsible for the deaths of all his brothers. And they start a dynasty.

So the point of that is maybe to make me feel better that Clytemnestra gets such a raw goddamned deal in this story.

Axe-Wielding Assaults on Tea Kettles

2009-01-13T09:15:00.008-05:00

Scott M. asked me the other day whether the MLA had affected my feelings about what I'd like to do with my life; that is, if getting some firsthand experience of that aspect of academic life had given me any useful insights.

I replied more or less as follows:

I'm not sure it affected my ideas about graduate school either way. The complaints I heard were about what I expected: it's hard to find jobs, harder to find good jobs, dissertations take a long time to finish, top-name schools aren't necessarily giving top-quality educations, etc. In a way, the most discouraging part was attending a panel ("Nothing and No Thing in Marlowe, Jonson and Spenser") and remembering how ridiculous academic work can be. The topics are interesting, but the results often seem so futile. So you wrote a well-received paper on the Faerie Queen from a Heideggerian perspective. You made a good argument, maybe got your promotion, but you haven't really achieved anything, changed anything. Next year someone else will say something different about the Faerie Queen, and no one will remember what you said in the first place. I don't know. The rules seem so arbitrary. Is anything ever accomplished?

His response was to link me to this column (the longer I know Scott, the more it seems that there is no topic on which he has not, at one point or another, written a column). It gets to the heart of something that has long bothered me about academic work, via the image of "chop[ping] a tea kettle,'" meaning "that a person makes a lot of noise without accomplishing anything."

Apparently that's a Yiddish idiom. Of course, it reminds me of the title of this blog (chosen by Fiona, to no one's surprise), which is taken from a well-known Vonnegut quote: "Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae."*

Anyway. Scott uses the expression specifically in reference to academic conferences, but it could apply to many aspects of academic life and ritual. It's something I noticed a lot when I was taking lit theory, in particular. We had to read a lot of, oh, de Man and Derrida and Habermas and Grice, and much of that was thought-provoking and occasionally fascinating, but I often felt that I didn't get the point. I did some writing for that class that I was very proud of, but it felt like exercise, you know, or a game: you have to make x argument under y rules, but there isn't really goal z. It was more like something you'd do just for the sake of it, just to see if you could. (And it makes your brain feel strong.)

If you're a professor, of course, you don't write these papers just because you can. You do it (so I understand) because you want to get tenure, because you are not guaranteed stability or income until you have published a certain number of articles and books, until you have presented at a certain number of conferences or obtained a certain amount of grant money. And every profession has its red tape, of course. It just seems like academia has way more.

I do like the idea of contributing to the body of human knowledge. And teaching, of course (apparently female professors tend to take pride in teaching above other aspects of their work; the same is not true of male professors). Maybe anyone in the humanities is doomed to having an inferiority complex because achievements in the sciences are often so much more tangible.

I'm wandering again. But I'm curious about how other people view this. What do you see as the point of academic work? (Or of conferences, lit theory, or book reviews, for that matter.) Is it all just chopping of teakettles, or armored assaults on hot fudge sundaes?

----------------

ADDENDUM: Randall Munroe has something to say about this.

----------------------------

*Fiona, why didn't you title the blog "Armored Attacks on Hot Fudge Sundaes"? I'm lost.

Next Up, "Howard's End: Resurrection"

2009-01-07T17:38:00.004-05:00

A post-it to make your day a little stranger:

There is going to be a video game based on Dante's Inferno. My excellent younger brother, who knows about these things, is very excited for it. Apparently there is also a video game based on the Iliad, which is similarly awesome.

The tagline for the Inferno game is "Go to Hell."

Atreides: They're just like Us!

2009-01-06T23:45:00.013-05:00

In "The Serpent and the Eagle," their introductory essay to Fagles' translation of the Oresteia,* Fagles and Stanford write, "The suffering of Atreus and his sons is a very old and yet a very modern matter. They are less removed from us than we might like to think" (16-17).

Now, I can see why one might want to be "removed" from the house of Atreus. To review:

The founder of the line was Tantalus of Lydia... [who] offended the gods by feasting them on his son's flesh, and they condemned him to starve in Hades, 'tantalized' by the drink and luscious fruits just out of reach. But they restored his victim, Pelops, to a new, resplendent life. ... Pelops had two sons, Atreus and Thyestes. When Thyestes seduced his brother's wife and contested his right to the throne, Atreus banished him and then, luring him back for a reconciliation, feasted him on his children's flesh. ... Atreus had two sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus.... Agamemnon became the commander-in-chief of the Greek forces that attacked Troy to avenge the seduction of Helen by Paris.... At the outset of the expedition, however, Agamemnon had to sacrifice his and Clytaemnestra's daughter Iphigeneia -- a fact that Homer had omitted, perhaps to exonerate the king for an aristocratic audience -- and so he comes an agent of the curse upon his house. (15)

So, yeah. I wouldn't really want to have a ton in common with the house of Atreus, it's true. But the argument the authors make to support their claims -- one, implicitly, that the reader would prefer not to identify with the characters of the Oresteia; two, explicitly, that these characters' actions and stories relate to the modern reader (and therefore, presumably, offer him insights into his own life or world) -- is never fully fleshed out (sorry, bad pun). The only connection they offer is that

[Atreus and his sons]... are cursed, their lives are an inherited disease, a miasma that threatens the health of their community and forces them, relentlessly, to commit their fathers' crimes. It is as if crime were contagious -- and perhaps it is -- the dead pursued the living for revenge, and revenge could only breed more guilt. For such guilt is more than criminal; it is a psychological guilt that modern men have felt and tried to probe. Every crime in the house of Atreus, whether children kill their parents or parents kill their children and feed upon their flesh, is a crime against the filial bond itself. (17)

So... Atreus and his sons have in common with us... the experience of feeling guilty for crimes we may or may not have committed? (Or perhaps -- less flippantly -- the inevitable feelings of guilt that result from the parent/child relationship.) That's pretty much all I'm getting from that. The argument that they are "less removed from us than we might to think" is not fully explained, let alone proven; it is used, instead, as a segue into a discussion of "the pathology of a culture ridden by its guilt" (17) and from there into ancient Greek religion and ritual, and the possible cultural underpinnings of the Oresteia.

Which is all very well and good. The authors have a lot of ground to cover in this essay, the sole piece of criticism/commentary in this edition. But the line caught my eye because it seems to me that critics of literature are always trying to tell me that the works they study are pertinent to my life, my world. It's as though they're afraid I'll see their arguments as pointless, their life's work as unworthy unless it reaches some particular threshold of relevance.

And that got me to thinking ("I couldn't help but wonder"): Is it a necessary condition of "literature" that it offer some enduringly relevant insight? I can see that scholars of ancient (and modern) works would want to believe that those works offer some sort of timeless wisdom or message to the reader; I know it's a common criticism of academia that it has too little to do with the so-called real world. (The term "ivory tower" is pretty self-explanatory.)

And -- god help me -- is a piece of literature "good" because it offers insight, or does it offer insight because it is good?

The gist of Tolkien's argument in "The Monsters and the Critics" is that Beowulf had been studied more as a historical document than as a work of literature because critics felt that it wasn't good enough to be studied as literature (structural weaknesses, or something; too many monsters). It is, too, good enough, Tolkien argues. It is beautiful poetry, and what's more -- oh, yes -- its themes are timeless. Beowulf, according to Tolkien,

glimpses the cosmic and moves with the thought of all men concerning the fate of human life and efforts; it stands amid but above the petty wars of princes, and surpasses the dates and limits of historical periods, however important. At the beginning, and during its process, and most of all at the end, we look down as if from a visionary height upon the house of man in the valley of the world.

Well, then. Oh, and lest you thought you could be distant from Beowulf the character, if not the broader themes of his story, Tolkien would like you to know that "Beowulf is not... the hero of an heroic lay.... He has no enmeshed loyalties, nor hapless love. He is a man, and that for him and many is sufficient tragedy."

I'm not trying to mock Tolkien. Far from it. I'm just thinking about this idea that literary merit is somehow connected to this standard of relevance, this idea that literature is that which teaches us something important, something lasting about people or life or the way of the world.

I won't fall into the trap of attempting to ascertain what exactly counts as literature, let alone how we determine that something is "good" (I was once in a conference class wherein the day's first topic was what constitutes literature; it became the day's only topic when the discussion was hijacked by an indignant ponytailed Classics junior who would not give up her argument that a grocery list could be considered literature. Finally, the professor -- a genial middle-aged Chaucerian who normally gave us very free rein -- cut in and said, "No. No." And that put a stop to that, except class was nearly over by that point anyway).

But it is curious to me to think that literature must have some particular bearing on life. I'm not sure how much I could say that literature has taught me anything about life; trust me, I did plenty of reading throughout childhood and adolescence and I was clueless.

It's a dangerous road, thinking that we should identify with literary characters and/or learn from them. There once came into my possession -- not through any doing of my own, let me assure you -- a book entitled Where There's A Will There's A Way, Or, All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Shakespeare, by one Laurie Maguire (who apparently did not learn it in kindergarten). Now, I did not actually read this unfortunately-named tome -- I sold it to Powell's the first chance I got -- but I gather that it's some sort of self-help book... based on Shakespeare. No. Really. I have to quote from Amazon's product description:

Covering such universal subjects as love and hate, the battle of the sexes, family relationships, and loss and death, Maguire shows how the dilemmas illustrated in Shakespeare's plays can help readers explore their own emotions and judgments. Together, Maguire and Shakespeare offer suggestions, comfort, empathy, and encouragement as they set out a timeless principle for living.

Apparently Shakespeare is "the ultimate self-help guru and life coach." I am not making this up.

This isn't to say that Fagles and Stanford (and Tolkien) share Maguire's absurd conclusion that literature can find you a boyfriend, or whatever. There's a big leap from "this work applies to your life and mine" to "this work will teach you to work through your grief over your father's death." Maguire has gone audaciously, hilariously literal with the idea that fictional characters are like us.

But hey, at least she's attempting to be pragmatic. Really. Will I get less out of the Oresteia if I can't identify with Agamemnon, Clytaemnestra or Orestes? Am I missing something crucial if I can't see how their lives relate to mine, how the trilogy's themes still apply to the world of today?

I find that I am confounded by the question. It seems presumptuous to think that what Aeschylus had to say has anything to do with me (Agamemnon died for my sins!); but it seems insulting to say that his work no longer has relevance.

Thoughts?

---------------

*We are reading the 1977 Penguin Classics edition, translated by Robert Fagles; introduction, notes, and glossary written in collaboration with W.B. Stanford. Stanford was Irish, and his political career looks interesting, too. Have a look.

--------------

ADDENDUM: Fiona worries that I may have conflated "I can identify with the characters" with "the work offers enduring insights." I don't think that I did; I was aware of the difference while writing the post, and I was fairly careful to distinguish between them in what I said. What I did fail to do is to explain how I see the relationship there. So I want to explicate just a little.

The line with which I began was this: "The suffering of Atreus and his sons is a very old and yet a very modern matter. They are less removed from us than we might like to think."

Essentially, this claims that we have something in common with these characters; we are not removed from them, we should on some level be able to identify with them. But also, their suffering is a matter, an issue that is modern, that is, a theme that remains relevant. Their guilt is "a psychological guilt that modern men have felt and tried to probe."

That is to say that the reason, ostensibly, that we should be able to identify with these characters is that their sufferings have something to do with our sufferings. Their stories, therefore, may tell us something about ourselves or our world.

Similarly, Tolkien emphasizes that Beowulf is a man (i.e. a person) like us as opposed to a mythic hero. His tragedy, per Tolkien, is specifically that he is a human being; his story "moves with the thought of all men concerning the fate of human life and efforts...." So the tale of Beowulf, insofar as it is a tale about a human being, offers a message that applies to all human beings.

The fact that we can identify with its characters need not entail that a work tells us something about life; and a work can still offer insight even if we don't particularly identify with its characters (let me tell you, I do not identify with Henry Chinaski, but that doesn't mean that Charles Bukowski has nothing at all to teach me about life -- for one thing, I learned that I hate Charles Bukowski).

But I guess what I am saying is that when I speak here about identifying with characters, I mean it in a relatively broad sense. For example, when I read Troilus and Cressida, I identify with Cressida more than with the other characters because she is a woman in a difficult situation who is harshly judged by people who really don't know her or attempt to understand her. And that's quite specific. But when I read Beowulf, I can't relate to Beowulf as a character in the same way I relate to Cressida. What I can do, at least according to Tolkien, is relate to Beowulf as a human being whose life is finite, whose most spectacular achievements have a limited impact (see Fiona's post on the ends of Beowulf and Hamlet).

It's not like Fagles and Stanford are arguing, say, that we should identify with Agamemnon because hey, remember that time you had to sacrifice your young daughter and it was awful and then your wife was really pissed?

Wow, I actually have a lot more to say about this, and I could keep going for a long time. I hope I've at least clarified this issue rather than confusing it further.

me: i'm trying to make sense of this blog post

which is now a hydra

damn it

Fiona: the blog post is a hydra?

me: yeah

Fiona: I think you have to cauterize the stumps

me: i tried to cut off one of its heads

and it grew more heads

Fiona: I think that is how he did it

me: and i'm out of lighter fluid

"Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three."

2009-01-06T12:02:00.003-05:00

I don't think either of us has gotten to the actual beginning of the Oresteia at this point because the introduction is long and at times arduous. It says many things, among them that the Oresteia is the sole surviving Greek trilogy. (Originally it was a tetralogy, but we'll pretend that final satyr-play was like Back to the Future III: Unnecessary and ultimately detrimental to the series as a whole.)

But hey, I hear you protest, what about the Theban plays? Gentle reader, that was my reaction as well. So I did research (on the google!) and it turns out that Sophocles' Theban plays (Antigone, Oedipus Rex, and Oedipus at Colonus) are each from separate tetralogies. Each is the sole survivor of its particular family of plays, and they've banded together like so many scrappy orphans in a Dickens novel.

And thus was the mystery solved.

New, Improved, and in Chronological Order

2009-01-04T12:31:00.003-05:00

Periodically I'll do a booklist update. This one is very important because it turns out half this stuff was slightly out of order with respect to years and now I am fixing that.

~~Beowulf (700-1000 AD)~~
~~The Odyssey (we are not talking about this)~~
The Oresteia (458 BC)
The Divine Comedy (1308-1321)
Piers Plowman (1360-1387)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late 1300s)
The Canterbury Tales (1380-1400 or so)
Everyman (late 1400s)
Le Morte d’Arthur (1485)
Utopia (1516)
"Defense of Poesy" (1581)
“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (158?)
“The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” (158?)
Tamburlaine (1587-88)
The Faerie Queen (1590)
Edward II (1592)
Amoretti (1595)
The Merchant of Venice (1596-98)
Romeo and Juliet (1597)
Much Ado About Nothing (1598-99)
Julius Caesar (1599)
As You Like It (1599-1600)
Othello (1603)
Volpone (1606)
Antony and Cleopatra (1606-7)
The Sonnets (1609)
The Tempest (1610)
Ben Jonson's Elegy to Shakespeare (1623)
John Donne's Holy Sonnets (1633)
John Donne's "Elegy 20" (1633)
John Donne's "The Bait" (1633)
John Donne's "The Flea" (1633)
Tartuffe (1664)
“To His Coy Mistress” (1650-52)
Paradise Lost (1667)
Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)
All for Love (1678)
Anne Bradstreet's “A Dialogue Between Old England and New” (1678)
Anne Bradstreet's “To My Dear and Loving Husband” (1678)
Anne Bradstreet's “The Author to Her Book" (1678)
Anne Bradstreet's "Upon the Birth of One of Her Children” (1678)
The Way of the World (1700)
"A Description of a City Shower" (1710)
Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Criticism" (1711)
Alexander Pope's “Rape of the Lock,” (1712)
Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Moll Flanders (1722)
Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
Alexander Pope's "The Dunciad" (1728)
"A Modest Proposal" (1729)
Alexander Pope's "Essay on Man" (1734)
Jonathan Edwards' “Sinners In the Hands of an Angry God” (1741)
Tom Jones (1749)
Tristam Shandy (1759)
Candide (1759)
The Vicar of Wakefield (1766)
She Stoops to Conquer (1771)
The Rivals (1775)
The School for Scandal (1777)
Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789-94)
Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93)
James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)
Mary Shelley's “Vindication of the Rights of Women” (1792)
Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
Samuel Coleridge's “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1797-98)
Samuel Coleridge's “Frost at Midnight” (1798)
William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (1800)
Faust (1806-1832)
William Wordsworth's “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1807)
William Wordsworth's“I Wandered Lonely as Cloud”(1807)
Walter Scott's “Marmion” (1808)
Sense and Sensibility (1811)
Samuel Coleridge's “Kublai Khan” (1816)
John Keats' “Fall of Hyperion” (1817)
Percy Shelley's “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (1817)
Childe Harold'd Pilgrimage (1818)
Percy Shelley's “Ozymandias” (1818)
Percy Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind” (1819)
Don Juan (1819)
John Keats' “To a Nightingale” (1819)
John Keats' “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819)
Percy Shelley's “Defence of Poetry” (1821)
Charles Lamb's Essays of Elia (1823)
Alfred Tennyson's “Lady of Shalott” (1832)
Alfred Tennyson's “Ulysses” (1833)
“Nature” (1836)
Oliver Twist (1837-39)
Robert Browning's “My Last Duchess” (1842)
Margaret Fuller's “Women In the Nineteenth Century” (1845)
Wuthering Heights (1847)
Vanity Fair (1847-48)
Alfred Tennyson's “In Memoriam, A.H.H.” (1849)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's “Sonnets from the Portuguese” (1850)
The Scarlet Letter (1850)
House of the Seven Gables (1851)
Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny (1851)
Moby Dick (1851)
Emily Dickinson's “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” (185?)
Emily Dickinson's “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died” (185?)
Emily Dickinson's “I Felt a Funeral In my Brain” (185?)
Hard Times (1854)
Alfred Tennyson's “Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854)
Walden (1854)
Robert Browning's “Fra Lippo Lippi” (1855)
Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" (1855)
Walt Whitman's “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (1855)
Bartleby the Scrivener (1856)
Madame Bovary (1856)
Tale of Two Cities (1859)
Mill on the Floss (1860)
Notes from the Underground (1864)
Walt Whitman's “Oh Captain, My Captain” (1865)
Crime and Punishment (1866)
Matthew Arnold's “Dover Beach” (1867)
Middlemarch (1871-72)
Portrait of a Lady (1881)
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
The Bostonians (1886)
Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
Yellow Wallpaper (1892)
W.B. Yeats' "Lake Isle of Innisfree" (1893)
W.B. Yeats' “When You Are Old” (1893)
Arms and the Man (1894)
Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
Heart of Darkness(1902)
The House of Mirth (1905)
Diaries of Adam and Eve (1906)
Is Shakespeare Dead? (1907)
Howard’s End (1910)
Death in Venice (1912)
Pgymalion (1912)
Duino Elegies (1912)
Ezra Pound's “In a Station of the Metro” (1913)
"The Dead" (1914)
"Araby" (1914)
Robert Frost's “After Apple Picking” (1914)
Robert Frost's "The Mending Wall" (1914)
The Metamorphosis (1915)
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
Robert Frost's "Birches" (1916)
W.B. Yeats' "Easter 1916" (1916)
Wilfred Owen's “Dulce Et Decorum Est” (1917)
T.S. Eliot's “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917)
Ulysses (1918-1920)
This Side of Paradise (1920)
W.B. Yeats' "The Second Coming" (1920)
T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" (1922)
Langston Hughes' "I, Too" (1922)
Sonnets to Orpheus (1922)
Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Love Is Not All" (1923)
Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Conscientious Objector" (1923)
Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Time Offers No Relief" (1923)
Edna St. Vincent Millay's "I Will Put Chaos Into 14 Lines" (1923)
The Great Gatsby (1925)
Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
Langston Hughes' "Mother to Son" (1926)
Langston Hughes' “The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1926)
To the Lighthouse (1927)
A Room of One’s Own (1929)
The Sound and the Fury (1929)
“A Rose For Emily” (1930)
Brave New World (1931)
W.B. Yeats' "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop" (1933)
Robert Frost's "Design" (1936)
Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
W.H. Auden's "Funeral Blues" (1937)
Hills Like White Elephants (1938)
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1938)
The Iceman Cometh (1939)
The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
W.H. Auden's "September 1, 1939" (1939)
W.H. Auden's “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” (1940)
W.H. Auden's "Epitaph on a Tyrant" (1940)
A Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1941)
T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" (1945)
George Orwell's “Politics and the English Language” (1946)
Waiting for Godot (1948-49)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Dylan Thomas' “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” (1952)
Dylan Thomas' “A Child’s Christmas In Wales” (1955)
Lolita (1955)
D.H. Lawrence's “Why the Novel Matters”(1956)
W.H. Auden's "The More Loving One" (1957)
Langston Hughes' "Theme for English B" (1959)

Why they named an epic after this guy I can't imagine.

2009-01-03T11:15:00.003-05:00

I have actually read the Odyssey before. How did I forget that Odysseus is a terrible human being? I remember the bit with the maids, but I figured if that's the bit of injustice everyone fixates on that it must be the worst of it. Ha. Ha.

Maybe the best is when, at the very end of the book, he goes to visit his father, Laertes. Not only did Odysseus' mother die because she missed him so much, Laertes refuses to eat and basically tends his garden wearing rags because he grieves so much for his lost son. So Odysseus has reclaimed his palace and his wife and he decides to go visit his dad. And when he gets there...

Long enduring Odysseus, catching sight of him now --
a man worn down with years, his heart racked with sorrow --
halted under a branching pear-tree, paused and wept.
Debating, head and heart, what should he do now?
Kiss and embrace his father, pour out the long tale --
how he had made the journey home to native land --
or probe him first and test him every way?
Torn, mulling it over, this seemed better:
test the old man first,
reproach him with words that cut him to the core. (24.257-266)

Dick move, Odysseus. I know when my father is old and infirm and dying of grief because he thinks I'm dead, I'll LIE TO HIM a little bit just to see if he's plotting against me.

And that's after Odysseus slaughters everyone who ever opposed him in the grisliest possible ways. One guy, Melanthius, who tried to help the suitors, meets this fate:

They hauled him out through the doorway, into the court,
lopped his nose and ears with a ruthless knife,
tore his genitals out for the dogs to eat raw
and in manic fury hacked off hands and feet. (22.501-504)

It's not enough to kill your enemies. You have to do it in the most disgusting way you can think of.

I didn't remember any of this from the last time I read it. Maybe it was phrased more delicately in whatever translation that was? So yes, children, eat your beets and you can grow up like Odysseus, man of twists and turns and hideous revenge fantasies.

onward and upward: a post-it

2009-01-02T13:38:00.004-05:00

So we're back to your regularly scheduled (or not) Iditarod. I started the Fagles translation of the Oresteia on the plane back from San Francisco, but the introductory essay was so boring that I read the in-flight magazine instead. And finished the crossword puzzle (with only a couple of errors: I'm bad at baseball players and model trains). I will try again as soon as possible.

I seem to have lost my company's wireless card on the trip back from San Francisco. I feel like Calvin when he broke his dad's binoculars. Awful.

Meanwhile, here are two pictures from the MLA to keep you entertained. They pretty much give away where I work, if you hadn't guessed by now. Please note that despite the MLA overlap, this is Fiona's and my personal blog. The views we express here are solely our own and do not represent our places of employment in any way. I'm very, very lucky to work where I do, and it's extremely useful in terms of grad school research, but it is a job and this is my personal blog. So. Pictures are for illustrative purposes only. I think blogs are more fun when they have pictures.

It's not really a post. It's a post-it?

2008-12-30T11:55:00.004-05:00

Dear Homer,
What's with all the ankles?

But someone saw him — Cadmus' daughter with lovely ankles,
Ino, a mortal woman once with human voice (5.366-67)

and later:

...the man himself delights
in the grand feasts of the deathless gods on high,
wed to Hebe, famed for her lithe, alluring ankles (11.691-93)

"Man, don't look at her face — but you should see those ankles."

I think Homer was an ankle man. He also seemed to pay attention to braids and rosy fingers.

Fiona

Artist: Serena. Medium: Laptop on Internet. Title: It was Late and I was Tired

2008-12-29T23:43:00.000-05:00

Some other bits and pieces from the MLA convention--I just don't have the time for a real post. My schedule's been sort of brutal.

--I've seen a whole lot of MLA folks sauntering casually back into the Hilton with brown paper bags under their arms. I'm not saying that there is necessarily a connection between that, the numerous liquor stores within a block of here, and the crazytown prices at the hotel bar... but the circumstantial evidence is strong.

--A lot of the people hitting up our booth are quite blatant about the fact that they're only there for the freebies. Which is fine; it comes with the territory. But the middle-aged professors who take five minutes just to mine our candy bowl are driving me nuts. They ate all the mini Snickers and the mini Hershey bars; now we only have Kisses and Reese's. I understand that times are tight... but really?

--Speaking of swag, I got some amazing stuff today, including all three volumes of this amazing anthology, a copy of Everything is Illuminated (which I still haven't read), and advance copies of a few other things, including one book that purports to be a biography of Shakespeare's brain. I also got some beautiful posters for various new books, including one for this edition of Beowulf. More than anything, though, I'm excited about the anthologies. We're going to get so much great Iditarod reading from them. Apparently there will be a lot more free books tomorrow. God only knows how I'll get all this stuff back to Washington.

--I did get hit on a lot more today. Last-minute desperation? Guys who struck out with their first choice, or are ready for a new victim? I don't know. The worst part, though, was that the two most persistent guys were both manning nearby booths, so there was basically no escape. Or maybe the worst part was the professor from the verrrrry respected college standing about four inches away from me while making no move to cover his quest to stare down my shirt. For ten minutes. While asking me rather personal questions about my life. I got invited to a number of bars and parties, as well as out to dinner, but I evaded all such suggestions and hit the hotel gym for two hours of cardio. After two solid days of candy and cookies, it was pretty much heaven.

--I met a ton of interesting people: grad students bitter and optimistic, friendly professors, cranky professors, Scott McLemee groupies (I swear the man has a fan club), folks from Ivies and community colleges... no David Horowitz, though, to my mild disappointment.

while we're off topic, jeeves

2008-12-29T01:19:00.006-05:00

No, I don't have anything profound to say about the Odyssey. Not one thing. It's late and I'm tired.

This is how tired I am: I was trying to write you a limerick about the Odyssey and I can't do it. I am not happy about this. I can ALWAYS write limericks. I promise you more limericks down the road.

Really, here is what I think when I read the Odyssey: This guy was a terrible sailor, couldn't steer, wrecked his boat, and made up all this rigmarole when he got home in order to save face. And then he hanged the maids, cause he's a bastard. Thus endeth the profound observations for the night.

This is just a little missive to explain my part of the Literary Iditarod. After all, Serena is (probably) going to grad school, and this is (it turns out not particularly effective) preparation for the GRE. But hey, at least she has an evident reason. But I don't want to go to grad school, unless it's to get an MA in something strange. I see no reason for me to go back to school -- though I love school. I always figured grad school would be fun, but it would also be postponing my real life. If I figure out what I want to do with myself and it's something I need to go back to school for, then I can go and not feel like I'm running away from anything.*

You like lists? I like lists.
Reasons Fiona Is on the Literary Iditarod:
» It's to fill holes in my own knowledge. I've read a lot of these books, but often when I was very young and didn't get them and barely remember them. It doesn't count as something-I've-read if all I can tell you about it I could get from reading a synopsis on Wikipedia ("So there's a guy and he turns into a giant cockroach for no reason and then...his life is...really hard. After that. Cause, you know, the cockroach thing. Roachism.")
» I finally can talk to someone about them. I imagine that having Serena (and the internet) will make The Fairie Queene much more bearable than I otherwise would find it.
» Honestly, I've padded the list a tiny bit. Is The Diaries of Adam and Eve truly essential reading to call oneself an educated person? No, but it's the Twain that's always made me laugh a lot. Is Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny really that important, compared to The Scarlet Letter? Nah. But it makes Nathaniel Hawthorne into a human being, and I think that's important when it comes to a writer like that who's so staid and difficult to feel a kinship with. We tried to make a list that would be educational, yes, but it's not just a list that covers the basics and I'm really happy about that.

*This applies to me only and is not a condemnation of anyone applying to or in grad school. I think grad school is awesome and I like grad students. I will never accuse anyone in grad school of being womb-bound or lame. Learning things is sweet. Some of my best friends are grad students.

"Are you a linguist?!"

2008-12-28T22:10:00.005-05:00

I'm in the lobby of the San Francisco Hilton. Enormous chandeliers, extravagant Christmas decorations, and networking black-clad academics as far as the eye can see. I would feel tremendously out of place--even the grad students here know someone, and I don't know a soul--but I think I'm too tired to care. I need to go find some dinner, but the eavesdropping and people-watching here are too good to pass up. I think I'll wait till things calm down a little and then just buy an overpriced salad at the hotel restaurant. I'd trade my hair for a glass of red wine, but I won't trade the $13 the Hilton is charging, so I'll have to go without.

I didn't mean to hijack the Literary Iditarod with my blogging about the MLA Convention; it's just too weird and interesting not to write about. And it has to do with grad school, so it's totally relevant. Sort of.

I don't know where to begin. I was working at my company's booth in the exhibit hall all day. The atmosphere there was actually much less overwhelming than here in the lobby: I knew what I was supposed to be doing, I had a goal, I had things to talk about. I'm far from being the most socially capable person in the world, but I've heard my bosses' spiels enough times to know more or less what they'd like me to say, and there are a lot of people who are very enthusiastic about our company, so I felt pretty comfortable, if sometimes seriously outclassed. I wish I could attend some of the lectures and discussions, but that isn't my job; I'm here to do the other stuff so that my boss can go to those. Oh well--I may have plenty of chances in the future.

Everyone is saying that the overall mood of the convention is darker than it has been in many years. I wouldn't know about that, of course. I'm just happy to be here. I did get to talk to a number of job-seeking graduate students, all of whom were about as bitter and dejected as one might expect, if not more so. The most bitter was probably the guy who only wants to work at an elite four-year, and only teaching upper-level Brit Lit. I can see, on the one hand, how those are reasonable goals--but on the other hand... wow. People say that you don't go into English unless you think you're better than everyone else; what does it take to go into English with such exacting requirements? Of course, I'm not even sure that I can muster up the self-confidence to apply to grad school, so I'm not necessarily qualified to judge him.

I don't know. My oldest sister says she can't imagine trying to go into academia because she doesn't think that she's smart enough. To me, it seems like so much of that is just point of view. Imagine academia as a language. You can grow up speaking Chinese and never think twice about it; you can take Chinese in school and learn it bit by bit until you're comfortable with it. But if you have never been exposed to it, it seems far beyond your comprehension, alien, impenetrable.

I was never exposed to academia growing up. None of my relatives are academics, and my parents barely mentioned college to me, let alone graduate school. I spent years at community colleges and state schools where my professors' goals were basic, practical: Can my students conjugate a regular Spanish verb. Can they write a coherent English sentence in which the majority of the words are spelled correctly. Can they master the math they will need to survive in a job in retail, food service, maybe as a nurse. None of my classmates were expected to attend graduate school: hell, if they could graduate from the community college, from the California State, it'd be a bloody miracle.

In some ways--don't laugh--I'm a very timid person, and it never occurred to me to go beyond what was asked of me. At Reed I found that I could do a lot more than I had thought, simply because my professors asked me to do so. If they expected serious work from me, I figured, that must mean that I was capable of such work. It had never crossed my mind before. And if they encouraged me to go to graduate school, that must mean that I was capable of graduate-level work.

Having the confidence to attempt to go into academia seems like largely a matter of believing that you can figure it out. Its terms and customs, as intimidating as I (and my sister) find them, must be things that one can learn.

Augh. I'm rambling. Sorry. Here are some other things that happened. Maybe I'll put them in bullet form to keep me on track:

--I went into the graduate student lounge to leave some of our company swag. There was only one other person in there, a young man. I took a moment to look over the pamphlets on the table, and I overheard as a young woman came in, evidently surprising the man while he was checking himself out in the mirror. "Um... I realize that when you came in, it seemed like I was looking at myself in the mirror, but actually I was just thinking about something else and I didn't even realize that the mirror was there," he blustered to the girl, whom he didn't seem to know. How does one make it as far as graduate school and still be that socially inept? And I thought Reedies were awkward...

--A lechy old professor type sauntered up to our booth and spied the bowl of candy. "Oooh, I'm just going to take as many of your Kisses as I can!" he enthused to me, his voice dripping with forced innuendo. Hey, old dude, you know what's funny? Making young women uncomfortable! (How do you make it to late middle age and a professorship and still be that socially inept?)

--Another middle-aged professor explained to me very earnestly that young women are much more mature than young men, who are disgusting, stupid, and chauvinistic. Then he lingered around our booth for at least twenty minutes, attempting to make small talk and giving me hopeful grins.

(Those two incidents were the closest I have come to having someone try to pick me up, though I know at least a few people here are looking... I have been told--shock!--that the MLA is something of a meat market. I'm tempted to put on something tight and low-cut and see if I can find out, but I'm not sure my boss would condone that sort of investigative work, and anyway, my exhibitor badge is maybe something of a turnoff. It's my understanding that grad students are the typical prey. Man, not being in grad school means I miss out on everything.)

I want to say more, but honestly, I'm so tired that I'm pretty sure this is all just boring and stupid. I'll post again when I am thinking more coherently.

Meanwhile, if you are curious about the MLA Convention and want to hear about it from people who are smarter than squirrels, Scott McLemee is blogging about it, as is the MLA's executive director, Rosemary Feal.

well... it is, and it's not

2008-12-28T02:38:00.005-05:00

I am at the MLA, and I practically just got here and it is already blowing my tiny little mind and I haven't even started work yet, and it's super late and I need to go to bed. But. I also finished the Odyssey on the plane on the way over, and I have a few things I want to mention before bed. Because I am bad at stuff.

I can't fully get behind this idea of the Odyssey as just a romp, just a romance. It nags at me. I mentioned already that Tiresias, when Odysseus visited him among the dead, was very clear about the additional hardships Odysseus would endure if his men slaughtered Helios' cattle. Let's look at this passage for a minute. It's long, but important:

Leave the beasts unharmed, your mind set on home,
and you all may still reach Ithaca--bent with hardship,
true--but harm them in any way, and I can see it now:
your ship destroyed, your men destroyed as well.
And even if you escape, you'll come home late
and come a broken man--all shipmates lost,
alone in a stranger's ship--
and you will find a world of pain at home,
crude, arrogant men devouring all your goods,
courting your noble wife, offering gifts to win her.
No doubt you will pay them back in blood when you come home!
But once you have killed those suitors in your halls--
by stealth or in open fight with slashing bronze--
go forth once more, you must...
carry your well-planed oar until you come
to a race of people who know nothing of the sea,
whose food is never seasoned with salt, strangers all
to ships with their crimson prows and long slim oars,
wings that make ships fly. And here is your sign--
unmistakable, clear, so clear you cannot miss it:
When another traveler falls in with you and calls
that weight across your shoulder a fan to winnow grain,
then plant your bladed, balanced oar in the earth
and sacrifice fine bests to the lord god of the sea,
Poseidon--a ram, a bull and a ramping wild boar--
then journey home and render noble offerings up
to the deathless gods who rule the vaulting skies,
to all the gods in order.
And at last your own death will steal upon you...
a gentle, painless death, far from the sea it comes
to take you down, borne down with the years in ripe old age
with all your people there in blessed peace around you. (11.125-156)

That's not even what I would call ominous. That is just very straightforward. (And it leaves little room for Odysseus' men not to slaughter the cattle of the sun, since he's been given such explicit instructions for how to deal with the fallout. After he's done with that little Calypso detour, of course. Plus some other stuff.) Odysseus, "man of twists and turns"--as Fagles likes to translate his epithet--has a lot more twists and turns coming up. I mean, look how long it took him to get home from Troy--and that was a journey with a fairly clear endpoint, whereas this is more like "come home when Poseidon is done being pissed at you."

And you don't get to forget this bit. Almost as soon as he's reunited with Penelope, even before they head to bed, Odysseus repeats this news to her pretty much word for word (he is just going outside, and may be some time). "And so," Penelope replies, "...if the gods will really grant a happier old age,/there's hope we'll escape our trials at last" (23.326-28). I mean... I wouldn't hold my breath. This is Odysseus, after all. God only knows how many ways he can find to screw up this business of finally making peace with Poseidon; how many other gods he'll inadvertently anger along the way.

And the phrasing, at least here in Fagles, is such that it's left open whether he'll make it home again any time before this "ripe old age" and "painless death." You can interpret it optimistically or... not. The way I'm reading these lines, it seems entirely possible that Odysseus has another ten-year journey coming up. And he just got home.

It reminds me a bit of the Iliad, actually--Hector is dead, and there's a lull in the fighting, but the war isn't over and Troy isn't going to fall for a while yet. What's more, we know that Achilles will die before that happens. Like Odysseus, he has two potential fates laid out for him, but for Achilles it's more of a Sophie's choice. Mind you, this is all from memory, but my recollection is that his mother, Thetis, tells Achilles that he can either remain out of the fighting and reach a peaceful and prosperous old age, or head back in and die young but glorious. Since Achilles ends up going back into battle--and killing Hector--to avenge Patroclus, we know for sure that he isn't long for this world. As Clare said, the Iliad ends with this sense that nothing is really going to be okay, but I'm not positive that the Odyssey is so different.

----

I'm also dying to talk about models of female sexuality in the Odyssey. You have your controlling seductresses, of course, Circe and Calypso, who--as Odysseus is always at great pains to point out--never win the man's heart. You have Penelope walking this impossible boundary, trying to placate everyone and never pleasing anyone: Telemachus constantly berating her, suitors hounding her; crying for Odysseus day and night (after twenty years?!)... and she can never win. After killing all the suitors, Odysseus conspires with Telemachus to make it seem as though a wedding is taking place so that the neighbors will be distracted and no one will realize yet what has actually happened:

And whoever heard the strains outside would say,
"A miracle--someone's married the queen at last!"

"One of her hundred suitors."
"That callous woman,
too faithless to keep her lord and master's house
to the bitter end--"
"Till he came sailing home." (23.165-69)

So apparently that is what the neighbors would have thought of Penelope, had she dared to remarry after twenty years alone. Good thing she didn't, eh?

And then, god help us, there is Clytemnestra, who "...brands with a foul name the breed of womankind,/ even the honest ones to come! (24.222-23). So says the ghost of Agamemnon, immediately after remarking that "[t]he fame of [Penelope's] great virtue will never die (24.216).

Evidently women can all be blamed for Clytemnestra's evil, but only Penelope can take credit for her own virtue.

And THEN if I were actually writing properly about this rather than hastily summarizing a few thoughts, I would talk about the maids, and how Telemachus kills a dozen of them basically just for sleeping with the suitors. They have brought disgrace upon the house of Odysseus, you see, what with the whole "being sluts" thing. Says Odysseus to his son:

"And once you've put the entire house in order,
march the women out of the great hall--between
the roundhouse and the courtyard's strong stockade--
and hack them with your swords, slash out all their lives--
blot out of their minds the joys of love they relished
under the suitors' bodies, rutting on the sly!" (22.465-70)

Man, and that is just the beginning of it. Telemachus, of course, decides that death by sword is too good for whores, and ends up hanging them in a super grisly little scene. The revulsion with which the two men respond to the spectre of female desire is searing in its vitriol, unpleasant to read.

And now I have to go to bed. Damn it.

you can tell because at the end everyone is married...

2008-12-27T23:56:00.005-05:00

I never thought of the Odyssey as a comic novel before, but it's starting to dawn on me that it is one. What?

Maybe it's because epics aren't often comedic -- even comic novels like Candide that cover long journeys and spans of time are so short and snappy that they can hardly be considered epics. Then again, epics aren't often intimate, but Beowulf will fight you in an alleyway. Anyway, when Clare says it's a "just a romp," she's absolutely right. I like to imagine Odysseus as just this dude who took a long time getting home and when people asked about it he told them about all the bad weather and the islands he'd seen and the people who had helped him, and they seemed bored and he kept talking and eventually it was this storm-swept adventure full of nubile maidens and one-eyed monsters.

(A thing that bothers me about the Odyssey is that I can't really seek out historical anecdotes about the author or the original manuscript, for obvious reasons. However, I'd like to point out that some guys with too much time took a debatable detail in the Odyssey and pinpointed the day the Odysseus returns home and kills all the suitors. For the record, it's April 16, 1178 BCE. We are totally having a party on April 16, and I'm gonna serve Odyssey-themed food. It's going to be the best thing that ever happened.)

how the Literary Iditarod saved Christmas

2008-12-26T20:51:00.008-05:00

Ok, it's possible that the Literary Iditarod didn't save Christmas, and was in fact not related to Christmas in any way--save perhaps for the fact that I was able to read a lot of the Odyssey in three days off work. I'm on Book 18 (out of 24). Fiona's lagging a bit, but that's ok because I'm leaving tomorrow for the MLA Convention and I may fall behind a little with reading and blogging. I also have a copy of David Lodge's Small World, which was suggested to me by a Literary Person as something I should read before the MLA (I've avoided talking about my job on this blog because it is a personal blog and I don't want to, say, write something stupid or offensive that then, by association, reflects poorly on my place of work, or anything like that, but I have perhaps been remiss in not mentioning that I have the great good fortune to work with people who know a lot about literature, academia, and other topics similarly dear to my heart). Small World is the sequel to Changing Places, which I also have not read, and I hate reading a sequel without first having read its predecessor, but maybe for the sake of the Iditarod I should suck it up this time.

Anyway. So I'm excited about the MLA Convention (and staying in a nice hotel, you guys, I have stayed at a hotel-as-opposed-to-a-motel like twice in my life, it is going to be like a fancy vacation except for the part where I will be working the entire time), and with any luck I will learn Many Important Things about academia and English and so forth and then I will blog about them. (I was talking to my dad on the phone today, and he was like ...so you still want to be an English professor? Are you sure that's a good idea? Have you heard about this Recession thing? And I was like Dad, I got this, it's cool.) But it has been a slow week here at the Iditarod and it may be a slow next few days, depending on how things go. I'm counting on Fiona to pick up any slack.

Before turning to the Odyssey, I just want to thank all of you--both strangers and (mostly) friends--for the kind and thoughtful comments you've been leaving. While this blog is largely intended as a project just for the two of us, it's awesome that people are reading it, following it, and commenting. It keeps me on track, and it gives me stuff to think about. Thank you.

Also, my laptop just died there. For the third time tonight. Seriously, laptop? Dear Santa: Please bring me a shiny new MacBook to replace this temperamental and geriatric iBook (purchased used, on eBay, for $800, the summer before I started Reed, so... 2005). What's that? You say I was astoundingly naughty this year and I'm lucky you didn't just feed this laptop to Rudolph? Well... balls.

----

So on to the Odyssey. I think Clare has a point here: "The Odyssey is a just a romp, a story with an obvious goal, and in the end it's entirely, satisfactorily resolved. The Iliad is a political struggle and a great clash of human emotion, and nothing is all right in the end -- in fact, things are in many ways much worse than they began. It's poignant."

I can't argue with that. I sort of want to like the Iliad better, because it's more difficult and ultimately, almost inarguably, more meaningful. Hector dies, Achilles is going to die, the war is still dragging on for no clear reason... I mean, I wrote my thesis on Troilus and Cressida. How can I not like the Iliad better?

But the Odyssey is such a lark! Did you think the idea behind Bumfights was a recent one? Did you think it was just another sign of the decline of our modern society that people thought it would be hilarious to induce homeless men to engage in physical combat for the sake of paltry rewards? Because let me tell you, bum fights are at least as old as Homer. Check it out. In Book 18, Odysseus is back at his palace in Ithaca, but he's disguised as a beggar so he can see what's going on, scope out the situation with Penelope and her zillion suitors, maybe plot some horrific bloody revenge. No one but his son Telemachus knows who he is; they all just think he's this impoverished, hungry old geezer. So this actual tramp, Arnaeus--"Irus for short/ because he'd hustle messages at any beck and call" (18.8-9) (heh, Irus, get it?)--comes up and threatens Odysseus, because he doesn't want competition for any food that might be begged from the numerous wealthy suitors.

Irus and Odysseus begin trading insults, which the suitors think is hilarious:

And Antinous, that grand prince, hearing them wrangle,
broke into gloating laughter, calling out to the suitors,
"Friends, nothing like this has come our way before--
what sport some god has brought the palace now!
The stranger and Irus, look,
they'd battle it out together, fists flying.
Come, let's pit them against each other--fast!"

All leapt from their seats with whoops of laughter,
clustering round the pair of ragged beggars there
as Eupithes' son Antinous planned the contest.
"Quiet, my fine friends. Here's what I propose.
These goat sausages sizzling here in the fire--
we packed them with fat and blood to have for supper.
Now, whoever wins this bout and proves the stronger,
let that man step up and take his pick of the lot!
What's more, from this day on he feasts among us--
no other beggar will we allow inside
to cadge his meals from us!" (18.41-58)

Bum fights, you guys. Classy, right? Of course Odysseus wins--he's Odysseus, for one thing, and for another the plot requires him to be able to hang around with the suitors for a while longer. You kind of have to feel bad for the actual bum. But the point is, there's nothing heroic about this, nothing epic, nothing that says much about life and the way of the world (besides whatever you have deduced from learning that the idea of bum fights is thousands of years old). It's just silly, and ridiculous, and sort of a lot of fun to read.

It's also very, very different from the Iliad. Can you imagine the Iliad with bum fights? If anything is going to make you ruminate on whether "Homer" was just one man or two or more, this will do it.

----

On an unrelated note, I'm wondering about time in the Odyssey. It seems so malleable. Odysseus has been gone for twenty years, but his dog is still alive when he gets back. Just barely, mind you--the poor thing kicks it pretty much as soon as Odysseus shows up--but still. The scene is super sad:

Now, as they talked on, a dog that lay there
lifted up his muzzle, pricked his ears...
It was Argos, long-enduring Odysseus' dog
he trained as a puppy once, but little joy he got
since all too soon he shipped to sacred Troy.
In the old days young hunters loved to set him
coursing after the wild goats and deer and hares.
But now with his master gone he lawy there, castaway, [...]
Infested with ticks, half-dead from neglect,
here lay the hound, old Argos.
But the moment he sensed Odysseus standing by
he thumped his tail, nuzzling low, and his ears dropped,
though he had no strength to drag himself an inch
toward his master. [...]

But the dark shadow of death closed down on Argos' eyes
the instant he saw Odysseus, twenty years away. (17.317-333; 359-360)

That is ridiculously sad. Although not as sad as the Futurama episode in which Fry's dog dies waiting for him. That is the saddest dog-related story of all time, straight up. (Oh god, you should never look these things up on the Wikipedia or you may discover that they are based on things that actually happened and then you will be even more sad.)

Anyway, Hachikō waited ten years for his master before dying; Fry's dog waited twelve years. Odysseus' dog lived for twenty years. What is going on there? Do dogs ever even live that long? And that's just the start of it. Penelope is described as "looking for all the world like Artemis or golden Aphrodite" (17.37)--which is to say, crazy beautiful--despite the fact that she and Odysseus were married with a small child when he took off twenty years ago, so there's no way she can be much under 35, and she could easily be 40 or older. Which is no biggie these days (Christy Turlington is about to turn 40 and she is approximately one million times hotter than I will ever be), but I'm pretty sure that even 35 was right next door to dead in those days. And Helen is described as continuing to be the most beautiful woman that ever happened, though she must be at least Penelope's age. Meanwhile, Nestor is still alive--seriously how can Nestor still be alive, he is like Methusalah at this point, it is totally absurd--as is Odysseus' father Laertes, and Odysseus himself is still handsome and strong like ox although he was a grown man and already famous when he left Ithaca. And Telemachus, who must be in his early twenties by now, is still more or less a boy, too young and weak to tell those insolent suitors what's what.

Now I think the Odyssey is set in some sort of heroic age, which I vaguely remember from Hesiod, and I could maybe buy that people just lived longer then, like in the Bible. Google Books offers some useful excerpts from The Quest for Immortality: Science at the Frontiers of Aging, by Stuart Jay Olshansky and Bruce A. Carnes: "The imagery of an idyllic distant time in the past when people were forever young, followed by a progressive trend toward shorter lifespans driven by increasingly decadent lifestyles, is a classic Antediluvian theme" (45). They also say that some people believe that the preposterously long lives of early Biblical characters are meant to be metaphorical, a sort of representation of how important they were--and certainly crying metaphor would make this aspect of the Odyssey a lot easier to swallow.

In any case, it's never clear how this is supposed to work, and Athena has a habit of confusing things still further by making her favorite people look more impressive and attractive for special occasions; she does so, at various times, for Telemachus, Odysseus, and Penelope. (Circe does something similar, making Odysseus' men taller and more handsome to make up for having transformed them briefly into swine.) [Also: to get Penelope extra gorgeous so she can have particular power over her suitors, Athena "made her taller, fuller in form to all men's eyes,/ her skin whiter than ivory freshly carved..." (17.222-23); uh, in case you were wondering, tall, curvy, pale women are all the rage. I missed my era.)

Does anyone have any thoughts about this nebulous depiction of time and age? I want to borrow someone's JSTOR privileges, or maybe visit the Library of Congress, so I can find out what the scholars have to say about it. It's probably something simple and obvious and I just have rocks for brains. I think my desire for everything to be completely literal and logical is hurting me here: the gods are hanging around messing with stuff all the time, Odysseus is held captive by nymphs and a Cyclops, Poseidon turns a boat and all its sailors into a rock to punish the Phaeacians, Odysseus hangs out with a bunch of ghosts in the Kingdom of the Dead, and I'm bothered by the fact that people are staying young for a long time? (I'm also bothered by the fact that Odysseus allowed his men to kill and eat the Cattle of the Sun! After both Tiresias and Circe made it one hundred percent clear that only badness would result! I know, ok, he was outnumbered and then he fell asleep, but couldn't he have told them that two very reliable sources said they would all die if they ate the damn cattle?! Oh my god, you people and your poor life choices, it pains me so much.)

----

The other thing I wanted to talk about was the lifespan of certain Greek myths. People in the Odyssey keep referring to, say, Oedipus and Orestes, and I think oh yeah, Sophocles, Aeschylus--and then I remember that Theban plays and the Oresteia wouldn't be written for hundreds of years yet. Tantalus and Sisyphus show up too; they won't make their appearances in the Metamorphoses for another, what, eight centuries or so, but they'll show up from time to time in the intervening years. There are so many figures here who pop up repeatedly in Greek and then Roman works. They sure loved to repeat their stories. I want to talk about this more, maybe look into it, but I have been writing this post for over two hours now--how is that possible?!--and I haven't even packed for the MLA and I'm leaving in the morning.

omnia mea mecum porto

2008-12-22T15:28:00.004-05:00

OK, first of all I want to say that I think Virginia Heffernan's review of Sarah Vowell's book was monumentally unfair, mostly because she seems to have a problem with Sarah Vowell's personality even more than her writing, and because she criticizes Vowell for things that ... don't make sense. Witness:

Vowell’s whole alt-everything vibe is just dated enough to be cringey. And then there’s her Great Plains accent: can something so wholesome-soundin’ be real? And her politics. Perfectly early-millennium coastal (green, be good, Obama, etc.). Can she really take pleasure in plumping for an autofill ideology that’s so widely shared?

In other words, "I am writing for the New York Times, and I get really annoyed when people are pro-Obama. Also, those people with accents. They really piss me off."

If the above paragraph makes no sense, read Serena's last entry. All will be revealed. She also links to the review.

Anyway, back to The Odyssey. It is something of a domestic epic, but that's why I prefer it to The Iliad, I think. It's like the longest white-text in the world.* But the where-are-they-now is an essential part of the epic. There are a lot of homages to the Odyssey -- some are respectable and some aren't -- but The Odyssey itself is an awful lot of "Hey, I wonder what happened to Helen and Menelaus AFTER THEY GOT HOME!"

And the truth is, I wondered! So thanks, Homer. You are way more awesome than that woman who wrote the sequel to Gone With the Wind.

All right, but really. Why is Odysseus, who of course matters in The Iliad but is hardly the main event, interesting enough to warrant his own spinoff?

It's because he's the only hero "regular people" can cotton to. The readers don't have god given invincibility, we're not launching any ships with our faces, and we don't have any prophetic powers. But everyone can believe they're clever (even if it's not true), and Odysseus' cleverness and tenacity allows him to endure an entire epic's worth of trials. And he's always just wanted to be home with his wife in Ithaca. There's a drive to stay in and later to return to his normal life that's immensely endearing, especially for people trapped in the details of the day-to-day. Quotidian doesn't look so bad when the alternative is fighting off cyclopes.

Also, this is very silly, but as a 22-year-old without any real long-term goals decided on, I look at The Odyssey and I think: HEY, he has a goal! Look at what you can achieve when you know what you want! I just need a goal!

Then the music swells. It's a pretty good time.

*"White-text" apparently doesn't have a Wikipedia entry, so I'm pretty sure I made it up, but I mean the little addendums to biopics, when they have white text on a black screen saying "Richard Nixon never left his house again. In 1978 he published his 1,000 page autobiography." Know what I mean? Well now you have something to call it too. If that's the kind of thing people talk about. Oh god, forget I said anything.

There is chaos under my blog, and the situation is excellent.

2008-12-21T22:03:00.011-05:00

Fiona and I have discussed the fact that our target audience here is basically... my mother. Except I think her computer is broken. And possibly Fiona's little brother because I understand he spends a lot of time online. My boss assures me that he reads it too--very comforting--but really, the idea behind the Literary Iditarod essentially guarantees that no one will read it. Most people, I would guess, have not read the books we're reading, or maybe read them for a high school class that they'd rather forget. The few who have read most of these books are likely already to know a lot more about them than we do, and therefore to find our observations trivial and boring.

Mostly I feel ok about no one reading our blog. I did feel a little bit worse when I read this review of The Wordy Shipmates. In fairness, at times that book was--okay--annoying, but the review was harsher than I felt was really warranted. "With all these middlebrow historians making scholarly work perfectly accessible," Virginia Heffernan writes, "do we really need still more accessibility — pierced-brow history, maybe, with TV and pop-music references?"

Ouch.

Another burn: "Vowell, who constantly emphasizes how nerdy (meaning impressive) she finds her own interest in the Puritans, introduces figures like John Winthrop and Roger Williams as if no one’s ever heard of them."

All right, I'm just going to own this one right here and now: I didn't know who they were before I read The Wordy Shipmates. Admittedly, I dropped out of high school after a year, and got two years of what should've been my high school education at decidedly mediocre Irish schools, so my knowledge of American history is... well... there's not a lot of it--but I'm not the most ignorant person there ever was, and I didn't know the first thing about Winthrop and Williams. It seems unlikely, moreover, that I would've been inspired to pick up a book about them if Fiona hadn't spoken so highly of Sarah Vowell. Just because something has been made accessible doesn't mean it's appealing.

Anyway. I digress. Heffernan's point is that, if you really want to learn about the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Vowell is maybe not your best bet. And of course if you really want to learn about Western lit classics, we are not your best bet. Which is fine, since that's not so much the point of the Literary Iditarod. But part of the point of the Iditarod is to make silly comments about great works, which is sort of the Sarah Vowell model. I can see why Heffernan is irritated about that--there's a lot more to say about the Massachussetts Bay Colony (/Homer), and you shouldn't have to have basic history (/literature) fed to you with a spoon. But isn't there room for both highbrow scholarship and lightweight books (/blogs)? I think it can be helpful to have a wide range of viewpoints and contexts; we can't all be David McCullough (/...Clifford Geertz?).

The Iditarod is also largely extraneous to one of its other ostensible raisons d'être: preparing me for the lit GRE. Most of the advice I see about it says buy the Princeton Review guide, maybe buy a Norton anthology or two, and cram. And that's more than reasonable--having seen some sample questions in my study book, well... I need not have skimmed a word of Hawthorne (and I haven't, yet) to be able to name Hester Prynne, and all the epic poetry I can read will never tell me that it was Maya Angelou who worked as a streetcar conductor and also as a prostitute (nor will it tell you that my mom used to date her son, Guy Johnson; I hope that's on the test).

I feel like I should do the reading, though, or at least as much of it as I can. And I enjoy it. So maybe there's no real reason for you to read our blog or for us to write it (especially Fiona--she doesn't even want to go to grad school!).

But if you are reading our blog and you have read Homer, I'd love to hear your thoughts about the Odyssey versus the Iliad. I'm finding the Odyssey so much more readable, to the point where I've flipped ahead a few times at tense points to see when things will be resolved. It's gripping! I want to know how things go down!* I'm sure some of that has to do with Lattimore vs. Fagles, but is some just a difference in the books themselves? David says that "a lot more happens in the Odyssey," but he's only read the condensed version, too, so I'm not sure I can trust his opinion. Is the Odyssey intrinsically more interesting? Is Fagles just way, way easier (I mean, he definitely is)? Knox writes,

One ancient critic, the author of the treatise On the Sublime, thought that the Odyssey was the product of Homer's old age, of "a mind in decline; it was a work that could be compared to the setting sun--the size remained, without the force." ...What prompted his comment "without the force" is clearly his preference for the sustained heroic level of the Iliad over what he terms the Odyssey's presentation of "the fabulous and incredible" as well as the realistic description of life in the farms and palace of Odysseus' domain, which, he says, "forms a kind of comedy of manners." (23)

Maybe I just like the comedy of manners stuff... the Iliad's gory battle scenes got a little repetitive for me. (Although when it comes to gore, the Odyssey maybe tops its predecessor; I was going to quote from the scene where Odysseus gouges out Polyphemus' eye, but then I realized that I don't even want to read it again, let alone commit it to print. Eye-gouging is always bad, no matter whose they are... Oedipus', Gloucester's, Polyphemus'... it's always gross and I always feel sick. Why you gotta gouge out so many eyes, Great Authors?) One of the things that keeps the Odyssey interesting is the huge variety of settings, characters, and events.

So did you like the Iliad better or the Odyssey? Why? And which are your favorite translations?

I wanted to make a more Odyssey-centric post, but I guess I got sidetracked. So further Odyssey to come.

-----------------

*Even though Homer basically tells you everything at the outset:

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,
many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,
fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.
But he could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove--
the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,
the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun
and the Sungod wiped from sight the day of their return. [...]
But one man alone...
his heart set on his wife and his return--
Calypso, the bewitching nymph, the lustrous goddess, held him back,
deep in her arching caverns, craving him for a husband.
But then, when the wheeling seasons brought the year around,
that year spun out by the gods when he should reach his home,
Ithaca--though not even there would he be free of trials,
even among his loved ones--then every god took pity,
all except Poseidon. He raged on, seething against
the great Odysseus till he reached his native land. (ll. 1.1-10, 15-24)

Geez, Homer, way to give away like the entire plot. It's cool. I didn't want any suspense anyway. But really, not even a "spoiler alert" or anything?

I read the news today, oh boy

2008-12-19T18:26:00.000-05:00

I have been reading (and very much enjoying) the Odyssey all week--next to Lattimore, Fagles reads like Beatrix Potter, so it's been easy and fun. But I have been thinking more about grad school, so that's going to be the substance of this post.

I've mentioned that I feel like I don't know much about grad school, and academia in general. I do know that I am getting myself into something very intimidating, which is a large part of why I have been putting it off for so long. There are no jobs for English Ph.D's! What English jobs exist are given to adjuncts! But don't hesitate--the longer you wait to get your Ph.D, the harder it will be to snag one of the three remaining jobs!

It just seems like such hubris to say, I am good enough to do this. I have the talent, the work ethic, the sheer luck it would take to make it past all of these obstacles and land a tenure-track job at a good school.

There's a long-standing joke at Reed that every student thinks he or she is the one who is secretly not smart enough to be there. The durability and the ring of truth to this joke are such that one year's orientation t-shirts read something like, "You are not an Admissions mistake."

I never felt like an Admissions mistake, exactly--my test scores and my post-high school grades were such that I figured it made sense for me to be there, and I never thought I was stupid or anything like that. But I did frequently feel outclassed: I didn't make it past a year at my lousy public high school, and here were all these kids who'd already read Hawthorne and Dickens and Virgil (in Latin!), who'd already heard of Derrida and Foucault, who knew what postmodernism was or could at least convince you that they did. What had I been doing all these years, I wondered. Look, my high school was going to allow me to take AP English as a sophomore (the only student for whom they'd ever made such an exception), but I gave up on trying to do the summer reading because I was bored by Huckleberry Finn. Either I was the epitome of wasted potential or people just kept thinking I was smarter than I am.

To a certain extent, my obvious inferiority was a boon. I worked all day, every day in a fever of terror, convinced both that I was at a serious disadvantage and that everyone else was studying even harder. I was at something of a disadvantage, having arrived at Reed as a junior with less education than many freshmen, but the panic induced by this awareness served me rather well. By the time I realized that I was achieving more than I'd anticipated (I would have been delighted, at first, to find myself in the middle of the class, as long as I was even passing), I was accustomed to making school my entire life, and by then it didn't seem like so big a sacrifice.

In any case. Although I think they appreciated my earnestness and dedication, I don't think my professors were grading me out of pity or because they knew I was trying; I must have been producing good work. And Ph.D preparation is a constitutive element of Reed as an institution (check out the statistics on female Reed grads obtaining Ph.D's in English lit). All of which is to say: Reed is good at preparing people to earn Ph.D's; I was good at Reed; therefore I would probably do well at earning a Ph.D.

Should that be comforting? It's not really comforting. The entire process--GRE to applications to acceptance to dissertation to job searches to tenure-track positions to actually earning tenure and being a good professor--seems impossibly complex and overwhelming. I must be crazy to entertain such an idea.

Of course, earning a Ph.D. needn't entail becoming a professor. Before I got my current job, I spent a number of months as an intern at a publishing company. My boss there--another Reed graduate, who'd even had the same thesis advisor--had a Ph.D from an excellent large public, but had decided not to go into academia. She said that her English doctorate served her very well in the publishing world, allowing her to skip immediately into the higher echelons and avoid years of working her way up. Given the choice between spending my time getting a Ph.D and spending it attempting to work my way up in a company or industry, I think I'd prefer the Ph.D: I really love school and I do well there; I don't want an advanced degree solely for the purpose of getting a particular job.

In a way, though, even that is terrifying. Getting an English degree for the sake of it? That just seems so impractical, almost laughable.

I mean, I would like to be a professor. I think? I loved Reed, I love literature and language, I love learning new things, I love being surrounded by people who are intelligent and curious, I even love having crazy deadlines and way too much to do. So it makes sense to go into academia... sort of... right?

BREAKING NEWS: Young white woman with English degree from small liberal arts college isn't sure what to do with her life; contemplates graduate school, feels inadequate; writes boring blog post detailing all her neuroses and self-doubt. STORY AT ELEVEN. Also: World Leaders React.

"I'm mad about you, my little shoplifter"

2008-12-18T21:19:00.006-05:00

For a high-seas adventure, The Odyssey is awfully domestic. When I last read it — eight years ago. Jesus I'm old — I thought of it as a great love story. He struggles for ten years to get home! She waits for ten years post-war, when she has no reason to believe he's alive! Also she manages not to kill Telemachus, which I would have. I'm sure it was hard for him to grow up without a father (those guys tend to be maladjusted in myth, see Phaeton), but he's just the most detestable little jerk and so disrespectful to his mother.

Serena said she didn't think Odysseus deserved Penelope, since he had so many dalliances on the way home. And it's true I suppose, but I still love them. They're both so crafty! If they were in a 1930s movie they'd be jewel thieves and they'd deceive everybody and at the very end he'd come home with the loot. Of course, in my ideal update, Odyssey (directed by Ernst Lubitsch, of course), the dialogue when he finally, finally comes home after 20 years goes something like:

Penelope: "What took you so long?"
Odysseus: "Traffic was a bitch."

OK, it's a little crude for Lubitsch. Shh.

Side note: Samuel Butler, author of The Way of All Flesh and one translator of The Odyssey, decided that the epic was written by a woman, because:

Men seem unable to draw women at all without either laughing at them or caricaturing them; and so, perhaps, a woman never draws a man so felicitously as when she is making him ridiculous. If she means to make him so she is certain to succeed; if she does not mean it she will succeed more surely still. Either sex, in fact, can caricature the other delightfully, and certainly no writer has ever shown more completely than the writer of the "Odyssey" has done that, next to the glorification of woman, she considers man's little ways and weaknesses to be the fittest theme on which her genius can be displayed. But I doubt whether any writer in the whole range of literature (excepting, I suppose, Shakespeare) has succeeded in drawing a full length, life-sized, serious portrait of a member of the sex opposite to the writer's own.

There will be more about this when I've read more. Fear not.

We had my camera on the train. Whoops.

2008-12-18T01:09:00.007-05:00

Because sometimes you have to stop reading The Odyssey on the Metro so you can annoy the other people on the train by taking pictures and giggling loudly.

Sometimes Serena hides behind her book and looks angry, but really it symbolizes how Odysseus hid behind his beggarly disguise near the end.

And then when I hit myself in the face with the book, which is what's happening here, you see, it means "oh, the trials of man, they continue to hit me in the metaphorical face...with their...poignancy and their hard covers."

Serena searches the Metro tunnel for monsters (just in case).

The Metro ride was approximately 10 years long but I did not anger any gods or kill any Cyclops, so I am ahead of Odysseus already.

he blinded me with library science!

2008-12-15T22:46:00.003-05:00

Here we have Homer's Odyssey as translated by the celebrated Robert Fagles, who died this past March. He was the Arthur Marks '19 Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at Princeton University, where he had taught since 1960. (Wow.)

This is the 1996 Penguin Classics edition, with an introduction and notes by Bernard Knox--another well-known classicist, who taught at Yale for many years--who also did the intro for Fagles' Iliad and three Theban plays. I chose the Fagles on purpose--but let me backtrack for a moment.

It is something of a detour (heh) to read the Odyssey after Beowulf. We have a couple of reasons for this slight change of plans. After learning that the GRE would have more than just the English-language classics on it, we decided to add some Greeks to our list, things that either I hadn't read for Hum110 or have since grown fuzzy on (I have got to reread the Oresteia--I can never remember what happens in which part). The Odyssey, in fairness, I probably don't need to read; I have read and studied the Iliad, after all, and I'm very familiar with the story; we even read the condensed version in high school.

But then... we read the condensed version in high school. They gave Homer the Reader's Digest treatment. It just doesn't seem right! I don't want to live my life with the secret shame of never having read the real thing. In any case, I really wanted to read a Fagles translation, because as I mentioned before, we read the Lattimore for Hum110, and a lot of the geekier classics-heads were pretty irked that we read him instead of Fagles. (But Lattimore was PBK, which is a fun thing.) So I wanted to know what I was missing.

I haven't gotten very far in yet, so I'm not sure how I feel. I know I don't feel very good, though, about something Knox mentions in the introduction. He says that Fagles' Iliad ends with, "And so the Trojans buried Hector breaker of horses" (24.944). If I recall correctly (I think I do), Lattimore's ends with, "Such was the funeral of Hector, breaker of horses." Fiona says that she believes Greek to be a very active language, and maybe Fagles' translation is more accurate. Which is altogether possible; Lattimore, of course, does his best to approximate the poem's original meter (Oliver Taplin, in this 1990 review of Fagles' Iliad, says that Lattimore chose a "long, free six-beat line"), but he has also gotten a lot of praise for sticking closely to the text's original meaning. Fagles--says Taplin--uses between three and seven beats per line, but usually six. A more relaxed meter might allow him to translate more directly, but really I'm just speculating.

In any case. Fagles is very famous, and I've read Lattimore, so it's Fagles' Odyssey we're reading. I really loved Knox's introduction, and I want to share three exciting things that I learned from it:

1. The Odyssey, of course, is in dactylic hexameter, as are the Iliad and the Aeneid. Hexameter means six metrical units, obviously; Knox informs me that a dactyl is "a long plus two shorts" and spondees are "two longs." (Boring, but it's good to know about meter.) But! What I didn't know is that, "The syllables are literally long and short; the meter is based on pronunciation time, not, as in our language, on stress" (12). I guess that's something I should have known by now; I'm sure we must have discussed it in class. But as an English major--and one who focused on Shakespeare!--I never so much as entertained the notion of a metrical style based on something other than stresses. Exciting times, guys.

2. This is... this is kind of the best thing ever. In a discussion of whether Homer would have composed his works as oral poetry or in writing, Knox says,

We do not know when papyrus, the paper of the ancient world, was first available in Greece, though we do know that it came at first not from its almost exclusive source, Egypt--which was not opened to Greek merchants until the sixth century B.C.--but from the Phoenician port the Greeks called Byblos (the Greek word for book was biblion--our "Bible"). 21

Guys. That is awesome. Dictionary.com tells the same story, but I would never have known if Knox hadn't told me. It also explains what libros are doing in the biblioteca. Oh, Bernard Knox, you blinded me with library science.

3. One more. Just one. On the subject of pirates, Knox mentions that "the young Julius Caesar was captured by pirates near the small island of Pharmacusa off the Ionian coast and held for ransom" (29). Caesar? Pirates? Ransom? Someone make a musical out of this! Or at least a bad Johnny Depp vehicle.

Beowulf and Religion; or, Ireland Makes Me Giggle

2008-12-13T00:54:00.009-05:00

Leigh, a friend of mine from Reed, ended up making a blog post about religion in Beowulf. He was a classics major, so you should almost significantly give significantly more weight to his words than mine on any issues pertaining to ancient texts (also comic books). Leigh writes,

The situation is strikingly similar to Homer, where we have a text that doesn’t have a lot of precedents but also obviously describes situations considerably earlier than itself. It makes dating the thing, or even isolating and dating the various layers within it, almost impossible, but maybe what’s interesting for your purposes is that it represents a literate Christian scribe (or series of scribes) trying to make sense of an illiterate pagan society (and possibly working from an oral text, or group of texts, that he’s received).

He goes on to discuss the various reasons that religion, which comes up so frequently in Beowulf, might have ended up being portrayed in such a nebulous and paradoxical fashion, but the two main theories are basically as outlined above: either you have a Christian author imposing his own sort of order on his depiction of what he knows was a very different society, or you have a Christian editor sticking some pious bits into an older text.

Thomas D. Hill (who has been teaching English at Cornell since 1967!), in his essay "The Christian Language and Theme of Beowulf,"* offers a slightly different take. Essentially, he sees the author as a Christian who admired the pagan heroes of myth and had "tolerance and respect for the past" (213), as opposed to, say, Alcuin, who wrote, "The Heavenly King does not wish to have communion with pagan and forgotten kings... for the eternal King reigns in Heaven, while the forgotten pagan king wails in Hell" (Norton p. 91, from Donald A. Bullough's 1993 translation). The point being that a lot of Christian scholars of that era did not look kindly on their pagan predecessors, however admirable or legendary, but the Beowulf-poet, argues Hill, was different. He "was willing to question the authority of what must have been the majority opinion of the church of his time" (210). (Hill mentions that other critics have tended instead to argue either that the Beowulf-poet simply wasn't particularly concerned with theological consistency or that he accepted that his heroes would be doomed to Hell.)

And now some lengthier quotes, because I think that Hill offers a very useful way to understand the poem's theology, but it's 2am and I don't trust myself to give a halfway-decent summary of anything he says:

...[I]t seems to me that the most consistent way to read the poem as we have it is to assume that the Beowulf-poet had thought long and hard about the problem and had arrived at (or had been taught) an essentially "humanistic" reading of his forefathers' paganism. He seems to have believed that the best and greatest of these men knew about God, creation, and natural moral law, and that when they died their souls went to heaven. ...
...Beowulf is a remarkably consistent text in that the religious language of the poem reflects the religious knowledge of those patriarchs who lived before the covenants and the creation of Israel. It is useful to have a term to define the religion of Beowulf, Hrothgar, and the good Germanic heroes in the poem and I would suggest that we define them as Noachites, that is, as gentiles who share the religious heritage and knowledge of Noah and his sons without having access to the revealed knowledge of God which was granted to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.... (202)

As for the bit about idol-worship and not knowing God, well, Hill argues that it doesn't match anything else in the text and can simply be deemed corrupt; either "someone else added that passage" or "the Beowulf-poet forgot for a moment to maintain the careful balance which he maintains elsewhere in the poem" (204); Hill seems to lean pretty heavily toward the former explanation. The latter is funnier, though.

Then, of course, you have the whole problem of the fact that Beowulf and his buddies worship just the one God who seems to have a whole awful lot in common with the Christian God, whereas

the pre-Christian Germanic peoples were in fact pagans who worshipped a number of different gods and there is no historical evidence that any of these peoples anticipated the distinctive Judeo-Christian God, who created the heavens and the earth (Beowulf lines 90-98 and who governs the course of history (Beowulf lines 696-702). (205)

Hill deals with this with the same idea that Leigh mentioned, that of a Christian scribe/author who, despite having a fairly firm grasp on religious history, chooses to order his fictional world in a manner he finds more palatable or more comfortable.

Hill offers a couple of examples from Old Irish and Old Norse-Icelandic literature to show how other early Christian authors dealt with the problem of having legendary heroes who happened to be pagans. Not wanting to imagine their heroes burning in hell, these authors evidently thought it would be ok for pagans--if they were exceptionally awesome--to go to Heaven, so they strained credibility and theology to make this possible. This is the best example, by far:

Thus in the death tale of Conchobar, Conchobar is wounded (the solidified brain of a slain enemy is embedded in his skull) and only partially healed--any excitement will kill him. He remains seven years in this parlous state until he is told of the passion of Jesus, leaps up to lead an onslaught of the Ulstermen to avenge this crime, and dies as an Irish martyr to the faith. (207)

THAT IS TOTALLY SWEET. Did you just read that part? He had a solified brain! In his brain! Also... what??

Hill takes the story from Ancient Irish Tales (1969), by Tom Peete Cross and Clark Harris Slover, which I should clearly track down and read because I am utterly enamored of the beautiful logic of that story. And apparently Cu Chulainn's salvation was arranged via similarly improbable happenstance.

This is going to have to end my discussion of religion in Beowulf, and indeed Beowulf itself, because I have already started reading Bernard Knox's introduction to the Fagles translation of the Odyssey. Don't be sad. Fiona still has one more Beowulf post to make, and also I am learning some amazing things from the Knox introduction. For real.

But--while we're on the topic of things that are both Irish and hilariously entertaining--I want to take a very brief detour back to the Heaney introduction, from which I learned this thing that I forgot to share with you. In a discussion of language and why he chose to translate Beowulf into, of all things, an old Ulster dialect, Heaney happens to mention that "the word 'whiskey' is the same word as the Irish and Scots Gaelic word uisce, meaning water" (xxxiv).

Explains a lot, doesn't it?

------------------------------------------------
*All criticism I have cited, up till and including Hill, has been taken from the previously-mentioned Norton edition. I have used page numbers (usually marked with p. or pp.) when citing criticism from the book and line numbers (usually marked with l. or ll.) when citing the poem itself; I hope this system makes sense to you. I'll try to be consistent with it.

"We don't want any adventures here, thank you!"

2008-12-13T00:48:00.005-05:00

The time has come (the walrus said) to talk of Tolkien and Beowulf.

Tolkien was a Beowulf scholar, and he delivered a famous lecture ("The Monsters and the Critics") that called for an examination of Beowulf as poetry, as story rather than artifact. After all, its reliability as a historical document has to be questionable. Sure, it didn't survive all those centuries because of any perceived literary merit -- it was just luck -- but to Tolkien, "there is not much poetry in the world like this." And thus he changed Beowulf scholarship forever. Now we approach it as poetry, not solely as a record of the stories told in the eleventh century, or the funeral practices, or the geography of Scandinavia. Yes, we study it because it's all we have. If dozens of Old English epics survived, maybe we'd study "The Lay of Brainless Bartholemew" or something. But that alone doesn't mean Beowulf is worthless as literature.

ANYWAY, so Tolkien was the most influential Beowulf scholar who ever lived. But as a person who grew up inundated with The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (my mother had read both out loud to me and my brother at least twice by the time I was eight), I'm much more interested in what the Titanic did to the iceberg.

After all, reading Beowulf, it's hard not to see the obvious. Beowulf's dragon is awoken when a hapless slave steals a gold-plated cup from his hoard. The dragon, enraged, flies around setting fire to things and generally laying waste and terrorizing the countryside. The Hobbit (of which, unfortunately, I don't have a copy to hand) duplicates this almost exactly ... Bilbo Baggins sneaks up on the dragon Smaug and steals a large gold cup. When Smaug realizes that the cup is gone, he blames the townsfolk who nest at the base of his mountain and starts flaming houses. Of course, Tolkien's dragon is writ larger. In Beowulf, the dragon lives in a "barrow" -- basically a little mound. I like imagining a tiny, cute dragon that belches little smoke puffs. Smaug has an entire mountain, and his stomach is nearly invincible because it is MADE OF TREASURE.

It makes sense that The Hobbit would have smatterings of Beowulf. Tolkien began The Hobbit as a bedtime story for his kids, so why not borrow a little from the Old English poem he was an expert on? It's not like the kids were going to call foul. Then when it gets published it just looks like masterful allusion. Everybody wins. Oh, Tolkien, you crafty man.

In countless other little ways, Beowulf influences Tolkien's sagas of Middle Earth. Even the word 'orc' is derived from 'orc-neas,' a term appearing in Beowulf that Heaney translates as "evil phantoms" (ll. 112). In fact, Old English massively influenced the names and languages Tolkien used in Middle-Earth (my favorite? The characters Eomer and Froda, of Beowulf. Also, did you know that Frodo was originally named Bingo? Heh.)

Is there a point to all this? Um ... Tolkien said he was trying to create a "mythology for England," which puzzled me because England has plenty of mythology, from Arthur to Robin Hood. Problem is, none of these stories is as bad-ass as Beowulf. Even the Round Table doesn't have the same primitive Viking brotherhood vibe that Tolkien so clearly craved and so painstakingly recreated in his own work. Reading Beowulf makes the Lord of the Rings seem almost like fanfiction. The best fanfiction ever written, but still. I bet Tolkien would have participated in Beowulf LARPs if they'd existed at Oxford.

goodnight, sweet ring-giver

2008-12-11T00:00:00.004-05:00

So yes, I will write that post about Beowulf and Tolkien one of these days, but for now what's on my mind is Hamlet.

Surely not. Beowulf doesn't wear black. Beowulf is the supreme embodiment of strength and will. Beowulf ripped off Grendel's arm with his bare hands, for god's sake, and Hamlet can't even decide whether he wants his cornflakes in the morning.

It's the transience of the drama that strikes me. One of my favorite things about Hamlet has always been the very end, which most productions omit. My geopolitical context, let me show you it. Or rather, let me cut it because I'm afraid some of our more venerable audience members might not make it out alive if we force them to remain seated for one. more. moment.

ANYWAY, the end of Hamlet. We've been so focused on this dysfunctional family for three hours -- who's incestuous, who murdered who, why the hell the aide-de-camp who described Ophelia's half hour floating time before she slowly drowned didn't just PULL HER OUT OF THE POND -- and finally the bloody denouement comes. Everyone we care about is dead, but Shakespeare didn't forget that Denmark was a kingdom, and that when the royal family goes and implodes, someone is going to come in and take over. This whole ridiculous incident was just a blip on the Northern European radar screen. Dynasties come and go. The prince of Norway marches in after beating the crap out of Poland, sees that everyone's dead, and decides that it's time to be king.

I guess it always surprised me that in something so epic, so tragic, so heightened, the final message is basically "Life goes on."

Beowulf is the same ... the final scene in which Beowulf's body is burned has such grandeur:

On a height they kindled the hugest of all
funeral fires; fumes of woodsmoke
billowed darkly up, the blaze roared
and drowned out their weeping, wind died down
and flames wrought havoc in the hot bone-house,
burning it to the core. (ll. 3143-3148)

But immediately after:

A Geat woman too sang out in grief;
with hair bound up, she unburdened herself
of her worst fears, a wild litany
of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,
enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,
slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke. (ll. 3150-3155)

Beowulf's reign is over and someone else is going to come in and take over. It makes the whole story seem smaller, more personal. And yeah, Beowulf is primitive literature, but you go write an intimate epic and bring it back in your pocket and show it to me. Yeah, some anonymous poet from the 10th century (or thereabouts) just owned you.

I'm Captain Evil (and I'm General Disarray!)

2008-12-10T00:02:00.019-05:00

Aaah! I had intended for this to be a longer and more thought-out entry, but I got caught up doing Actual Work and now it is already midnight. I should really give it up and go to bed, but I just finished this Tolkien paper, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" (of which Wikipedia has a brief but accurate summary) and I wanted to mention a few things it brought to mind. Curse you, Norton Critical Editions, you and your large samplings of interesting and relevant critical material. Whatever. I'll sleep through the musical we're seeing tomorrow. (The plot summary of which reminds me of two different novels I read recently, and oh god, I'm already going off on tangents.)

Anyway. Tolkien. (I'll leave the LOTR angle to Fiona, since it's not my department.)

He discusses Beowulf in the context of its inevitable companions, the Aeneid and the Odyssey (apparently Beowulf used to be known as "the Beowulf"!); he considers the former a more appropriate counterpart, although he demurs on the question of whether Beowulf's author had read Virgil (I don't know if this question has been resolved since 1936, and if so, what the answer is; I'll investigate further):

There is, of course, a likeness in places between these greater and smaller things, the Aeneid and Beowulf, if they are read in conjunction. But the smaller points in which imitation or reminiscence might be perceived are inconclusive, while the real likeness is deeper and due to certain qualities in the authors independent of the question whether the Anglo-Saxon had read Virgil or not.... We have the great pagan on the threshold of the change of the world; and the great (if lesser) Christian just over the threshold of the great change in his time and place.... (p. 120).

In a footnote, Tolkien adds

In fact the real resemblance of the Aeneid and Beowulf lies in the constant presence of a sense of many-storied antiquity, together with its natural accompaniment, stern and noble melancholy. In this they are really akin and together differ from Homer's flatter, if more glittering, surface. (p. 120)

Ooh, burn. Seriously though, I did think of the Aeneid much more frequently than the Iliad (I haven't read the Odyssey yet, ok) while I was reading Beowulf, but I wasn't sure how much of that was because I read the Mandelbaum translation of the Aeneid and the Lattimore translation of the Iliad (mah hexameter, let me show u it). Lattimore's Iliad is very formal, whereas Mandelbaum's Aeneid and Heaney's Beowulf, neither of which attempts rigorously to adhere to the meter of its original, share -- perhaps partly as a result -- an immediacy and intensity that Lattimore's Iliad lacks. Since I have no Greek nor Latin nor Old English, I can't be sure which of all these qualities result from the poems as written and which are a consequence of their various translations. Tolkien's jab at "Homer's flatter, if more glittering, surface" would hint that at least some of this difference is inherent to the originals, but I just don't know.

One aspect of Beowulf that did remind me of Homer was the epithets, but oh, SO MUCH BETTER. If you thought "Hector, breaker of horses" was a pretty sweet moniker, how about Grendel, "captain of evil" (l. 749)? And while we're on the topic of exciting nomenclature, let's not forget the line where Beowulf describes his sword as a "sharp-honed, wave-sheened wonderblade" (l. 1490). (Hey, baby... wanna see my wonderblade?)

Beowulf also contains my new favorite example of serious understatement. When Grendel is fighting Beowulf in Heorot, the hall where he (Grendel) has been murdering people every night for the past twelve years or so, Grendel begins to realize that he is losing: "The latching power/ in his fingers weakened; it was the worst trip/ the terror-monger had taken to Heorot" (ll. 763-65).

Yeah, the worst trip for sure. You know. The one where Beowulf rips off his arm, which injury shortly results in his agonizing death. Look, you guys, it was definitely way worse than those other trips where he just killed and ate a bunch of people and stuffed their remains into his dragon-skin pouch [Per Beowulf: "I had done no wrong, yet the raging demon/ wanted to cram me and many another/ into this bag" (ll. 2089-91)].

Oh dear. I have a lot else to say about Tolkien and Christianity and epithets and kennings (shield-clash! wave-vat! neck-ring! hate-honed! hall-roofing! bone-house!), but somehow I have been writing this post for well over an hour. More soon.

Daniel Donoghue: Academia and Guys Named Joe

2008-12-08T12:04:00.028-05:00

I don't know a lot about academia. Before I went to Reed, the idea of going to graduate school had never even occurred to me. For that matter, the thought of getting my BA from a reasonably reputable institution hadn't occurred to me either (thanks, Mom). Now I'm scrambling to find out all the things about graduate education that it seems like everyone else already knows.

One thing I've noticed is that academia is definitely something of a guy-named-Joe situation. This is like what happens when you start dating a guy named Joe: suddenly you realize that half the people you meet are named Joe, and you'd never noticed it before. Similarly, once you become aware of the existence of some scholar, you see his name everywhere. There's nothing remarkable about this, I suppose--it's just a matter of paying attention to something that hadn't been on your radar before. But I was struck by the coincidence of happening to see this article immediately after I'd finished reading the Beowulf edited by Daniel Donoghue.

I am given to understand that, when considering graduate schools, it's important to know where various scholars are. So I'm going to try to start thinking about who's who in English academia.

Daniel Donoghue is a professor of medieval English studies at Harvard; he's also a "director of undergraduate studies," though I'm not sure just what that entails. His interests, per his faculty page, include "Old English and early Middle English literature; early historiography; the history of the English language; metrics and syntax; medievalism – or the reception of the Middle Ages today." He has written a book called Old English Literature: A Short Introduction and one entitled Lady Godiva: A Literary History of the Legend. He's the editor of Year's Work in Old English Studies. I also found this article in Harvard Magazine, entitled "Beowulf in the Yard."

I wish I could see where he went to school--it's good to keep track of these sorts of things--but I don't see a CV among these Google results. Oh well.

It's very unlikely that I will ever need to know any of these things about Daniel Donoghue. But it can't hurt to start somewhere, and perhaps these baby steps will help me overcome my terror of grad school.

historical anecdotes are my calling, it seems

2008-12-07T21:47:00.005-05:00

This is what our friend Clare's cat, Shark, thinks of Beowulf. Perhaps it is because he is a monster of the deep, and Beowulf dispatched a few of those.

This is certainly a testament to my hunger for anecdotes, but the story of the Beowulf manuscript! So no-one really knows where it came from or who wrote it, but they know it was part of the collection of one Robert Cotton upon his death in 1631.

(The best thing about this collection is the organization. Cotton kept a different bust on each bookshelf, and that was how he catalogued his books. So Beowulf was "Vitellius.A.xv," indicating its position on the first shelf on the bookcase decorated with a bust of Vitellius. When I am Librarian of Congress, I will be adopting this system.)

Anyway, the manuscript was living in Ashburnham House in Westminster in 1731 when there was a fire. Some manuscripts burned, and Beowulf's edges were scorched. Its snug leather covers saved it, and the trustees who broke into a burning library in order to throw books out of the windows and keep them safe.

Enough of this heroic firefighter fantasy. Give me a Beowulf-saving librarian any day.

So this stout little manuscript survives for at least 700 years before anyone even thinks to make a copy. Finally a man makes two transcripts and takes them to Copenhagen, where he prepares Beowulf for publication. Except, whoops, in 1807 the British bomb the city and burn his house down. Eventually Beowulf gets published in 1815.

Admittedly it's not as poetic as if a monster came out of the sea and ate the manuscript.

God-cursed Grendel

2008-12-07T21:35:00.008-05:00

What do you think Grendel looks like? I never could get a good mental picture of him. I'm tempted to search the Internet for Grendel-art. I bet there's a bunch of it. I wish I still had access to JSTOR; I'm sure there's mountain of Grendel-specific criticism. It says that "...he had dwelt for a time/ in misery among the banished monsters,/ Cain's clan, whom the creator had outlawed/ and condemned as outcasts" (ll. 104-7).

The maddening vagueness of every physical description of Grendel -- "Every nail,/ claw-scale and spur, every spike/ and welt on the hand of that heathen brute/ was like barbed steel" (ll. 983-6)... yeah, thanks for clearing that up -- is exceeded only by the hopeless muddle that is the story's theological situation. The Danes are described as having "pagan shrines" and "vow[ing] offerings to idols" (175-6), and we are told that "the Lord God... was unknown to them" (ll. 181, 183). The narrator himself credits Beowulf's victory over Grendel to "the Lord/ the Ruler of Heaven" (ll. 1554-5), which is all very well and good, okay, because the narrator can be a Christian who is describing the events of pre-Christian times. But no. That would be too straightforward. BECAUSE THEN HROTHGAR GIVES THIS SPEECH. Explain to me how lines like these make sense:

...It is a great wonder
how Almighty God in His magnificence
favors our race with rank and scope
and the gift of wisdom; his sway is wide. (ll. 1724-27)

AND LEST YOU WONDER JUST WHICH GOD HE IS TALKING ABOUT, we get a little caution to Beowulf about being a Good Christian--though that word is never used:

Choose, dear Beowulf, the better part,
eternal rewards. Do not give way to pride. ...
...Your piercing eye
will dim and darken; and death will arrive,
dear warrior, to sweep you away. (ll. 1759-60; 1766-68)

And to finish off all that--

...So I praise God
in His heavenly glory that I lived to behold
this head dripping blood... (ll. 1178-80)

Even Beowulf himself says God helped him to defeat Grendel! So what is going on here? There's an essay in the Norton entitled "The Christian Language and Theme of Beowulf." I really hope it will help me figure out what is up with that. I'm so confused.

------------------------

I forgot to mention the I am using the 2002 Norton Critical Edition of Beowulf, edited by Daniel Donoghue.

canon fodder

2008-12-06T13:13:00.002-05:00

It's true that we're in New York, but it's less true that we have other things to do, so I will take a few minutes to outline the goal of the Literary Iditarod:

I graduated from college in 2007, and now I have a job that I enjoy, but at some point I want to go to grad school so that I can feel like a more accomplished human being. I'd like to get a Ph.D in English, but right now I don't think that I have read widely enough either to do well on the lit GRE or to be sure of what I would like to study. Since I wrote my thesis on Troilus and Cressida, I tend to think I'd focus on the Renaissance, but I don't want to make any big decisions until I have a more thorough background in Western lit (Fiona wants to make me a t-shirt that says "CANON FODDER").

If I'd spent four years at Reed, I could've taken Humanities 210 and 220 and I would feel a lot better about all of this. But having transferred there as a junior, I had to narrow my focus pretty much immediately, and I never got what I would consider a solid foundation.

My former thesis advisor suggested that I spend some time catching up before I apply to graduate school, so Fiona and I put together a rough list of what I should read, and now we are starting with Beowulf. I read the first half of it on the bus coming up here. More on Beowulf shortly.

If you have suggestions about works that might prove useful for taking the literature GRE, or if you just have ideas about What Every English Major Should Have Read, please do contribute to our list. Or just talk to us about books. We're pretty nerdy that way.

Our Booklist

2008-12-06T12:44:00.004-05:00

This is the list we're working from, and I would be witty about it but we're in New York and we have other things to do.

Please feel free to make suggestions on additions or favorite translations. Remember, our constraints: Beowulf through Virginia Woolf. Nothing really after, though I sneaked Lolita on there because it's important to me.

Edit: We stop at Virginia Woolf because the point of this is to get an education in the foundations of English-language literature, and because we only have so much time in our lives. And because Serena's advisor told her she could stop there.

Besides, how can you not love the fearful symmetry?

Original Booklist:
Beowulf
Everyman
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Canterbury Tales
Piers Plowman
Le Morte d’Arthur
Volpone
Ben Jonson's Elegy to Shakespeare
"Defense of Poesy"
Edward II
Tamburlaine
“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”
Utopia
The Tempest
Julius Caesar
Othello
Antony and Cleopatra
Romeo and Juliet
Much Ado About Nothing
The Merchant of Venice
As You Like It
The Sonnets
The Faerie Queen
Amoretti
John Donne's Holy Sonnets
John Donne's "Elegy 20"
John Donne's "The Bait"
John Donne's "The Flea"
Paradise Lost
“To His Coy Mistress”
“The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd”
The Way of the World
Pilgrim’s Progress
All for Love
The School for Scandal
The Rivals
"A Modest Proposal"
"A Description of a City Shower"
Gulliver’s Travels
Alexander Pope's “Rape of the Lock,”
Alexander Pope's "The Dunciad"
Alexander Pope's "Essay on Man"
Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Criticism"
Moll Flanders
Robinson Crusoe
James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson
She Stoops to Conquer
The Vicar of Wakefield
Tom Jones
Tristam Shandy
Mary Shelley's “Vindication of the Rights of Women”
Vanity Fair
»Moby Dick (Annemarie suggested it!)
Samuel Coleridge's “Kublai Khan”
Samuel Coleridge's “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
Samuel Coleridge's “Frost at Midnight”
Sense and Sensibility
Childe Harold'd Pilgrimage
Don Juan
Wuthering Heights
Percy Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind”
Percy Shelley's “Defence of Poetry”
Percy Shelley's “Ozymandias”
Percy Shelley's “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”
Walter Scott's “Marmion”
Charles Lamb's Essays of Elia
Mysteries of Udolpho
Hard Times
Oliver Twist
Tale of Two Cities
John Keats' “To a Nightingale”
John Keats' “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
John Keats' “Fall of Hyperion”
William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads
William Wordsworth's “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”
William Wordsworth's“I Wandered Lonely as Cloud”
Songs of Innocence and Experience
Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Mill on the Floss
Middlemarch
Importance of Being Earnest
Picture of Dorian Gray
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's “Sonnets from the Portuguese”
Robert Browning's “My Last Duchess”
Robert Browning's “Fra Lippo Lippi”
Alfred Tennyson's “In Memoriam, AH.H.”
Alfred Tennyson's “Ulysses”
Alfred Tennyson's “Charge of the Light Brigade”
Alfred Tennyson's “Lady of Shalott”
Jonathan Edwards' “Sinners In the Hands of an Angry God”
Anne Bradstreet's “A Dialogue Between Old England and New”
Anne Bradstreet's “To My Dear and Loving Husband”
Anne Bradstreet's “The Author to Her Book"
Anne Bradstreet's "Upon the Birth of One of Her Children”
Moby Dick
Bartleby the Scrivener
House of the Seven Gables
The Scarlet Letter
Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny
Emily Dickinson's “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”
Emily Dickinson's “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died”
Emily Dickinson's “I Felt a Funeral In my Brain”
Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself"
Walt Whitman's “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”
Walt Whitman's “Oh Captain, My Captain”
“Nature”
Walden
Diaries of Adam and Eve
Adventures of Huckberry Finn
Is Shakespeare Dead?
Margaret Fuller's “Women In the Nineteenth Century”
The Bostonians
Portrait of a Lady
Arms and the Man
Pgymalion
»Yellow Wallpaper (Annemarie, this was a good one, and one I totally spaced)
Howard’s End
The House of Mirth
To the Lighthouse
A Room of One’s Own
Heart of Darkness
Ulysses
"The Dead"
"Araby"
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
D.H. Lawrence's “Why the Novel Matters”
W.B. Yeats' “When You Are Old”
W.B. Yeats' "Easter 1916"
W.B. Yeats' "Lake Isle of Innisfree"
W.B. Yeats' "The Second Coming"
W.B. Yeats' "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop"
Langston Hughes' “The Negro Speaks of Rivers"
Langston Hughes' "I, Too"
Langston Hughes' "Mother to Son"
Langston Hughes' "Theme for English B"
T.S. Eliot's “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets"
T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland"
Robert Frost's “After Apple Picking”
Robert Frost's "Birches"
Robert Frost's "Design"
Robert Frost's "The Mending Wall"
A Moveable Feast
Hills Like White Elephants
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
This Side of Paradise
The Great Gatsby
The Sound and the Fury
“A Rose For Emily”
Mourning Becomes Electra
A Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Waiting for Godot
George Orwell's “Politics and the English Language”
Nineteen Eighty-Four
The Grapes of Wrath
The End of the Affair
W.H. Auden's "Funeral Blues"
W.H. Auden's "The More Loving One"
W.H. Auden's "Epitaph on a Tyrant"
W.H. Auden's "September 1, 1939"
W.H. Auden's “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”
Ezra Pound's “In a Station of the Metro”
Matthew Arnold's “Dover Beach”
Wilfred Owen's “Dulce Et Decorum Est”
Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Love Is Not All"
Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Conscientious Objector"
Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Time Offers No Relief"
Edna St. Vincent Millay's "I Will Put Chaos Into 14 Lines"
Dylan Thomas' “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”
Dylan Thomas' “A Child’s Christmas In Wales”
Brave New World
Lolita

Recent Additions Since We Decided To Read Things Not Originally In English:
The Divine Comedy
The Oresteia
Medea
The Persians
Notes from the Underground
Crime and Punishment
Madame Bovary
Tartuffe
Candide
Faust
Death in Venice
Metamorphosis
Rilke (TBA)

Seamus Heaney, Poets Laureate, and big words

2008-12-05T12:46:00.003-05:00

I'm trying to figure out whether Seamus Heaney is officially Ireland's Poet Laureate or not, and the internet is giving me very conflicting stories. I see news items in which he is referred to as such, but the Wikipedia doesn't even say that Ireland has a poet laureate.

I remember my classmates at the Drogheda Grammar School complaining about him, and I thought that they said he was the poet laureate. But now I'm not sure, and I've been looking it up for so long that the words "poet" and "laureate" have lost all meaning to me. Maybe he is, like, de facto poet laureate; my friend Tash says, "We have a Poet Laureate? First I've heard. Still, if it's anyone, it'll be him...."

He's Irish and a poet and a Nobel laureate, so I guess that's close enough.

This is the poem about which I specifically remember hearing complaints; they had to study it for the Leaving Cert. His wife is rummaging in a drawer, and she reminds him of a skunk. Now I feel like I should study Seamus Heaney. It's so easy to get sidetracked.

Should you be reading Seamus Heaney's introduction to his translation of Beowulf -- to return to the topic ostensibly at hand -- you may come across a number of unfamiliar words. Perhaps being a poet does not incline one to write clearly in prose, or perhaps I'm thinking of being an academic. In any case, here are some words that I encountered with which I was unfamiliar or only sort of familiar (you know, when you've read a word enough times that it makes sense to you in context, but then you realize that you couldn't define it if you were asked); I will regard this as practice for the verbal section of the GRE. Mmm... Latin.

All definitions are via dictionary.com and/or the Wikipedia; I sure miss Reed's OED subscription.

in illo tempore: "at that time"

effulgence: "A brilliant radiance."

tumulus: "An artificial hillock, especially one raised over a grave, particularly over the graves of persons buried in ancient times; a barrow." Or, in geology, "a domelike swelling or mound formed in congealed lava."

foundedness: Well, actually, dictionary.com doesn't know what he means by this. Nor do I. We'll get there...

lambency: "An appearance of reflected light"; the adjective lambent is defined as "flickering lightly over or on a surface," or "effortlessly light or brilliant," or simply "having a gentle glow; luminous." David said he knew this one because there is a video game in which you can get "lambent armor." Apparently I've missed a lot by not playing video games.

chthonic: "Of or pertaining to the deities, spirits, and other beings dwelling under the earth." Also, "pertaining to the earth; earthy." This makes more sense to me in context; Heaney seems to use it to mean something like "inherent" when he says that "the dragon... could be read as a projection of Beowulf's own chthonic wisdom refined in the crucible of experience" (Translator's Introduction, xxxi).

There are probably more, but those are all the ones I can think of for now. This is the sentence that got me started on this topic to begin with (Heaney is speaking of the dragon): "Once he is wakened, there is something glorious in the way he manifests himself, a Fourth of July effulgence fireworking its path across the night sky; and yet, because of the centuries he has spent dormant in the tumulus, there is a foundedness as well as a lambency about him" (Translator's introduction, xxx).

Heaney's meaning is clarified somewhat by the following sentence, in which he describes the dragon as "at once a stratum of the earth and a streamer in the air, no painted dragon but a figure of real oneiric power..." (xxx). But really. This is what I mean about poets writing prose. He could have just said, "The dragon, having slept in the earth for a very long time, comes out all luminous and airborne (sparkly and flying!), which juxtaposition contributes to his impact and complexity in the reader's impression." Or even "DRAGON=AIR+FIRE+EARTH."

But no. Then I wouldn't get to brush up on my Latin roots.