"Many have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness."
"We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time."
"'He has got no good red blood in his body,' said Sir James.
'No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semi-colons and parentheses.'"
"Suppose we turn from outside estimates of a man, to wonder, with keener interest, what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or capacity: with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labors; what fading of hopes, or what deeper fixity of self-delusion the years are marking off within him; and with what spirit he wrestles against universal pressure, which will one day be too heavy for him, and bring his heart to its final pause. Doubtless his lot is important in his own eyes; and the chief reason that we think he asks too large a place in our consideration must be our want of room for him."
"Correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets."
"And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl's life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her and to whom she is grateful."
"Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love."
"For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardor is generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptible as the ardor of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly."
"There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them."
"'I should like to make life beautiful--I mean everybody's life. And then all this immense expense of art, that seems somehow to lie outside life and make it no better for the world, pains one. It spoils my enjoyment of anything when I am made to think that most people are shut out from it.'"
"All these sights of his youth had acted on him as poetry without the aid of the poets, had made a philosophy for him without the aid of philosophers, a religion without the aid of theology."
"In all failures, the beginning is certainly the half of the whole."
"But it is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired."
"'By desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil--widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with the darkness narrower.'
'That is a beautiful mysticism--it is a--'
'Please not to call it by any name,' said Dorothea. 'It is my life. I have found it out, and cannot part with it.'
"They were looking at each other like two fond children who were talking confidentially of birds."
"Foolish sayings were more objectionable to her than any unwise doings."
"Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self."
"She had once said that she would like him to stay, and stay he would, whatever fire-breathing dragons might hiss around her."
"He looked like an incarnation of the spring whose spirit filled the air--a bright creature, abundant in uncertain promises."
"'I have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other I cling to that as the truest--I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it. It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.'"
"He was doctrinally convinced that there was a total absence of merit in himself; but that doctrinal conviction may be held without pain when the sense of demerit does not take a distinct shape in memory and revive the tingling of shame or the pang of remorse. Nay, it may be held that the deptch of our sinning is but a measure for the depth of forgiveness."
"But even while we are talking and meditating about the earth's orbit and solar system, what we feel and adjust our movements to is the stable earth and the changing day."
"Life would be no better than candlelight tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been, to issues of longing and constancy."
"It had seemed to him as if they were like two creatures slowly turning to marble in each other's presence, while their hearts were conscious and their eyes were yearning."
"A man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repeated error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame."
"It could not be fairly called wooing a woman to tell her that he would never woo her. It must be admitted to be a ghostly kind of wooing."
"'I have never done you injustice. Please, remember me,' said Dorothea, repressing a rising sob.
'Why should you say that?' said Will, with irritation. 'As if I were not in danger of forgetting everything else.'"
"'Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus,
Another thing to fall."
-Measure for Measure (cited)
"The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses."
"But the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself."
"And in the long valley of her life, which looked so flat and empty of waymarks, guidance would come as she walked along the road, and saw her fellow-passengers by the way."
"'Yes, dear, a great many things have happened,' said Dorothea, in her full tones.
'I wonder what,' said Celia, folding her arms cozily and leaning forward upon them.
'Oh, all the troubles of all people on the face of the earth.'"
"'Explain my preference! I never had a preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing.'"
"'I have felt how hard it is to walk always in fear of hurting another who is tied to us. Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.'"
"'It is quite true that I might have been a wiser person,' said Dorothea, 'and that I might have done something better, if I had been better. But this is what I am going to do.'"
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Monday, March 23, 2009
Eliot's Middlemarch (installment #1)
"It is a misfortune, in some senses: I feed too much on the inward sources; I live too much with the dead. My mind is something like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about the world and trying mentally to construct it as it used to be, in spite of ruin and confusing changes."
"'You are a poem--and that is to be the best part of a poet--what makes up the poet's consciousness in his best moods,' said Will, showing such originality as we all share with the morning and the spring-time and other endless renewals."
"Two people persistently flirting could by no means escape from 'the various entanglements, weights, blows, clashings, motions, by which things severally go on."
"As the sore palate findeth grit, so an uneasy consciousness heareth innuendoes."
"'You are a poem--and that is to be the best part of a poet--what makes up the poet's consciousness in his best moods,' said Will, showing such originality as we all share with the morning and the spring-time and other endless renewals."
"Two people persistently flirting could by no means escape from 'the various entanglements, weights, blows, clashings, motions, by which things severally go on."
"As the sore palate findeth grit, so an uneasy consciousness heareth innuendoes."
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Your Catfish Friend
If I were to live my life
in catfish forms
in scaffolds of skin and whiskers
at the bottom of a pond
and you were to come by
one evening
when the moon was shining
down into my dark home
and stand there at the edge
of my affection
and think, "It's beautiful
here by this pond. I wish
somebody loved me,"
I'd love you and and be your catfish
friend and drive such lonely
thoughts from your mind
and suddenly you would be
at peace,
and ask yourself, "I wonder
if there are any catfish
in this pond? It seems like
a perfect place for them."
-Brautigan
in catfish forms
in scaffolds of skin and whiskers
at the bottom of a pond
and you were to come by
one evening
when the moon was shining
down into my dark home
and stand there at the edge
of my affection
and think, "It's beautiful
here by this pond. I wish
somebody loved me,"
I'd love you and and be your catfish
friend and drive such lonely
thoughts from your mind
and suddenly you would be
at peace,
and ask yourself, "I wonder
if there are any catfish
in this pond? It seems like
a perfect place for them."
-Brautigan
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Tua Fata Docebo
I recently finished All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers, by Larry McMurtry. There's pretty much no possible way I can talk about this book, no way that I can recommend it highly enough. It's nothing short of absolutely brilliant.
' "I shouldn't have given you that story," she said. "It would make a great cartoon."
"Go to San Francisco with me," I said, "We'll compete for it. If your cartoon is better than the novel I write I'll burn the novel."
"No, you should never burn things," Jill said, looking at me seriously for a second. "What you should do is give them to the sea." '
(143)
'I have no real resistance to temptation, drunk or sober. Very few attractive temptations come my way and when they do I almost always yield to them. I can't smash them away like they were badminton birdies. I just don't have any moral coordination, as Jenny Salomea well knew.'
(26)
Also, I've been reading Virgil's Aeneid:
Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbrum
On they went, darlking in solitary night, far into the gloom.
O gnate, ingentem luctum ne quaere tuorum. Ostedent terris hunc fata neque ultra esse sinent.
O my son, ask not of the heavy grief that your people must bear. Of him the Fates shall give a glimpse to earth, nor suffer him to stay.
' "I shouldn't have given you that story," she said. "It would make a great cartoon."
"Go to San Francisco with me," I said, "We'll compete for it. If your cartoon is better than the novel I write I'll burn the novel."
"No, you should never burn things," Jill said, looking at me seriously for a second. "What you should do is give them to the sea." '
(143)
'I have no real resistance to temptation, drunk or sober. Very few attractive temptations come my way and when they do I almost always yield to them. I can't smash them away like they were badminton birdies. I just don't have any moral coordination, as Jenny Salomea well knew.'
(26)
Also, I've been reading Virgil's Aeneid:
Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbrum
On they went, darlking in solitary night, far into the gloom.
O gnate, ingentem luctum ne quaere tuorum. Ostedent terris hunc fata neque ultra esse sinent.
O my son, ask not of the heavy grief that your people must bear. Of him the Fates shall give a glimpse to earth, nor suffer him to stay.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Unrelated things
"The Tempest allows us to be washed free of images, one of the comedy's many gifts. We are Miranda, who is adjured to "Sit still, and hear the last of our sea-sorrow." If the sea values nothing, and swallows all, it also keeps nothing, and casts us back again. Ariel's best song makes our drowned bones into coral . . . It is a sea fiction, a drenching that at last leaves everyone dry. No one is harmed in the play, and forgiveness is extended to all by Prospero, in response to Ariel's most human moment. Everything dissolves in The Tempest, except the sea. From one perspective, the sea is dissolution itself, but evidently not so in this unique play."
-Harold Bloom, you're a cranky old codger, but you sure have your moments of beauty.
Meanwhile, declining from the noon of day,
The sun obliquely shoots his burning ray;
The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,
And wretches that hang jurymen may dine'
The merchant from the Exchange returns in peace,
And the long labors of the toilet cease.
-Pope
-Harold Bloom, you're a cranky old codger, but you sure have your moments of beauty.
Meanwhile, declining from the noon of day,
The sun obliquely shoots his burning ray;
The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,
And wretches that hang jurymen may dine'
The merchant from the Exchange returns in peace,
And the long labors of the toilet cease.
-Pope
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Things I'm Stoked About
1.
Mervyn Peake:
"A ritual, more compelling than ever man devised, is fighting anchored darkness. A ritual of the blood; of the jumping blood. These quicks of sentience owe nothing to his forbears, but to those feckless hosts, a trillion deep, of the globe's childhood. -- The gift of the bright blood. Of blood that laughs when the tenets mutter 'Weep.' Of blood that mourns when the sere laws croak 'Rejoice!' O little revolution in great shades!"
And, also Peake:
"If ever a man was destined to fill in the gap of his own absence with his own ghost it is he. For excommunication is a kind of death."
Also Peake, but just a fragment here:
"the talons of adventure, the antlers of romance"
2.
John Berryman: "Come & diminish me, & map my way."
3.
Homer:
"There was a world . . . Or was it all a dream?"
Mervyn Peake:
"A ritual, more compelling than ever man devised, is fighting anchored darkness. A ritual of the blood; of the jumping blood. These quicks of sentience owe nothing to his forbears, but to those feckless hosts, a trillion deep, of the globe's childhood. -- The gift of the bright blood. Of blood that laughs when the tenets mutter 'Weep.' Of blood that mourns when the sere laws croak 'Rejoice!' O little revolution in great shades!"
And, also Peake:
"If ever a man was destined to fill in the gap of his own absence with his own ghost it is he. For excommunication is a kind of death."
Also Peake, but just a fragment here:
"the talons of adventure, the antlers of romance"
2.
John Berryman: "Come & diminish me, & map my way."
3.
Homer:
"There was a world . . . Or was it all a dream?"
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Poetics
"Berryman is a poet so preoccupied with poetic effects as to be totally in their thrall," James Dickey wrote. "His inversions, his personal and often irritatingly cute colloquialisms and deliberate misspellings, his odd references, his basing of lines and whole poems on private allusions, create what must surely be the densest verbal thickets since Empson's."
In his 366th "Dream Song" Berryman himself wrote, "These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. / They are only meant to terrify & comfort." "And understood many have not been," Phillips wrote. "Packed with private jokes, topical and literary allusions (Berryman's reading and personal library are legendary), they boggle many minds. When the first 77 Dream Songs...were published, Robert Lowell admitted, 'At first the brain aches and freezes at so much darkness, disorder and oddness. After a while, the repeated situations and their racy jabber become more and more enjoyable, although even now I wouldn't trust myself to paraphrase accurately at least half the sections.'"
(Wikipedia)
In his 366th "Dream Song" Berryman himself wrote, "These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. / They are only meant to terrify & comfort." "And understood many have not been," Phillips wrote. "Packed with private jokes, topical and literary allusions (Berryman's reading and personal library are legendary), they boggle many minds. When the first 77 Dream Songs...were published, Robert Lowell admitted, 'At first the brain aches and freezes at so much darkness, disorder and oddness. After a while, the repeated situations and their racy jabber become more and more enjoyable, although even now I wouldn't trust myself to paraphrase accurately at least half the sections.'"
(Wikipedia)
Monday, January 12, 2009
Was There A Time
Was there a time when dancers with their fiddles
In children's circuses could stay their troubles?
There was a time they could cry over books,
But time was set its maggot on their track.
Under the arc of the sky they are unsafe.
What's never known is safest in this life.
Under the skysigns they who have no arms
Have cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost
Alone's unhurt, so the blind man sees best.
-Dylan Thomas
"Today I saw a great pavement among the clouds made of gray stones, bigger than a meadow. No one goes there. Only a heron. Today I saw a tree growing out of a high wall, and people walking on it far above the ground. Today I saw a poet look out of a narrow window. But the stone field that is lost in the clouds is what you'd like best. Nobody goes there. It's a good place to play games and to dream of things. I saw today a horse swimming in the top of a tower. I saw a million towers today. I saw clouds last night. I was cold. I was colder than ice. I have had no food. I have had no sleep."
-Mervyn Peake
In children's circuses could stay their troubles?
There was a time they could cry over books,
But time was set its maggot on their track.
Under the arc of the sky they are unsafe.
What's never known is safest in this life.
Under the skysigns they who have no arms
Have cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost
Alone's unhurt, so the blind man sees best.
-Dylan Thomas
"Today I saw a great pavement among the clouds made of gray stones, bigger than a meadow. No one goes there. Only a heron. Today I saw a tree growing out of a high wall, and people walking on it far above the ground. Today I saw a poet look out of a narrow window. But the stone field that is lost in the clouds is what you'd like best. Nobody goes there. It's a good place to play games and to dream of things. I saw today a horse swimming in the top of a tower. I saw a million towers today. I saw clouds last night. I was cold. I was colder than ice. I have had no food. I have had no sleep."
-Mervyn Peake
Sunday, January 11, 2009
New Books and Movies
I made a list of every new book I read and every new movie I saw in 2008. Here it is:
Movies I've Seen In 2008 (first-time movies only)
1. Hitch
2. La Vie Est Belle
3. Punch-Drunk Love
4. Sweeney Todd
5. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
6. Twelve Monkeys
7. Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines
8. The Shining
9. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
10. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
11. Talk Radio
12. City of Lost Children
13. No Country for Old Men
14. Delicatessen
15. Be Kind Rewind
16. Little Shop of Horrors
17. A Streetcar Named Desire
18. Long Day's Journey Into Night
19. Cabaret
20. 1776
21. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
22. Dumbo
23. Atonement
24. Network
25. Machuca
26. Of Mice and Men
27. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
28. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
29. Lonesome Dove
30. Brokeback Mountain
31. Being There
32. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
33. Repo Man
34. 1/2 of Into the Wild (BUT IT SUCKED SO BAD)
35. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
36. Milo and Otis
37. Death Lends A Hand (Columbo)
38. There Will Be Blood
39. Wall-E
40. Futurama II - The Beast With A Million Backs
41. The Muppet Movie
42. I'm Not There
43. A Little Romance
44. Pee Wee's Big Adventure
45. MST3000: Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders
46. MST3000: Santa Claus
47. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
48. Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control
49. Koko the Talking Gorilla
50. Tremors
51. They Live
52. Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex (1992)
53. W.
54. When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
55. Aliens
56. Aguirre The Wrath Of God
57. The Seventh Seal
58. The Future of Food
59. Synecdoche, New York
60. Hatley High
61. After Hours
62. In Bruges
63. Sunshine
64. Labyrinth
65. Bringing Up Baby
66. Holiday
67. Slumdog Millionaire
68. The Philidelphia Story
69. Vertigo
70. The Devil Wears Prada
71. Field of Dreams
72. Sullivan's Travels
73. Eight Men Out
Books I've Read In 2008 (first-time books only, and only books I fully read cover-to-cover)
1. Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen
2. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
3. The Persian Letters by Montesqueiu
4. As You Like It by William Shakespeare
5. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
6. Contact by Carl Sagan
7. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
8. Henry IV, Pt. I by William Shakespeare
9. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
10. Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris
11. Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware
12. Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill
13. Henry IV, Pt. II by William Shakespeare
14. Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser
15. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
16. Paradise Park by Charles Mee
17. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
18. The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno
19. Antony & Cleopatra by William Shakespeare
20. Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen
21. Master of Reality by John Darnielle
22. The Lover by Marguerite Duras
23. The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare
24. Lila the Werewolf by Peter S. Beagle
25. The Line Between by Peter S. Beagle
26. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
27. Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott
28. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
29. Nickel & Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America by Barbara Ehrenreich
30. Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen
31. Homegrown Democrat by Garrison Keillor
32. The Thirteen Clocks by James Thurber
33. The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster
34. The Favorite Game by Leonard Cohen
36. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
37. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
38. The Misanthrope by Moliere
39. Tartuffe by Moliere
40. The Problem of Nature by David Arnold
41. Tastes of Paradise by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
42. Rameau's Nephew by Denis Diderot
43. The Marriage of Figaro by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
44. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
45. Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster by Michael Eric Dyson
46. Hind Swaraj by M.K. Gandhi
47. Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
48. Waverley by Sir Walter Scott
49. In the Solitude of Cotton Fields by Bernard-Marie Koltes
50. Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute
51. It's Beautiful by Nathalie Sarraute
52. Liberty by Garrison Keillor
53. The Waltz of the Toreadors by Jean Anouilh
54. Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac
55. Lazarillo de Tormes (Anonymous)
Movies I've Seen In 2008 (first-time movies only)
1. Hitch
2. La Vie Est Belle
3. Punch-Drunk Love
4. Sweeney Todd
5. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
6. Twelve Monkeys
7. Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines
8. The Shining
9. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
10. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
11. Talk Radio
12. City of Lost Children
13. No Country for Old Men
14. Delicatessen
15. Be Kind Rewind
16. Little Shop of Horrors
17. A Streetcar Named Desire
18. Long Day's Journey Into Night
19. Cabaret
20. 1776
21. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
22. Dumbo
23. Atonement
24. Network
25. Machuca
26. Of Mice and Men
27. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
28. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
29. Lonesome Dove
30. Brokeback Mountain
31. Being There
32. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
33. Repo Man
34. 1/2 of Into the Wild (BUT IT SUCKED SO BAD)
35. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
36. Milo and Otis
37. Death Lends A Hand (Columbo)
38. There Will Be Blood
39. Wall-E
40. Futurama II - The Beast With A Million Backs
41. The Muppet Movie
42. I'm Not There
43. A Little Romance
44. Pee Wee's Big Adventure
45. MST3000: Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders
46. MST3000: Santa Claus
47. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
48. Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control
49. Koko the Talking Gorilla
50. Tremors
51. They Live
52. Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex (1992)
53. W.
54. When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
55. Aliens
56. Aguirre The Wrath Of God
57. The Seventh Seal
58. The Future of Food
59. Synecdoche, New York
60. Hatley High
61. After Hours
62. In Bruges
63. Sunshine
64. Labyrinth
65. Bringing Up Baby
66. Holiday
67. Slumdog Millionaire
68. The Philidelphia Story
69. Vertigo
70. The Devil Wears Prada
71. Field of Dreams
72. Sullivan's Travels
73. Eight Men Out
Books I've Read In 2008 (first-time books only, and only books I fully read cover-to-cover)
1. Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen
2. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
3. The Persian Letters by Montesqueiu
4. As You Like It by William Shakespeare
5. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
6. Contact by Carl Sagan
7. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
8. Henry IV, Pt. I by William Shakespeare
9. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
10. Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris
11. Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware
12. Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill
13. Henry IV, Pt. II by William Shakespeare
14. Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser
15. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
16. Paradise Park by Charles Mee
17. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
18. The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno
19. Antony & Cleopatra by William Shakespeare
20. Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen
21. Master of Reality by John Darnielle
22. The Lover by Marguerite Duras
23. The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare
24. Lila the Werewolf by Peter S. Beagle
25. The Line Between by Peter S. Beagle
26. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
27. Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott
28. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
29. Nickel & Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America by Barbara Ehrenreich
30. Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen
31. Homegrown Democrat by Garrison Keillor
32. The Thirteen Clocks by James Thurber
33. The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster
34. The Favorite Game by Leonard Cohen
36. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
37. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
38. The Misanthrope by Moliere
39. Tartuffe by Moliere
40. The Problem of Nature by David Arnold
41. Tastes of Paradise by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
42. Rameau's Nephew by Denis Diderot
43. The Marriage of Figaro by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
44. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
45. Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster by Michael Eric Dyson
46. Hind Swaraj by M.K. Gandhi
47. Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
48. Waverley by Sir Walter Scott
49. In the Solitude of Cotton Fields by Bernard-Marie Koltes
50. Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute
51. It's Beautiful by Nathalie Sarraute
52. Liberty by Garrison Keillor
53. The Waltz of the Toreadors by Jean Anouilh
54. Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac
55. Lazarillo de Tormes (Anonymous)
Friday, January 9, 2009
On Philological Scholarship
'Alas for the lost lore, the annals and old poets,' wrote Tolkien, referring indeed to Virgil but by analogy to the sources of Beowulf. Gudbrand Vigfusson and F. York Powell, editing the Corpus Poetisum Boreale, the whole poetry of the North, in the 1880s, might look back on past ages and see the 'field of Northern scholarship' as 'a vast plain, filled with dry bones,' up and down which there walked 'a company of men, doing their best to set these bones in order, skull by skull, thigh by thigh, with no hope or thought of the breath that was to shake this plain with the awakening of the immortal dead.' But though philology did come and breathe life into the dry bones of old poems, filling history with the reverberations of forgotten battles and empires, still there was a point beyond which it could not go.
-T.A. Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth
-T.A. Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth
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