Thursday, December 25, 2008

The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth: this is the kind of book Dr. Casaubon was trying so hard to write ("A Key to all Mythologies"). It was fascinating to get to know the Near Eastern gods, whom I had previously encountered as mere faceless villains in the Hebrew Bible, and fascinating to come across traces of polytheism in the Hebrew Bible. The chapter on the epic of Gilgamesh as a source of the Iliad was especially moving. The book's length and critical apparatus may look intimidating, but in fact it's for anyone interested in mythology or philology. One had the thrilling sense that this is as far as we can go — West follows certain threads all the way to Sumerian literature, which is over 4000 years old. Beyond we'll never know.

Last summer I met a Palestinian, a translator by profession, who told me that the Hebrew word for grain or cereals, "dganim," is related to the Philistine god's name "Dagon." He was a god of agriculture and of the harvest. And the Hebrew word for "sun" is practically identical to the name of the Babylonian sun god. And one of the Hebrew months, Tammuz, is named after Dumuzi, the Sumerian goddess's Inanna's shepherd lover — analogues of Venus and Adonis, according to West.

Friday, November 28, 2008

I love Macaulay! Here he is reviewing Southey's Colloquies:

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Mr. Southey's political system is just what we might expect from a man who regards politics, not as matter of science, but as matter of taste and feeling. All his schemes of government have been inconsistent with themselves. In his youth he was a republican; yet, as he tells us in his preface to these Colloquies, he was even then opposed to the Catholic Claims. He is now a violent Ultra-Tory. Yet, while he maintains, with vehemence approaching to ferocity, all the sterner and harsher parts of the Ultra-Tory theory of government, the baser and dirtier part of that theory disgusts him. Exclusion, persecution, severe punishments for libellers and demagogues, proscriptions, massacres, civil war, if necessary rather than any concession to a discontented people; these are the measures which he seems inclined to recommend. A severe and gloomy tyranny, crushing opposition, silencing remonstrance, drilling the minds of the people into unreasoning obedience, has in it something of grandeur which delights his imagination. But there is nothing fine in the shabby tricks and jobs of office; and Mr. Southey, accordingly, has no toleration for them. When a Jacobin, he did not perceive that his system led logically, and would have led practically, to the removal of religious distinctions. He now commits a similar error. He renounces the abject and paltry part of the creed of his party, without perceiving that it is also an essential part of that creed. He would have tyranny and purity together; though the most superficial observation might have shown him that there can be no tyranny without corruption.
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It is high time, however, that we should proceed to the consideration of the work which is our more immediate subject, and which, indeed, illustrates in almost every page our general remarks on Mr. Southey's writings. In the preface, we are informed that the author, notwithstanding some statements to the contrary, was always opposed to the Catholic Claims. We fully believe this; both because we are sure that Mr. Southey is incapable of publishing a deliberate falsehood, and because his assertion is in itself probable. We should have expected that, even in his wildest paroxysms of democratic enthusiasm, Mr. Southey would have felt no wish to see a simple remedy applied to a great practical evil. We should have expected that the only measure which all the great statesmen of two generations have agreed with each other in supporting would be the only measure which Mr. Southey would have agreed with himself in opposing. He has passed from one extreme of political opinion to another, as Satan in Milton went round the globe, contriving constantly to 'ride with darkness.' Wherever the thickest shadow of the night may at any moment chance to fall, there is Mr. Southey. It is not everybody who could have so dexterously avoided blundering on the daylight in the course of a journey to the antipodes.

***

We despise those mock philosophers, who think that they serve the cause of science by depreciating literature and the fine arts. But if anything could excuse their narrowness of mind, it would be such a book as this. It is not strange that, when one enthusiast makes the picturesque the test of political good, another should feel inclined to proscribe altogether the pleasures of taste and imagination.

Sunday, October 5, 2008

My Antonia

I was assigned to read My Antonia in seventh grade, didn't like it, and struck Willa Cather off my list of authors to read, until Jennie recommended The Professor's House a few years ago. Since then I've worked my way through Cather's œuvre, and some of her novels rank as my all-time favorites. So I was curious to re-read My Antonia: was I wrong to be unimpressed? Would I see things that had escaped me in seventh grade? The answer is "no." My Antonia is inferior to all the other novels I've read by Cather, and I can't understand why it received so much praise, or why it hasn't been displaced on school syllabi by Lucy Gayheart or (if you want a novel about the making of America, which people do, unfortunately, when they think of Cather) O Pioneers!. It's a hodgepodge, a grab-bag of characters and anecdotes that never come together. Oh, it's not terrible — it has the looseness, the breadth and breath of life, some of the episodes are memorable, and Cather's prose is always graceful, but I'm peeved that I almost missed out on Cather because someone inexplicably thought My Antonia was just the thing for a school syllabus!

This is the best part:

I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I soon began to ache all over.  When the straw settled down, I had a hard bed.  Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and peered over the side of the wagon.  There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields.  If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight.  There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.  No, there was nothing but land -- slightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side.  I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's jurisdiction.  I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it.  But this was the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it.  I did not believe that my dead father and mother were watching me from up there; they would still be looking for me at the sheepfold down by the creek, or along the white road that led to the mountain pastures.  I had left even their spirits behind me.  The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither.  I don't think I was homesick.  If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter.  Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out.  I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.

"Not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made": one could say that My Antonia is not a novel, but the material out of which novels are made.

Monday, September 8, 2008

The New York Times is not going to publish my letter, so here it is:

To the Editor:

I read Jiri Pehe's opinion piece, "A Spring Awakening for Human Rights," with sympathetic interest. I was startled, however, to read that "After 1968, once powerful communist parties in France, Italy and other Western European countries gradually faded." This is not true in the case of Italy. Indeed, the Italian Communist Party, under the leadership of Enrico Berlinguer, condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia: in a speech he gave in Moscow in the presence of Leonid Brezhnev, Berlinguer declared that the "tragedy in Prague" had revealed fundamental differences within the communist movement on national sovereignty, socialist democracy, and cultural freedom. The Italian Communist Party continued to be the main opposition party through the 1970s and 1980s, and is the direct ancestor of the main center-left party in Italy today.

Sunday, September 7, 2008

"Drift," as defined by a new student, a fifth grader:

to move unknowingly and floatingish

Friday, August 29, 2008

I'm re-reading Philip Pullman's The Shadow in the North: my ninth grade is going to read it this semester. (Patrick complained that last semester's book, Emily of New Moon, had no plot. You want plot?! I'll give you plot!!) (Gratifyingly, most of his classmates liked Emily of New Moon, and not just the girls.)

I noticed on the copyright page that The Shadow in the North had originally been published in 1986 under the title The Shadow in the Plate. "In the plate"? What's that?! Then I realized he must mean "photographic plate": Sally's comrades run a photographer's studio. A shadowy evil in the north, photography... these are the leit motifs of Northern Lights (aka The Golden Compass). Where do they come from?

Photography (not to mention electricity) as a link to the spirit world was the object of much study in the nineteenth century — and Northern Lights is set in the nineteenth century, albeit a fantasy of the nineteenth century — no less than the Sally Lockhart quartet. The northern evil must come (via Milton) from Canaanite mythology, where the great Adversary had his seat in the north. God, anti-god, Pullman's atheism...

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Funny names for food:

sticky Richard
spotted Dick
bangers and mash
neaps and tatties
toad in the hole
pigs in blanket
bubble and squeak

saltimbocca

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

A while ago I went to JS's presentation of his new book, at Columbia. It was very interesting, and a lively discussion followed. I participated, but I wasn't yet able to put into words what I was thinking. Hence this post.

— I was troubled by the way that the word "ahistorical" was used as if it were a bad word. The philosophical foundations of human rights are "ahistorical." So they are, and isn't it in the nature of ideals to be ahistorical? Ideals can be bad and they can be good, and historicism is a poor standard by which to judge them. And: why not say, instead of "ahistorical," "timeless"? I know that's a word that people are embarrassed to use, but why? It's an embarrassment that should be interrogated.
[J once pointed out that academic critics' fondness for the word "interrogate" betrays their adversarial stance toward literature. Yes, although it's also a word that translates poorly from romance languages — in Italy teachers interrogate their students, and I suppose there's something adversarial in the exercise, but not as much as in a police interrogation!]

The flip side: I recently read Perry Miller's essays in Errand into the Wilderness, on the first few decades of Calvinism in America. He shows very convincingly that this tremendously unstable Calvinist edifice [J's talk was all about the deep contradictions in pure Calvinism] began to buckle under pressure from reality very soon — by the 1660s Boston reverends were already engaging in casuistry, and surely they knew what they were doing. Isn't there a danger in treating Calvinism in America as something that never evolved — a danger of being ahistorical?
Books since last summer:

Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763
Felix Holt, the Radical (George Eliot)
Vertigo (Sebald)
Nights at the Circus (Carter)
Storia degli Italiani, vol. II (Procacci)
Sexing the Cherry (Winterson)
The East Face of Helicon: West Asiastic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (West)
Malgudi Days (Narayan)
The Same Sea (Oz)
Ozma of Oz (Baum)
Comet in Moominland (Jansson)
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation: vol. I: The Pox Party (Anderson)
Prince Caspian (Lewis)
Emily of New Moon (Montgomery)
The Enchanted Castle (Nesbit)
My Antonia (Cather):
I, Claudius (Graves)
Claudius the God (Graves)
Miti e leggende di antica Roma (Agizza)
My Mortal Enemy (Cather)
Living in the Land of Ashes (Gebert)
The Omnivore's Dilemma (Pollan)
Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace (Gessen)
One of Ours (Cather)

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

I changed my signature; "a reader" seemed too generic. Miranda Gaw made up the nickname "Nanette Elfstocking," Kaveri called it a stroke of genius, so that's my new signature. Or pseudonym. "Elfstocking" has to do with our shared love of socks, especially thigh-highs, especially stripey thigh-highs. It was Miranda who introduced me to the store Sock Dreams. Nanette, I don't know.