And an updated list of books I read in March:

Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Spark)
Anne of Green Gables (Montgomery)
Inferno (Dante)
The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)

Recommendations:

Terry Castle's memoir of Susan Sontag in the LRB is very amusing, and true to my own impression of Sontag (from the one time I met her). It's rather cruel and catty, but so funny you can't really feel guilty. I like how Castle casts herself as a clumsy ingenue.

Last year I heard Jill Crossland perform in Balliol College. I sent her a very appreciative e-mail, asking if a Händel CD was in the works. Her secretary wrote to thank me, and say that there was no Händel CD nor would there be one for a while. I didn't reply, because I didn't really have anything more to say. Then a few weeks later this kind soul wrote to me again, apologizing that she, and not Ms Crossland herself, was writing, and saying that there was a homemade recording of Händel's Suite No. 5 (which includes the miraculous Harmonious Blacksmith variations), would I like a copy? Would I! And how thoughtful and excessively modest of her to apologize for not being Jill Crossland. Anyway, I got it in the mail a few weeks ago — Händel's Suite no. 5 and the Chaconne. I love love love them. Especially in the Chaconne, the way it slows down after that marvellously self-confident, majestic entrance (so typical of Händel). "Let me savor this," it seems to say, and goes into variations (explorations really) that range from the contemplative to the energetic. After five minutes it modulates into minor and you think, "This is just another variation; such self-confidence can afford to entertain self-doubt." But after a while it becomes clear that this is no entertainment: the poison almost makes the music grind to a halt, until suddenly it catches a kind of despairing energy: "If it must be, so be it!" Might as well go down in style. It gathers momentum (baroque music is the best at conveying extremes of bitterness and despair without ever losing shape, quite a feat when you think about it; gives the lie to Johnson's comment about Milton's "Lycidas"). And then all that running in a miserable panic through a wasteland leads one to, of all places — I don't know, a sunrise, a banquet, a loved one, all rolled in one — the joy of the beginning, except that this time it feels earned. It starts out majestically, and then it starts running too. But this is a happy running.

What a piece! All that in under twelve minutes!

Then I started listening to John Potter's recordings of John Dowland. At first I thought I only liked "Come Again" (I bought the CD for that song) but then I discovered "Fine Knacks for Ladies" and "Now, O Now, I Needs Must Go." They're excellent. (All the other songs promise to be real downers: "In Darkness Let Me Dwell," "Lachrymae Verae, " "Lachrymae Tristes," "Lachrymae Amantis," "Flow My Tears," "Go Crystal Tears.") The liner notes for the CD are interesting. They start out defending the use of the saxophone in a recording of Elizabethan music, and end up as an impassioned declaration of artistic independence from historicism. It's very well-written, and it struck a chord with me since I read it during a period when I was spending days and weeks with boring historicist criticism. (The saxophone, in case you're wondering, works astonishingly well in Dowland's songs.)

Good news: my review of James Wood's The Irresponsible Self is going to be published! In The Reader. I've met him twice in the past month and a half (happy to report that he's a Nice Person; one doesn't want to admire cads), and the second time he asked me, was I writing anything. "Yes, as a matter of fact I've just finished a book review." "Well, I'll definitely look out for it." You're in for a big surprise, I thought, too shy to tell him what I'd reviewed.

My father recently went to California for the first time in nearly forty years. "What were your impressions?" I asked. "Well, California has changed a lot. In 1968 I read a book at the library of UC Berkeley. This time, I ordered that same book, and — they didn't have it!" I later repeated this exchange in my father's presence, and he objected: "That's not what I said." But it is. (This is very typical of my father.)

I re-read what I wrote above about time passing and I couldn't help remembering a friend's parody, I can't remember of what: "I was brushing my teeth, and suddenly I thought, 'This is life!' and sat down on the edge of the bathtub and burst into tears." And a friend who had edited her high school's literary magazine said half the submissions were exactly like that.

For a long time I thought the Trojans were Greeks too, a different kind of Greek, but I've just found out that they actually spoke "Luvian," an Indo-European language (sub-family: Anatolian) related to Hittite. Google thinks I might be interested in meeting "Luvian Singles."

Cassandra, Alexander, Scamandrus, Meander, Leander — is that a Luvian ending??

I've read that Etruscan might be a language related to Luvian, and not an isolate after all. I know you can't believe everything you read on the internet, but it's an awfully intriguing possibility. It would corroborate Herodotus's story about the origins of the Etruscans, and, of course, Virgil, considering that most of the seven kings of Rome were Etruscan. Maecenas, after all, had Etruscans forebears.

I recently came across this:

(Dis)empowering the Child: A Critique of Children's Literature

It's a post-colonial critique — a sweeping condemnation — of children's literature. It also offers itself to the hapless undergraduate as a "sample essay." I had two reactions: 1) "I always knew this kind of criticism was entirely mechanical, and now I have proof: you could take this sample essay and change the names — the author seems to expect you to do this — and no one would blink an eye" and 2) "I'm surprised a postmodernist critic takes enough interest in his students to produce a webpage" though, to be sure, the page does nothing to foster independent thinking.

The best/worst line was "Thus we must not condemn all writing by adults."

Thank goodness for that!

I wonder what a post-colonial critic would make of Homer's treatment of the "Other" in the Iliad. Maybe he would be big enough to recognize Homer's generosity, or maybe he would rage against lines such as "Thus would murmur any man, Achaian or Trojan: / 'Father Zeus...'" as an attack on the Trojans' irreducible otherness.