Literary pretensions – Page 2

Hell 2.1, a small update

I left you in my exploration of the Encyclopedia of Hell pondering which version of the Faustus story was better: with or without his final redemption. Personally, I prefer without, because it offers greater dramatic opportunities. I also don’t like the notion of redemption: it seems like a “get out of Hell free” card. Christianity is the only religion I know of that offers this particular way out of your bad deeds: accept Jesus as your personal saviour and you’ll get diverted from Hell. So basically you can be evil until your deathbed, not take responsibility for your actions, then ……… click below for more ↓

Hell 2.0

2013-07-22 2013-07-22 Atheism & Spirituality / Books & Reviews / Faith / Literary pretensions / Religion / Social Order & Disorder / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

I left you last time after finishing the letter D, in Miriam Van Scott’s Encyclopedia of Hell. I’m back in book form to take you through a few more entries in her exploration of the afterlife. But first a couple of additions to your reading material. First on the list is Alice Turner’s 275-page The History of Hell. It’s an illustrated guide to how Westerners have come to think of Hell, It starts with the ancient influences – Egypt, Greece, Rome and Judaism – but its main focus is on the evolving Christian imagination. She has a lot to say ……… click below for more ↓

What in Hell…?

2013-07-19 2013-09-16 Atheism & Spirituality / Books & Reviews / Humour & Satire / Literary pretensions / My Writing / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

Hades, you know, isn’t a place. It’s a guy. The Greek god of the underworld. His territory consists of a bunch of domains, including the rather unpleasant Tartarus, where souls – called shades – suffer eternal punishment. Hades wasn’t a fun god. If you weren’t getting your skin ripped off in Tartarus, life sucked in other ways. You moped about in the other domains, lethargically meandering around the afterlife without much purpose. Sort of like former politicians or local bloggers. That’s the sort of thing you learn when you read books. And the sort of thing that gets me labelled ……… click below for more ↓

The sum of all knowledge

2013-07-16 2013-07-16 Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Literary pretensions / Psychology & Sociology / Uncategorized / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

In his 2004 book, The Know-It-All, A. J. Jacobs tells of his quest to become “the smartest person in the world” by reading the Encyclopedia Britannica from cover to cover. Right away, you can see the fly in this intellectual ointment: knowledge doesn’t equal intelligence. Jared Diamond, in his introduction to Guns, Germs, and Steel, credits the barely literate, ill-educated tribespeople of New Guinea as being the smartest people he ever met. Not because of their ability to discourse, as Jacobs says, on the intricacies of the Phoenician legal system, but rather because their daily life is such a struggle. ……… click below for more ↓

Putdownable books?

2013-07-13 2013-07-13 Books & Reviews / Language & Grammar / Literary pretensions / My Writing / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

A recent article in The Independent said that J.K. Rowling’s new book and the abysmally-written 50 Shades of Grey were among the books most put down by readers as unfinishable. Putdownable. A description no author or publisher relishes. They joined titles like Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Ulysses, Lord of the Rings, Moby Dick, Atlas Shrugged and Catch 22 as books readers gave up the struggle to finish. Personally, I hesitate to put 50 Shades in the same category as anything even vaguely literary, let alone the likes of Joseph Heller and J.R. Tolkein. But we’re talking statistics here, not ……… click below for more ↓

Midway in our Life’s Journey…

2013-05-23 2013-05-23 Arts / Books & Reviews / Culture / Literary pretensions / My Writing / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

So begins The Inferno, the first of the three books that comprise Dante’s magnificent and complex work, The Divine Comedy.* It’s a rich, complex and challenging read. I have to admit I have not read it all – all three books that is – but I have made a mighty effort to complete Inferno in several editions. My problem is not comprehension, but rather distraction. Were this a desert isle, it would make it much easier to finish. I read like a jackdaw. But back to Dante. The first lines (Canto I, trans. by John Ciardi, Norton edn.), continue: Midway in ……… click below for more ↓

Musing on Melville’s Poetry

2013-05-22 2013-05-22 Arts / Books & Reviews / Culture / Literary pretensions / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

I came across a poem last night that I had not read in the past (always a pleasant thing to discover something new in one of your books)*. It is by Herman Melville, an author I associate with novels and short stories rather than poetry. Yet he was surprisingly prolific as a poet, mostly in his later life. Poem Hunter lists 93 of his poems on its site (on PDF here). He wrote many more, it seems – many of them naval or related to the sea, others about the Civil War – and the collected works can be found ……… click below for more ↓

Shakespeare’s Lost Plays

2013-04-27 2013-05-01 Arts / Books & Reviews / Literary pretensions / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

Shakespeare’s canon, as it is known today, is incomplete. The Bard is known to have written several plays that were not, for various reasons, included in the First Folio printed shortly after his death. Other plays, several included in the third folio, were attributed to Shakespeare after that publication, but most are known not to have been written by him, and have since been rejected (called the Shakespeare Apocrypha). Some, like Pericles, have be given grudging acceptance in the modern canon. Many modern scholars accept Pericles as a collaboration between Shakespeare and a lesser talent (George Wilkins is suggested), but ……… click below for more ↓

The Pulp Renaissance

2013-04-20 2013-05-01 Arts / Books & Reviews / Literary pretensions / Personal Reminiscences / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

In the late 1950s, I came across a copy (1912; an original edition, I believe) of Edgar Rice Burrough’s first published novel, Tarzan, The Ape Man, on my parent’s bookshelf in the basement. A forgotten book, one my father had likely brought with him from England when he immigrated here in 1947, something from his own boyhood. It sat beside old volumes of the Boy’s Own Annual and other English books. Of course I had to open it and read it. From the very start, I was fascinated by it, by the adventure, by the sheer fantasy of it all. ……… click below for more ↓

The Missing Lines

2013-04-19 2018-03-20 Arts / Books & Reviews / Culture / History & Biography / Literary pretensions / US Politics / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

The National Museum of Iraq – known originally as the Baghdad Archaeological Museum – once housed some of the oldest works of literature in the world. Treasures from the origins of civilization, from the cities of Sumeria, Babylon, Assyria were on display*. In 2003, when the Americans invaded**, a battle was fought between US and Iraqi forces at the museum. The Iraqi troops fled, and looters came in. According to Wikipedia: According to museum officials the looters concentrated on the heart of the exhibition: “the Warka Vase, a Sumerian alabaster piece more than 5,000 years old; a bronze Uruk statue from ……… click below for more ↓

Profundity

2013-04-17 2013-05-01 Arts / Culture / Literary pretensions / My WritingLeave a comment

In 1923, William Carlos Williams wrote one of the most profound poems in the English language: The Red Wheelbarrow. It reads like a Japanese Zen haiku: so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. Wikipedia tells us that the poem’s title is not its original, but rather one applied by its readers. The poem was first published in anthology titled Spring and All. The poem itself was simply titled “XXII,” indicating its place in the collection. Referring to the poem as “The Red Wheelbarrow” has been frowned upon by some critics, including Neil Easterbrook, ……… click below for more ↓

Enter Christopher Marlowe – Again

2013-03-27 2013-03-27 Arts / Balderdash & Hoaxes / Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Literary pretensions / My Writing / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

Back in the late 1990s, I wrote an essay about the “controversy” over who actually wrote the works of Shakespeare. I wrote, then, Not everyone agrees that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. The challenge to his authorship isn’t new: for the last three centuries it’s been the most popular whodunit of literature: trying to uncover the true identity of the author of the world’s greatest dramas and comedies. I can’t think of another author of note in the world who is considered not to have written the works under which his or her name is penned. Even Shakespeare’s many contemporaries are considered ……… click below for more ↓

The Consolation of Literature

2013-03-14 2013-03-14 Books & Reviews / Literary pretensions / My Writing / Personal Reminiscences / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

For Boethius, it was the Consolation of Philosophy*. For me, it’s literature. Not to write about it so much as to read it. Consolation from the act of reading. And read about literature. Sometimes literature is made more meaningful, brought into sharper focus by analysis and deconstruction. I started reading Shakespeare’s Shakespeare: How the Plays Were Made (John C Meagher, Continuum, New York, 2000) last night. He opens by saying: There are as many legitimate ways of reading Shakespeare’s plays as there are of having a conversation, making a meal, or rearing children. I suppose we assign meaning to whatever ……… click below for more ↓