Sholem Asch--The Apostle (1943)

The Jewish authors who made the pre-1960 IWE reading list are in many instances not those who would seem obvious today. There is no Bellow, no Mailer, no Malamud, no Singer (Roth was obviously too young to have his early works considered), no Kafka, no Dorothy Parker, no Salinger even. Marx and Freud did make it, as did Proust. Kafka's Prague contemporary Franz Werfel, like Asch famous for novels about Biblical and Christian themes (a genre that is itself well-represented on this list) made it, as did Herman Wouk and some of the American playwrights of the 30s such as Kaufman and Hart. Anne Frank is on as well. I suspect that a few of the other late 19th and early 20th century French, German, Austrian or Russian authors on the list who are not as well known today might turn out to be Jewish, but I have not done the research on all of these yet. What immediately strikes one about those included on the list is that they tend more towards the sober and scholarly end of the distribution, whereas the more comic and bombastic/fantastical authors are held in higher regard today. It is a very old WASPy, and more specifically old Yankee list for sure, which however, despite its shortcomings and oddities, such as its fondness for doorstop historical fiction about early American history, I think is a good one. Old Yankees, though they continue to loom somewhat sinisterly in the national imagination, are getting ever harder to find in actual life even on their native ground, and their presence in and influence on American literary culture withers more and more every year. When I was younger I used to frequent numerous antiquated libraries in New England which partook of this old time atmosphere, even the books on the shelves in many instances not having been replenished in decades. These reminiscences date back 30 years now however, and even most of these places have been remodeled and brightened up and made more accommodating to technology, many of the books which formerly furnished the rooms on shelves reaching from floor to ceiling having evidently been discarded or relegated to the off-limits storage area in the basement. But I am getting far off of the subject of The Apostle now.

Sholem Asch was born in 1880 in Kutno, Poland, which was at that time part of the Russian Empire. He lived in Warsaw for a few years as a young man and got married there, then went abroad, eventually making his way in 1910 to the United States, where he remained for the duration of the first World War and beyond, becoming a citizen in 1920. He went back to the newly independent Poland after the war, and then lived in France for a while. returning to the United States in 1938. He seems to have stayed in the U.S. until some time in the 50s, after which he spent two years in Israel, where his house is preserved as a museum, towards the end of his life. He died in London in 1957. I note all of this because the biographies of people impacted by tumultuous historical upheavals are of interest to me. He wrote in Yiddish and was a prolific author no matter where he happened to be living, writing in the neighborhood of thirty books, the majority of which look to be weighty in length, tone, and subject matter. The Apostle, which depicts the life of St Paul, is actually the middle volume of a trilogy of novels about the lives of major early Christian figures, the other two being The Nazarene, about Christ himself, and Mary. The Apostle however is the only one of these, or any other of Asch's books to make the IWE list.

I liked this quite a bit, even if it is perhaps a little overlong. It is distinguished by an earnest seriousness that seems strange to us ("us" referring to that imaginary segment of the contemporary intellectual world that is super smart and well-informed whose sensibilities are remarkably in "sync" with mine) because earnest has become to my thinking something of a derogatory word that implies futility and a certain limitiation of ability when applied to intellectual pursuits. He was thoroughly Jewish, and led a thoroughly Jewish life, socially, culturally, and so on, so I doubt it would have been possible for him to adopt any of the more drastic Christian beliefs under any circumstances, but he was able to grasp the possibility of others' doing so. To be sure there is much more emphasis on Paul's Jewishness, and the Jewish origins of the entire Christian movement, than is usually found in Christian origin literature. There is always a fashion, maybe more prominent nowadays than ever, to be skeptical that the stories and major figures of the New Testament, including Peter, Paul, and Christ himself, have any basis in reality whatever, in some instances to the point of arguing that every aspect of them is entirely fictitious. What Asch believed as far as this goes I suppose I don't know, but he treated the stories and ideas of the gospels and epistles, whoever wrote them and who and whatever they are supposed to be referring to, very seriously, which is an approach most modern Christian debunkers don't see themselves as having to do. He knows that the power of the story is important in any case.

As with other long books I have had for this list recently, I neglected to take any notes until I was about 300 pages in, when I thought I had better jot some things down for the report. And as usual, once I began I ended up with quite a lot.

What prompted me to begin writing notes was a debate between Paul and his faction of Messianists and an opposing one led by some older school Jews regarding the necessity or not of circumcision for initiation into the new covenant ("circumcision a big deal" reads my note).

"He who cannot summon up enough courage to submit to circumcision for the sake of the God of Israel, is not worthy of admission into the congregation of the Messiah. He is a coward who cannot fight the battle of the Lord. For the Messiah is the battle of the Lord. And only those shall be admitted to the ranks who have the strength to give their blood to the covenant: even as it is written: `And in thy blood shalt thou live!'"--p.336

I took a moment to note the general awesomeness of the Jews across history, though perhaps there is some playing up in this author of their centrality and dynamism in the life of the Roman Empire.

The more the book went on and Paul began his travels throughout the Empire, Asch began to emphasize the myriad abusing and tormenting of human beings that underlay its entire operation. The first instance that pushed me to feel the necessity of making some record of my impression was the section on the bronze-working slaves of Corinth who passed away their entire lives in caverns feeding the smelting ovens and never seeing the light of day. I can't quote the whole section, but I will lift some especially pertinent sentences: "The life of these cave-workers was a short one." Regarding the mixers, whose work required a higher degree of skill which afforded them somewhat better treatment than the oven slaves: "Their beds were comfortable, but they were chained to them. For them as for the others, the cavern was a living tomb." "Most of the children taken into this work were such as had some physical defect, or some sickness, for which reason they could not be sold as house servants or prostitutes. These unfortunate discards of humanity were the dregs of the slave markets...When night came their bodies collapsed about the blocks and stalls at which they had worked all day. In the morning the overseers woke them with the lash..." (pps. 429-431) And on and on. I remarked at the time that this part was good, but Asch was just getting started with the depiction of atrocities. They seemingly kept getting worse with each change of scene.

After that I didn't make any more notes until page 654, at which time Asch dropped Sabina Poppea, the ultra-cultured wife of the manchild emperor Nero and diva superbabe of her generation, on my head. "Sabina had dreams of becoming the `Helen of Rome', with a temple of her own, in which worshipers would offer sacrifice after her death." She kept five hundred asses which accompanied her on all of her travels, as she maintained her glorious complexion by bathing regularly in their milk. On being introduced to the concept of resurrection, "Poppea was deeply interested; the possibility that she could arrange to be resurrected in all the beauty and charm which she alone possessed was something to be looked into."--p.656. However, "Any hint that worship of the Jewish God was bound up with duties, penalties, obligations, self-denials, discipline of any sort, she rejected. This was not in her style."--p.657. She capriciously punishes one of her attendants by pinching her breast with a pair of tweezers as hard as she can until the slave collapses.

     

The catalog of atrocities indulged in by the Romans never fails to fascinate. There is a section devoted to the epidemic of dumping bastards and other unwanted babies alive into the Cloaca Maxima, which is depicted here as a stream into which all of the sewage and other refuse of the capital was dumped and sent on its way out to see, Then there was one of Nero's parties, which took place on barges in a lake full of alligators:

"...in any case he (Nero) would enjoy the spectacle of the terrified slaves who, from their small boats, had to bring the dishes to the barges. The reptiles, their appetites awakened by the odor of food, swam after the boats and set them rocking. The girl dancers who had to perform on narrow ledges running round the barges were pale with terror; and the guests, reclining on couches at their tables, laughed drunkenly at the antics of slaves and dancers. The laughter rose into a shout of excited merriment when an unhappy youth or girl, unable to endure the test, fell with a scream into the water. A huge pair of reptilian jaws closed on the white body, and the water was stained red."--p.680

There is no reason not to believe I guess that the Romans really enjoyed watching people get eaten by alligators. Middle American types have always hard time understanding this as a major strain in the human character that their society has largely been able to suppress, at least in this kind of raw form. 

PP 700-701 brings the graphic torture of the character Antonius. It occurred to me rather belatedly, that he must have been supposed to be St Anthony, though I cannot find a St Anthony whose dates and mode of life corresponds with this guy's. Nonetheless, several of the minor characters sneaked up on me as being major biblical personages, Lukas, Marcus, etc, which I did not pick up on until they began to do fairly obvious things that signified who they were. Oh yes, about that torture:

"The bones of his hands and arms and legs had been cracked one by one between the claws of iron pincers. The skin had been torn, strip by strip, from his quivering flesh. One by one the nails of his fingers had been pulled out by the roots. His flayed feet had been held over a slow fire. He lost his human aspect and was reduced to a bundle of raw, blistered flesh."

It is remarkable what these early Christians had (and were willing) to suffer to be near God while Jimmy Swaggert and his ilk (or me, though officially I claim not to really believe in any kind of divinity or afterlife) don't have to suffer anything. It is true, Paul and his early followers were often buoyed by visions of and meetings with Jesus himself. Of course Jimmy Swaggert probably claims that he has talked to Jesus too, so it's really a puzzle why American Christians get to have the easiest of earthly passages.

After Nero had most of Rome burnt down, he famously (assuming the story has not been debunked) and absurdly pinned the blame on the Jews and their Christian adjuncts and held a giant entertainment in which members of these unfortunate groups were to be killed en masse for the delight of the Roman crowds. The show was boring, however: "...the Christians did not fight (in the gladiatorial arena); they only prayed and let themselves be eaten...here and there even the dulled, brutish heart of the Romans were touched by the spectacle of so many women and children fed to the wild beasts." 

Last note, on the conditions at the Tullianum prison, the last destination of saints Peter and Paul prior to their respective executions: 

"They were not starved to death so much as eaten to death. Food of some kind was given them, but they in turn, while still alive, were eaten by monstrous rats and crawling things which bred in countless numbers in the foulness of the cells and corridors. The prisoners were chained, either to rings in the walls or to great, immovable blocks of wood. The floors of the prison were littered with human offal, with moldering bodies and bones gnawed clean, and the poisonous air ate into the lungs and skin. A thick ooze dripped from the walls..." I think you get the picture. At the time I guess I thought this was the worst of all the executions and tortures, but probably the endless parade of them over the last half of the book had softened me up, and when they brought the rats in, I was finished, you know.

The Bourgeois Surrender Challenge

The major words used to produce this Challenge were obviously heavily Rome or Jewish-specific, which could have produced great results, but in this case produced a list of contestants I have no interest in reading. However, I have to try one of them, so I am going to go straight with the shortest of these that I can check out of the library  

1. Acharya S--The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold......................373

2. Peter Heather--The Fall of the Roman Empire......................................................167

3. Elaine Pagels--The Origin of Satan.......................................................................166

4. John MacArthur--One Perfect Life........................................................................148

5. John L Allen, Jr--The Global War on Christians..................................................101

6. Dietrich Bonhoffer--Letters and Papers From Prison............................................85

7. Simon Schama--Landscape and Memory................................................................42

8. Saul: The Journey to Damascus (movie).................................................................33

9. Mark A Gabriel--Journey Into the Mind of an Islamic Terrorist............................19

10. James Wasserman--The Temple of Solomon.........................................................12

11. Copan and Litwak--The Gospel in the Marketplace of Ideas................................12

12. The Real Jesus: A Defense of the Historicity and Divinity of Christ (movie).......11

13. Makers of Ancient Strategy (ed. Hanson)..............................................................11

14. Robert Silverberg--Needle in a Timestack.............................................................10

15. Stuart Munro-Hay--The Quest for the Ark of the Covenant....................................5

16. Mark Gibbs--The Virgin and the Priest...................................................................4

Round of 16

#1 S over #16 Gibbs

#15 Munro-Hay over #2 Heather

#3 Pagels over #14 Silverberg

#4 MacArthur over #13 Makers, etc

#5 Allen over #12 The Real Jesus

#6 Bonhoffer over #11 Copan and Litwak

#10 Wasserman over #7 Schama

#9 Gabriel over #8 Saul....

Elite 8

#15 Munro-Hay over #1 S

#3 Pagels over #10 Wasserman

#4 MacArthur over #9 Gabriel

#5 Allen over #6 Bonhoffer

Final Four

#3 Pagels over #15 Munro-Hay

#4 MacArthur over #5 Allen

Championship

#3 Pagels over #4 MacArthur



Nothing much to be said about these. Pagel's book is 214 pages. She is a professor at Princeton, so the odds that she is a total crackpot are reduced somewhat, I suppose.

December Update

No, I haven't given up *blogging* altogether. I have gotten bogged down trying to write something on the other site about the election which is not close to being finished. It is superfluous to keep complaining about how I need a computer that I can use at home, but--I need one. I should just get something and put it on a credit card, but every time I am about to do that, something else comes up that I need to put on a credit card. Still, this is killing my career right now.


A List: Arthur Miller--All My Sons.....................xxiii/85


B List: Asch--The Apostle................................721/754


C List: Seamus Heaney, The Burial at Thebes....49/79


I'm still in the introduction on the Miller play, which having been written in 2000 for a Penguin edition is longer and more pointless than it needs to be. This is the fourth of a set of American postwar plays we are going through, including another one by Arthur (why didn't he go by Art?) Miller,  Incident at Vichy, about a group of (mostly) Jews who have been rounded up during World War II and are sitting together in the waiting area of the police station, which I thought was a good piece of drama. The other two were also interesting. The first was Tea and Sympathy by Robert Anderson, produced in the early 50s and set at a New England prep school. It centers around a boy whom everybody suspects to be gay to the point that he is hounded from the school, though he is afforded the chance to demonstrate that he may not be fully of that persuasion at the end, while his main tormentor among the faculty leaves little doubt that his true nature in this matter is not what everybody would have it to be. There is a whole gamut of 50s psychological dysfunction and pathology on pretty raw display. There was a film version that came out in 1956 that was directed by Vincente Minelli (no comment with regard to this particular story--great director) and starred the suddenly ubiquitous (in my life) Deborah Kerr. The other play was Tennessee Williams's  The Rose Tattoo. This play is about love, not repressed, bourgeois love, but the kind that is intense, untamed, that gives everything it has freely, and is therefore somewhat terrifying to middle class people whose incomes are dependent on not indulging in these kinds of passions. Williams has aged quite well--his mentality fits well with the proclivities of our time. Besides being a uniquely talented writer, unabashedly gay at a time when that was not all that common, and a very publicly unhappy and troubled person, he had a great gift as a writer for relating to all kinds of different people on an elemental level as individual personalities, which is a trait that a lot of people writing very desperately would like to have, but their self-consciousness hampers them in this. I would assume Williams was afflicted with no small degree of self-consciousness, but it is not something that impairs him in writing about people.


The Heaney is a version, in very stripped down and basic modern English, of Antigone that was written on commission for the 100th anniversary of the Abbey Theatre. The simplicity and directness of the language is a surprise to me. My image of Heaney was of one of those quasi-mystical, gilt-tongued but at the same time cryptic Irish bards, really inscrutable to Americans, or least ones like me, because the gulf between the quality of the respective spiritual, cultural and intellectual backgrounds was too vast. Perhaps he is more like that in his other poems.


Picture Gallery

November Update

Late this month because I didn't have a computer on Sunday and then I had to rush to put up something about the election on parent blog on Monday, and then I got caught up in the election on Tuesday. So here it is:


A List: Between books, again.


I just did a bunch of short stories from the 1910-1940 era for this list.


B List: Sholem Asch, The Apostle..............................................................312/754


C List: Maria Augusta Trapp, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers......148/312


The Apostle is a novel about the life of St Paul, written originally in Yiddish, though never published in that language, appearing publically for the first time in an English translation in 1943. There is much about it and its author that I find interesting. Needless to say I will do a big review of this when I have finished it.


The Von Trapp book is indeed the source material on which The Sound of Music is (loosely) based. It is a charming little book. Maria would probably be considered a simpleton by most book people nowadays, but she really seems to have been one of those energetic positive people who never whines and makes things, such as her marriage into the Austrian aristocracy and the family's international music career, happen, by her account without intentionally seeking them but in the course of celebrating and honoring God's creation. The book was the selection of the Catholic Book Club for December, 1949, and the tone is devout and pro-Catholic Church. Most of the book takes place after the family moved to the United States, the Austrian portion made famous by the play and movie only taking up about the first third. The captain is a much softer touch than he is depicted as being in the film, though the bits about the whistles and the insistence on formality at all times were taken from the book. The von Trapps had lost most of their fortune during the crash of the 30s prior to the Nazi invasion, though they were able to keep their castle/palace by taking in boarders, mostly priests and students. Also Maria had married the captain way back in the 1920s--in the movie the Nazis arrive just as they are getting back from their honeymoon. The edition I am reading notes that the baron and baroness had had to give up their titles and the use of the 'von' in their names upon coming to America. I had thought this was a rule that American citizens could not possess or demand to be called by titles, but I feel like this has been relaxed in recent years. One of Hillary Clinton's good friends, Lady de Rothschild, who was born in New Jersey, seems to use her title socially in the United States without encountering a lot of indignation from democratic types.


The Gallery


I was going to put up some personal pictures with Von Trapp themes, particularly from a visit we made to their lodge in Vermont around 2004, but I have not been able to find them. Which is too bad, because there were some very nice pictures. We had just the two children at that time, and we were younger, and the pictures of my wife that day were especially pretty, and I remember that now as a happy time for me, though I am sure all manner of troubles were causing me to be miserable that have been forgotten now. So I will have to find other pictures.

Shakespeare--Antony and Cleopatra (1606)

I did a series on this for my original blog back in 2009, (Here and Here) to which I do not have anything substantial to add at this time. Antony and Cleopatra still ranks as one of my personal favorites in the Shakespeare ouevre, along with the other Roman plays, mostly because I don't have the sense that too many other people have claimed it as one of theirs. I need some patch of ground in the realm of Shakespeare appreciation on which to stake a foothold. Also its cleanness and formal perfection of composition has always impressed me, though I suppose other writers are able to give us something approaching this, and the most forcefully sentient people are more drawn to the robust protean energy of the most essential works.

This is the second Shakespeare play to come up on the IWE list, and the first tragedy. The alphabetical order is fine for this as I will be reading most of the plays that are on it for the second, third, fourth, etc, time. I have been on a bit of a Shakespeare binge lately--four plays in the last month for my "A" list plus this one and I am evidently overwhelmed as far as being able to pick out any especial insights or mildly interesting thoughts I had in reading it. I seemed to have had more to say directly in 2009. At that time I had not read any Shakespeare in several years, and I also think my mind was in one of those periodic windows in one's life where it is receptive to new impressions of old things. Also the rhythm of how I read now, especially for this IWE list, has seemingly been adjusted to consume the long novels which dominate it, so when plays come up, especially the super classics like Sophocles and Shakespeare, I want to spend some time with them, but my perception is not adjusting to the scale and density of the work. In truth, I am having difficulty in organizing and executing this essay. For one thing, though one of the purposes of this program of reading is to detach myself somewhat from the contemporary mental environment, it still seeps in, and of course I still crave a certain degree of intellectual camaraderie with the living, which I have never been able to obtain to my satisfaction. On this latest occasion I kept noting Shakespeare's attitudes with regard to what men should be like and what women should be like, which seemed to exist within a more or less traditional framework, though of course as with most of the better authors it recognized the existence of outliers, even if he largely maintained that the ideal even for these was ultimately to be constrained within a version of the traditional roles that was acceptable to them. Like a lot of people, the election, and the intense reactions and emotions it is provoking in people, are having effects on me. I was never attracted to Trump, but trying to persuade myself that Hillary Clinton is as wonderful as we are increasingly pressured to concede that she is only causes me to be unhappy and surly. The contempt and lack of respect for men that she projects and legions of her supporters openly revel in is not something I am able to embrace or celebrate. I told people, jokingly as I thought, that as long as Hillary Clinton demonstrated at any point in the campaign anything resembling respect for men who are not potentially large donors that she would have my vote. We are now two weeks from the election and I am still waiting. I am not going to vote for Trump, and I don't understand beyond the most primitive level why his supporters have put their hopes in him, but in my own life it is the increasingly aggressive and obnoxious progressives who loom as the greater problem, because I don't agree with their attitudes where men, particularly of the heterosexual, European descended variety are involved. I do not want a full restoration of 1950s gender roles and attitudes even if that were possible, but men do need to figure how to reassert themselves and play a strong and at least an equal part in life and regain some of the respect they have lost with women as well as among themselves, or I think we will continue to see very ugly politics centered around gender divisions and other various resentments. The current atmosphere is untenable.

But what of Antony and Cleopatra? The political choice wasn't really that appealing in that conflict either, to one of a democratic mindset. It was probably for the best that Augustus Caesar prevailed. He was the more modern man, though symbolically at least, more associated in the mind with despotism and unassailable power, while Antony symbolically represented the last link to the Republic, and a less absolute state. But I guess you should read my older posts on this play, since I really have not come up with any new thoughts since the last time.

The Challenge

Once again the magic words invoke so blatantly the great characters of the play that nearly all of the contestants in the Challenge can claim a Roman theme:

1. Hail, Caesar (movie).................................................................1,055
2. Stacy Schiff--Cleopatra: A Life....................................................731
3. Bernard Cornwell--Death of Kings................................................513
4. Tom Holland--Rubicon: Last Years of the Roman Republic.........259
5. Suetonius--Lives of the Twelve Caesars........................................200
6. Julius Caesar (movie--1953).........................................................194
7. Clay Griffith--The Greyfriar (Vampire Empire #1).......................154
8. Anthony Everitt--Augustus: The Life of Rome's First Emperor....148
9. Barry Strauss--The Death of Caesar..............................................139
10. Colleen McCullough--The October Horse...................................129
11. Joanne DeMaio--Beach Blues........................................................80
12. Isaac Asimov--Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare.............................66
13. Joseph Max Lewis--The Diaries of Pontius Pilate........................66
14. Steven Saylor--The Triumph of Caesar.........................................62
15. Chris Scarre--Chronicle of the Roman Emperors..........................45
16. The Last Days of Pompeii (movie--1935)......................................40


Round of 16

#16 The Last Days of Pompeii over #1 Hail, Caesar

Hail, Caesar is probably a better movie, but the general custom of the Challenge favors older movies in head-to-head matchups.

#15 Scarre over #2 Schiff


Scarre is shorter by 77 pages.


#14 Saylor over #3 Cornwall


Two basically identical books, genre novels published 2 years apart, both available. Saylor is 9 pages shorter.


#4 Holland over #13 Lewis


History (I think) beats more genre work.


#12 Asimov over #5 Suetonius


Suetonius would have been the choice, especially as Asimov clocks in at over 800 pages, but Asimov has an upset coming in this tournament, and he gets it in the first round.


#11 Demaio over #6 Julius Caesar

#7 Griffith over #10 McCullough

Battle of genre novels. Griffith about 400 pages shorter.

#8 Everitt over #9 Strauss

I can't tell if the Strauss is a serious book or not. Otherwise, they look pretty similar. Strauss is slightly shorter, but Everitt too is entitled to an upset. Which he does not need to get by here however.


Round of 8

#4 Holland over #16 Last Days of Pompeii

#7 Griffith over #15 Scarre

Griffith also had an upset in reserve.

#8 Everitt over #14 Saylor

#12 Asimov over #11 Demaio

The Asimov is 843 pages but I can't have it lose to a literal beach novel.

Final Four

#4 Holland over #12 Asimov

#8 Everitt over #7 Griffith

Championship

#4 Holland over #8 Everitt

The Holland is about 30 pages longer but it looks like a more solid book. Plus Holland also has an upset in reserve, which cancels out Everitt's unused upset in an extremely tight title game.

Sophocles--Antigone (441 B.C.)



We have an interlude now in the midst of these long books with a couple of foundational, all-time standard plays. Antigone, especially, is so short (or, if you prefer, concise) that even going over it at the most leisurely pace possible while still getting any productive reading done, a couple of days is about the maximum required to complete a reading in English. I don't remember how many times I have had to read this, for school, or one list or another. Three? Four? This time felt to me like the most successful effort, that I had the best frame of mind, concentration, the best overall grasp of the literary and mythical world in which the play took place. Of course one can only get so far reading it in English. It is pretty much certain at this point that I will ever become proficient enough in Greek to be able to really read the literature, beyond making painstakingly slow translations, which I can do to some extent now, though my vocabulary remains weak. So I am not going to kill you with a lot of literary analysis, which you will either already know or can get elsewhere. I read the old Elizabeth Wyckoff University of Chicago translation, which is the good old mid-century scholarship I am most comfortable with and have the most trust in with regard to emotional tone and things like that. This (the tone) seems to me at least, based on my biases and school experiences, what Greek literature conveyed into English should be like, especially for middling intellects. 



The concern with order and duty and the conflict between the competing ideas of what constitutes these that form the subject of the play made a stronger impression on me on this occasion than they had formerly, perhaps since in our own time these ideas as they apply to governing bodies and societal harmony, and oddly to me, perhaps even the cosmos itself, are weakening and being relentlessly questioned. They are not associated with promoting a greater, or common good, at least the ideas of duty and order that are invoked. Such ideas were strong however among ancient writers and in the systems that they devised or made records of. Creon comes across negatively in the play because he wishes to suppress an action rooted deep in custom and long practice for the sake of order. The implication is that he is attempting to impede the carrying out of necessary activity, of necessary duty, which is the true source of order. The importance of Antigone's being a woman is not of paramount significance to me, other than that I think it heightens the drama of the act of defiance, and suggests an awareness and interest in the feminine will and capacity for opposition that is not always evident in classical authors....      

I had inserted a heading here to be filled out later called Notes on my feelings. That would be feelings evoked by this reading. Naturally any Greek reading evokes memories, usually fond enough ones, of my school days, and will always continue to inform my encounters with these kinds of books, because I can associate them with the people, and social activities of that time, which in many instances involved real experiences and relationships rather than the more imaginary ones with which I associate other kinds of books. The story I accept as a kind of fact in itself, possessed of a being that is greater and more essential to the aspects of human existence that are of interest to me. And all of that.

The Challenge


The magic words for Antigone are frequently ones that are very particular to itself. This has the effect, as with other classical stories, of leaving a very small field for the tournament.

1. Virginia Woolf--Night and Day..............................................................301
2. Charles Boyce--Shakespeare A to Z..........................................................31
3. Antigone (film--Greece 1961)...................................................................25
4. Harold Bloom--Bloom's Critical Interpretations: Oedipus Rex................23
5. John Gardner/John Meier--Gilgamesh......................................................22
6. Seamus Heaney--The Burial at Thebes.....................................................21
7. Eleanor Fuchs--The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater, etc.....0
8. Dina Gujesnova--European Elites and Ideas on Empire 1917-1957..........0
9. Patricia Clark--Wreath For the Red Admiral...............................................0




Play-in Round


#8 Gujesnova over #9 Clark


I can't tell what kind of book the Clark is, but libraries don't have it anyway.


Round of 8


#1 Woolf over #8 Gujesnova


#7 Fuchs over #2 Boyce


#6 Heaney over #3 Antigone


#4 Bloom over #5 Gardner/Meier


I don't particularly like Harold Bloom, but his book here is shorter than Gilgamesh, and I don't think I am really up for that epic at this time anyway.


Final Four


#7 Fuchs over #1 Woolf


The Fuchs book is fairly obscure, but there are places that have it, and it is only 224 pages. Woolf is intriguing here, since I have never heard of this particular novel. However it runs around 450-500 pages, and especially with the insertion of the Knausgaard book into the slot where the challenge books go, I am going to need some shorter winners.


#6 Heaney over #4 Bloom


Championship


#6 Heaney over # 7 Fuchs


The Heaney book is actually just his version of the Antigone, which would be technically illegal. However, being a Nobel Prize winner and one of the handful of most celebrated poets in English of the last fifty years, his version probably can be counted as a work of literature in itself rather than a straight translation. And at 79 pages, it is practically a no-brainer here.

October Update

A List: Between books currently

B List: Between books currently

C List: Karl Ove Knausgaard--My Struggle: Book 1........196/441

For the A-List I have just finished a trio of Shakespeare plays--Measure For Measure, Cymbeline, and Henry V--that I had not managed to read before. I decided to tally up the overall number of Shakespeare plays I have read through via these lists, and to my surprise this recent batch just put me over the halfway point, at 20 out of 37. I thought I must have read more by this point. But it is legitimate, I have missed thus far most of the early comedies and histories, as well as the five or so plays that are generally obscure, Pericles, King John, Henry VIII and so on. Measure for Measure and Cymbeline were better than I was anticipating. Henry V was mildly disappointing in that I was expecting it might join the ranks of my all-time favorites, and parts of it certainly have that quality, but I was not positively enthralled by it all the way through on this first reading anyway as I thought it possible I might be. At this point of my life, expectation plays an outsize part in my response to literature and other works of art encountered for the first time after having only read about them, in some instances over the course of decades.

I am working on an essay for a book I have just finished for the B-list. I have made a rule that I cannot move on to the next book on this list until the posting for the previous book is published, otherwise I would never complete them, Hopefully that will be up in the next day or two.

The Knausgaard is also a deviation from my usual strict system. An old classmate had a copy mailed to me because he wanted me to read it, the first volume anyway, and the series has received effusive praise among the intelligentsia here so I decided to take it up. To this point it is largely a record of memories of ordinary life as experienced by a Norwegian teenager--and a heterosexual male at that--in the 1980s. Knausgaard is only about a year older than I am and I also went to high school in a cold northern place that was not unpleasantly a couple of decades behind the times in certain aspects. So his experiences are very similar to mine, with the exception that he was, if not a full-blown stud, a little less hopeless with the ladies during his high school years. There was at least some mild kissing and breast touching going on, and this with Scandinavian girls too, it must be borne in mind. I have to admit, the enthusiasm for this writer among many normally jaded and scornful critics and intellectuals, the kind of people who understand everything new and move with it and are bored by anything that is at all informed by the past we have left behind, is puzzling to me. I do not yet see the genius and brilliance that these other very exacting people are evidently seeing. I am not persuaded that it is not coming, because I am quite fascinated by the attraction it has for this self-consciously smart and superior class of readers, and I really want to know what they are finding in it. I don't dislike it, and I am curious to finish the first volume at least--maybe I will continue on to the other books down the line, one a year or something like that--but it does not strike me as being particularly funny (maybe this is because, as the argument was made against Bob Hope, Knausgaard is not Jewish, and Americans are conditioned now to understand humor as existing in the form in which it has been presented by Jewish comedians for the last 80 years). I also do not think the writing itself is that special. He constantly records very plain and seemingly unimportant exchanges of conversation verbatim, but then when a brash and confident boy comes into a room at school where the author is sitting with a girl he is in love with and the intruder proceeds to cast a spell over her and prompts her to (unconsciously?) open her legs when he takes a step near her (this was a good observation) he does not actually transcribe what this rival said that was so mesmerizing and effective, which I was dying to know. But perhaps this is consistent with the overall plan of the book...

No pictures this month. Too late in the evening.  

Author List Volume XI

Henry IV of England (1367-1413) Born: Bolingbroke Castle, Lincolnshire, England. Buried: Cathedral, Canterbury, Kent, England.


Henry V of England (1386-1422)  Born: Monmouth Castle, Monmouth, Wales. Buried: Westminster Abbey, Westminster, London, England. Cradle, Museum of London, 150 London Wall, City, London, England. College: Queen's (Oxford)


Henry VI of England (1421-1471) Born: Windsor Castle, Windsor, Berkshire, England. Buried: Windsor Castle, Windsor, Berkshire, England.






Laurence Olivier (1907-1989) Born: 26 Wathen Road, Dorking, Surrey, England. Buried: Westminster Abbey, Westminster, London, England. Riad Laurence Olivier (Hotel), Marrakech, Morocco. College: Central School of Speech and Drama






Catherine of Valois (1401-1437) Born: Hotel Saint-Pol, St Paul Church, 4eme, Paris, France. Buried: Westminster Abbey, Westminster, London, England.




Henry VIII of England (1491-1547): Born: Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich, London, England. Buried: St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, Windsor, Berkshire, England. Hampton Court Palace, Richmond-upon-Thames, London, England.


Margaret of Anjou (1430-1482) Born: Pont-a-Mousson, Lorraine, France. Buried: Angers Cathedral, Angers, Anjou, France.




Lady Grey (Elizabeth Woodville) (1437-1492) Born: Grafton Regis, Northamptonshire, England. Buried: St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, Windsor, Berkshire, England.

James II of England (1633-1701) Born: St James's Palace, Westminster, London, England. Buried: Church of the English Benedictines, Rue St Jacques, 5eme, Paris, France.

Cecil Scott Forester (1899-1966) Beat to Quarters (1937), Ships of the Line (1938), Flying Colours (1939) Born: Cairo, Egypt. Buried: Loma Vista Memorial Park, Fullerton, Orange, California.

Arthur Joyce Cary (1888-1957) The Horse's Mouth (1944) Born: Bank Place, Derry (Londonderry), Northern Ireland. Buried: (?) College: Trinity (Oxford)

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Marble Faun (1860) Born: Nathaniel Hawthorne Birthplace, 54 Turner Street, Salem, Essex, Massachusetts.(*****3-4-01*****) Buried: Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Middlesex, Massachusetts.(*****7-20-97*****) House of the Seven Gables, 115 Derby Street, Salem, Essex, Massachusetts.(*****3-4-01*****) The Wayside, 455 Lexington Road, Concord, Middlesex, Massachusetts (*****7-20-97*****). The Old Manse, 269 Monument Street, Concord, Middlesex, Massachusetts. College: Bowdoin.

Samuel Butler (1612-1680) Hudibras (1663-78) Born: Strensham, Worcestershire, England. Buried: St Paul's, Covent Garden, London, England (*****6-21-99*****)

Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) Humphrey Clinker (1771) Born: Dalquhurn, Renton, Strathclyde, Scotland. Buried: Old English Cemetery, Livorno, Tuscany, Italy. Cameron House, Loch Lomond, Alexandria, Dunbartonshire, Scotland. College: Glasgow.

In my old literary tourism guides from the 1970s and 80s the Cameron House, which was home to the Smollett family for many generations, was apparently open for regular tours and contained a small museum dedicated to the writer in one of its rooms. It looks as if now it has been transformed into a five star luxury resort, however.

Pierre Loti (1850-1923) An Iceland Fisherman (1888) Born: La Maison Pierre Loti, 141 Rue Pierre Loti, Rochefort, Poitou, France. Buried: Saint Pierre d'Oleron, L'Ile d'Oleron, Poitou, France. Pierre Loti Hill, Istanbul, Turkey. Pierre Loti Tepesi (Café), Idris Koeskue Cad, Eyup, Istanbul, Turkey. Pierre Loti Hotel, Sultanahmet, Istanbul, Turkey. College: Brest Naval College.

Robert Graves (1895-1985) I, Claudius (1934) Born: 1 Lauriston Road, Wimbledon, London, England. Buried: Deia Cemetery, Deia, Mallorca, Islas Baleares, Spain.  La Casa de Robert Graves, Carretera Deia a Soller, Deia, Mallorca, Islas Baleares, Spain. College: St John's (Oxford).  

Claudius (10 B.C.-54) Born: Lyon, Rhone-Alpes, France. Buried: Mausoleum of Augustus, Campus Martius, Rome, Lazio, Italy. Claudius Therme, Sachsenbergstrasse 1, Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.

Livia (58 B.C.-29) Born: (Rome?) Buried: Mausoleum of Augustus, Campus Martius, Rome, Lazio, Italy. Painted Garden of the Villa of Livia, National Roman Museum, Palazzo, Massimo, largo di via Perretti 1, Rome, Lazio, Italy.

Tiberias (42 B.C.-37) Born: Rome, Lazio, Italy. Buried: Mausoleum of Augustus, Campus Martius, Rome, Lazio, Italy. Villa of Tiberius, Sperlonga, Lazio, Italy.

Lancelot

Guinevere Born: Old Oswestry Hill Fort, Oswestry, Shropshire, England. Buried: Glastonbury Abbey, Somerset, England.

Pelleas

Ettarre

A.S.M. Hutchinson (1879-1971) If Winter Comes (1921) Birthplace: India.

For whatever reason there is a real dearth of biographical information available about Hutchinson compared to just about every other author on this list. I can find nothing with regard to a gravesite or scattering of ashes, whether he attended a university or not, or any more precise birth location than "British India".

Homer (before 700 B.C.) The Iliad (c.800 B.C.) The Odyssey (c.800 B.C.) Born: Smyrna, Turkey. Buried: Tomb of Homer, Plakoto, Ios, South Aegean, Greece.

I am aware that there is no hard historical evidence that any particular poet named "Homer" ever lived, or that either of these places has a definite connection with anyone with a claim to be the author of the Homeric poems. I am not a scholar, however, and in the absence of any positive evidence of anything, I happily revert back to these traditional memes, which have their origins in antiquity itself. While numerous cities and islands have also staked claims to being the birthplace of the legendary poet, the Smyrna (Izmir) claim is the one I have seen the most and in the most affable sources, so it is the city I have settled on to honor the poet pending further evidence.

George Chapman (1559-1634) Born: 35 Tilehouse Street, Hitchin, Hertfordshire, England. Buried: St Giles in the Fields, Camden, London, England.

Nestor: Nestor's Palace, Chora, Peloponnese, Greece.

Machaon Born: Trikala, Thessaly, Greece. Buried: Gerenia, Messenia, Peloponnese, Greece.

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) Born: Oscar Wilde Centre, 21 Westland Row, Dublin Ireland. Buried: Cimitiere du Pere-Lachaise, 20eme, Paris, France. Oscar Wilde House, 1 Merrion Square, Dublin, Ireland. College: Trinity (Dublin); Magdalen (Oxford).

Halldor Kiljan Laxness (1902-1998) Independent People (1945) Born: Reykjavik, Iceland. Buried: Fossvogskirkjugardur, Reyjavik (Hofudborgarsvaedi), Iceland. Gljufrasteinn, Posthof 250, Mosfellsbaer, Iceland.

 







Liam O'Flaherty (1896-1984) The Informer (1925) Born: Gort na gCapall, Inis Mor, Galway, Ireland. Buried: Haven't found this yet. College: University (Dublin).


Victor McLaglen (1886-1959) Born: Stepney (Tower Hamlets), London, England. Buried: Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, Los Angeles, California. Quiet Man Cottage Museum, Circular Road, Cong, Mayo, Ireland. Danagher's Restaurant, Cong, Mayo, Ireland.








Charles Sheldon (1857-1946) In His Steps (1896) Born: Wellsville, Allegany, New York. Buried: Mount Hope Cemetery, Topeka, Kansas. Charles Sheldon Museum, 1248 SW Buchanan Street, Topeka, Kansas. (maybe). College: Brown.