Being INTP is hard sometimes.

Current Music: Magyar Posse - Black Procession

is my favourite poet right now. He's so...punk rock!

At what point is one no longer an amateur at something?

Current Music: Jeno Jando - No.8 in E Flat Minor/D Sharp Minor,BWV 853

The offices through which our friends passed should have been described but for the fact that our author finds himself completely overawed in government offices. Even if he has happened to pass through them when they were at their most brilliant and dignified, with polished floors and tables, he has tried to run through them as quickly as possible with eyes humbly fixed on the floor, and because of this he has no idea whatever how flourishing and prosperous things they are.

Tags: gogol

I'm reading Dead Souls right now...the narrative structure! Oh! Gogol is with us throughout, I'm conscious of his physical proximity to the novel at all times. I am there with him, as if together we are watching a drama unfold. Yet he controls the camera, he forces my gaze on a scene, and afterwards, or at any moment, he tears the world away from me and I am in a dark room with no one but Gogol as he looks me dead in the face and tells me what I've just seen, what it means, or he may poke fun at the characters, all of them, ridicule them. But his monologue occurs in real time with the narrative; he takes opportunities wherein nothing important happens to tell me something. I know this because he says so:

Since the conversation which our travellers conducted with one another is of no great interest to the reader, we shall do better if we say a few words about Nozdryov himself, for he will perhaps play a not inconsiderable part in our poem. The reader is probably to some extent familar with Nozdryov's personality...

and on he goes for a few pages until they arrive at Nozdryov's house. The novel is surreal, grotesque, a dream. "They had all sorts of names and most of them in the imperative mood..." Consider this remarkable scene built out of dialogue. They are sitting at the dinner table, but where do they go? Where is time? When do they move?

"I won't hear of it," said Nozdryov. "I won't let you go."

"Please don't make it difficult for me, my dear fellow," the brother-in-law said. "I must go. Really I must. You will make a lot of trouble for me, you know."

"Nonsense, nonsense, we'll have a game of cards."

"Please have one yourself, my dear fellow. I can't. My wife will be vary angry with me. Really, she will. I must tell her all about the fair. You see, my dear fello, I simply must do something to please her. No, please don't keep me."

"Oh, to hell with your wife! As if you had anything important to do with her."

"Oh no, no, my dear fellow. She's a very good and faithful wife. Does so many things for me. Believe me, it makes me cry. No, please don't keep me. I'm an honest man and I must go. Honestly I must. I assure you."

"Let him go," Chichikov said softly to Nozdryov. "What's the use of keeping him?"

"You're quite right," said Nozdryov. "I can't stand these namby-pamby sentimentalists." And he added in a loud voice: "Oh, to hell with you! Go and make love to your wife, you fetyuk!"

"No, my dear fellow, don't call me a fetyuk. I owe my life to her. She's such a nice, sweet woman. She's so sweet to me. she makes me cry. I'm sure she'll ask me what I saw at the fair and I must tell her all about it. You see, she really is a darling."

"Oh, go. Tell her a pack of lies. Here's your cap."

"No, you oughtn't talk like that about her, my dear fellow. You see, you really are insulting me by such talk. She is such a darling."

"Well, then, get out and go to her quickly!"

"Yes my dear fellow, I'm going. I'm sorry I can't stay. I'd be glad to, but I can't."

The brother-in-law went on repeating his apologies without noticing that he had been sitting in his carriage for a long time and had been driven out of the gates hours ago and that for hours there was nothing before him but open fields. It is to be assumed that his wife did not hear a lot about the fair.

"What a rubbishy fellow!" said Nozdryov, standing before the window and watching the carriage as it drove away. "Look at him rolling along! His trace horse isn't bad: I'd long wanted to snaffle it, but you see, you can never agree about the price with him. He is just a fetyuk, simply a fetyuk!"

They then went back to the room. Porfiry brought candles and Chichikov noticed in his host's hands a pack of cards which seemed to have materialized out of nowhere.

Out of nowhere, yes! the whole book is like this, sudden shifts, time flying forward and backward, characters fading in and out of being, like Gogol is himself a magician conjuring all of this up as we watch. Which is unlike other novelists who do their conjuring behind our backs, as it were. No, Gogol enthralls us with constant motion, now showing us something, now smacking our head, now he's somewhere else. An amazing book!

Tags: gogol, reading, russian literature

It took me a few days to settle down with it but I finally read the introduction and the first two selections: Caedmon's Hymn and The Dream of the Rood. I don't have anything interesting to say about the former--Uh, it would be cooler if I knew OE. Otherwise, the selection boils down to the story of a man becoming divinely inspired to utter poetry. The Dream, on the other hand, was neat. First crazay thing about it is that it was discovered in a single manuscript, a collection of OE poems, in ITALY, from the 10th century. So, wow, I wonder where the thing was copied. It's also a cool read, a first-person monologue from the perspective of the tree which was cut down and made into the cross upon which some "young Hero" was crucified.

Beowulf is next, which I've read, but it was long enough ago that a re-reading is ok.

I want to start with OE soon; anyone know a good textbook? I have Peter S. Baker's Introduction to Old English; how is it? I don't like how it doesn't have vocabulary lists for each chapter. I need vocab lists--which words are high-frequency, which words are important to know...that sort of thing.

Tags: norton, oe
Current Music: Mogwai - Kids Will Be Skeletons

Tonight I was sleeping. Or trying to sleep. I saw a road covered with bloody arms and could not close my eyes. I sat up and turned on the light but saw nothing. Now I'm here writing this letter. I had a dream that she married a military man and painted hexagons for eternity, hunched over an open window. The hexagons scattered themselves over the edge of her canvas and out the window and I pulled myself up on them and said goodbye. I walked out into the shapeless, amber landscape and disappeared.

Tags: unreal

After my last post on the Norton Anthology Project, I started to feel bad for skipping volume A. Sure there's some "greatest hits" stuff in here that I've read before (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales), but that is no excuse because I'm unfamiliar with many of the other selections. Plus a part of my goal is to witness the evolution of English literature and starting with the Renaissance won't give me a good picture of that--I'm starting off with a revolution in literature and not reading through the context of that revolution! So, volume A will get a read through now.

Tags: norton
Current Music: Tear Ceremony - A Mouth Likened to Pomegranate

Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, 1503-1542
Introduced the sonnet to the English language through his translations and adaptations of Petrarch's sonnets.
Faves: "Farewell, Love:"

Farewell, Love, and all thy laws forever,
Thy baited hooks shall tangle me no more;
Senec and Plato call me from thy lore,
To perfect wealth my wit for to endeavor. (excerpt)

"Madam, withouten many words:"

Madam, withouten many words,
Once, I am sure, ye will or no.
And if ye will, then leave your bordes,
And use your wit and show it so.

And with a beck ye shall me call.
And if of one that burneth alway
Ye have any pity at all,
Answer him fair with yea or nay.

If it be yea, I shall be fain.
If it be nay, friends as before.
Ye shall another man obtain,
And I mine own and yours no more.

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, 1517-1547, the last man executed by Henry VIII
This guy invented the English sonnet, and also introduced blank verse. He utilized blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) to render Virgil's Aeneid into the English tongue. He was a friend of Thomas Wyatt, so the two of them were a pretty potent coupla guys for the development of English poetry.
(The Italian or Petrarchan sonnet is 14 lines long, consisting of an octave and a sextet. The English sonnet is intead quatrain, quatrain, quatrain, couplet.)

Faves: hard to say just yet, but I love his rendering of Petrarch 164, "Alas! so all things no do hold their peace," and amazing contrast between his inner turmoil with the outward peace of nature. Well-done!

Tags: norton
Current Music: Sonic Youth - Brother James

I've taken up the project of reading the entire Norton Anthology of English Literature. This will take a while, but I think I'll try to post regularly on my progress. The Norton Anthology is a large collection of English literature beginning with Beowulf and continuing up to writers living today. I think the entire thing--I don't have the second set yet--amounts to over 6,000 pages. One of the reasons I want to do this is, well, I'm a little ashamed that I am so unfamiliar with the literature of my own language. I've been feeling like an exile lately, craving a greater acquaintance with English. It is a travesty that I do not know Old English or Old Norse and I should not be proud not to know other Germanic languages better than I do. Oh, German.

So far, I've cheated a little bit by skipping volume A on the Middle Ages. I'll come back to it. In volume B I've read John Skelton, Sir Thomas More, and Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder. Here's an interesting passage from More's Utopia, which reminded me of rinku:

But while they equal the ancients in almost all other subjects, they are far from matching the inventions of our modern logicians. In fact they have not discovered even one of those elaborate rules about restrictions, amplifications, and suppositions which our own schoolboys study in the Litle Logicbook (sic). They are so far from being able to speculate on "second intentions" that no one of them was able to conceive of "man-in-general," though I pointed straight at him with my finger, and he is, as you well know, bigger than any giant, maybe even a colossus.

More's friend Peter Giles (to whom the work is addressed) created a sample of the Utopian language which is pretty neat.

Utopia is a cool book to read after you've gotten to know Lucian pretty well, especially the Alēthē Diēgēmata.

Next up is Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who lost his head to the whim of Henry the Eighth.  ("Eighth" looks funny. Like some weird Welsh cough.)

Oh, and Christian? Stop reading my journal. Go away. Now.

Tags: english literature, utopia
Current Location: treehouse