Congratulations on 52, Melissa!

This week was mostly spent reading, though not quite finishing, William James' Psychology: Briefer Course. This was meant as a shorter, student-friendly version of his monumental Principles of Psychology (students called the latter "James," and the Briefer Course "Jimmy"), but included new materials on what he called "the stream of consciousness," which ended up being an important literary source for Joyce, Stein, etc. Lots of the chapters bear on topics important in dh's field, and now and then I read him chunks of "Jimmy" just to enjoy his professional reaction to Victorian speculation. "Hey, don't shout at me, I'm only reading it for the literary significance." Only thing finished this week was some Roman theater: Plautus's play Amphitryo (195 BC). Cuckolded by Jove while away at the wars? Your slave impersonated by Mercury to keep you out of your own bedroom? What to do? Oh the hijinks!

Junie, If you like Poe but not horror, maybe Arthur Gordon Pym, if you haven't read it already?

I'm very sorry, Junie. May the Lord bless him and keep him.

Middle Girl took her AP English Literature exam today. After spending an hour telling me every detail of the exams (she took the French also), the school, the other students, and every facet of every moment of her mental processes through the long day, she said how excited she was that now we could just read and study literature together without worrying about preparing for the AP. Yes! I'm excited, too! Let's see, what's up next? Mutiny on the Bounty, since she loves sea adventures? Romantic poetry? Wee Girl and I did a close reading of "Daffodils" today.... Wait, how about the English satiric tradition? Gulliver's Travels, after all. (Of course, if she bombed, it's toiling through Gatsby and The Scarlet Letter for her.)

I'm going to make a yeoman effort to find Couperus. University Interlibrary Loan, here we come.

Will you say what you think of the Kitto when you're done? I was disappointed in the last Pelican history I read but maybe The Greeks is better.

Sounds like you should be the one giving us your lists! Hint. 😉

Who's next up to the plate after Dickens?

The Prince is short and very readable in modern translations, for anyone who wants a literary selection this week. However I personally am all full up of late medieval/ early Renaissance Italian political intricacies, having spent this week reading Dante's Purgatorio in the Sayers translation (previously read the Ciardi). Lots and lots of notes, geared to the nonspecialist (which would be me). Better in maturity, as so many of these things are. Next up: William James.

Dh teaches Logic, and would write down every single accusation and response in first-order logic notation, working it out as he went. He always won before anybody else figured out anything. We had to make a house rule that he’s not allowed a pencil but must do it in his head, which gives the rest of us a fighting chance. I mostly lose because I panic and make a final accusation based more on intuition than evidence. Which I will mention if ever summoned for jury duty.

Well I just finished losing (as usual) at Clue, where as it happened, someone did get bashed over the head with a candlestick. In the conservatory. Maybe if I read cozy mysteries I'd win once in a while.

Don't feel dumb about Gulliver's Travels! You probably don't need a better translation but better notes. It makes little sense in English if you don't know whom Swift is poking in the eye with his satire. Also, his satire is very dry, so it can be hard to tell when he's being serious and when he means the opposite of what he says. Can you list some books you'd have available in Dutch? In fact, what are some classics of Dutch literature? All I can think of is Thyl Ulenspiegel, if I even have that spelled right.

I plan to read Middle Girl's Heaney translation because I used to (in another lifetime) read A-S passably, and the facing text will let me delude myself that I still can. We toyed with "Attica" as a girl's name, figuring people could choose, for the referent, between Athens and the prison riot. I kind of wish now we'd had the courage.

Whoops. Well there's more at the end that I didn't reveal, which may yet (crossing fingers) make you change your mind. Or maybe not. 😉 So, my biggest Faulkner disappointment: I read The Wild Palms (an older edition, before it was renamed If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem), and got a little whiplash from the interweaving of the two plots. Not only are they set in completely different times and places, but the tone is utterly different. How would these two disparate storylines eventually unite? I wondered. Well they don't. They're two separate novellas, utterly unrelated (despite Wikipedia's desperate attempt to find a common basis in that they're both, um, about a man and a woman, see?) Faulkner just makes you read them both alternately, whether you like it or not, with no hint that they're DIFFERENT BOOKS.

Yeah I have my eye on the Oxford World's Classic. I like to visit the big used bookstore near Big State U. about this time of the semester, for the lovely Oxford and Penguin Classics on the clearance shelf, from undergraduates who couldn't get rid of the books fast enough.

But the end was hilarious! Got me mah NEW TEETH!! However, there are supposedly Great Books that no earthly power could make me re-read, too; so I'm right there with you in spirit, if not with regard to the particular text.

One last post before getting some actual homeschooling done. Just in case, here's the works that may count as classics on my current to-read list. If anyone is seized with a desire to read along. Anonymous, Beowulf Anonymous, "The Phoenix" (poem) Asser, The Life of King Alfred Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment Emerson, Essays Euripides, Bacchae Hesiod, Theogony/ Works and Days Irving, The Alhambra James (Henry), Roderick Hudson James (William), Psychology, A Briefer Course Lucretius, De Rerum Natura Perez Galdos, Fortunata and Jacinta Plautus, Amphitryon Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus Terence, Phormio

Interesting! I haven't checked e-books because I hate reading electronically so much (it's on Project Gutenberg too, but I lasted three pages). But the long hold list seems to support the recent-interest theory. We'll throw that one on the stack then! Here's a quick list; please add. (Sorry table format unavailable) This high school work is better in our maturity... 1. Dickens, Great Expectations 2. Euripides, Medea 3. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby 4. Homer, The Iliad 5. Swift, Gulliver's Travels 6. Sartre, No Exit 7. James, The Portrait of a Lady 8. Shakespeare, King Lear 9. Faulkner, As I Lay Dying 10. Poe, "The Cask of Amontillado" 11. James, The Turn of the Screw 12. Shakespeare, Hamlet 13. Melville, Moby Dick ... because now we've all ... 1. ... read Harry Potter and want to see the source material. (h/t Kevin) 2. ... seen a horrifying marital break-up where both spouses know exactly which buttons to push. 3. ... met people who go through life blithely wrecking things and letting others pick up the pieces. 4. ... found out first-hand what damage ungoverned anger does. 5. ... lived in a society ruled by overweening technocrats. 6. ... discovered the hard way that Hell really is other people. 7. ... known women abused by men who never laid a finger on them. 8. ... begun to see Regan's and Goneril's point. 9. ... had neighbors like the Bundrens, whom we'd gladly pay to Go Away. 10. ... entertained that particular fantasy. Oh, we'd let them out after a while. Really. 11. ... hired at least one crazy babysitter. 12. ... seen kids who come home from college all judge-y about their parents. 13. ... started cheering for the murderous whale. Hey, no one made you go harpooning endangered species. Dishonorable mention: Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird ... is worse in our maturity, because now we've all ... met our hundredth child named Atticus or Scout.

Ooooo! Can I make a list? I think I mentioned above that Gulliver's Travels is much better now that one can recognize Laputa as a transparent satire on Silicon Valley.

The strangeness of the premise (and the stranger aspect that she isn't even really dead until they bury her) may work better for you if you think of it as Tragic Farce (or I suppose farcical tragedy, depending on how you weight the novel). The fractured, stream-of-consciousness narrative is very Faulknerian (at least in As I Lay Dying he tells you who you're hearing from now, as opposed to switching narrators unannounced in the middle of a paragraph), and takes some getting used to; it seems to be how he prefers to achieve his effect of particular realism. It strikes a lot of people that Faulkner's characters seem to talk, or at least think, like Faulkner; again, he wants to achieve a kind of realism, backwards as that may seem, by letting the reader have the immediacy of Darl's thoughts, and not distorting them second-hand through the prism of his dialect, intelligence, or lack of education. At least that's how I read it. YMMV.

The plan for reading Notre-Dame de Paris has foundered on the shoals of unavailability. The public library doesn't have it; the university (!) mega-library doesn't have it (except for a lonely Puffin adapted-for-children edition); the local used bookstores don't have it; the usual $0.01+shipping copies are not to be found on bookfinder.com. I can only conclude that the fire at the Cathedral spiked demand. Never mind; we can be patient.

Two books this week: 31. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels. Everyone remembers Lilliput and Brobdingnag from the children's versions, but reading the real book for the first time in years, it was striking how apposite the Laputa section is. Laputa, you recall, is a flying island, designed and run by socially inept technocrats contemptuous of anyone not good at math. They rule over the rest of the kingdom's inhabitants, who live in what is literally fly-over country, punishing those who resist the Laputan views by hovering over them to block out the sun, or where resistance is fierce, literally crushing them. 32. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets. I read this last year; but poetry, like chili, is better every time it's reheated. Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind/ Cannot bear very much reality. This week's reading: Some American poetry, some Dante, and surely the times call for Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Not just because of the fire, but because for Bad Catholics, today is Quasimodo Sunday. Really! And I've never read it before. Or seen the movie.

I clicked on "thanks" but I really wanted to click on the laughing face: all that adorableness literally made me laugh with joy.

I knew you were a worthy person! "I have a plan so cunning, you could pin a tail on it and call it a weasel."