Hurrah for carrot juice, mango chunks, fresh scallops and oysters. And leisurely swimming, playing with dogs and chicken rice, getting in touch with long-lost friends and learning obscure chinese characters and reading Dante online.
Stories have been told as long as speech has existed, and sans stories the human race would have perished, as it would have perished sans water…I see today a new art of narration, a novel literature and category of belles-lettres, dawning upon the world…And this new art and literature - for the sake of the individual charaters in the story, and in order to keep close to them an not be afraid - will be ready to sacrifice the story itself…It is a nobel art, a great, earnest and ambitious human product. But it is a human product. The divine art is the story. In the beginning was the story; the human characters came on the sixth day only.
- Isak Dinesen, The Cardinal’s First Tale
Kundera and D’ors wrote novels. Plato wrote down a myth that Aristophanes had told during the symposium. Andersen wrote fairy tales. Novels describe how life is because it can be so. In a myth an impossible answer is given to unanswerable questions. Something happens there that never happens anywhere. Myths are examples, novels are pictures, fairy tales are beloved lies told by people who find the failed myth of life unbearable. In myths people live forever. In fairy tales they live happily ever after. In novels there is, at the end of the “ever after”, the beginning of unhappiness, and usually even before. In myths everything is solved in some way or other; in novels nothing is ever solved, and in fairy tales the solution is postponed, but if it ever takes place it will be outside the scope of the fairy tale. That is the lie.
- Cees Nooteboom, In The Dutch Mountains (from Minzhi)
has been declared the International Year of the Potato. Well done, UN.
A FRIEND was talking about experiences couchsurfing, a neat grassroots hosting system which I wish I’d heard of when I was an undergrad.
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M’illumino
d’immenso
- Ungaretti
John Milton 1608-1674
1637: Lycidas
1640-1660: The Pamphlet wars
1651: Blindness
1667: Paradise Lost
- Also know sonnets, Aeropagitica, Comus, Samson Agonistes
Lycidas: pastoral elegy. Edward King. Successors — Shelley’s Adonais and Matthew Arnold’s Thyrsis. Conventions — history of past friendship, questioning of destiny, procession of mourners, consolation, refrain. Predominantly in pentameter but with some trimeter lines, irregular rhyme scheme.
Paradise Lost: first half — rises Hell through Chaos to Heaven. Second half — opens with Descend, largely confined to earth. Book 4 (entry of Satan into Paradise) balances Book 9 (loss of Paradise); Book 5 and 10 before and after the Fall. Centre — destructive war in Heaven (Book 6), Creation (Book 7). Range of classical reference and gift for epithet. (Amazing stuff, Milton moves securely through the literatures of half a dozen languages and as many cultures.)
After a period of despair at the work I’ve to do (simi si alexandrine and euphuistic prose, for instance), it’s really fun to get re-acquainted with what I’d known a few years back. The sweep of Paradise Lost — war, love, hell, religion, heaven, the cosmos — and the hero who picks up the burden of worldly existence. Shivers. I had read it before and admired it, but was largely unmoved. This time it’s coming alive.
What forms of epic do we have nowadays? To read — Derek Walcott’s Omeros.
JUST learnt that Robert Jordan is dead. Nooooooo! His Wheel of Time series, which I’ve been following for 15 years now, is so cheong-hei we used to joke that he might die before finishing it. And that’s what happened!
Though it’s a long drawn out series, the characters gave me great reading pleasure in my teens. It feels like a door to that imaginary world has closed.
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This book sounds quite interesting.
Metaphysical statements you get on the job:
1. “Language knows no barriers.”
2. “It is about a love when two wholes are halved.”
Starting a collection here.
Subbing stories on Myanmar led to listening to Walk On — daylight is a long way off, still — then thoughts of Seamus Heaney.
The Underground
There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,
You in your going-away coat speeding ahead
And me, me then like a fleet god gaining
Upon you before you turned to a reedOr some new white flower japped with crimson
As the coat flapped wild and button after button
Sprang off and fell in a trail
Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms,
Our echoes die in that corridor and now
I come as Hansel came on the moonlight stones
Retracing the path back, lifting the buttonsTo end up in a draughty lamplit station
After the trains have gone, the wet track
Bared and tensed as I am, all attention
For your step following and damned if I look back.
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Graham Swift, The Light Of Day: “But it doesn’t fade. It’s not true what they say, that it fades, it cools with the years. It grows, it blooms, the less time that’s left. Eight years, nine years…How long do we have? Things get more precious, not less.”
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WTB: Robert Alter’s Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel.
A book in three different and distinct ways — in the mind of the author, on a shelf in the library, and in the imagination of the reader. And our cities, which unfold not only in the building but also in the telling of them.
Onwards with the writing.
RAVEL, Bleak House and Just A Minute on the BBC. Don’t watch much TV other than documentaries, but am listening to a lot of radio.
Graham Greenes, Susan Howatches. What with the Alpha course, I’m still searching. It waxes and wanes.
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Too little time to read whole novels for the GRE Literature exams. And what sort of obscure American writers they have! Mary Rowlandsdown? Cotton Mather? Wah lao, she says.
Quiz: What’s antanaclasis, ploce, parison, anaphora, epizeuxis?
Resources: Study guides: I, II, III. JHU. Links and more links.
Basic terms, more terms