Sophocles. Done.

And it only took just under a year.  This whole thing is going to take much longer than I thought if I don't get a move on.

I'll be doing some re-reads of some of the non-Thebian Sophocles from a collection of Roche translations I picked up-- just once through to get the flavor of the plays from language I've come to appreciate.

But in the meantime, I need a break from Greek tragedy.  So on to the Peloponnesian War!

Year 1, In The Books

Honestly, I didn't mean for that to be a pun.  Liked it so much, I kept it.

Job and Ecclesiastes

The Iliad

The Odyssey

The Agamemnon

The Libation Bearers

The Eumenides

Prometheus Bound

Ajax

Antigone

The Histories of Herodotus

Common Sense

The Spirit of Laws

Second Treatise of Civil Government

The Anti-Capitalist Mentality

The Joke

Speed-The-Plow

Radical Chic

Mau-Mauing The Flak-Catchers

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

The Dark Knight Returns

Batman: Year One

The Killing Joke

Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers (Tom Wolfe)

It's all an illusion.  Government programs, class struggles, status-climbing, identity politics, community organizing-- all of it.

Those who design top-down programs and solutions think that they will make a dent in the problem.  What's the problem?  Well... clearly there is a problem, and clearly we have in mind that we will do something about it, and in the end, clearly that will indeed come to pass.  Because how could it not?

Every participant uses the system in place for ends other than what the system was put in place for.  Community leaders hand out favors to friends.  Government bureaucrats check boxes on a checklist, their assignments fulfilled.  Status-seekers see an opening and make a move for themselves.  Children are conscripted for image management purposes.  Teachers create lessons to raise awareness-- the most important thing that can be done for a learner.  Writers claim to have discovered The Answer, while cultural guideposts pick winners nearly at random.  Money is flung around because money is the only medium known to produce results-- the mere use of it must be part of the solution!

Is there an alternative?  Well... an alternative to what?  If you never define the problem you can insist that only your actions can possibly solve it.  Who can propose a better way?  How could they possibly show their way to be better?

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I guess I hinted at this same problem in the last post, but here it is again.  Trying to wrap my head around macroscopic sociological problems-- or even macroscopic descriptions of society-- drives me crazy.  Wolfe's style is very helpful in explaining why this might be so-- because the most likely case is that it doesn't make any sense.  The best way to realize that is to see whaat we actually see in our everyday experience of the world and the large society we live in-- only disjointed facts and impressions, that whirl around while the rational part of our brains try to tell some kind of narrative that makes sense.  It could very well be that we're not wired to make sense of that level of abstraction.

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On another note, I have noticed that my posts tend to be written in the voice of the author I just read-- or at least a facsimile of that voice.  This is not a new phenomenon.  Thinking back to high school and my first years of college, I often fell asleep trying to read whatever was in front of me (that I had put off until I was too tired to actually get through it-- some things never change).  Fiction, non-fiction, magazines, whatever.  And I always had dreams narrated in the style of whomever I had been reading.  I can distinctly remember this happening with Tom Clancy more than anything else.  Upon waking, I'd notice that whatever the narrator had been saying was utter, utter nonsense, and then the content of that narration would fade completely.  But the tone remained (even if I was unable to reproduce it while I was awake).

Anyway, it's happening again, especially in the entries for Chesterton and Wolfe.  I'm glad that it is.  In Chesterton's case, his tone is so lofty I want to capture it as my own.  In Wolfe's case, it would be impossible to take careful sequential notes of what he writes-- and I wouldn't want to anyway.  As I mentioned above, the free-wheeling style is the only way to make sense of his subject matter in the first place.

Sidelines (Ed.: Sidelights?)

It can get awfully boring limiting oneself to a set sequence of books.  And it can get mighty annoying reading just enough to outline in a post, and no more.  I'm getting a little sick of it at the moment.  Can't I just read?

So, a new addition.  Random insertions of non-classics, read quickly and immersively (well, more immersively).  Library books, many of them will be.  They'll get single entries, and I'll feel free to move on.  Capice?

Sudden panic, however: do I call these sidelines, or sidelights?  Apple's Dashboard dictionary says:

sideline - an activity done in addition to one's main job
sidelight - a piece of incidental information that helps to clarify or enliven a subject

They're both right!  Ummm..... sidelights it is.  (The whole damn blog is a sideline.)

Well this is just depressing

Review of a critic of Classics translations (via The Fortnightly Review).  Apparently, Lattimore sucks.

To which I can only say

Branching out

I've got shelves and shelves of books that I wanted to own, but never got around to reading, and it's not all literature.  There's no reason not to read more than one thing at a time-- if I could do it in fourth grade, I can do it now.  But I think it's best to read only one selection from a genre at a time.  My shelves are pretty well divided between Literature, Religion, Politics, and Philosophy, though there's a good deal of overlap between the categories for some books.

Note-taking isn't necessary for every book, either.  At the moment, I'm reading Mark Steyn's Lights Out.  I ordered that one pretty soon after it came out, I think (along with Dream Theater and Van Morrison CDs, apparently).  Since it's simply a collection of his essays, and it's mostly entertainment, that's all that needs to be said.

Delays

Having finished The Iliad in the first couple days of November, and having decided to get the blog underway before reading any further, it appears I've taken a two-week break from reading at all.  That sucks.

A number of issues intersect here.  Apparently, I have a tendency to go big or don't go at all.  If I don't anticipate having an open stretch in which a project (or the next book) will complete itself, I hestitate to start it.  Actually, the blog notes should help with that-- any delays that come up can be absorbed, because I can easily review what has been covered so far.  I should keep that in mind.

Issue #2: For some reason, I fear running out of project to complete.  That is, I feel that if I were to finish something early, what would I do then?  It's an incredibly stupid attitude-- at this point, I've got shelves and shelves of books that will take years to finish even if read daily, and I keep adding to the collection anyway.  Ultimately, all I do is time-shift anticipated wasted time from the unknown future to the ever-extending present.  I feel like this is a little bit different than procrastination.  But maybe this actually is the central essence of procrastination.

Issue #3: When I'm not reading, I feel like I'm not that good of a reader.  It's weird, because when I'm actually doing the reading, I feel like I love it.  So why don't I recognize that, or know that about myself, when I'm not doing it?  A very bizarre instance of a lack of self-awareness.

In any case, I'm caught up on notes now.  Time to get to the next book

Where to begin?

The Bible would seem a logical place to start. And lucky for me, that happens to be where I started-- at the beginning of Lent, 2009. At that time, I made it through Numbers before petering out. When Lent started in 2010, I took it up again and made great progress (thanks in large part to Eucharistic Adoration at St. Veronica parish in Chantilly.) By the time I moved, I had successfully completed the Historical books (minus Maccabees). It would be useless to try to summarize those books now-- perhaps I'll re-read the Bible at some point, and can fill in the entries then. In any case, all of that was read before I had planned this project.

If I was really going to begin at the beginning, I think the Epic of Gilgamesh would have been the earliest reasonable work of the Western Canon. After a little research, however, I wasn't confident that there was a definitive "Epic of Gilgamesh" that wasn't mostly a later reconstruction. Not worth the effort-- not part of the project.

At some point I purchased Harold Bloom's The Western Canon to use as an overall guide, but it doesn't extend to ancient times. During my used-book purchasing spree at the Fairfax County libraries I came across another Bloom work, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found, that seems to cover ancient literature-- enough for my purposes, anyway.  And Bloom starts with a comparison of Job and Ecclesiastes, followed by a comparison of Homer and Plato.

Perfect.  Job it is.

Mostly, it's a memory aid.

What is the point of all this?

I'm starting a project to read the classics of Western Civilization, from the beginning. It's a matter of personal enrichment (as opposed to expecting any practical or professional benefit from it). Longer term, perhaps the thought is that with a proper base of knowledge, it will be easier / more likely / more useful for me to enter into conversations about enormous, big-picture issues and be satisfied with my ability to make a meaningful contribution. Do I expect that to happen? Not exactly-- but I expect it won't happen if I don't undertake the project.

One issue holding me back is the recognition that I'm not the best reader in the world. That is, I'm not good at reading for overarching themes, for symbolism, for the illustrations of philosophy that the best literature tries to achieve. Once again, undertaking the project itself should go a long way toward addressing these deficiencies. But I'm also afraid I'm not all that good at even remembering what has happened in a major work from one section or chapter to the next. At least at first, the majority of posts will be simple outlines or summaries of the surface action of the work-- a source that I can refer to later to remind myself of what happened when. I think that once my memory has been jogged (by my own writing, of course-- isn't that what I preach to the students I tutor?) I will be able to recall the work itself, well enough at least to recognize the themes that appear or are referenced in later literature.

So, boring notes to begin. Maybe personal insights-- or reminders of personal insights-- as they arrive. If it seemed important, write it down.

Why a blog? Because that's how it's done nowadays. But also, after manually jotting notes from the first two books, I realized that I didn't want a stack notebooks to be discovered by the authorities at a later date like with Kevin Spacey in Se7en. And if I ever do get good at this, it will be easier to show a blog to other people.