Paging All Bookworms! discussion

My goals are about the same as last year: 150 books, 50 not in English, 37,000 pages.

Jan. 3

1. Widukindus Corbeius, Rerum gestarum Saxonicarum libri tres Book II [967?] 38 pages [HTML, Biblioteca Augustana] [in Latin]

Following the death of Henry and the naming of Otto as his successor, there were rebellions by the Hungarians, Slavs, and other peoples who had been subjugated by Henry, as well as civil dissensions among the Saxons, the most important of which were led by Otto's brothers, first Thancmar and later on Henry junior. For the first decade of his reign, Otto was continually at war to hold together the empire of his father and keep it under his own power. That is the content of this second book. At the end of the book, he has defeated all his enemies and reconciled with his brother Henry (Thancmar was killed in his rebellion.)

The style is basically the same as Book I, although the facts being contemporary are presented more straightforwardly and soberly, for the most part. One exception is Duke Henry Junior's war with Count Immo over Immo's stealing of Henry's pigs. Immo escapes from a siege by Henry by throwing down beehives on Henry's horses, who go crazy from being stung so that Henry has to abandon the siege. This sounds like a folk story. (Widukind does actually say that he doesn't know whether this story is true or false.)

The book ends with the death of Queen Edith in 946.

Jan. 5

2. Widukindus Corbeius, Rerum gestarum Saxonicarum libri tres Book III [973] 54 pages [HTML, Biblioteca Augustana] [in Latin]

At the beginning of the third book, Otto wages new wars against the Franks and the eastern barbarians, and his son Liudolf campaigns in Italy, extending the empire. In this book Otto is referred to as the emperor rather than the king. King Luthwic dies, and Otto marries his widow. Then a new rebellion breaks out led by his son and heir Liudolf, which occupies most of the first part of the book. This part is very condensed and difficult to follow, whether because Widukind assumes his readers will already know most of the facts or because he doesn't want to discuss things at length which would still be painful memories to Otto, and to Mathilda, to whom the book is dedicated. Understanding this section well would really require some prior knowledge of the history which I don't have.

After Otto's reconciliation with Liudolf, the book turns to further wars with the barbarians (and if they are barbarians compared to the Saxons, one can imagine how bad they are); the narration once again becomes fairly easy to follow. The main villain in this part is a certain Wichmannus who makes alliances with the barbarians. There are further wars in Italy and against the Byzantines and Saracens.

One manuscript ends with the death of Wichmannus in chapter 69; the other manuscripts continue for another seven chapters to the death of virtually everyone important in the book, ending with the death of Otto himself and the coronation of Otto II. It isn't known certainly whether these seven chapters are by Widukind himself or by a continuator.

Jan. 7

3. Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions [1884] 83 pages

Whenever I read a popular science book which deals with speculations about string theory and extra dimensions, it always mentions this classic little book from the nineteenth century. This time, I decided to check it out from the library and read it, which only required a couple hours. It is very short, and a fun read. The premise is that a being called A. Square, who lives in a two-dimensional world called Flatland, is visited by a three-dimensional creature called The Sphere. At first the Square cannot understand the concept of a third dimension, until the Sphere actually lifts him up and he can see the whole of Flatland from above. The Sphere explains to him that just as a point moving in one direction creates a line, and the line moving parallel to itself produces a square, so by analogy a square moving parallel to itself in another direction (which to a Flatlander is invisible) can create a cube, or a circle a sphere. Once the Square has understood the analogy, he immediately asks the Sphere to show him the Fourth Dimension, which must exist by the same analogy; the Sphere indignantly replies that there can only be three dimensions. The point of course is that the Sphere's refusal to accept a Fourth (and higher) dimensions is as much a limited perspective as the Flatlander's refusal to accept the Third Dimension. Even more modern sounding is the suggestion that Flatland actually must have a third dimension which is too small to be perceived, and the three dimensional world must have a small fourth dimension.

However, there is much more to this little book than the reasoning about dimensions. The account of Flatland is actually a biting satire on the British aristocracy and the crushing of the Chartist movement (Universal color = Universal suffrage), as well as the treatment of women and various other subjects which were topical when the book was written, and many of which still are.

Jan. 12

4. Naguib Mahfouz, The Journey of Ibn Fattouma [1983, tr. 1992] 148 pages

In this short political fable, the protagonist, Ibn Fattouma, angry because a powerful flunky of the Sultan has taken the woman he is engaged to, leaves his homeland, a fairly normal if corrupt Islamic country, and journeys in search of the utopian land of Gebel. In the course of his travels, he visits various flawed utopian and dystopian societies: one with sexual freedom (Mashriq), one with an all-powerful ruler (Haira), one with complete freedom but no economic justice (Halba), one with economic justice but no freedom (Aman), one totally mystical (Ghuroub). He marries twice, and spends twenty years in prison. The book ends with him on the verge of entering the supposed utopia of Gebel. Definitely one of Mahfouz' best.

Jan. 17

5. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le cru et le cuit [1964] 402 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in French]

The first volume of Lévi-Strauss' series Mythologiques, this long book in very small print (not enlargeable in the format Open Library uses) is a classic of twentieth-century anthropology (also available in English translation as The Raw and the Cooked.) He begins by analyzing a myth of the Bororo people (one of the central Brazilian tribes which were the subject of his own fieldwork, described in Les tristes tropiques) about the origins of destructive weather (heavy wind and rains). He then moves to a group of similar myths of neighboring tribes which speak languages of the Gé family, dealing with the origins of (domestic cooking) fire, which have elements in common with the Bororo myth. Throughout the book, he picks up new elements in certain myths and then seeks other myths which contain those elements, ending up discussing groups of myths about (inter alia) the origins of cultivated plants, fishing and hunting with poisons, death and diseases, and the differentiation of various species of animals and birds. In so doing, he also brings in many different regions of Brazil and the Amazon basin, and occasionally analogues from elsewhere in South and North America.

Lévi-Strauss' basic theory of structuralism is that myths (and other cultural traits), like language, are built up from underlying (and pre-conscious) structures of oppositions analogous to phonemes, which are expressed in various "codings" analogous to grammar, then modified by sytematic transformations to provide specific messages (content). Important oppositions include Nature/Culture (which can be coded as the raw and the cooked), Heaven/Earth/Water, Male/Female, Life/Death, Animal/Human/Plant, and so forth. Some categories "mediate" others; thus the cooked mediates between the raw and the spoiled (pourri). He explains the functions of particular birds and animals through the various myths in terms of the oppositions they represent (many myths are about opossums, vultures, jaguars, turtles and armadillos, for example.) His theory is much too complex to summarize in a short review.

Whatever one thinks of structuralism as a theory, this book would be worth reading just for the myths alone.

Jan. 20

6. Lisa Randall, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions [2005] 500 pages

A few years ago I read Lisa Randall's 2011 book Knocking on Heaven's Door, which she described as a "prequel" to her 2005 book Warped Passages. I recently found a copy of this in a used book store and added it to my reading list. The later book, as I said in my review, was essentially two different books in one: a description of scientific method and a technical-historical description of the Large Hadron Collider which was then first starting up. It had a bit of the science that the LHC was looking for, but not a great deal, mainly on the Higgs boson. This book, on the other hand, goes into depth (as much as a mid-level popularization without much math can do, of course) about the different speculative theories that the LHC might test. It is one of the better books I have read on the state of speculative physics at the beginning of the present century.

The framework, as the subtitle indicates, is the idea of additional spatial dimensions. After an introductory section briefly explaining the notion of dimensions and the concepts of branes and bulks first proposed on the basis of string theory, and a section outlining relativity and quantum theory which is obligatory for any low to mid-level popular physics book, she turns to her own area of specialization, particle theory, and outlines the Standard Model, symmetry-breaking and the Higgs mechanism, and proposals for Grand Unified Theories, along with the hierarchy problem. This section has some of the clearest explanations I have read of these questions, especially the hierarchy problem, and the book would be worth reading for these chapters alone. Randall, as she explains, comes from particle physics and a "model-building" approach, that is a bottom-up approach which tries to imagine solutions to actual problems in known theories, rather than from the theoretical, top-down approach of deducing consequences from string theory or M-theory, although unless I have misunderstood totally any theory involving branes depends on supersymmetric string theory in some form.

She then gives a somewhat more in-depth explanation of string theory and branes than in the introduction, and proceeds to the last section which outlines various theories of extra dimensions, from the usual string theory account of compactified dimensions in Calabi-Yau spaces (less detailed than in Brian Greene's books) through sequestering and large extra dimensions (ADD model) to her own models of warped dimensions between branes (SR1 and SR2). All this is very interesting speculation which I wasn't previously familiar with, but it is of course unknown whether any of it is relevant to the real world or not; some is obviously just exploring mathematical possibilities for their own sake, but others may be testable.

Here we come to the main problem of the book: it was written nearly two decades ago, before the LHC was completed. Throughout, she points to predictions which she believes will be testable once the LHC is operational: besides the Higgs boson, there should be light supersymmetric particles to solve the hierarchy problem, or Kaluza-Klein particles as indications of extra dimensions, and possibly five-dimensional strings and black holes — the list goes on. Shortly after the LHC went on line, the Higgs boson was discovered. But in the decade since, as the LHC reaches higher and higher energies, no further particles have been found. At all. No light supersymmetric particles, which rules them out as a solution to the hierarchy problem, and while not disproving string theory makes it much less attractive; no evidence at all for extra spatial dimensions, although maybe the evidence is just beyond. So, is the speculation in this book no longer worth reading? I don't think so; the book makes clear why the negative results of the LHC matter, and what theories it does or doesn't rule out, and that is worth knowing. I would like to read a revised edition of this written since the LHC results have come up negative. In the meantime, my next popular science book will be Brian Greene's latest — since he is one of the most enthusiastic popularizers of string theory, I want to see what modifications he has made in his account.

Jan. 21

7. Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization [2010] 310 pages [Kindle Unlimited]

Paul Kriwaczek is a Viennese journalist for the BBC, and amateur historian; his popular histories, based on mostly popular secondary works, are essentially background material for the stories he covers. Thus this history of Mesopotamia begins with Saddam Hussein's attempt to identify his government with the ancient history of Mesopotamia. This book, like most books that have Babylon in the title, is actually about the whole Mesopotamian world from the Sumerian beginnings to the Persian conquest. While given the amount of material available on the period there were bound to be some facts I hadn't come across before, essentially there is nothing in this book that will be new to anyone who has read other books on ancient history. What it is, is an attempt to work the material up into a "story" with a simple "plot" of rise and fall, achievement and decay. It might have been a good book for lay (and mainly younger) readers who might be put off by a "drier" more scholarly popularization, like the books this is based on (van Meerop, Leik, Roux, etc. — I've reviewed most of his "Further Reading" in the past couple years.)

Unfortunately, though, there are two problems I had with it. First, he is relentlessly idealistic. He explicitly rejects the idea that Sumerian culture was a result of material forces, or that it's decline was based on material causes, whether economic, climatic or external. Rather, everything is due to the desire of the Sumerians for change, their ideology of progress. He claims, for example, that the Neolithic Revolution was due to people abandoning an easy, abundant life of hunting and gathering for a harsh and difficult life as farmers just because they wanted to do something new, and then spreading agriculture as a messianic religious ideology. He loves to repeat the word "ideology" as an explanation for anything. As an example, he mentions that the collapse of the Uruk culture has been attributed to climate, war or economics, but that it was really due to a change in attitudes:
"Their world probably collapsed as much because its citizens lost faith in the benefits of their beliefs, the ability of their ideology to assure them a happy and rewarding life, as from any external pressures. The later Sumerians did not remember, or did not choose to remember, any of this. We find no explicit references in the myths, legends and epics that have come down to us."
In other words, this is how it happened but there isn't any evidence. The same thing is true of his explanations of Babylon, Assyria, and so on.

The other problem is that he identifies anything he doesn't like in Mesopotamian culture with the Soviet Union or China, taken out of any context. It's odd to find that kind of obnoxious cold war propaganda in a book written decades after the collapse of the USSR.

The only worthwhile part of the book is "For Further Reading": look at that, then read the books he lists instead of this.

Jan. 26

8. Mario Benedetti, La tregua [1959] 145 pages [Kindle] [in Spanish]

A novel in the form of a diary, La tregua is the story of a middle-aged widower in the last few months before his retirement from a meaningless job as a middle manager. The main theme is his May-December romance with a young woman from his office, but there are also subplots (never resolved) dealing with his three adult children and one or two acquaintances. It's all rather quotidian and even banal, but Benedetti manages to keep it interesting and cast light on the human condition as it was experienced in mid-twentieth-century Montevideo. The end is somewhat melodramatic and sentimental, and touches on religious themes, which I didn't appreciate.

Feb. 1

9. Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, Hrotsvithae Opera Book I [mid-10th century] 111 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in Latin]

Hrotsvitha was one of the very few important women authors of the early Middle Ages, best known for her plays (which are in Book II). She was a nun at the convent of Gandersheim in Germany in the tenth century; most sources say she lived from about 935 to somewhere after 973, although some believe she lived into the early eleventh century. Little is known about her except what she says herself in the prefaces to her works. The works were largely forgotten until resdiscovered at the beginning of the sixteenth century; they are usually divided into three books, the first containing the eight "legends" (hagiographical poems), the second containing the six plays, and the third containing her histories of the reign of Otto the Great and of the convent of Gandesheim. The edition I read in e-book format was the edition by Karl Strecker published in 1906, which is considered a very good version.

The first five poems in the book were probably her earliest work, written at a relatively young age; the last three were added later. As she admits in the prefatory poem, addressed to Abbess Gerbirga, the prosody is somewhat weak, and like many poets starting out, she chooses an unusual vocabulary to make it easier; for instance, she uses many diminutives without diminutive force for the sake of the rhythm (although that was a feature of Mediaeval Latin in general, she very much overdoes it) and invents many compound words which are not found elsewhere, which makes her Latin more difficult than in the other tenth-century works I have read in the past few months (the epic Waltharius and Widikund's prose history of the Saxons). The poems are obviously influenced by those of Venantius Fortunatus and C. Sedulius, but the use of internal rhyme and alliteration makes her seem less close than these to the classical authors and more a forerunner of later poetry. The subject matter is of course religious and obsessed with chastity, as one would expect from a mediaeval nun.

The first poem, which in the manuscript bears the grandiloquent title (not necessarily by Hrotsvitha) "Historia Nativitatis Laudabilisque Conversationis Intactae Dei Genitricis quam Scriptam Repperi sub Nomine Sancti Iacobi Fratris Domini" but is usually just referred to as "Maria", is interesting above all because it is based on an apocryphal gospel, the so-called Protevangelium of James (and partly on another apocryphon, the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, which at that time was apparently incorporated into it.) In the prefatory poem Hrotsvitha claims she didn't know when she wrote it that the book was not accepted by the church as genuine, but that she hopes it may turn out to be true anyway. It tells the story of the miraculous birth of the Virgin Mary and her childhood up to her marriage to Joseph (miraculously chosen as her husband by a rod which turned into a dove) and the birth of Jesus. She summarizes the gospel account of Jesus' birth very briefly but dwells on the non-biblical story of the midwives who find Mary's virginity still "intact" even after giving birth. It then turns to the flight to Egypt and recounts a number of fantastic miracles from pseudo-Matthew. Both the Protevangelium and Hrotsvitha's verse are intended to emphasize the "perpetual virginity" of Mary, which was not yet an official dogma; that is they are part of the process which substituted chastity for charity as the main virtue of Christianity.

The second poem, "De Ascensione Domini . . .", is an account of the last days of Christ on Earth (after the Resurrection) and his discussions with his disciples. According to the rest of the long title it is based on a Greek account translated into Latin by a Bishop John; neither the Greek or Latin is known. The remaining poems are martyrs' legends: "Passio Sancti Gongolfi Martyris", "Passio Sancti Pelagii Pretiosissimi Martiris qui Nostris Temporibus In Corduba Martirio est Coronatus", "Lapsus et Conversio Theophili Vicedomini" (considered a precursor of the Faust legend, although I don't think there is any real comparison, beyond the fact that they both sign pacts with the Devil. There's a wicked Jew instead of Mephistopheles), "Basilius" (another pact with the Devil), "Passio Sancti Dionisii Egregii Martiris" (notable for the hero walking two miles carrying his cut off head), and "Passio Sanctae Agnetis Virginis et Martyris" (with such an obnoxious heroine it was a relief when she was beheaded and had to shut up).

Feb. 3

10. Jean Piaget "with the assistance of seven collaborators", The Moral Judgement of the Child [1932, tr. 1932] 410 pages

Piaget's fifth book, The Moral Judgement of the Child is one of his most interesting. He begins with a study of how children understand the rules of marbles at different ages, and shows that there are two different ways of looking at rules: the younger children consider them as something objective which must be followed exactly (although in fact they seldom do so), while the older children change them according to circumstances by agreement and then follow them consistently. He then shows in the second chapter that young children tend to see moral rules also as objective ("moral reality"), based on "expiatory" punishment and "objective responsibility" and imposed by the constraint of adults or older children, while in the third chapter he shows that the older children tend to see them as more subjective, a result of mutual agreements, and emphasize reciprocity and equality (and at the highest age, equity.) The fourth chapter is a theoretical polemic with Durkheim, M. Bovet and G.M. Baldwin on the origins of morality based on his observational results. As opposed to the previous four books, he is less concerned with consecutive "stages" than with changes in the proportions of the different types which all exist to some extent at all ages. He also mentions for the first time that his researches were all with children from very poor families, which may explain why the average ages of the various stages seemed to me to be rather higher than I would have expected.

Feb. 12

11. Leonard Susskind and André Cabannes, General Relativity: The Theoretical Minimum [2023] 372 pages

General Relativity is the fourth book of the Theoretical Minimum series, and is based on a course of ten lectures of the same name. The previous books included brief explanations of derivatives, integrals, partial derivatives, vectors and so forth, and were apparently aimed at the layman interested in physics and wanting to go beyond the usual popularizations and understand the physics with the relevant mathematics, which would describe my own situation. In the preface to this book, however, it is stated that the target audience of the series is people who studied physics "at the undergraduate or graduate level" but "went on to do other things" and want essentially an up-to-date refresher. I think this represents a certain change, and the book is a bit more difficult than the earlier ones. It is not a "stand-alone" book; to be comprehensible at all, it requires that the reader have read books one and three (classical physics and special relativity; the second book is on quantum theory and uses an entirely different set of mathematical tools, so it is more of a "stand-alone") or have learned that material in other courses or from textbooks. I can't claim to have "studied physics at the undergraduate level" although I did have two semesters of introductory physics, which the course description claimed were "calculus-based" because they used simple calculus, but were not in the way these books are (starting from Lagrangians and least action.) In fact, since this book just came out, about six and seven years after I read the first and third books, I was quickly lost until I found my notes on those. (And yes, this is the kind of book you need to take notes on.)

The first thing to be clear about is that these are physics books, not math books. To make an analogy, my high school ATA course (basically today's Precalculus with a short introduction to calculus) taught vectors in some depth; my high school physics class, which did not require Precalculus, also taught how to use vectors, but without as much explanation of the "why's". These books similarly teach the necessary math from the standpoint of how to manipulate the symbols and do the calculations in the physics rather than from the standpoint of explaining it as math. I was actually surprised how much they did explain, and in the previous books and about the first two lectures of this one I was generally able to fill in the "why's" myself; but from the end of lecture two here, that is from the point at which Susskind moves from tensor algebra into tensor calculus with the covariant derivative, I essentially understood the "what's" and most of the "how's" but not the "why's" (of the math). Which is what the book is about, doing physics, not mathematics. It is however frustrating that the text is mostly presented abstractly and the actual calculations are left to "exercises" with no examples and no answers given.

The book begins, like most popularizations, with Einstein's thought experiment of the elevator and the equivalency principle. It then goes on to explain coordinate transformations and Riemannian geometry. The second lecture is devoted to tensors (without ever really explaining clearly what a tensor actually is, although after a while I figured it out) and the algebra of vectors and tensors. The third lecture continues on into tensor calculus and finishes the math "toolbox" with the curvature tensor. Then, after a bit more math (Minkowski geometry, hyperbolic coordinates), the book returns at the end of lecture four and in lecture five to the physics with gravity as curvature (the Schwarzchild metric), and proceeds through an explanation of black holes in lectures six through eight, a general explanation of Einstein's field equations in lecture nine, and ends up with gravity waves in lecture ten. Contrary to the claim in the subtitle, this is not all you need "to do physics" but it will give an idea of what it is really about if you spend the effort to understand it. At the end, Susskind announces the next two volumes, book five on cosmology and book six on statistical mechanics.

When I read the first two volumes of the series (and Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality) some seven years ago, I was motivated to begin working my way through math starting with what I already knew and going on a bit further. I got off to a good start with a book on logic and set theory, a couple histories of math, and rereading my high school ATA text; then I got diverted to other subjects and haven't read a lot of anything mathematical for another four or five years. Perhaps this book will motivate me to get started again, now that I am retired and have more time to read and study.

Feb. 17

12. Claude Lévi-Strauss, From Honey to Ashes [1965, tr. 1973] 512 pages {Kindle, Open Library]

The second volume of Lévi-Strauss' series Mythologiques, this follows the same method as in the first volume (Le cru et le cuit/The raw and the cooked) which it continues (and which I read last month). As I could not find a free or inexpensive copy of this volume in French, and I already have physical copies of the last two in English, I had to switch to reading the translation.

The first volume began with myths about the origins of cooking, or culture as opposed to nature, and expanded to other myths which Lévi-Strauss considered as "transformations" where traits were transformed along various axes according to discoverable laws. In this volume, the subject is myths about honey and tobacco, which are investigated in the same way. In fact, it is almost all about honey and other foods associated with the dry season. Lévi-Strauss considers that these myths are connected with initiation, and have the double function of teaching the boys about providing food and choosing wives. As with the first book, it is much too complex to attempt to summarize.

When I am reading a fairly long e-book, I generally alternate with physical books, so I have something to read while my Kindle is recharging. I was reading this along with Leonard Susskind and André Cabannes, General Relativity: The Theoretical Minimum, which is also concerned with transformations (of coordinate systems) according to specific rules, and there seemed to be a similarity between the two discussions. I don't know which was more difficult, the relativity book which introduced advanced mathematics which I had to learn as I went along or this book which refers to almost three hundred myths by numbers, many from the first volume (my memory couldn't cope with that.) Both books had my brain giving me "buffer overflow" errors. Perhaps this represents a "structure" of early twentieth-century scientists?

Feb. 20

13. Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, Hrotsvithae Opera Book II [mid-10th century] 108 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in Latin]

The second book contains the six plays, for which she is best known. These were the first plays (so far as we know) written since the first century CE. Although she describes them as having been written in the style of Terence but with a Christian moral content, they are written in a rhythmic prose while Terence wrote his in verse. What they do have in common is the use of a simple, spoken form of Latin (not simple for us, of course, since we are much more familiar with the formal written language, both in antiquity and the middle ages.) They are not really tragedies, since they all have "happy endings" (usually the torture and death of the heroines, which is what they want — to achieve the palm of martyrdom — and their spirits joining their sacred husband Jesus in heaven); neither are they really comedies, although they have some comic scenes. While these plays are certainly important for the history of theater and of mediaeval Latin, the content is far from attractive to the modern reader, being mostly concerned with an obsession about celibacy, as were her verse legends of saints. There are no faithful wives in any of the plays, although there are some widows, but only women who are devoted to celibacy and prostitutes — it seems that her view is that anyone who is not a nun or monk is essentially a prostitute or a deceiver.

To discuss the individual plays in the order of the manuscripts, which may not be the order of composition:

The first is Gallicanus, which may actually be the earliest, since it seems to me to be poorly constructed. The Emperor Constantinus asks his greatest general, Gallicanus, to undertake a campaign against the Scythians who threaten the empire; Gallicanus agrees, but asks to marry Constantine's daughter Constantia on his return. (Hrotsvitha of course regards Roman generals in the light of tenth-century independent feudal lords who have to be persuaded by rewards to fight.) Constantia (of course) has decided to devote her virginity to God, but agrees on the condition that Gallicanus take her confessors, Paulus and Iohannes, along with him (I assume that "primicerius" here must mean something like "confessor", since none of the actual definitions I could find, either secular or ecclesiastic, seem to fit the context) and leave his two sisters with her. Having arrived in Scythia, the army of Gallicanus is quickly surrounded by the Scythians and his officers decide to surrender; Paulus and Iohannes then convince him to accept the "true God" and a miraculous force of angels immediately defeats the Scythians. He returns to Rome and he, his two sisters, and Constantia all live celibately ever after. This would seem to be the end, but we are then transported several decades later to the reign of Julian the Apostate, and after a couple of cryptic sentences about Gallicanus going to martyrdom in Alexandria, the play becomes a drama about the martyrdom of Paulus and Iohannes.

The second play, Dulcitius, is the play which is most often translated and anthologized, perhaps because it is the least obviously concerned with celibacy, or because it has a comic scene in which the villainous jailer Dulcitius mistakes cooking pots and frying pans for the girls he intends to violate and kisses and embraces them, becoming so covered with soot that when he returns to his guards they think he is a devil and run away. The basic plot is that three sisters are being persecuted under Diocletian for being Christians, and unlike most of the other plays it is not overly emphasized that they are celibate (although of course we know they are.) In the end they all receive the palm of martyrdom and the crown of virginity.

In the third play, Callimachus, the protagonist Callimachus is in love with Drusiana, a married woman who has become a Christian and therefore no longer has sex with her husband Andronicus (again, for Hrotsvitha becoming a Christian and becoming a nun are essentially synonymous.) Drusiana rejects him, and when he says that he will continue to harass her she prays and dies. He then bribes the funeral director Fortunatus to let him see her body, but when they open the sepulcher Fortunatus is attacked and killed by a venomous serpent and Callimachus is killed by an angel. Then Andronicus arrives with Saint Iohannes, who prays to Jesus to resurrect Callimachus and Drusiana. When Drusiana returns to life, she insists that Fortunatus should also be resurrected since three miracles would correspond to the three persons of God, but Callimachus objects that Fortunatus is unworthy of the miracle. There ensues a dialogue about how no one merits anything but it all a matter of God's free grace and no one should envy God's grace to anyone else. When Fortunatus is finally resurrected, he says that if Drusiana and Callimachus have been resurrected then he prefers to remain dead, and he dies again. The others all live celibately ever after.

The fourth play, Abraham, concerns two hermits, Abraham and his friend Efraim. Abraham adopts an orphaned niece, Maria, and raises her to be a nun in a cell with only one small window; a man disguised as a monk gets in to her and she runs away to become a prostitute (for Hrotsvitha, the only alternative to being a nun.) Eventually Abraham finds her, convinces her to repent and spend the rest of her life in an interior cell with no window lamenting her sins. The fifth play, Pafnutius, also deals with a monk and a prostitute whom he converts and locks up in a cell to lament her sins. Some of the same dialogue is actually repeated in the two plays.

The last play, Sapientia, is the simplest; essentially it is the story of a mother, Sapientia (Wisdom) and her three daughters Fides, Spes and Karitas (Faith, Hope and Charity). The play opens with the villain, Antiochus, informing the Emperor Adrianus (Hadrian) that a family of Christians have arrived in Rome and present a threat to the empire; he says that they have made many converts and the women will no longer have relations with their husbands. Adrianus sends for them to appear before him. He asks Sapientia how old the girls are and she gives him an erudite lesson in mathematics which he can't follow, but eventually tells that they are twelve, ten and eight years old, respectively. They have all devoted their virginity to God. (If this seems strange, we should remember that in the tenth century girls generally entered convents at seven or eight, as was probably the case with Hrotsvitha herself.) He then demands that they worship Magna Diana, and when they refuse he attempts to torture the three girls, who remain unharmed until he finally has their heads cut off, to the great joy of their mother, who then prays to die so she can be reunited with them in heaven.

The book ends with a relatively short poem, "Iohannes", which is basically a vision of heaven.

Feb. 23

14. Abdulrazak Gurnah, Afterlives [2020] 309 pages

Gurnah's most recent novel, Afterlives is a historical novel set in the former German East Africa. The first two chapters introduce the characters of Khalifa and Ilyas, respectively. While both have some backstory on their childhoods, the narrative really begins in 1907 with the marriage of Khalifa and his boss's niece Bi Ashi. Ilyas rents a storeroom in Khalifa's house. We also meet Ilyas' young sister Afiya, who will become one of the major characters. As the First World War approaches, Ilyas suddenly decides to join the askari or schutztruppe, the native forces recruited by the Germans, and leaves the young Afiya with another family, who mistreat her because she knows how to read and write. Khalifa rescues her and brings her up as an adopted daughter. The third chapter then begins in an askari recruiting camp, not with Ilyas as we expect but with a new character, Hamza. Much later we get bits and pieces of Hamza's backstory, and apart from the name he could be a sequel to Yusuf in Gurnah's 1994 novel Paradise. The major part of the book deals with Hamza and the First World War battles in East Africa, although we get occasional glimpses of the earlier characters. The book continues until the early 1960s, although after about the end of the thirties it becomes much less detailed. (I might mention that the summary of the book on the bookflap is quite incorrect in its description of events.)

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Spoilers after this point.

After the British win the war and take up their "mandate" over the former German colony, Hamza returns to the town he started out from, which turns out to be the same town in which Khalifa and Bi Ashi live. He gets a job in the same warehouse where Khalifa works, and ends up moving in with Khalifa. In the end, he marries Afiya. The novel then follows their lives in the twenties, thirties and forties, and their son, also called Ilyas after his uncle. Ilyas never contacted them again after leaving for the war, and eventually they begin to search for him. The book continues at a much quicker pace through the fifties and early sixties. I won't reveal the ending or what they find out about Ilyas.

While not exactly a conventional happy ending, Gurnah avoids the kind of tragedy that is so often obligatory for "literary" fiction. This was one of the best novels I have read by him.

Mar. 7

15. Harriet Crawford, ed., The Sumerian World [2013] 660 pages [Kindle]

Recommended to me by someone on Goodreads, The Sumerian World is the most technical work I have read on the Ancient Near East since the first two volumes of The Cambridge Ancient History (third edition) nearly half a century ago, and it is also the most recent by nearly a decade, so it had much that was new to me. The book consists of thirty-two articles by different authors, all recognized specialists working in the discipline, divided into six parts. The intended audience is neither the general reader (such as myself) nor other specialists in Sumerology, but specialists in related areas who are looking for comparative data, who are familiar with the methodology and terminology. I admit I had to look up several technical terms. It is part of a series of similar "The ____ World" books published by Routledge.

As with any multi-author book there was some unevenness in quality and interest (to me), but all but one were worthwhile. (The article on "Women and Agency" was so disorganized and ungrammatical that it was essentially incoherent.) Many of the articles had issues with grammar that occasionally made them harder than necessary to understand (surprisingly not in the articles by foreign authors); the book could have used a good copy-editor. This is really unforgiveable in a book by a reputable publisher which cost me $45.00 for the Kindle edition (and sells for $250.00 in hardcover — obviously for ripping off libraries.) There were also, naturally, some repetition and some differences of opinion.

The first part was called "The Background" and contained some of the best (although most technical) articles in the book. One was on the physical geography of Mesopotamia, one (with some repetition of the first) dealt with the irrigation systems and how they changed over time, and one was on agriculture and land management. Although I had picked up from other books that exploitation of the marsh resources had probably preceded large-scale irrigation, the detailed information here made it much more real to me, and also explained the probable reasons (climate change and other ecological factors) why the economic system changed over time. There was also an article on the transition from the Ubaid to the Uruk period, and one on the Sumerian language which was extremely interesting to me. Sumerian is described as an agglutinative, ergative, and verb-final language, apparently a very unusual combination of features. Despite some background in linguistics I had never come across the distinction between nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive languages, and the discussion was very clear. Also interesting is that Sumerian had two grammatical "genders", not masculine and feminine but human and non-human. The last article in this part was a brief summary of the standard history and chronology necessary for understanding the other articles.

The second part was on "The Material Remains". The first article was on settlement patterns, especially as revealed by air and satellite imaging. The other five were interesting but had less that was new to me. The third section, on "Systems of Government" and the fourth section called "Life and Death" on everyday life, also had less new material but some of the articles were still of interest.

The last two sections, "The Neighbors" and "The Ends of the Sumerian World" were the most fascinating. They dealt with the relations and trade of Sumer with the surrounding regions (North Mesopotamia, Western Syria and the middle Euphrates Valley, Anatolia, Mari and Ebla) and regions farther off (the Iranian Plateau and Highlands (not just Elam but many other cultures), the Gulf (Dilmun and Magan), and the Harrapan Civilization (Meluhha)). Mesopotamia had the first pre-Greek civilizations to be discovered, apart from Egypt, and especially after the discovery of Sumer it became the primary if not exclusive subject for archaeological and historical research in Western Asia (with the exception of "Israel"). We all learned that "History began in Sumer." After the 1995 Gulf War and the subsequent invasion and occupation of the present century, on-the-ground archaeological research ceased in Iraq, and the focus of archaeologists by necessity moved into the surrounding areas, with unexpected results. While the influence of the Ubaid cultures remains important, it now appears that significant urbanization did not simply diffuse from Sumer in the "Uruk Expansion" but appeared simultaneously throughout the region including Syria, Anatolia and Iran, largely independently of developments in Sumer. Sumer may have developped more quickly and progressed somewhat farther but the entire region made contribution to "History." It is not even certain that writing was invented at Uruk; the "Proto-Elamite" tablets from Susa cannot be dated with enough certainty to say whether they came before or after the assumed Sumerian tablets from Uruk, and since both were essentially logographic we cannot be sure what languages they represented (the Sumerian tablets were probably in Sumerian, since there is continuity with later tablets that are definitely Sumerian, but the "Proto-Elamite" writing system died out before the language could become evident.) There was a "Proto-Elamite" Expansion similar to the "Uruk Expansion" and which ended as mysteriously. Many of the supposed influences of Mesopotamia in the Gulf and elsewhere actually seem to resemble Iranian rather than Mesopotamian features. Finally, I learned that entire new cultures have been discovered recently (recently compared to my reading) such as the Oxus Civilization.

Each chapter, in keeping with the book's purpose, has its own two or three page bibliography, mainly of articles but some books as well. I was gratified that I had actually read some of the older and more general books.

In short, I would recommend the book to those who are interested in a somewhat technical in-depth consideration of the subject, and have the money to buy it or can find it in a university library. It is probably too long to try to read on Interlibrary Loan, which I considered.

Mar. 8

16. Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe [2020] 428 pages

Having read some of Brian Greene's other books, which are all heavily into string theory, I was interested in what his take would be on the failure of the LHC to find many of the things string theory predicts.(See my review of Lisa Randall's Warped Passages.) This is not that book. Basically, it is the same kind of book as the Carl Sagan and Anne Druyon Cosmos books, a popular account of the universe from the Big Bang to the end(s), with descriptions of the origin of life, mind, religion and art along the way. General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics (but not string theory) are mentioned in connection with Black Holes and the various end-time scenarios (mainly in the more advanced and mathematical end-notes) but primarily the book focuses on the two classical themes of Entropy and Evolution. His explanations of entropy and how it can decrease in particular structures by exporting it to the environment are very clear, especially with regard to stars.

As often when a physicist or astronomer approaches questions outside those fields, the chapters on the beginning and end of the universe are more credible than what he says about the human endeavors, though that is mostly well-thought-out and never as superficial as with some "scientific" writers. He has a clear physicalist bias, but it's one I share so no problem. What was a problem for me was that he has a very sociobiological approach to cultural traits. If humans have religions, art and music, those must have evolved by natural selection and be part of our genetic heritage. (He's on more solid ground with language, which does seem to be a genetic adaptation.) He discusses, for example, the possibility that religion increased the cohesion of early human groups and their ability to cooperate, which may well be true. However, he then immediately tries to explain how that could result in an adaptive advantage to the individuals involved: Perhaps the groups with increased cohesion could have massacred the groups without it (I concede that religious groups have often massacred non-religious groups), or perhaps the greater cooperation allowed them to have more offspring, etc. and therefore the genes for a predisposition to religion would have increased by natural selection. He considers various alternative explanations, but not the one that seems most obvious to me: that the cultures with greater cohesion would have been more successful as cultures and thus have spread at the expense of other cultures. Would this not account for the fact that most cultures (but not anywhere near all individuals) have religious beliefs, without any individual biological predisposition needed? He does the same thing for art and storytelling, and his suggestion that they serve as "flight simulators" to consider possible scenarios before they occur is plausible (though I think myths and art do more than that) but again, why could the propensities to art and story not be cultural rather than based on some genetic control of behavior? In the first part of the book he considers evolution before life, i.e. "Molecular Darwinism", but he doesn't seem to consider "cultural evolution" of what seem to be obviously cultural traits.

I don't want to seem too negative; this was actually a good book and I learned about many new ideas and ongoing research projects in many areas. I was surprised at how seriously some scientists apparently take the problem of "Boltzmann Brains" and related ideas which seem to be more philosophical than scientific problems, and the description of the possible endings of the universe ("Physical eschatology") went beyond anything I had read about previously. Many of the most interesting ideas are actually in the notes rather than the text.

Mar. 12

17. Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, Hrotsvithae Opera Book III [mid-10th century] 52 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in Latin]

The third and final book of Hrotsvitha's writings, this consists of two verse works, one on the reign of Otto the Great and one on the history of her convent of Gandersheim.

The Gesta Ottonis was apparently written at the suggestion (or command?) of her abbess Gerbirga, who was the daughter of Otto's brother Henry. It commences with a prologue in which, among the usual protestations of her inadequacy to write it, she tells us that she is the first to write the history of Otto I, or if others have written about him she hasn't seen their works. The actual history then begins with a sentence saying (in my poor but literal translation) that "after the king of kings who alone rules in the ages by himself transmuting the times of kings ordered the kingdom to be transferred from the Franks to the famous people of the Saxons, having their name from boulders (saxa) through their hard firm minds, the son of the great and venerable duke Otto, namely Henricus, first took on the kingship . . . ". This bit of etymology seems to come out of the blue. At the end of December and beginning of January of this year, I read the Rerum gestarum Saxonicarum libri tres of Widukind of Corvey, of which the second and third books deal with the period of Otto's reign. In his first book, Widukind gives an etymology of the name Saxons, deriving it from the name of a certain kind of knife. In his case, the etymology is introduced more naturally; he is at that point giving a general account of the Saxons and has just described a scene in which the Saxons hid their knives under their cloaks in order to surprise an enemy with whom they were supposedly making peace. He then adds that they were called Saxons because of those knives. It seems to me that Hrotsvitha is very probably contradicting Widukind here, in which case she must have seen at least his first book. (Both etymologies are equally fanciful, but at least Widukind has them named in German and not in Latin.)

This same sentence also highlights the difference between the two works; although Widukind is a monk, his prose account is basically secular, only introducing religion where the church or clergy is actually involved in the actions, whereas Hrotsvitha presents the historical events as essentially a struggle between the "eternal king" ("rex perennis") and the "ancient enemy". In other words, she is writing not so much a history or biography of Otto as a religious epic poem based on the events of his reign.

She then goes on to say that King Henricus (i.e. Henry the Fowler) had three sons, Otto, Henricus and Brun, of whom Otto was destined to be king after him, Henricus was a great warrior, and Brun became a bishop. She makes no mention of his oldest son by his first marriage, Thancmar. The first real episode in the poem is the mission to England to secure Edith, the daughter of King Edward (i.e. Edward the Elder) and half-sister of the current king Athelstan, as Otto's wife; her perfections are described at some length. After the wedding, Hrotsvitha jumps to the death of King Henricus, and almost immediately to the rebellion of Otto's brother Henricus (skipping over a long period including the earlier rebellion of Thancmar.) If Widukind is circumspect in his treatment of the family infighting between Henricus and Otto, Hrotsvitha, writing for Henricus' daughter, is even more so; she solves the problem by describing the rebellion as a misunderstanding caused by the deceits of the ancient enemy and emphasizes the "sadness" of both brothers at their disputes. There are a few lines mentioning Evurhardus rather cryptically — cryptically because she has omitted Thancmar and all the previous background. The rebellion is soon over and the two brothers reconciled.

We next find Otto conquering Italy. At this point we get the most vivid and interesting episode of the poem, not least because Hrotsvitha is the only source. After the death of the King of Italy, his widow Aedelheitha (also spelled Aethelheitha) is overthrown and imprisoned by Berengarius. She escapes with the help of a loyal bishop, and flees, hiding in the daytime and traveling at night, with Berengarius' soldiers in hot pursuit, until she reaches the bishop's house with the strong walls. Then Otto arrives to defeat Berengarius and ultimately marry Aedelheitha. The Empire finally has peace and prosperity — until the ancient enemy causes Otto's son and heir Liudulphus to believe that he is being ignored and his appropriate honors given to the king's brother Henricus due to the influence of Aedelheitha. Then . . . the last two-fifths of the manuscript are lost, except for two short fragments, one describing Liodulphus' return from exile and one summarizing the poem and ending with the final prayer.

The Primordia Coenobii Gandesheimensis gives us an insight into the founding of an early mediaeval convent. It begins with a woman named Aeda who is stretched out praying at the altar of John the Baptist. She sees a man's feet in front of her and raises her head to see a figure all in shining white. It is of course John the Baptist himself, and he promises her that her descendants will be the most powerful rulers in the world and tells her to found a convent. This Aeda happens to be the mother of Oda, the wife of Duke Liudulphus of the Saxons. (This is not Liudulphus the son of Otto from the previous poem, but Otto's great-grandfather.) At the urging of his wife and mother-in-law, Liudulphus agrees to build a convent at his own expense, and gets his overlord, King Hludowicus (II) of the Franks, to donate a parcel of land near the town of Gandersheim on the Gandes River. The next step is a pilgrimage to Rome to obtain the permission of Pope Sergius and some impressive corpses of saints to be the convent's relics.

The poem continues with the actual building of the convent, mainly the church, and the collection of the first nuns with Liudulph's daughter Hathumoda as the first abbess. Then it mainly becomes a description of deaths and funeral, with Hathumoda succeeded by the first Gerbirga (the sister of Hludowic's queen), and then Cristina. Interestingly, the first abbess Gerbirga leaves her husband to become abbess, like a heroine of one of Hrotsvitha's plays. The connections with the ruling families is evident, and the gifts of the kings and dukes are another main theme of the poem. It ends before the time of the second Gerbirga who is Hrotsvitha's abbess (and as mentioned above the niece of Otto I).

Mar. 16

18. Pablo Neruda, Odas elementares [1954] 271 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in Spanish]

A first sight, a somewhat slighter book than the Canto general; not only is it only half as long (probably less than half if one subtracts the long introduction by the editor), but it is lighter in tone, more lyric than epic, more humorous than tragic. Yet it is a book full of ideas and clever images, really fun to read. Many of these odes certainly are committed to the struggle of the workers and peasants, but the book is less exclusively political than the earlier one. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys poetry.

Mar. 22

19. Olga Tokarczuk, Jeu sur tambours et tambourins suivi de L'Armoire et autres nouvelles [2001, Fr. tr. 2023] 394 pages [Kindle] [in French]

This e-book contains recent French translations of two collections of short stories by 2020 Nobel Prizewinner Olga Tokarczuk. As far as I can tell, unlike the case of her novels, none of her story collections have yet been translated into English.

L'Armoire et autres nouvelles was her first collection, first published (in Polish) in 1997, and consists of three stories; "L'Armoire" (1985) is a strange story about a piece of furniture and how it affects its owners, "Les numéros" (1989), which is the longest, follows a hotel chambermaid through her day at work, and "Deus ex" (1985) is about a computer genius who codes and plays Sim games.

Jeu sur tambours et tambourins contains nineteen stories, and I won't try to summarize them individually, but there are certain themes which recur in many of the twenty-two stories. One is artificial copies of life; in addition to "Deus ex", there is a story which features an incredibly detailed doll house, one about a creche which models the world, and one about a re-enactment of the capture of Jerusalem in the first crusade. Her first success as a novelist, Primeval and Other Times has a similar theme (a game which models the world.) There is another story about the life of a cleaning woman, which also includes dolls. Several of the stories are about ordinary people in almost surrealistic situations; two are about characters caught up in the "state of war" following the protests in December of 1981, and one is about an unidentified catastrophe which may be the end of the world. Nearly all are written in a sort of stream-of-consciousness, even if some are told from the outside in third person.

All in all, this is an intriguing group of experimental stories.

Mar. 28

20. Olga Tokarczuk, Recits ultimes [2004, Fr. tr. 2007] 291 pages [Kindle] [in French]

Recits ultimes is a novel in three inter-related stories. As with many of Tokarczuk's works, they focus on very ordinary characters in abnormal (for them) situations of partial or total isolation. It may seem that this is the usual formula for most literature, but in fact in most stories about "ordinary people" they are in fact special in some way, intelligent or resourceful, independent, sensitive or brave, etc. These three women are on the contrary limited, confused by events, unsure of themselves or what they should do in the circumstances, fearful, and centered on themselves (and especially their random memories and strange ideas). All three stories contain reflections on death and dying (hence the overall title). The style is of course quite "experimental" as with most contemporary literary fiction.

The first part, "Blanche contrée" (White Country) is the story of a fifty year old woman named Ida who serves as a tour guide between the East European cities of Varsovie (Warsaw), Crakovie, Prague, Berlin and Vienna. After a short introductory section, we find her driving on a snow-covered road, planning to visit the town where her mother and father lived the latter part of their lives and where she grew up. She misses a turn in the snow and crashes the car, then manages to make her way toward a town where she finds shelter in a farmhouse with an elderly couple suffering from Alzheimer's and a dying dog. The story chronicles her inability to deal with the simplest tasks such as contacting the police about the accident or notifying friends or coworkers, alternating with her memories about her husband and the birth of her daughter Maya.

The second part, "Paraskewia, la Parque", is about Ida's mother, Paraskewia, also known as Parka (with a pun on Parcae, i.e. the Fates.) It is set about a decade earlier than the first part. She lives with her husband Petro on a mountainside which is completely isolated from the town below during the winter months. As the story opens, in mid-winter, Petro has just died. The story describes her bizarre behaviors as she tries to cope with his death, alternating with memories of World War II and the forced migrations which followed (Ukrainians into eastern Poland, Poles from eastern Poland into western Poland, German-speaking Poles from western Poland into East Germany), also a theme of one of Tokarczuk's earlier novels. The couple did not fit in with any of the mutually hostile communities, since Petro was Polish and Parka is Ukrainian, which is one reason they chose to become isolated. Her memories are obsessed with her oldest daughter, Lalka, who died on a train during one forced move, and she essentially cares nothing about Ida from whom she is long estranged.

The third part, "L'Illusionniste", is about the adult daughter Maya and her eleven-year-old son (I don't believe he is ever named,although he is one of the major characters; he is just called "her son" or "the boy".) The story begins with them travelling with a group of divers through a jungle to a port where they cross to a small island. The setting is apparently in Malaysia. Maya is writing a travel guide to the region. The story takes place mostly in or around a small hotel-restaurant owned by a man named Mike. There is much detailed description of the island and of the coral reefs among which they dive. About half-way through the story, a dying (stage) magician, Kisz, the "illusionist" of the title, arrives at the hotel, to whom Maya for no apparent reason takes an instant dislike. He teaches her son some magic tricks. This is the entire plot of the story.

21. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Origin of Table Manners [1968, Eng. tr. 1978] 551 pages

The Origin of Table Manners is the third volume of Mythologiques. While the first two volumes were nearly entirely about South American myths, this volume begins with some South American myths in the first half and then moves to the North American myths in the second half, which will also be the subject of the fourth and last volume which I hope to get to next month. The title is somewhat misleading as table manners, even in a rather loose sense, are a very small part of what he is describing here; mainly, the myths in this volume are concerned with time, or more exactly periodicities in time: day vs. night, the months (and menstruation and childbirth), the seasons of the year, and human lifetimes. He takes care in this volume to frequently recapitulate where he is in his argument, which makes it somewhat more understandable than the first two books (or perhaps I'm just more used to his methods after reading them), although it is still complex and introduces another two hundred or so myths which he again refers to by index numbers.

April 5

22. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave: A True History [1688; Norton crit. ed. 1997] 272 pages

Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was one of the most important English women authors of the seventeenth century; Oroonoko was one of the earliest English novels and one of the first literary works to deal with the slave trade and American slavery. The novel claims to be a "true history" but this is probably just a convention as with many novels of the time; however, Behn apparently did reside for some time in the English colony of Surinam (later taken by the Dutch and now the Republic of Suriname) where the novel is set, and the English characters are all historical persons.

The main character, Oroonoko, is a prince on the Gold Coast of Africa; the king, his grandfather, steals Oroonoko's wife Imoinda, and later sells her to a slave trader. Later, Oroonoko himself is kidnapped by a slaver and sold in Surinam, where he is reunited with Imoinda. He then leads an unsuccessful slave insurrection.

The novel contrasts the nobility of Oroonoko and the innocence of the Indians with the treachery of many of the English characters; the attitude of the narrator, who is based on Behn herself, towards slavery and colonialism is somewhat ambiguous, but relatively advanced for the time — following the theories of John Locke, she accepts the justice of slavery for prisoners taken in a "just war" but questions the extension of slavery to the wives and children, and both justifies the rebellion but is fearful of the results.

The edition I read was a Norton Critical Edition which in addition to the novel itself (less than seventy pages) contained over two hundred pages of excerpts from documents relating to slavery and from several late twentieth century critical books or articles about the novel. It also contained excerpts from the dramatic adaptation by Thomas Southerne which was produced in 1691 and was long very popular on the stage. (Oroonoko was one of Behn's last works, published in 1688; she died in 1689.)

April 7

23. Ana Teresa Torres, Doña Inés contra el olvido [1992] 256 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in Spanish]

Considered a "contemporary classic" of Venezuelan literature (at least according to the publisher's description on Amazon), this is a historical novel told by the ghost of Doña Inés, a wealthy aristocrat born at the end of the seventeenth century. The history of Venezuela from the colonial period through the war of independence and the slave rebellions of the nineteenth century, the civil wars and military dictatorships of the twentieth century to the present-day of the novel (it ends in the mid-1980s) is organized around the lives of the descendants of Doña Inés and of the Black overseer of her hacienda, and the complicated property disputes concerning the land she once owned. Much of the narrative is addressed to her husband Alejandro, a former slave named Juan del Rosario who founded a Black settlement on part of her land (which her husband may or may not have given him), and other characters who are also dead.

This is a more difficult book than most historical novels because so many political figures from the early Spanish governors to the long succession of ruling generals are alluded to without any context; I think one would need to be Venezuelan to really follow the thread of the political history. The family history on the other hand is fairly clear and the stories of many of the characters are interesting and sometimes moving.

April 10

24. Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night with Notes Anthropological and Explanatory (Richard Burton ed.) v.5 [Kindle, Project Gutenberg] approx. 380 pages

I have been working my way through Burton's edition of the Thousand Nights for a couple years now, and I'm almost finished, with only one more volume left, which I will hopefully get to in the next two or three months. This is the fifth of the six supplemental volumes which contain material not in the Buqlac manuscript which was translated in full in the first ten volumes. It contains additional stories from the Wortley Montague Codex which were either not in the Buqlac or more often are variants which differ significantly from the same tales in that edition (unfortunately usually by being much inferior.) Those tales which are substantially the same as the Buqlac edition were not re-translated here. I could only say about the same things I said about the earlier books, except that this one is almost adequately proofread.

April 11

25. Annie Ernaux, La place [1983] 114 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in French]

Written ten years after her first novel, Les armoires vides, La place tells the same basic story, but concentrating on the life of her father rather than herself.

April 17

26. The Blickling Homilies [971] 392 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in Old English]

The Blickling Homilies are an anonymous collection of nineteen homilies (sermons) in Old English from the end of the tenth century. The edition I read was a facsimile of the first printed edition edited by Richard Morris (1880) (originally printed in three volumes, but the book I read from Open Library had the complete text). One of the homilies mentions that it is written in 971, but they may have been put together from different sources. Actually very little is known about their origins or the intended audience. They are interesting both from the viewpoint of the language and of what they tell us about the popular religion of the time.

Having read the legends and plays of Hrotsvitha a couple months ago, which were written about the same time (in Saxon Germany rather than Anglo-Saxon England and in Latin rather than the vernacular), I couldn't help compare the two. There were similarities, in that both contained unscriptural legends about the Virgin Mary and rather unbelievable legends of various saints, but overall they seemed to be from very different religions. While the works of Hrotsvitha identified Christianity entirely with celibacy, the homilies had almost nothing to say about monks or nuns and assumed that most Christians had husbands and wives. The homilies' view of Christianity was mainly about almsgiving and treating the poor with respect, which Hrotsvitha says nothing about. In other words, the homilies are much closer to the original religion of the Gospels, while Hrotsvitha represents the later monastic view of religion.

27. Olga Tokarczuk, Les enfants verts ou le récit de singuliers événements survenus en Volhynie, consignés par William Davisson, médecin de Sa Majesté le roi Jean II Casimir [2015, Fr. tr. 2016] 96 pages [Kindle Unlimited] [in French]

Les enfants verts is a novella set in Poland in 1646, against the background of the Wars of Religion. I read it in French translation (from Polish); as far as I know it is not yet available in English. The story is narrated in the first person by a Scottish doctor and botanist, who was accompanying King Jean II Casimir of Poland on a voyage to Lvov when he broke his leg and was forced to remain behind in a small rural mansion. He tells the story of two children, a boy and a girl (they appear to be six and four, approximately, although he suspects that the girl at least may be older) who were discovered in the woods by the King's retinue. They were dirty and poorly dressed, apparently unable to speak, and had skins of a strange green color. The book gradually reveals their nature, although the narrator remains in doubt; I won't reveal the mystery. It was a good, fast read.

April 20

28. Olga Tokarczuk, Histoires bizarroïdes [2018, Fr. tr. 2020] 205 pages [Kindle] [in French]

This collection of ten "bizarre-like stories" was very uneven. It begins with a much shortened translation of Les enfants verts and two very short stories, "Le passager" and "Les bocaux" which seemed pointless. The fourth story, "Les coutures" also seemed pointless, but in a deliberate way, reminiscent of Sartre's La nausée (hardly interesting three-quarters of a century after Sartre). The fifth story, "La visite" was a science fiction story about a social visit in a strange future society; "Une histoire vraie" was a less successful version of a story in Jeu des tambours et tambourins about a professor in a foreign city, and "Le coeur" was about a man who has a heart transplant and begins having unusual desires which lead him to a monastery in China (this unintelligent theme has been worked to death in science fiction, most famously by Heinlein). At this point I was about ready to give up and write a negative DNF review, but I'm glad I didn't because the last three stories were good original science fiction: "Le Transfugium" and "La montagne de Tous-les-Saints" I can't really say anything about without spoilers; "Le calendrier des fêtes humaines" was a sort of parody of the Christian year.

April 24

29. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Naked Man [1971, tr. 1981] 746 pages

The fourth and last volume of Mythologiques, The Naked Man concentrates primarily on the mythology of the Native American populations in the area of Oregon and Washington, with some analogies to the Plains Indians and other parts of North America, and of course compares them with the South American myths from the first two volumes. Among the sets of myths he discusses are the "Loon Woman" group, the "Lewd Grandmother" group, and the group concerning the war between the earth and sky people. He considers all the groups of North and South American myths to be a set of transformations of "One Myth" (the title of the penultimate chapter.) The final chapter answers criticisms by (unfortunately unnamed) "philosophers" and then becomes a long digression giving a somewhat odd theory of music. There is an index of all the myths referred to in all four volumes, by the tribes they belong to (about 750 myths and well over a thousand variants.) These four volumes are rather difficult and make a huge demand on the memory, but are vital for understanding the structuralist project (and remember that the "postmodernists" are also called the "post-structualists".)

April 26

30. Naguib Mahfouz, Morning and Evening Talk [1987, tr. 2007] 195 pages

One of Mahfouz' later novels and probably his most experimental (although in a sense also the most traditional, since it is modeled after the mediaeval Arab genre of the biographical dictionary), the book consists of sixty-seven short sketches of characters, in alphabetical order by their first names; of course he did something very similar in his 1971 book Mirrors, but in that book the characters were unconnected and taken seemingly randomly from all walks of life, illustrating the various religious, political and social divisions of the country, while in this book they are all related and interconnected making it a novel of a very unusual kind. The order taken from the Arabic alphabet makes the novel completely non-chronological and it seems random, although of course Mahfouz named the characters to put them in the order he intended. The translator's afterword compares it very aptly to a jigsaw puzzle which the reader has to try to assemble. At first, when I came across some two dozen names in the first two or three pages, I thought I would never be able to remember who was who or follow what was happening, but the repetition of the genealogical data at the beginning of each sketch, together with the Egyptian naming convention which is forename, father's name, grandfather's name, made all the characters ultimately fall into place.

One problem was that there is an almost total lack of explicit dates, and it was hard for me to fit the various events into any coherent chronology. The actual chronological beginning of the novel is given in the sketch of Yazid al-Misri, which is found on the very last page. Yazid, a pharmacist from Alexandria, moves to Cairo two days before Napoleon's invasion, thus in 1798. He becomes friends with two other men, Ata al-Murakibi who works for a merchant and eventually marries his boss's daughter, and Shaykh al-Qalyubi, a teacher at the religious al-Azhar University. Yazid has two sons, Aziz and Dawud. Aziz marries Ata's daughter Ni'ma and has two sons, Amr and Surur, and a daughter Rashwana. Dawud is educated in France and becomes a doctor, and a Pasha (a title of nobility). After Ata's first wife (Ni'ma's mother) dies, he marries an extremly rich widow and has two sons, Ahmad and Mahmud. Thus there are three families, the Dawud family which is "noble" and highly educated, the al-Murakibi family which is nouveau-rich, and the Aziz family which is "neither rich nor poor". Amr marries the granddaughter of Shaykh al-Qalyubi, Radia, a mystic who is one of the central figures in the novel, and they have many children, including two sons who marry into the Dawud family; Surur, on the other hand, has an abrasive personality and his family become the "poor relations" of the others. The book also has sketches of their children and grandchildren and their husbands and wives, whom I will not try to list. Of course we learn all this completely out of order and in bits and pieces.

While the family history, the marriages, deaths, divorces and so forth, are the foreground of the novel, the background is of course the history of modern Egypt from 1798 to the 1980's, as the various characters participate in, ignore, or are affected by the British occupation, the Urabi revolution, the 1919 revolution and the protectorate, the July 5 revolution and Nasser, the Tripartite Aggression (a.k.a. the Suez Crisis), the wars with Israel, and the rise and fall of Sadat. A very complex tapestry which I ultimately enjoyed but perhaps not Mahfouz' most successful experiment.

April 27

31. A. Zee, On Gravity: A Brief Tour of a Weighty Subject [2018] 181 pages

Zee states in the Preface that he intended this book as a bridge between popularizations (such as his own An Old Man's Toy) and textbooks (such as his own Einstein Gravity in a Nutshell), neither of which I have read, so I expected something similar to Leonard Susskind's Theoretical Minimum series, but it was not at that level. The first half was a fairly low-level, virtually math-free popularization of waves, electromagnetism, the idea of a field, and special relativity; the book then jumps to the concept of action and becomes filled with integrals and other equations which I probably wouldn't have understood without having read the Susskind books earlier (although despite the equations, it remains basically a qualitative though high-level popularization.) What links the two halves is the discovery and explanation of gravity waves. Some of the discussion was useful, such as the explanation of how the differential, laws-of-force approach to physics we all learned in high school or early undergraduate physics courses and the least action approach used here (and in more depth in the Susskind books) are related, and why the latter is preferred by people doing advanced physics. The book is very up-to-date, if somewhat conservative. On the negative side, like many popularizers he tries too hard to be funny.

April 29

32. Neil DeGrasse Tyson and James Trefil, Cosmic Queries: StarTalk's Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going [2021] 309 pages

In the tradition of the Sagan and Druyon Cosmos books (Tyson hosted the related TV show for a time) and the last book I read by Brian Greene, this is a simple, non-mathematical summary of what we know or reasonably suspect about the origin and history of the universe. It is very clear and well-organized and is the book I will now recommend to high-school students and others who have no scientific or mathematical background and want to get a quick overview of the current state of physics and astronomy. As with most scientists, the authors are not particularly good at the history of science, but that is not a major part of the book.

April 30

33. Laura Mersini-Houghton, Before the Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe and What Lies Beyond [2022] 216 pages

Before the Big Bang is a memoir of the Albanian-born theoretical physicist Laura Mersini-Houghton's life and the research which led to her particular theory of the multiverse. Unfortunately, the title suggests it is an account of the science rather than a memoir, but leaving that aside, this is the kind of book we wish we had by many important scientists such as Newton or Einstein, explaining the personal experiences and thought processes that led to their theories. The question is, is Mersini-Houghton or her theory sufficiently important to make the personal origins of her thought interesting? The description on the back flap (don't authors write these themselves?) says she "is one of the world's leading experts on the multiverse and the origins of the universe." One of the blurbs on the back cover (by one of her own close collaborators) calls her "one of the world's most renowned cosmologists".

She arrived at her theory of the multiverse (derived by considering the wave-equation of a particle over the string-theory "landscape") while drinking coffee in 2004, and she claims that it was empirically confirmed by the measurements of the variations of the Cosmic Microwave Background in 2014-2016. While she may somewhat exaggerate the importance of her "discovery", if her theory is correct and has been or could be verified it would indeed be of extreme importance in the history of science. On the other hand, I have read many scientific popularizations on cosmology (including several which concentrate heavily on multiverse theories) written after 2004 and even after 2016 and I do not recall ever seeing her name mentioned before I ran across this book on the new book rack at the library; if it was, it was not sufficiently emphasized that I remember it.

She attributes the supposed "resistance" of scientists to accept the multiverse to a psychological preference for traditional ideas, if not an actual fear of losing their positions for backing a new paradigm, and she frequently refers to the career shift of Hugh Everett III as an example of "persecution" for prescient ideas. Now I can understand her paranoia given her experience growing up in Stalinist Albania (she refers to the "one universe" tradition as a "party line") but for me this is a major red flag. In any case, cosmology from everything I have read seems to be a field which is very open to speculation if mathematically expressed (perhaps too much so) and the idea of a multiverse appears to have been considered legitimate as a speculation even before she "discovered" it.

So I decided to look into her. A google search on her name came up with reviews of this book in newspapers, a few hits from the University of North Carolina website (she is a professor at UNC Chapel-Hill) and a Wikipedia article. So at least she is important enough to have a Wikipedia article? When I clicked on that I found a very short page with a very long "talk page", mainly arguing about whether she was important enough to have an article. I also learned from following up the references there that she made another major "discovery" (not mentioned in her memoir) in 2010: Black holes cannot exist, because Hawking radiation would prevent them from forming in the first place. I also found a reply by a well-known scientist explaining that she totally misunderstood the idea of Hawking radiation and negative energy, that Hawking radiation cannot exist until after the event horizon has come into existence, and that in any case we know that Black holes do exist because we have found them. With regard to her multiverse theory, there appears to be disagreement about whether her predictions were confirmed, refuted, or just so vague it doesn't really matter.

So what is her theory? It is based on combining string-theory and the idea of the string-theory "landscape" (both speculative) with a version of Everett's Multiple World Interpretation of quantum theory (very speculative). It assumes that there was an original inflaton particle and considers the wave equation of that particle over the "landscape" of possible energy levels (within string theory) to attempt to decide which levels would (and therefore did, if Everett was right) give rise to inflation into real universes. After some mathematical calculations (not included in this memoir, which has no math) she decides that contrary to what was previously believed the decoherence of quantum theory would make the most energetic rather than the least energetic the most probable to result in real universes, and thus our universe which had a high-energy beginning is not highly improbable or specially fine-tuned but a fairly usual one. She also claims that the original coherence (entanglement) between the infant universes would leave traces in our universe, which would be detected in the variations of the CMB (the basis of her claim that her theory has been confirmed).

In order to convince us that this is the only explanation of our universe, she argues against an alternative view that our universe is indeed improbable or special, but since there are bound to be a few special cases in an infinite or very large number of possible universes (the same "landscape") it is not surprising that we live in a universe in which life could form (the "anthropic principle"). Since the anthropic principle is a simple, philosophical idea which doesn't depend on any complex physics, I have no hesitation in saying that she completely misunderstands it. It is an explanation of why we would live in an unusual universe, not as she seems to think a teleological argument for which universes should exist. For instance, she says that since our universe will eventually end and all life will become extinct, the anthropic principle would not result in our universe; obviously the anthropic principle only depends on our existing now, not forever, and it doesn't result in any particular universe.

The bottom line is that I will add her theory to the collection of interesting speculative possibilities which I am not knowledgeable enough in physics to judge between. If it turns out that her theory is in fact somehow confirmed or accepted by most cosmologists, this book will become must reading, but for now it is probably not worth the effort except for total physics geeks.

May 5

34. Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer, Inanna Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer [1983] 227 pages

Inanna is a collaboration between the folklorist and storyteller Diane Wolkstein and the noted Sumerologist Samuel North Kramer. Kramer newly translated or re-translated most of the known Sumerian texts relating to Inanna, and Wolkstein then put them into a chronological sequence and somewhat modified them to form a single story, essentially a "re-telling" of the myths. Of course, apart from new discoveries, we have no way of knowing whether the Sumerians thought of these myths in that particular order, or in any order, but the story is compelling enough. Following the texts, there is a general account of Sumerian culture by Kramer (after forty years, somewhat out of date) and a very interesting account of the discovery and reconstruction of the Descent of Inanna from fragments in museums in Istanbul and Philadelphia (from the excavations at Nineveh) and at Yale (from the excavations of Ur), in which Kramer played the major part; a commentary on the myths by Wolkstein; and annotations of the illustrations (mainly cylinder seals) by Elizabeth Williams-Forte. (I could not make out all the details of the illustrations as she describes them, possibly because of the small size and quality of the grayscale images.)

Since I had already read most of these texts in other anthologies, the real interest for me was in the commentary. Reading this book a week and a half after finishing the four volumes of Claude Lévi-Strauss' Mythologiques, I was naturally interested in whether the myths concerning Inanna could be analyzed in a similar way. While Wolkstein's analyses are not explicitly structuralist, she does suggest many oppositions, such as male/female, nature/culture, animal/vegetation, descent/ascent and so forth, which are found in Lévi-Strauss, and discusses "reversals" between them. As well, I couldn't help seeing the Greek myth of Persephone (not mentioned in this book) as an inverse transformation of the myth of Dumuzi, with the exchange of sexes (female Ereshkigal to male Hades, male Dumuzi to female Persephone), of animal and vegetation (Dumuzi the shepherd-king to Persephone the vegetation goddess) and of the seasons (the growing season in Mesopotamia is from autumn to winter with the harvest in spring, while in Greece it goes from spring to summer with the harvest in autumn — although Wolkstein sometimes reverses this, perhaps inadvertently). Wolkstein also identifies various "codes" (she doesn't use the term) such as the agricultural, the sexual, and the astronomical.

In addition to this "structuralist" reading she also emphasizes what I might call a "Jungian" reading in which the descent is a psychological descent into the unconscious mind, with Ereshkigal as the unconscious, dark aspect of Inanna. This was similar to the explanation in Sylvia Peralt's Descent to the Goddess which she mentions in a footnote (and which I read some three decades ago for a college course.) I am not at all sure that this aspect was intended by the Sumerians, although the cross-dressing which was part of Inanna's rituals does seem somewhat "Jungian".

In short, an interesting and worthwhile but not absolutely essential reading for those interested in ancient Sumer.

May 10

35a. Voltaire, Candide, ou L'optimisme [1758] 71 pages [in French]
35b-c. Robert Adams, ed., Candide [Norton critical ed. 1966, 2nd ed. 1991] about 165 pages

Having recently finished my French literature projects on Balzac and Merimée, I decided (as a dedicated procrastinator) that before going on to the huge project of reading Victor Hugo I would go back and pick up a few earlier French writers that I had totally or partially skipped. Of course I never skipped Candide, in fact I have read it many times (as well as all of Voltaire's other fiction), but last year I found the Norton critical editions (first and second editions) for a dime each at a used book store, so I put it back on my list. I re-read the text in French, the critical readings from the first edition of the Norton, and the new readings from the second edition. Because of the duplication, the page number is only approximate.

I do not generally get much out of literary criticisms, to be honest, but these books had the advantage that all the readings were from before the vogue of postmodernism and thus deal with the actual text rather than using it as an illustration of some fad critical theory or other; and Candide is probably the most misinterpreted of all the "classics". The usual story which I remember from school is that Pangloss, and initially Candide, were "optimists" in about the sense that the word is used today, seeing the world through rose-colored glasses, until a series of horrible disasters (inspired by the Lisbon earthquake) convinces Candide that the world is actually a terrible place, after which he "drops out" and cultivates his own garden apart from the world. Every part of this (in my opinion) is wrong, and most, though not all, the critical articles here show why it is wrong, although they read the story in somewhat different ways, as is always the case with real literature.

The "optimism" that Voltaire is combatting in this satire is a particular philosophico-theological doctrine about the "problem of evil". He uses the terminology of Leibniz' Theodicy, although he may have been aiming equally at Alexander Pope ("What is, is right") and other authors of his own time. The optimists did not at all deny that there is much evil in the world, from a human perspective; if anything they exaggerate it, so their achievement in justifying it, which is their actual intent, will be all the greater. Their arguments are that there is a chain of cause and effect such that everything that happens is essentially predetermined and cannot be otherwise, and that God created the best of all worlds which were possible, so that any world or chain of events that was different would be worse. They also tried to suggest that what seem to be evils in a human perspective actually have good outcomes if we could see the whole from the perspective of God, and this claim is part of what Voltaire satirizes in Pangloss. Neither Pangloss nor Candide are blind to the evils around them; if they were, they would be figures of farce rather than satire. The problem is that they insist on justifying the evils as necessary and part of the best possible world. As Voltaire says explicitly in many of his letters around this time, the optimist view is really a counsel of despair: nothing could be other than it is, all is for the best ultimately, and the evils will continue happening in the future as they have in the past and the present. "What is, is right." To Voltaire the social activist this kind of fatalism was something that needed to be combatted.

If this is a correct interpretation, it would be absurd for him to end the story with Candide "dropping out" to cultivate his own garden, and that is not what Voltaire says. He says "cultivate your garden", not "your own garden". Rather than giving up and accepting the evils of the world, Candide and the others are trying in their own small way to improve the world. Voltaire uses cultivation as a metaphor for improvement (note that Candide's first impression of El Dorado is that it is cultivated). It is also worth noting that at the time he was finishing Candide, Voltaire had just purchased the estate at Ferny which he intended to turn from an impoverished, backwards area into a prosperous modern farm, not only for its own sake and to improve the lives of the peasantry but also as a model to other landowners in France. This is the meaning of cultivating your garden: as Peter Gay says in one of the selections here, "He [Voltaire] always said demurely that he was only cultivating his garden, but privately he defined his garden as Europe."

It is also true that Voltaire both before and after Candide used arguments which resemble optimism, although without the quietistic implications (I'm following this up with a few of his shorter verse works which were mentioned in the articles and which I have never read); it would be difficult to avoid for someone who, despite his anti-clerical and anti-Christian opinions, believed in God and Providence while denying original sin. He could never bring himself to accept the views of atheists like his occasional correspondent the Baron d'Holbach, which cuts the Gordian knot of the problem of evil by making it natural rather than the fault of an omnipotent and presumably perfectly good Creator (cf. his later story "Jenni"). In a sense, I think Voltaire stands between Rousseau and the Encyclopedie. In any case, Candide is an enjoyable book and the style is superb.

May 12

Some short verse works by Voltaire:
36a. "Le Mondain" [1736] 11 pages [in French] including also:
Lettre de M. de Melon à Mme. la comtesse de Verrue sur l’Apologie du luxe [in French]
Défense du Mondain ou l’Apologie du luxe [1737] [in French]
Sur l’usage de la vie pour répondre aux critiques qu’on avait faites du Mondain [1770] [in French]
36b. "Sept Discours en vers sur l'homme" [1737] 47 pages [in French]
36c. "Poème sur la loi naturelle" [1752] 23 pages [in French]
36d. "Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne" [1756] 16 pages [in French]

"Le Mondain" is a short poem praising luxury as a stimulus to commerce and industry; it got Voltaire into a bit of trouble, the "Défense" got him into more and he briefly went into exile; the much later poem "Sur l'usage de la vie" seems almost like a partial retraction.

The "Sept Discours" are largely versified platitudes, only rarely relieved by flashes of Voltaire's wit. The sixth discourse is the most interesting, because it is Voltaire defending the theory of Leibniz and Pope that this is the best of all possible worlds, which he later satirized in Candide,

The "Poème sur la loi naturelle" is a good statement of Natural Religion, or what we now call Deism. The fourth part on religious tolerance is probably the best. The notes, which make exceptions for Catholicism, are probably tongue-in-cheek for the benefit of the censorship.

The "Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne" is one of Voltaire's most famous writings, although only a few pages. It was written shortly after the 1755 earthquake which almost totally destroyed the city of Lisbon and several cities in North Africa. Anticipating the arguments of Candide more directly, it takes issue with the followers of Leibniz, Shaftsbury, Bolingbroke and Pope, and discusses the issue of the problem of evil, concluding that the solution is beyond human understanding. The later preface denies that he meant Leibniz and Pope themselves, but only those who abused their arguments; as usual in his prefaces and footnotes he backpeddles his real positions.

May 13

37. Aelfric, "Colloquy on the Occupations" [ca. 1000] 26 pages [in Old English]

I seldom read, much less review, children's books, but given that this one was written over a thousand years ago, I guess I can make an exception. The target audience would have been young boys, somewhere between seven and eleven, in a monastic school. The text was originally written in Latin at the end of the tenth century as a kind of dialogue for learning to speak that language (think of the A-L-M French or Spanish texts we tried to learn from in Junior High school). Sometime later (early eleventh century) one manuscript was supplied with a loose interlinear translation in Old English. The whole thing was published with a glossary of the Old English in an edition by George Norman Garmonsway in 1939; the Old English translation and the glossary from Garmonsway's book (but not the original Latin text) are available on various websites, and that is what I read. Today the Old English is far more interesting than the Latin anyway, since we have much less available in Old English than in Latin.

The content is in a way very similar to many children's books today. Any public library could probably fill a shelf with books about "people in your neighborhood" with a teacher, a doctor, a nurse, a firefighter, a letter carrier, a policeman, and perhaps some more exotic occupations. Aelfric's selection is a bit different. He begins, naturally, with a monk, since his students will mostly become monks; that's why they are learning Latin. Next is the ploughman, the yrthling, who provides us with food and drink. A modern book might have the farmer; but there were no farmers in Aelfric's England, just farmworkers who cultivated the land for the feudal nobility. Then we get the shepherd, the oxherd, the hunter (still a real occupation then, unlike today), the fisherman, the fowler (someone who hunts birds), the merchant trader, the shoemaker (and general leatherworker), the salter, the baker, and the cook, all treated with a bit of humor but giving us a glimpse of the daily functioning of the Anglo-Saxon economy a half-century before the Norman Conquest. We then get the "wise counselor" who starts a discussion about the importance of the crafts which becomes an argument introducing new characters such as the smith until the counselor gives us a short sermon on each person following their own craft. The children complain that the dialogue is becoming too deep for them, and it ends with the daily life of the students, mostly consisting in singing the liturgical offices.

May 15

38. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind [1972] 517 pages

Gregory Bateson was at various times in his life a researcher into anthropology, psychiatry, biology, and cybernetics. Steps to an Ecology of Mind is an anthology of his writings in all of those fields, arranged in more or less chronological order. It begins with a series of what he calls "Metalogues", short (pehaps imaginary) dialogues with his then young daughter on questions of method and epistemology, which are probably the best part of the book. It then presents a selection of scholarly articles in each of the four fields mentioned above, and concludes with some articles on environmental politics.

Bateson's reputation is somewhat of a paradox. On the one hand, he is obviously brilliant, and made real contributions to all of the fields mentioned, including the ideas of schismogenesis, the "double bind", "deutero-learning" and more generally the idea of a hierarchy of types of learning, and applications of communications theory to animal behavior. On the other hand, he is often considered to be on the fringes of real science, a somewhat dubious character. Partly, this can be explained by the fact that in his later years he was influenced by and involved with the "counterculture" of the sixties, criticizing the traditional epistemology of the sciences and mixing his theories of cybernetics with God and mind, not to mention his talking about his experiences with psychedelic drugs. Roughly the last 15% of this book borders on nonsense, although always with some compensating insight. This is especially noticeable in the articles on environmental politics (although this may be a bit unfair to Bateson, since most academics who write on politics have a good percentage of nonsense.)

I think the problem goes a bit deeper. It is obvious following the articles in chronological order that he begins with an idea like schismogenesis or the double bind, described in concrete terms and with a restricted area of application. Then from one article to the next, the idea becomes more abstract and is applied, often metaphorically, to more and more disparate contexts, until it ends up as a general explanatory principal which purports to explain a wide swath of phenomena — and of course it really doesn't.

This is a book which is full of stimulating and suggestive ideas, but one which needs to be read very, very critically.

May 19

39. Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge, edd., The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature [1986] 298 pages

This book in the Cambridge Companion series consists of fifteen chapters by different scholars covering various aspects of Old English literature. By Old English literature, it understands literature written in Old English rather than literature written by Anglo-Saxon authors; with the partial exception of the last two chapters, writings in Latin are not covered except incidentally as sources or comparisons with the writings in the vernacular. The first two chapters are preliminary, on "Anglo-Saxon society and its literature" and "The Old English language"; the third and fourth are general, "The nature of Old English verse" and "The nature of Old English prose". Following chapters deal with various themes in the literature: Germanic legend, heroic values and Christian ethics, pagan survivals and popular beliefs, fatalism and the millenium, perspectives of transience and perspectives of eternity, the Old Testament, the New Testament, the saintly life and the world of learning. Beowulf gets its own chapter. While the book covers both prose and poetry, most of the chapters emphasize the verse works.

Having read most of the extant Old English poetry and at least some of the prose (including the translations of Alfred the Great and his court, and most recently the Blickling Homilies) I found the book very interesting and informative.

May 22

40. Pablo Neruda, Cien sonetos de amor [1959] 126 pages [in Spanish]

Last year I read and reviewed the Veinte poemas de amor, an early work by the young Neruda. The Cien sonetos de amor were written thirty-five years later by a more mature poet, and addressed to Mathilde Urrutia Cerda, who seven years later became his third and last wife. I liked them better, although the earlier work was also good. They are much more direct than the earlier, somewhat overwrought metaphysical poetry; most identify Mathilde with some aspect of nature, especially of the south of Chile where both Neruda and Mathilde originated. The book is divided into four parts, Mañana, Mediodia, Tarde and Noche (Morning, Midday, Afternoon and Night). The last few poems are looking forward to what would happen to their love after his death, although in fact he lived with Mathilde another fourteen years, until he was (probably) murdered by the Pinochet regime.

I'm not sure whether these are technically sonnets; they are all in fourteen lines (divided 4, 4, 3 and 3) but they are not rhymed, which I think is part of the definition.

May 22

41. Voltaire, Traité sur la Tolérance [1763] 213 pages [facsimile] [in French]

I don't plan to fill in all the blanks in my reading of Voltaire this time around (I'm still skipping those of the plays and the histories which I haven't already read) but when I realized I hadn't read the Traité sur la Tolérance which is one of his most important works, I had to add it to my list. I downloaded this facsimile of the original edition from Gallica, the Bibliothèque National de France website, which is another great resource for free books on the Internet.

The Traité sur la Tolérance is essentially a long political pamphlet (rather than a well-argued treatise like that of Locke) inspired by a particular case, the judicial murder of Jean Calas, a Huguenot (French Calvinist) who was framed by Catholic fanatics in Toulouse for the murder of his son (who apparently committed suicide). After summarizing the Calas case, Voltaire goes on to deal generally with the problem of religious intolerance. The combination of wit and passion made this one of the most influential writings against fanaticism and intolerance on the road from the Enlightenment to the French Revolution.

It's also a somewhat contradictory book. On the one hand, he wants to show the absurdity and inhumanity of religious persecution; on the other hand, he takes the position that persecution is a local French atavism which no longer exists elsewhere in the world, and which was generally unknown for example in the ancient world or the far east. While he makes some good points, such as that the stories of the Christian martyrs are obviously made up, and the actual state persecutions of Christians were often provoked by Christian attacks on the pagan temples and ceremonies, he uses history very selectively in support of his polemical position, that religious intolerance is peculiar to modern Christians, specifically the Catholic church, and most specifically the Jesuit order. While it is probably the case that few other religions in the past have been as relentless and systematic in their persecution as the Christian church, all religions have always been intolerant to some degree, often depending on the political and economic situations of their time and place (as we can see in the contemporary Middle East). For example Voltaire oscillates between describing the Old Testament Hebrews as persecutors (when he is trying to discredit the Bible) and denying that they were persecutors, in support of his thesis.

As often with Voltaire, he will present (usually in a long footnote) a cogent argument by someone else refuting some aspect of Christian or Catholic religion, and then at the end cover himself by saying, of course no sensible person would agree with this. He doesn't specifically deal with persecution of atheists, or mention them except to say that religious intolerance leads people to become atheists, but he also does not make them an exception to his argument for toleration as does Locke.

While I would take his history with a grain of salt, this is a book that every educated person should read at some point, particularly today when religious intolerance seems to be increasing again throughout the world.

May 23

42. Annie Ernaux, Une femme [1987] 106 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in French]

This is the third book I have read by this year's Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Annie Ernaux; all three contain the same basic story told from three different perspectives. The first, Les armoires vides, dealt with her own life, growing up and establishing her independence from her family; the second, La Place dealt mainly with the life of her father; this one centers on her mother. As she decribes the book in the next to last paragraph, "Ceci n'est pas une biographie, ni un roman naturellement, peut-être quelque chose entre la littérature, la sociologie et l'histoire."

The book is written in the first person, and begins with her mother's death. Ernaux in the weeks that followed wrote this history of her mother's life, based on her memories. It starts with a description of her maternal grandparents, farmworkers living in the countryside of Normandy. Her mother (who is never named, except as Mme. D . . .) was born in 1906, so she was about four years younger than my own grandmother. She dropped out of school at twelve and went to work in a local factory, proud to be independent and a worker, a step up from the rural life of her parents. She married Ernaux's father, a worker in the same factory. Her goal in life was to own her own shop, and eventually, despite many setbacks including the death of their first daughter and the Nazi occupation, they managed to open a combination restaurant/pub and grocery store, where Ernaux was born in 1940 and grew up. At the end of the book, after the death of her husband, she lives for a while with Ernaux and then goes into a nursing home. The description of her last years with Alzheimer's was very like my mother's. I could relate to the emotions Ernaux expresses so well in the book.

June 4

43. Rómulo Gallegos Freire, Doña Barbara [1929; 3rd rev. ed. 1954] 474 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in Spanish]

Doña Barabara is considered a classic of modern Latin American and world literature; it's on all the Internet lists and syllabi. The Ediciones Cátedra edition which I read, based on the 1954 revision, has an introduction of about a hundred pages by Domingo Miliani, which traces the history of Venezuelan literature from about 1900 to the time the first edition was written in 1929. (The novel was considerably revised the next year, perhaps as Miliani suggests to make it more accesible to non-Venezuelan readers since it was published in Spain, and revised again (and much expanded) for the twenty-fifth anniversary edition in 1954, returning to a more Venezuelan perspective.)

The introduction situates the novel in the context of five tendencies in Venezuelan literature: positivism (I know what this is in philosophy and in politics, but I have no idea what it means as a literary tradition, and Miliani doesn't really explain it); cosmopolitanism, which is largely urban and tries to be part of world literature; regionalism, which emphasizes the specifically Venezuelan experience and especially the experience of rural Venezuela; modernism, which apparently differs from cosmopolitanism in its choice of European models; and vanguardism, which is also not really explained, but seems to be more into symbolism. Doña Barbara is presented as a synthesis (in a very Hegelian sense) of the previous tendencies. This was all very interesting and perhaps I would have understood it better had I read some of the older novels he mentions as examples, but Doña Barbara is the earliest novel I have read so far from Latin America.

After reading the novel, from a North American perspective I think there is much more obvious way to consider the tradition in which this is written. I recall once having a discussion with a friend who had a very dismissive attitude toward "genre" literature (particularly I think in regard to science fiction) as being "not real literature", and I pointed out then, and still believe, that this is an artifact of our classification. If a book has all the characteristics and typical themes of a particular "genre", but has "literary quality" in some hard-to-define but easy-to-perceive sense, it is simply not classified with that "genre". For example, Frankenstein, 1984, Brave New World and Slaughterhouse 5 are not called science fiction novels; they're not usually discussed as science fiction, don't get the science fiction labels in the library, don't get put on the science fiction shelves at the bookstore and so forth, yet they are in fact science fiction. Likewise Pride and Prejudice is not shelved with the romance novels, The Name of the Rose isn't put with the detective novels, and so forth. So "genre" literature is just what remains after one subtracts the books that one considers as "literature".

From this perspective, Doña Barbara seems to me to be something even more rare: a literary-quality Western. It has many of the standard plot elements of a Western: the feud between two cattle-ranchers; the "bad guys" rustling the cattle of the "good guys"; the macho cowboys proving their manhood by breaking horses and lassoing stray cattle; the cattle roundups; the hapless (but beautiful) young woman who needs to be "rescued" by the hero; the displaced Indian tribes in the background; and even the cliché of fencing in the grazing lands. More importantly, there is the same theme of the "taming of the West", the hero who tries to replace the lawless violence of the "wild West" and bring in law and order. Of course the setting for Doña Barbara is not the North American prairies but the Venezuelan Llano, the Llanura, but this seems to have the same sort of culture and the same sort of topography; a land more suited to cattle than farming, located far from the centers of "civilization", given to violence but also to traditions of personal loyalty and honest dealing. The customs and culture of the Llano are described here more in detail and more realistically than in a stereotyped North American Western, though.

Of course there are differences. There are specifically Latin American elements; for example the novel begins with the protagonist, Santos Luzardo, travelling in a small boat up the river. This is almost a standard cliché of Latin American literature; I must have read at least half a dozen Latin American novels in the past year which feature a journey in a small boat or pirogue on an alligator-infested river, whether the Amazon, the Magdalena, the Orinoco, or in this case the Apure. There is the "magical" aspect, which is ambiguous; every example has two explications, magic and rationalization. (The Wikipedia article on the book calls it a forerunner of "magical realism", but that label is given to most Latin American writers before Garcia Marquez; the magic here does not seem to me to be treated in anything like a "magical realist" manner.) Most significantly, there is what I have called the "literary" aspect. The ideas and themes are both more explicit and more nuanced than in a genre Western. The antithesis between the "civilizer" and the "barbarian" is not only between but within the main characters, and doesn't follow the same lines as that between the heroes and villains. To quote a phrase used in the book, "we have to kill the centaur within us". Ultimately, there is an ambiguity about how much civilization is desirable, and at what cost. Then there is the obvious — perhaps at times too obvious — symbolism, as in the names of the main characters: Santos Luzardo, whose name recalls santo or saint, Doña Barbara whose name is literally the Spanish word for barbarian, and the North American Mister Danger (in English in the book). (I read on the Internet that Hugo Chavez used to refer to George Bush as "Mister Danger" alluding to the novel.) Finally, there is a great difference in the way violence is regarded; in the usual Western, it is taken for granted that it is a good thing that the hero defeats the villain in a gunfight, which is the standard climax; in Doña Barbara this is considered a defeat, a failure of the civilizing project. In that sense, we could call this an "anti-Western".

And of course, it's also a romance. And a psychological novel. And perhaps a tale of the supernatural. And maybe even a parable of redemption, in a non-religious sense. Although Santos is the protagonist and we see most of the action through his perspective, the novel is called Doña Barbara and perhaps we could consider it as a tragedy, the rise and fall (and perhaps moral rise) of Doña Barbara herself.

The novel begins with Santos Luzardo, a young man dressed in city clothes, travelling up the Apure; his purpose and destination are not immediately revealed. There is a mysterious and somewhat disreputable man aboard the boat, later identified as El Brujeador, the male witch. We are told second-hand about the other witch, the enigmatic Doña Barbara, the "devourer of men", more or less the incarnation of evil, and Santos is warned against coming into opposition with her. The novel then regresses to give us the background; in the second chapter we learn of the feud of the Luzardos and the Barraqueños, in the third we get the back story of Doña Barabara, and initially feel some sympathy for her, as a young girl who is abused and whose first love is murdered, but then we learn that she has become an enemy of society and especially of men. Santos arrives at his family hata, Altamira, and from the fourth chapter on the novel describes his attempts to rebuild and restore the property and recover whatever he can of the cattle that has been stolen by Doña Barbara and other neighbors such as Mister Danger. Even more than advancing his personal interests, however, he is attempting to subject the Llano to the rule of law.

This is the political content of the novel, the liberal criticism of Venezuelan politics: Doña Barbara represents the same arbitrary rule as the Venezuelan dictatorship, and Santos' emphasis on legality is the position of Gallegos himself. The dictator at the time the novel was set (Juan Vincente Gomez) was still in power at the time it was written and certainly saw the novel as an attack on his regime, and (after an unsuccesful attempt to "co-opt" him) Gallegos was forced into exile, returning after the fall of the dictator to run for President. He was in fact perhaps the first and certainly one of the very few legitimately elected Presidents in the long history of Venezuelan dictators, and was of course removed by a military coup after only serving a few months in office.

The edition I read follows the novel with an appendix comparing the order of chapters in the original and revised editions, and one listing the real persons on whom the fictional characters appear to be based.

June 18

44. Hesiod, etc., Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica [9th? to 5th centuries BCE; Loeb 3rd ed. 1936] 557 pages [Greek/English bilingual]

This volume of the Loeb Library contains the Greek texts and English translations by H.G. Evelyn-White of all the extant works attributed to Hesiod, including fragments and testimonia; the Homeric hymns, and other works attributed to Homer other than the Iliad and Odyssey; the "Contest of Homer and Hesiod"; and a selection of fragments from the Epic Cycle. Essentially the version from 1914, revised in 1919 and with a new appendix added by D.L. Page in 1935, this is the "old" Loeb version; in the "new" twenty-first century Loeb, which I haven't seen yet, the material in this volume together with much new material (including newly discovered papyri) is divided among four volumes: two volumes of Hesiod with translations by Glenn Most, one volume containing the Homeric Hymns, Homeric Apocrypha, and Lives of Homer and one with all that remains of the Epic Cycle, both translated by M.L. West. (I may buy at least the much more complete Epic Cycle book at some point, but since I'm not a specialist I probably will make do with this one that I bought in college for the other things.) The translations in this older volume are very literal , which was useful to me since it has been probably a decade since I read any long works in Greek and I was very rusty on vocabulary. Unfortunatly, like many of the "old" Loeb translators, Evelyn-White has a predeliction for obscure and archaic words like "glebes", "chine", "withes" and "coombes"; he may be doing this deliberately to suggest the "feel" that the epic diction might have had for "classical" Greeks, but it is distracting, and I think any reader who had to rely on the translation would find it very annoying. Verily, I think I would not recommend many of the "old" Loeb translations to anyone who doesn't need the Greek texts. (The "new" Loeb editions are more contemporary in their translations, which is one reason the older volumes are being updated — apart from the obvious economic motivation as they are beginning to fall out of copyright.) There is also a brief but very good introduction (for the time) by Evelyn-White, although he didn't convince me of the unity of the Works and Days.

Hesiod

With regard to Hesiod, Evelyn-White argues that there was a real, mid-ninth-century poet named Hesiod and that he was the author of the Works and Days, the other poems attributed to him being later works by other now anonymous poets imitating his style or subject matter. This is of course controversial and many scholars today apparently date the Theogeny earlier than the Works and Days and place both Homer (if he can be dated at all, given the nature of oral composition) and Hesiod in the eighth century. Since my college courses in Greek literature were fifty years back, I am not in a position to judge this. The poems are written in the "epic" dialect and dactylic hexameter meter of Homer's epics.

If the Works and Days is in fact as Evelyn-White claims the only poem which is actually by Hesiod, it is hard to understand why he was ever coupled with Homer, apart from chronology. This work has none of the literary merit of Homer's two epics. It is addressed to Hesiod's brother Perses, with whom he has had a quarrel about an inheritance (some things haven't changed in millennia). Hesiod, who considers himself the aggrieved party, lectures Perses on how he ought to behave. The first few pages of the book read like a rather poorly constructed homily, full of platitudes — if you are lazy and covet other peoples property, the gods will punish you, but if you work hard you will become rich — if the gods wish it. In other words, you need a better work ethic. This section is relieved by examples from mythology (including the famous description of the five ages, the golden age, the silver age, the age of bronze, the age of heroes and the present age, with a prophecy of the "last times" that could have come out of a mediaeval homily), which are the only interesting part of the book except to specialist historians of agricultural techniques. The relevance of the myths to the argument of the sermon is not always apparent. The book then turns to a discussion of agriculture, and later sea trade, giving much practical advice, but still harping on hard work and the work ethic. If the frame story is true (Evelyn-White thinks it is, while many other scholars then and now consider it a fictional excuse for the moralizing) I think Perses would simply find it terribly annoying. The poem then falls apart completely into one or two sentence "gnomic" utterances in completely miscellaneous order, mixing practical banalities with superstition: Avoid the anger of the gods. Do not treat a friend equally with a brother, but if you do, do not offend him first, but if he offends you, pay him back double. Do not blame a man for being poor. Do not be churlish at a common dinner. Do not offer libations to Zeus after dawn without washing your hands first. Do not pee standing up facing the sun. Do not have sex after returning from a burial. Do not cross a river with unwashed hands. Do not cut your fingernails at a religious ceremony. And so on and so forth. If this weren't boring enough, he then finishes with several pages about what is lucky or unlucky to do on various days of the month.

This editon follows the Works and Days with five short testimonia, some of which contain actual fragments, of a work called the Astronomy, which seems to have been a collection of myths explaining the constellations (although perhaps Hesiod or whoever wrote it linked them to "works and days", and the later writers who cited him simply extracted the mythical passages.) In any case the testimonia do not seem entirely consistent. Then come a few fragments and testimonia from other lost works, the Precepts of Chiron, the Great Works, and the Idaean Dactyls, about which we cannot form any real idea, but were probably similar in subject matter to the Works and Days. All these are only a few pages.

The longest surviving poem attributed to Hesiod, and by far the most important, is the Theogeny, a genealogy of the gods and mythical prehistory of the world, with some of the mythology attached to the various gods. This again is important as a systematic survey of Greek mythology before it was turned into literature by the later poets and dramatists, rather than as itself a literary work; none of the works here show Hesiod as much of a poet, frankly, even making allowance for the likelihood that much spurious material has been interpolated, as the later Greek critics recognized. Perhaps to be generous we can blame it on the interpolators, but the account of the gods is not entirely consistent; for example the three Fates, Atropos, Lachesis and Klotho, are described first as the offspring of Night in the pre-Olympian era, and later as the daughters of Zeus and Themis.

This is followed by about a hundred short fragments and testimonia which Evelyn-White considers are probably from either the Catalogue of Women or the Eoiai, assuming these were separate works.

Then he prints the Shield of Heracles, the third complete poem (although I think he is correct in considering that it is actually just a long fragment of the Eoiai rather than a separate work.) This is a really poorly constructed poem, with many obvious interpolations. It begins with the story of Amphitryon and Alcmene and the birth of Heracles and Iphicles, then shifts abruptly to preparations for a single combat between Heracles and Cycnus (and his father, the god Ares.) The preparations are interrupted by a long description of Heracles' shield, which gives the work its later title, and which is a poor imitation of Homer's description of the shield of Achilles. The poem then resumes the preparations and describes the battle, with many long-winded similes imitated from Homer which add nothing to the poem. This is followed by more fragments and testimonia from other lost works (The Great Eoiai, Melampodia, Aigimius,etc.)

The Homeric Hymns

The Homeric Hymns are a collection of 33 poems about various divinities, which were sometimes attributed in antiquity to Homer, although many ancient critics disputed the attribution. They are not Homeric and they are not really hymns in any liturgical sense. The modern consensus is that they were written by multiple authors and were all later than either Homer or Hesiod, although at least the major poems are still among the oldest surviving Greek literature. The exact dates are controversial. Some of the shorter poems may have been added later, even very much later; some of them are just extracts of the longer poems (for instance the second hymn to Hermes is just the beginning and ending lines of the long hymn) which many scholars believe were intended as invocations to introduce recitations of other poems. The first two hymns were rediscovered rather later than the others and are only found in a single manuscript.

The first hymn is a short fragment invoking Dionysus.

The second hymn, to Demeter, is one of the oldest and undoubtedly the best poem of the collection; it is often published as a separate book. It tells the story of the abduction of Persephone by Hades and the sorrows of Demeter in a very stiking way and is not unworthy to be described as "Homeric".

Evelyn-White divides the third hymn, to Apollo, into two parts, one of which he calls a hymn to Delian Apollo and the other a hymn to Pythian (i.e. Delphic) Apollo. Neither part is particularly good. The first part tells the story of the birth of Apollo at Delos, and the second part deals with the founding of his oracle at Delphi. It begins with him searching for a site to build his oracle, and the way the various personified places talk him out of choosing them, until he comes to the island where the oracle was in fact built. It then describes in a few lines, more or less in passing, the killing of the serpent who brought up Typhoeus, which one would have expected to be the central event of the hymn. While elsewhere (including the Theogeny) Typhoeus is a tremendous elemental force of nature born from the Earth (obviously related to the Babylonian Tiamat) whom Zeus barely defeats shortly after his birth in a titanic struggle, and who if he had had more time to mature would have easily made himself the ruler of the gods, in this hymn he is a son of Hera conceived in a fit of pique against Zeus who is merely a nuisance to the mortals in the immediate neighborhood. The author then gives a bizarre etymology of the place name Pythos, deriving it from the verb meaning "to rot" because Apollo left the serpent to rot in the sun, which reminded me of a line in one of the Addams family movies. Then the majority of the hymn is an account of how Apollo, taking the form of a dolphin (for no apparent reason), hijacks a merchant ship from Crete and forces the sailors to become his priests. Much of the "story" is just a long list of places they sail by to get to his island.

The fourth hymn, to Hermes, is the longest, and is also good. It is a humorous account of the new-born Hermes stealing the cattle of Apollo and what resulted. The author, like the translator, has a penchant for unusual vocabulary which made this the most difficult of the hymns for me to read. The fifth hymn, to Aphrodite, is about her affair with the Trojan Anchises and the conception of their son Aeneas, later to be made famous by Vergil. The sixth hymn to Dionysus, though short (two pages) is a well-told episode about pirates who try to kidnap the god and are turned into dolphins.

The remainder of the hymns are short, between a few lines to a couple of pages.

The poems of the Epic Cycle

The next section contains a selection of fragments and testimonia from the lost poems of the so-called Epic Cycle. The longest testimonia are from a collection of summaries by later writer named Proclus (not the philosopher and mathematican of that name). The Epic Cycle was a group of epic poems telling the stories of the Theban Cycle (Oedipus, his sons, and the epigonoi) and the parts of the Trojan Cycle which were not included in the two longer epics of Homer. They were naturally sometimes attributed to Homer, but more often to other later poets about whom we know nothing. The attributions were not made with much confidence, and the testimonia tend to say things like this (from Athenaeus, in Evelyn-White's translation): "the author of the Cypria, whether Hegesias or Stasinus . . . whoever he was, writes . . ." In the form in which they were ultimately written down and known to the later Greeks, they are organized around the Iliad and the Odyssey as prequels, sequels, and "interquels" if there is such a word, but modern scholars have suggested that they selected their material from the same larger corpus of oral poetry about the Trojan War as the Homeric epics themselves. These fragments provide us with a tantalizing glimpse of the details and variations of myths which we all think we are familiar with from reading Greek tragedy and later writers.

The minor poems attributed to Homer and the Contest of Homer and Hesiod

The volume is rounded out with a short collection of epigrams attributed to Homer, a mock epic called the Batrachomyomachia (Battle of Frogs and Mice), and a short account of what was believed about the two poets called the Contest of Homer and Hesiod. The Batrachomyomachia is a dactylic hexameter poem which describes a war between mice and frogs in the Homeric style with heroic formulas and epithets; the Suda attributes it to one Pigres of Halicarnassus, along with the Margites, a lost poem of apparently the same humorous type (which may be the source of the famous quotation about the fox and the hedgehog.) The Contest in the form we have it comes from the second century CE, but is undoubtedly put together from much earlier writings. The book ends with an appendix of fragments first published while it was in press, and a second appendix by Page with the fragments discovered or published between 1919 and 1935.

June 22

45. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe [1718] 316 pages

I'm trying, as I enter into my retirement years, to fill in the gaps in my reading of the classics, works which I have somehow always skipped. I originally planned to begin the "modern" part of my project by completing my reading of Blake, one of the few English authors I read for a college class (I only took two literature classes in college), but on considering that my biggest gap was the eighteenth century (my high school English classes basically skipped from Shakespeare and Milton to the nineteenth century) I decided instead to go back to the beginnings of the eighteenth century with Defoe, Swift and the early novelists. As far as I know, I have never read Robinson Crusoe before, unless it was in grade school before I began keeping track of my reading (it was often considered a good book for children, before the current mania for judging older literature by whether it conforms to present-day political attitudes).

I have a certain fascination with origins, and Robinson Crusoe is one of the first English novels, depending on how the novel is defined. I really don't need to summarize the plot, which is familiar to everyone as part of popular culture whether or not they have read the original book: the solitary man shipwrecked on an uninhabited island who manages to survive and create a reasonably comfortable life by his own ingenuity; the rescuing of "Friday" from the cannibals, and the final deliverance and return to England. There is something of universal appeal in this celebration of human ability. The novel has an undercurrent of religious sentiment which is usually left out of the popular adaptations, as for other reasons is the account of his life as a slave-owning planter in Brazil (he was shipwrecked on a mission to buy slaves in Africa.) In fact I was a bit surprised that the shipwreck happens a quarter of the way through the book.

After reading so much contemporary literature with the almost obligatory tragic endings, I enjoyed the fact that this was such an optimistic book, despite the extreme situation of the hero. In fact, in the Afterword to the Signet Classic edition I read it in, Henry Swados makes the point that Defoe takes a model who was obviously mentally disturbed (Andrew Selkirk, whose voluntary marooning on a deserted island for four years was the probable inspiration for the novel) and turns him into a normal middle-class Englishman, while a contemporary novelist would more likely take a seemingly normal individual and reveal him to be psychologically abnormal.

June 23

46. Paddy Chayefsky, The Tenth Man [1959] 100 pages

The Tenth Man is a three-act comedy first performed in 1959. The entire play takes place in a synagogue in Mineola, Long Island. It opens with a group of older men, Russian immigrants, looking for a tenth man to make up the quorum for the morning prayers. They manage to conscript a young, assimilated and hungover lawyer, Arthur Landau, who knows nothing about his religious traditions. Meanwhile, another of their group, Foreman, arrives with his mentally ill granddaughter Evelyn, whom he is convinced is possessed by a dybbuk. The situation plays out with many comic misunderstandings and ends with a romance between Arthur and Evelyn. A slight but enjoyable play.


47. William Shakespeare (and Thomas Middleton?), The Life of Timon of Athens [c. 1606] about 100 pages [Kindle]

One of Shakespeare's less often performed plays, which I will be seeing next month at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. It's difficult to review a play which is so well-known and like all Shakespearian works has had so much written about it. The play is based on Plutarch and Lucian; it tells the story of a man who spends his fortune entertaining and helping his "friends", who abandon him when he runs out of funds, and ends up as a misanthropic recluse. With an obscure subplot about Alcibiades and an unsatisfying ending, it has often been considered as an unfinished work. We have no idea whether it was produced in Shakespeare's lifetime or not; the first attested production was in 1715 in Ireland.


June 24

48. Lilian Hellman, Toys in the Attic [1959] 84 pages

Another play from the end of the nineteen fifties, this is very "fiftyish" with much domestic angst. (The sixties had their own variety of angst which was rather different.) It deals with a poor family whose inner conflicts come to the fore when the ne'er-do-well brother shows up rich.

June 26

49. Saul Levitt, The Andersonville Trial [1959] 88 pages

The Andersonville Trial was a play presented on Broadway in 1959, although it had already been performed in a shorter version as a television play in 1957. Although not a "documentary", it was based largely on the actual transcript of the trial of the commandant of the Fort Sumpter Military Prison, better known as Andersonville, Henry Wirz, the only Confederate officer to be executed as a war criminal after the Civil War. The edition I read did not have any introduction or notes.

When I was in fifth or sixth grade, we were assigned to read a "historical novel", and (much to my teacher's horror) I read McKinley Kantor's 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Andersonville. After more than half a century I can still remember some of the horrors represented in the book. One of my great-great-grandmothers had a brother who died at Andersonville, along with some fourteen thousand other Union prisoners. Some descriptions of the play I found on the Internet said that it was "inspired" by Kantor's novel, but I don't see much connection between the two. What they didn't say, although I think it should be obvious to anyone who read the play, is that it is a comment on the Nuremberg trials which were then fairly recent (as Kantor's choice of the subject may have been influenced by the German concentration camps). The basic issue raised by the play is whether "obeying orders" is a defense, or whether there are some orders which must be disobeyed no matter what the consequences.

June 27

50. Articles on Timon of Athens (9 articles downloaded from Academic Search Premier) 176 pages

Robert C.M. Fulton III, Timon, Cupid and the Amazons (Shakespeare Studies, 9, 1976) 17 pages — Deals with the tradition of the masque, the Renaissance conceptions of Cupid and of Amazons, and the context of the masque in the play.

William W.E. Slights, Genera Mixta and Timon of Athens (Studies in Philology, 74, 1, 1977) 24 pages — Argues that the play mixes several genres of literature; rather than being either a tragedy or a morality play or a satire, it uses the conventions of each as it is appropriate to the particular scene.

Ruth Levitsky, Timon: Shakespeare's Magnyfycence and an Embryonic Lear (Shakespeare Studies 11, 1978) 15 pages — One of the more useful articles, it argues that the basic idea and structure of the play is similar to Skelton's late morality play Magnyfycence, and that it deals with the same ideas that Shakespeare later dealt with more successfully in King Lear. Considers that the play is arguing for a basically Aristotelian morality against the Stoic/Cynic philosophy of Apemantes.

Lewis Walker, Timon of Athens and the Morality Tradition (Shakespeare Studies, 12, 1979) 19 pages — Another article on the relation of the play to the older morality plays. Concentrates entirely on the first part of the play, and shows many themes from the moralities are used, such as the five senses, food and drink, etc. The article does not mention Skelton's play.

William L. Remley, But, Isn't Timon of Athens Really Trauerspiel?: Walther Benjamin's Modernity (Critical Horizons 16, 1, 2015) 19 pages — Analyzes the play as an example of Walter Benjamin's concept of Trauerspiel. While I have read Benjamin's book on the origins of German Trauerspiel, I'm not sure I really underestood it; and although I generally find Benjamin less irrelevant than most of the other trendy critical theorists, this article was fairly obscure, although not without some interest.

David Hershinow, Cash Is King: Timon, Diogenes and the Search for Sovereign Freedom (Modern Philology, 115, 1, 2017) 27 pages — Discusses the Renaissance tradition of Diogenes and Cynicism as related to Apemantus and the Timon of the second half of the play. Suggests an analogy with King James I. Unfortunately deals too much with other critics which makes his thesis somewhat less clear.

Elke Kronshage, Conspicuous Consumption, Croyance, and the Problem of the Two Timons: Shakespeare and Middleton's Timon of Athens (Critical Horizons, 18, 3, 2017) 13 pages — A rather different analysis of Timon, claiming that he knows the parasites are not his friends, but is using them to enhance his own prestige but conspicuous consumption as described by Veblen. Well-argued but I don't think it is consistent with what the play says.

Richard Finkelstein, Amicitia and Beneficia in Timon of Athens (Studies in Philology, 117, 4, 2020) 25 pages — Discusses the classical background of the play, and the differences between Cicero, Seneca and Plutarch on friendship and benefits and how they relate to the character of Timon.

David M. Bergeron, Timon of Athens, the Absent Mercer, and Nothing Poet: "To th'dumbness of the gesture/One might interpret" (1, 1, 33-34) (Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 35, 2022) 17 pages — Discusses the non-speaking character of the Mercer in the stage direction at the beginning of the play, who is generally omitted in editions of the play, and suggests that he has a symbolic role in the drama.

June 27

51. William Shakespeare, Coriolanus [c. 1607-1609] about 160 pages

Another play I will be seeing at the Utah Shakespeare Festival next month. Although I have read all of Shakespeare's plays at least twice and most several times, as far as I can remember I have never seen this one performed. As always, it is difficult to review a classic about which so much has been written. Probably derived mainly from Plutarch, Coriolanus is about a historical (or at least legendary) figure from the very earliest days of the Roman Republic; the play refers to his first battle having been against Tarquin's attempt to re-establish the monarchy. While I have not studied Roman history for a long time, it seems that Shakespeare has somewhat condensed events as he often does in his history plays.

The play opens with Menenius, the moderate, trying to mediate between the demands of the plebs and the Senate, only to be undercut on the one hand by the newly-established (and demagogic) tribunes and on the other by Marcius Caius, newly come from a military victory over the Volsces, who openly shows his contempt for the common people. The action then shifts to a new war with the Volsces, in which Marcius captures the Volscian city of Corioles, earning the name Coriolanus. On his return, he is honored by the populace, but unwisely chooses to stand for the consulship. He is elected by the Senate on behalf of the patricians, but then must secure the approval of the plebeians. Arrogantly, he shows his disdain of the people and Hillary-Clinton-like considers himself entitled to the consulate without reference to the people. Urged by his mother Volumnia and his friends to pacify the people, he is provoked by the tribunes into losing his temper and ends by being banished from Rome. He then makes an alliance with the Volcian leader Aufidius and invades Rome, camping under the walls of the city. He rejects the attempts of his former commander Cominius and his father-figure Menenius to make peace, but ultimately yields to the entreaties of his mother and wife. He then returns to the Volcians, where he is again provoked into losing his temper and is killed.

If I can with some diffidence offer an interpretation of a difficult play, I think Shakespeare intends to show that the patrician ethic of glory-seeking (for Coriolanus, despite his patriotic rhetoric, his military valor is more about his own glory than defending Rome) is as dangerous to the state as the more obvious seditions of the plebs. Undoubtedly, as with most of Shakespeare's plays, there was an application to the politics of his own time.