The Canterbury Tales

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

*ahem*

If you've ever glanced at my Classics Club list, you'll see Canterbury Tales sitting there, and I've regarded it as one of the tougher ones on my list -- in the same tier as the Russians,  April is the ideal month for reading the Tales, in part because it's set during April ("Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote ..."),  but mostly because April is a month I've dedicated to England for the past several years.  With its girth in mind, I began early, on March 1st.   (That marked the first day of Lent, and I was amused by the thought of reading about a pilgrimage during a time inspired by pilgrimage.)

I will note from the beginning that I did not read the tales in Chaucer's original English. My library, happily, has a 900+ page volume that presents a column of Chaucer alongside one of 'modern' English, and it was the modern English which I largely read. I often compared the two columns, reading as much as I could of Chaucer before having to take a peek at the meaning of words, and I saw enough to realize -- based on the fact that certain words were suppose to rhyme - -that Chaucerian English really did sound much different from ours.

I assume most people are aware of the general premise of The Canterbury Tales, but just in case: a large group of people on pilgrimage to Canterbury (intent on honoring Thomas a Becket) converge on an inn. Since they're all headed the same way, they decide to engage in a little friendly competition: each person will spin a couple of tales there and back again, and when they all return to the inn they will decide who gave the best story, and all pitch in to give that person a free meal.  Such is the General Prologue,  after which various personalities step forward to give a story. The stories vary in length and in mood, as do the storytellers; some are noblemen, like Knights; others are commoners,  some are women, some are members of religious orders.  Some of the stories are noble, some tragic, some sad, and some very silly.

Rather than reviewing Chaucer (rather like reviewing Homer!), I want to share a couple of general comments and then recap some of the more memorable stories from the first half of the Tales, when I was still taking notes.  I was surprised by the varied settings of the stories; some are set as far afield as Russia, Syria, and Greece. As with The Merrie Adventures of Robin Hood, there are grievances aplenty against the landed nobility, including the church.  Lastly, while I've heard much about the medieval cult of courtly love, I never appreciated how fantastically silly medievals were for romance until I read through some of this preposterous goings-on.

And now, recaps of a few more memorable tales, complete with a moral:


Knight's Tale:  Two cousins imprisoned together fall in love with the same woman, and are violently jealous even though they're in a tower and there is zero chance of them courting her.    Naturally one escapes and the other is pardoned, and upon pursuing the girl they meet in a field and start fighting. Who should discover them but the king who imprisoned them in the first place, who -- persuaded by the girl, who turns out to be his sister -- allows them to meet one year hence, with their respective armies, and enter into trial by combat to see who shall win her hand.

The moral:   Finders keepers.

The Miller's Tale:  One woman is pursued by two men while still married to a third. The story involves two occasions of rear ends being kissed by mistake.

The moral: Wait until daylight to kiss people.

The Clerk's Tale:  A King is pressed by his people to marry and decides to marry a beautiful and virtuous peasant.  Despite her character, wisdom, and beauty, the King is constantly suspicious of her and inflicts a series of Job-like tests upon her which amount to (1) making her believe he's killed her children,  (2) making her believe he's going to annul their union and marry someone less controversial, and (3) having her PLAN THE NEW WIFE'S WEDDING.   When the wedding guests arrive, and lo! The "bride" is actually her long-lost daughter, with long-lost son in tow,  everyone enjoys a happily-ever-after moment. (Instead of "What the heck, Dad? moment.)

The moral:   What seems like psychopathic behavior may, in twenty years, turn out to be  a convoluted plan with a happy ending.  So uh, have patience.

The Wife of Bath: After entirely too much information about her five husbands, the Wife of Bath tells the story of a Knight who raped a woman and was brought on trial to the King's court, whereupon the Queen gave him one year to  solve the question: What do women want?   Having queried high and low to no avail, the Knight resignedly begins returning to the court to meet his death, only to chance upon a horribly disfigured old woman who will give him the answer if he promises to anything she wants.   He gives the answer to the Queen and is promptly confronted by the old woman, who bids him marry her.   He resists by recounting her faults (poverty, age, etc);  she rebuts them by praising poverty, age, etc, and finally he relents to marrying her.  She then asks him:  would he rather she be old and faithful, or young and tempting to others?   He leaves the matter to her, and  she -- happy that he has ceded his judgement to hers -- decides to become both young and faithful. (Oh,  and the answer to 'what do women want?' is 'to be in charge'.)  Hurrah for...resignation...?

The moral:   Rape is evil, but if you find a witch who wants a husband, you might get away with it.

Middle English prologue read at 1:14

Real Music

Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church
267 pages
© 2016 Anthony Esolen

In his book Out of the Ashes: Restoring American Culture,  Anthony Esolen devoted an entire chapter solely to music. Here he does one better! To sing is to pray twice, wrote St. Augustine, and Real Music demonstrates that emphatically. There is nothing quite like the musical tradition in Christian liturgy; a newcomer to an Anglican or Catholic church may first appreciate the mere sound of the organ or harp, but when time is invested in these services -- when one attends throughout the year, for several years -- the real beauty and power of its hymns, offertories, anthems, etc. reveal themselves. These hymns are not merely pretty lyrics put to pretty music, but are themselves poetic articulations of the Church's theology and scripture. The Christian music tradition can do much more than make a listener feel "nice"; hymns can fill the soul with beauty and the mind with poetry. Esolen attempts to convey this experience not over a course of years, but into one book, devoting different chapters to distinct areas of the tradition. He here covers Eucharistic hymns, hymns of glory and penitence, hymns celebrating life and challenging death. Esolen does not merely present hymns to the reader and comment on their theology; he guides the reader through how the hymns' very meter and grammar strengthen the meaning. This book is a treasure for Christians who love traditional hymnody, or who have heard it on the wind before and yearn to know more about it.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

© Wendell Berry, from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

Epic of Gilgamesh

The Epic of Gilgamesh
© 1997 verse translation by Danny P. Jackson
116 pages

When I threw in with the Classics Club, I knew the Epic of Gilgamesh had to be  on there. The oldest known recorded story? How could it be missed?  I've had intentions of reading it since encountering an excerpt of its Flood narrative in high school world literature, and have even listened to recitations of the drama. For those who have never encountered it: Gilgamesh is a king whose subjects behold him in fear and trembling. So potent is he that he gets away with nicking people's wives on their wedding night. It's good to be the king, no? The people of Uruk plea to the gods for relief from the king, and in response they send him...a bro.  A wild man named Enkidu, who alone is Gilgamesh's match for sheer manliness. He is utterly untamed, in tune with the animals and such, until a priestess seduces him with her feminine wiles (and by this translation, she literally jumps him). Abandoned by his  four-legged friends in the forest, Enkidu goes to meet Gilgamesh, whose reputation precedes him. After a good brawl to shake hands with,  these two men of power start taking down monsters and cutting down trees. They attract the rage of some of the gods -- especially that of Ishtar, who attempts to seduce Gilgamesh but is forcefully refused by him delivering a list of all the men she's  used and destroyed --   and Enkidu dies, deflating Gilgamesh's sails. Having previously been blithe about death, Gilgamesh is now hit with its reality, and goes to seek out the only man who cheated death, Utnapishtim, he who survived the Great Flood.  Utnapishtim attempts to dissuade him from the immortality quest, but then clues him in on a secret plant -- one which is promptly stolen by a snake. Gilgamesh resigns himself to making the best of life that he can, and that's' that. (Unless you count the last chapter, which involves Enkidu and a brief visit to the Netherworld.)

Anyone who has read Genesis will see shared aspects and perhaps dimly remember that Abraham originally hailed from the city of Ur, just down the river from the site of Uruk. Most obvious is the Flood story, of course, but so is the snake costing man the secret of immortal life. I found it interesting when I first heard this story that Enkidu's knowledge of woman immediately ruptured his 'one with nature' status.  In Genesis, Adam and Eve aren't said to 'know' each other until they've been severed from their own natural paradise and put to work as farmers, but there's still a tenuous link between sexuality and alienation from the natural world.   I faintly remember reading that  the agricultural Sumerian religious rites involved sex (see the priestess as a reminder), so perhaps that's the connection: he who would control nature cannot be at home in it, and Enkidu does start learning about farming from the priestess after they leave.   Other, more distant similarities can be found between Gilgamesh and other ancient stories:  Gilgamesh's refusal of a divine seducer, for instance, brings to mind Circe and Odysseus.

Not included in this translation are the 20 new lines discovered a couple of years ago in Iraq, which add a bit to the Enkidu and Gilgamesh adventures. Apparently they meet monkeys in the forest, and the wild beast Humbaba is presented a forest-king who is entertained. That might explain why Humbaba appears like a man in so much Sumerian art, though that could be laziness or something else.  I'm glad this is the translation of Gilgamesh my library has:  it's rendered in verse in approachable English, and features 20 illustrations that invoke woodcuts.

Related

• The Epic of Gilgamesh audio drama, produced by A Podcast History of Our World
• Beowulf -- another story of a man fighting dragons and yearning for immortality

Inferno

Inferno
created 14th century Dante Alighieri
translated © 2002 Anthony Esolen
528 pages

If Dante's Inferno is to be believed, Hell is mostly populated by Italians.  The first piece in the Divine Comedy, Inferno takes the reader down into the depths of the infernal abyss,  through ring after ring of the damned. Fire is the exception, not the rule down here;  Hell is a vast geography of misery.  The ground is rocky and steep, the air filled with cold and lashing rain, or noxious fumes.  The reader, taking Dante's place as he wanders off the straight roads of life into the wilderness, is guided through Hell in safety by Virgil -- the greatest of all classical poets.

 Inferno contains two things in abundance:  classical allusions and Italian politics.  The world of the Inferno is peopled by characters, beasts, and places that draw on the rich vocabulary of the classical tradition. We see here not only the 'virtuous pagans' hanging around a medieval version of the Asphodel Plains, denied entry into paradise but not damned either, but more than a few heroes of the canon. Odysseus is here, condemned as a liar -- and so is Brutus, a traitor in the gnawing maw of an angry devil.  My original intent was to read the Inferno as part of a series of medieval history and medieval literature -- and considering the amount of Florentine politics here, that may have been helpful. Dante can't so much as move without tripping over a corrupt pope, an exposed friend, or some hapless Florentine giving a  dire warning about impending civil war. (And I do mean tripping -- people are stuck into the ground head first, or trapped in a frozen river with only their heads exposed..) The ranks of the traitors are especially Italian-rich. A little familiarity with medieval cosmology helps in understanding the text -- the idea that the universe is a series of spheres, each level nesting inside the other.  Dante also displays an intriguing imagination, creating poetic punishments. (Schismatics who create division within the church or society are themselves divided with an axe to the head.) At the bottom of the pit is a frozen wasteland, with the greatest of traitors entrapped by darkness and ice. The artic winds that create the ice are created by Satan's wings, constantly beating in his eternal attempt to rise.

When the year's young in season, 
and the spray washes the sun beams in Aquarius
and the nights dwindle south toward half a day
When the frost  paints a copy on the ground
of her white sister's snowy image, but
Her feather's sharpness doesn't last for long [...]   (Canto 24)

 Esolen errs on the side of accuracy rather than rhyme with his translation,  but he does achieve a certain lyric quality and uses footnotes judiciously, creating a text neither confusing nor cluttered. Esolen's appendices are unusually rich, containing textually similar lines from The Aenid, text from the non-canonical "Vision of St. Paul", which describes different  degrees of punishments for sinners, and theological writings from Aquinas and Boniface that would have informed Dante's view.  More extensive notes follow the end of Canto XXXIV, but of course that's not the end of the story -- it continues on the mount of Purgatory.

One by one

In the past few days I’ve knocked out several categories for the 2015 Reading Challenge, including:

A Book Older than 100 Years:  Beowulf,   the story of a hero from another land who conquers a monster,  his mother , and his own fear of death against a horde-guarding dragon.  I used Seamus Heaney’s translation, which seemed to be the best judging by reviews, and found it far shorter than I expected.

A Book You Were Supposed to Read in High School:  Grendel is a mid-20^th century retelling of Beowulf through the eyes of the fearsome beast our doughty Geat  rendered ‘armless.  This was assigned to me in 12^th grade English, though we never read it because the teacher was a Guardsman and we were taught by a series of substitutes.  I never gave away the book, though, because I paid $12 for it, and when a book is assigned to me reading it becomes a point of honor. Anyhoo, Grendel was a curious choice for my teacher. As it turns out the fearsome beast is a teenager:   clumsy, chronically mired in an existential crisis, and fairly miserable on the whole.  Aside from a few philosophical conversations with the dragon, Grendel spends the book crashing through the woods, spying on the Danes, feeling sorry for himself, and occasionally screaming at the heavens. Though I endured this in the hope that Beowulf would show up and put him out of his misery, I must say the ending line did make me feel…almost sorry for him. Almost.

A Book Based on a Television Show: Star Trek: Foul Deeds Will Rise,  based heavily on “The Conscience of the King” and touching on another though to name it would give away  the whodunit.

A Book By an Author Who You Love, But Which You Haven’t Read:   Zebra Derby, Max Shulman. Yes, despite saying “anything by Asimov or Wendell Berry” for months now,  last night I spotted my copy of Max Shulman’s Large Economy Size and realized – hey, I’m awfully fond of Shulman, and I haven’t read the third novel in that collection, so why not?  It’s a short bit of postwar satire in which a returning soldier struggles to find his place in the new world. Through his misadventures Shulman pokes fun at door-to-door salesmen, Communists,   psychologists, bureaucrats, and entrepreneurs . It’s not nearly as funny as the soldier’s previous misadventures (Barefoot Boy With Cheek), erring as it does on the side of randomness, but I still like Shulman. 

What's next? Probably either Book on the Bottom of Your To-Read List,  for which I have a nonfiction contender I've been meaning to read for several years now, but have never actually picked up, or A Book with Magic, as I'm  plodding through The Two Towers.   Sure, I could use a Narnia book for the magic, but scavenger hunts are no fun when there's no challenge.

The Fellowship of the Ring

The Fellowship of the Ring, being the first part of the Lord of the Rings
© 1954 J.R.R Tolkien
570 pages

Not many birthday gift involves a life-threatening quest to defeat a Dark Lord and prevent the enslavement of all living creatures,  but Bilbo Baggins is an exceptional gift-giver.  Frodo Baggins had no idea when he accepted his uncle’s gift that it could hold so much trouble in store for him (nor did Bilbo, for that matter), but c’est la vie.  The ring belonged to an ancient, malevolent power, and the evil one wants it back.  No choice remains but to destroy it, so Frodo must venture from his safe home into the outlands, brimming with dangerous monsters and ancient mysteries.

Such is the beginning of the Lord of the Rings tale, its first two chapters gathered here as The Fellowship of the Ring.  Having struggled to get through The Hobbit, I was surprised by how immediately this story drew me in. There’s a basic simplicity to the story, from the overall morality theme – good is good, evil is evil, and ne’er the twain shall meet, except in combat --  and the imagery evoked. There’s nothing mysterious about a reader’s delight in the arcadian comforts of the Shire, or dread at the gloomy forests and hostile, forbidding crags.  Far from simple, however, is the delivery;  Tolkien is a master world-builder, whose characters move through a landscape full of its own history, and are enmeshed in actual cultures.  ‘Developed’ isn’t quite the word. Tolkien delivers an experience more than just a fantasy story;  his characters’ heads are full of stories, legends, and songs that they regale one another with, and offer insight into Middle Earth’s history – which is still being written with their own adventure. The experience delivered by Tolkien is more than a fantasy-adventure novel; his characters tell tales and sing songs in invented language that seem at first like garnish, but later prove to have lasting relevance. This is a story rich in imagination from the beginning,  the archetypical high-fantasy epic with settings that overwhelm the mind’s eye, complete with villains that resonate on a primeval level.

Although I’m only starting out on my personal quest to read through the adventure, I daresay I’m looking forward to it much more than Frodo and his companions, for whom doom looms large. Onward!

The Bhagavad Gita

The Bhagavad Gita: a New Translation
© 2000

Our Gita, the Muslims' Koran, your Bible -- it's always the simple things that catch your breath. 'Love thy neighbor as yourself.' - the Mahatma, Gandhi

Back in late 2006 I began a personal but intermittent cultural literacy project in which I aimed to begin reading about global religions, including tackling their originating documents when possible. Since then,  I’ve studied Judaism, Islam, Taoism, and Buddhism but have time and again avoided the vast subject of Hinduism. What prompted me out of my reluctant was the movie Gandhi, given the affectionate way the titular character regarded the book.

What attracted me to this translation was the cover art and a sewn-in burgundy ribbon intended to serve as a bookmark. The inside page quality and coloration were also obviously chosen with care, with an attention to quality that is rare and so much the more appreciated.

The Gita itself takes the form of a conversation between the god Krishna and a human being named Arjuna, who is reluctant to engage in a battle to reclaim his homeland. Although the articles I read introducing the Gita claim that Krishna disguises himself as Arjuna’s charioteer, in Mitchell’s translation he is referred to throughout the book as The Blessed Lord and speaks of himself in the first person as a divine entity. Midway through, he explicitly reveals himself as the God,  the being from which all deities find their source, and shows Arjuna his true physical form.

Before this, and following it, Arjuna and Krishna converse about the meaning of life, suffering, wisdom, the path to righteousness, the value of faith, and many diverse but related concepts. Krishna opens the conversation by encouraging Arjuna to have courage. Their conversation expands from there, Arjuna asking Krishna to elaborate on one question or another.

In reading, I saw the origins of ideas I associate with Hinduism -- reincarnation and universalism, for instance. I also saw the origins of ideas I associated with Buddhism (Krishna identifies desire as the enemy of wisdom).  Even translated into contemporary English, the Gita is not a light read, but Mitchell’s offering is lucid on the average, and I tended to find myself caught up in the narrative flow -- pausing only to refresh my memory of what a particular untranslated Hindi word meant.

Although translated poetry assuredly loses something in the process, Mitchell manages to convey beauty and simplicity here. Unlike his translations of other works (Gilgamesh and the Tao te Ching, which I've previewed but don't have access to), Mitchell refrains from 'updating' the text with modern idioms and allusions. If you're interested in reading the Gita for literacy purposes -- or just looking for poetry that reminds you Hindu and some Buddhist religious principles -- I'd say Mitchell's translation is promising.

Infernova

Infernova: An Infidel Reinvents Dante's Hell
© S.A. Alenthony
220 pages

Go to Hell.

Go there with Mark Twain. In fact, let him give you a tour of Hell. It's actually the kind of place he approves of, because in an ironic twist, it is the arrogantly pious and faithful who people it -- not the rational and humanistic. This is no place of sadistic wrath, however: only a realm in which people are forced to face the consequences of their actions -- where those who limited themselves and humanity by their refusal to commit to rationality realize their self-imposed limitations in full.

Infernova is a modern retelling of Dante's Inferno, the classic story in which a man is forced to tour the bowels of Hell, being guided through its many levels by a sage or personal hero of sorts. There are nine levels all told. After passing through the Vestibule -- where the otherwise rational who clung inexplicably to irrationality, like Sir Isaac Newton and C.S. Lewis -- linger, chuckling at their foolishness on Earth -- our narrator, led by Mark Twain,  begins his descent into Hell. With Twain commenting all the while, they will descend the Slippery Slope, cross the Plains of Bullshit inhabited by sheep (people who are now in form what they remained in mind in life), and enter the final descent, which is flanked by the petrified forms of self-appointed prophets and demigods who set themselves up as spiritual tyrants and dogmatic teachers. These prophets, still living, have been forced into stone where they are unable to manipulate the minds of people with their words. Among their ranks are not just televangelists and religious fathers, but political dictators. The Inferno is home to all forms of mental slavery, not just that maintained by religion.

Impressively, and appropriately given that this is a retelling of The Inferno, Infernova is written in rhyming verse and is divided into Cantos rather than chapters.I enjoyed the format, so different from that to which I am accustomed. Written as a parody, the book will easily provide rationalists and skeptics with laughter. The author's audacity in naming names is also entertaining. With Infernova, Alenthony promotes reason, compassion, and the human spirit while skewering the opposition in a playful way. Best of all, he does this without seeming vindictive or mean-spirited, for Twain introduces Hell in such a way as to let the narrator know that the sights he will see are not true:  no outside power is inflicting further humiliation on these people.  The punishments seen here are physical symbols of the mental slavery and punishment people inflict on themselves so willingly in reality.

Related:

• Jennifer Michael Hecht's interview with For Good Reason, titled "The Poetry of Skepticism".

Sand and Foam

Sand and Foam
© 1926, 1943 Kahlil Gibran
112 pages

I am forever walking upon these shores, 

Betwixt the sand and the foam, 

The high tide will erase my foot-prints, 

And the wind will blow away the foam. 

But the sea and the shore will remain 

Forever.

A few years ago,  I read Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet after being stirred by some of his words available through a quotations site.  It proved to be an enriching read, and I have maintained an interest in reading more of his works since. I was able to do that this week when reading Sand and Foam, a collection of aphorisms initially published in 1926.  Unlike the Prophet, which set its poetry and sayings within a general plot,  Sand and Foam is a straightforward collection of small sayings, most of which consist of only a line. There are exceptions, as is the case above. The aphorisms have a mystical feel about them: Gibran never speaks directly, but through poetry. Worship of truth, beauty, and love are common in the book, which is appropriate for Gibran. He is a deeply religious man, but in a universalistic sense. This particular printing contains illustrations by Gibran, typically of the human form. This is a must-read for those who enjoy Gibran, but recommended generally. The book may be read online here.

Wisdom of the Ages

Wisdom of the Ages: A Modern Master Brings Eternal Truths into Everyday Life
(Strangely, the subtitle on Amazon is "60 Days to Enlightenment." It seems to be a different edition with 20 more pages.)
© 1998 Wayne Dyer
268 pages


My local public library has taken to rearranging its shelves this spring after a period of discarding (a period I missed, otherwise my personal library would have gained substantially), meaning that I can no longer flit from shelf to shelf in the certain knowledge gained after a lifetime of experience in this library. This has led to me accidentally seeing books in areas where I was not looking for them, leading me to Wisdom of the Ages by Wayne Dyer. Dyer, if you recall, penned a book interpreting the Tao te Ching that I read recently. Dyer is something of a self-help guru whose advice reminds me a little too much of stuff you'd find on the Oprah book club list at times, but which is generally rationally kosher*.

Words of Wisdom consists of quotations from philosophical and religious teachers as well as authors and poets and interpretive explanations on those quotations by Dyer. The book consists of sixty chapters, each devoted to a particular concept that Dyer finds important (self-reliance, kindness, inspiration, leadership, etc) and each introduced by one of the quotations or literary excerpts. The chapters are arranged in a manner that seems to be chronological based on the thinker whose work is quoted. Only one author (Ralph Waldo Emerson) is repeated: Dyer draws from both his poetry and his essay work. Given when they lived, the classic philosophical and religious teachers are quickly exhausted and the bulk of the book's content is drawn from poetry with occasional breaks from people like Henry David Thoreau and Gandhi.

The individual chapters are written well, and I think Dyer does a good job of explaining the poetry. Individuals may agree or disagree with Dyer's interpretations of the many poems included, but there were poems that made little sense to me until I read Dyer's explanations for them. Other poems, like Frosts' "The Road Not Taken" and "If" by Kipling, are more straightforward. As far as value goes, I think it's mostly good advice. While some of his thoughts definitely remind me too much of The Secret and similar works, I'd say the majority of it makes sense. The questionable chapters deal with the power of the mind. I am well aware of our ability to change our perceptions of reality through the power of our minds -- learning to control our emotions and direct our thoughts -- I'm very "skeptical" about our ability to change reality itself with "thought energy", as Dyer claims to do when projecting happiness and calmness at bickering people in the grocery store. Whenever Dyer makes a claim like this, he attempts to ward off questioners like myself by saying "No one knows enough to be a pessimist" -- that is, we don't know that we can't move clouds with our minds, so what's the harm in believing so? I think you could test cloud-moving abilities, but Dyer does not quote from scientists. Although he quotes Buddha in promoting reason as the only way of arriving at the truth, it seems from my perspective that Dyer doesn't quite give reason its due.

What this means for the reader depends on the reader. I think Dyer is generally harmless: his chapters are about individuals taking charge of their lives -- their beliefs and their perceptions. He offers tips at the end of each chapter to help people implement the advice of each chapter, just as he did with Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life. Maybe some of his other books are more compromised, but I think this is generally a solid read. I enjoyed the experience. I may read more Dyer in the future.





* Now there's a contradiction in terms.

Familar Poems, Annotated

Familar Poems, Annotated
© 1977 Isaac Asimov
272 pages

In reading I, Asimov, the good doctor made mention of his commentary work -- including his Guide to the Bible, Guide to Shakespeare, and now Familiar Poems, Annotated. The book's approach is quite simple: Asimov has collected thirty-seven poems that are or were broadly known in the United States of his time and regarded as classics of sorts. (The number includes Invictus, one of my favorites.) After each poem, Asimov has penned a few pages of commentary, focusing on historical, scientific, literary, or otherwise cultural allusions and context. In his introduction, he maintains that his purpose is not to comment on matters of meaning and meter, but to explain the "particular words and phrases used in constructing the poems". He uses an excerpt from his commentary on Cargoes by John Masefield, focusing on the line "Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir".

In connection with [this] first line in Masefield's Cargoes, it may occur to you to wonder what the devil a quinquireme might be. And who is Nineveh and why does she happen to have a quinquireme? And where, oh where, is Ophir, since you won't find it in the atlas. After all -- once you have the answer to these questions, as I give them to you, you may then go back to the line, and, having lost none of the beauty of the sound, find you have gained an added appreciation of the sense.

The poems are arranged chronologically according to subject, not published date. The selection shows a definite American bias, with 19th century American history being especially-well represented. The commentaries themselves are up to Asimov's usual stellar par. They read well, are quite detailed, and held my interest for the most part. I enjoyed the poems by themselves: although I'd read bits and pieces of most of them, I've never stopped to read them in whole, and this was an opportunity to do so. The Pied Piper of Hamelin and its commentary were especially memorable. My only knowledge of the poem was that it was about a man who played a pipe and cleared a town of its rats: I had no idea he took their children as payment, although having read the poem does make that "gotta pay the piper" utterance make sense. The greatest "A-ha!" experience for me was reading "Ozymandias": having never read it, I tend it confuse "Behold my works, ye mighty, and despair" with that "I am become death , destroyer of worlds" line, having never read either the Ozymandias poem or the section of the Gita from which the ye-mighty-and-despair-line was. I don't know if it was my attentive reading or Asimov's commentary, but I "get" the poem now.

In short, it was an excellent read and I reccommend it. I am tempted to provide the full list of poems, but given that there are nearly forty I shall only list a few:

• Ozimandias, Shelley
• The Destruction of Sennacherib, Lord Bryon
• The Vision of Belshazzar, Lord Bryon
• Antony to Cleopatra, William Haines Lytle
• The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Robert Browning
• A Visit from St. Nicholas, by Celment Clarke Moore (Comments include origins of Christmas)
• The Charge of the Light Brigade, Alfred Tennyson
• Battle-Hymn of the Republic, Julia Ward Howe
• O Captain! My Captain! , Walt Whitman
• Invictus, William Ernest Henley
• The Modern Major-General, William Schwenk Gilbert (The commentary was informative).
• The New Colossus, Emma Lazarus,
  
• In Flanders Fields, John McCrae
  

This Week at the Library (3/7)

I've had a lot of good reading the last few weeks, which is not suprising given how heavily steeped my library selections were in science. I began with Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade. The cover of the book is of a mature acacia tree, silhouetted by a beautiful African sunset. Before the Dawn is a work of anthropology, and it focuses on humanity as we became human and began to populate the globe. All aspects of human society at that time are brought into focus -- race, religion, and so forth. It reminded me a bit of Guns, Germs, and Steel. If you're interested in anthropology, I think this book is worth checking into. While reading it, I couldn't get a certain Johnny Clegg tune out of my head.

We are scatterlings of Africa, both you and I...
We're on the road to Phelamanga, beneath a coppy sky
And we are scatterlings of Africa, on a journey to the stars..
Far below we leave forever dreams of what we were....

I then read two related books about neurology. The first was Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, which dealt with the biological origins of belief. I found it interesting, but I enjoyed Phantoms in the Brain far more. It was a genuine pageturner. I enjoyed every moment I spent reading it. Phantoms deals with mysteries of the human mind -- phantom limbs, stroke oddities, delusions, hallucinations, and so on. Technical knowledge about the field may help in better understanding some of the biology mentioned, but you need nothing to appreciate the weirdness that the brain is capable of generating.

The next book I read was Jacques-Yves Cousteau's The Whale, and it was interesting enough. It isn't exactly an informative book about whales; it chronicles some of Cousteau's trips and a lot of the material is his logs. There are many pictures, but I was looking more for information. I changed genres for my next book when I read The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. It is a work of poetry, and rather than read it straight through like a novel, I read the chapters one at a time and savored them. I've posted some of my favorite quotations here.

After this, I read Isaac Asimov's Extraterrestial Civilizations, whereupon Mr. Asmiov explains the requirements for life to arise in the universe, and speculates on what kind of organisms might form in varying atmospheres. He also writes about human colonization efforts. I read this mainly because of the author. On a similar note, I read Space Station: Base Camps to the Stars, which was a history of human efforts to establish a space station in orbit. I found it to be highly interesting.

My next book was a history book titled Hitler's Shadow War, and it put forth the idea that the second world war was really just a farce -- something Hitler did to draw attention away from his genocidal policies. While it failed to prove this to me, it did offer a lot of information on the Holocaust. The last book I read was a work of fiction by Jean M. Auel, called The Clan of the Cave Bear. I ran across this while reading about Neanderthals. The book is about a young Cro-Magnon girl who is adopted by a tribe of Neanderthals. The "Clan", as they call themselves, are very different humans than we are, and the girl -- Ayla -- must struggle to fit in. As she does, we learn about how these humans might have lived. I loved this book and decided to read more of the series.

So that concludes my last two weeks of reading. As I said, highly enjoyable. Next week:

1. The Valley of Horses, the sequel to The Clan of the Cave Bear.
2. Nightfall and Other Stories by Isaac Asimov.
3. Dolphin Days by Kenneth S. Norris.
4. The Tribe of Tiger by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
5. Jewish Wisdom by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin.

That should make for a lovely week of reading.