calmly Reading the unabridged 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which is a lot longer than I thought it was. It also has a smattering of Latin, and pages and pages of delightful marine-biology nerding out. Due to translation problems – and as far as I can tell, occasional wholesale alteration of the original French text – […]
Category Archives: Essays on Literature
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
01-Oct-17Review of a New Biography of Thoreau.
10-Sep-17The University Bookman decided I was the right guy to review the new Thoreau biography, presumably because of all these years living off-grid and the defense of Thoreau I wrote when The New Yorker published its scandalous, fact-free attack on the man. So I read the biography – a nice one, by Laura Dassow Walls – and […]
Temples The Shape of the Sky
08-Sep-17I don’t quite remember the year or the date, but at some point I saw on PBS Mikis Theodorakis’s oratorio To Axion Esti. The force of the performance, however, I do remember. It started with a bit of orchestral chaos, and then a chord, and something that sounded like the voice of a lonely, mournful […]
Venerdi Dantesco.
25-Mar-16Today is Good Friday, and an unusual one: it’s also March 25th, the day of the Annunciation, traditionally New Year’s Day by the Catholic calendar. It was believed to be the day God created the world, and hence the day He began it again with the Incarnation; the day of the Passover as well (in […]
Paul Theroux’s Deep South.
30-Nov-15I don’t know quite what to make of Paul Theroux. I think his resume is very interesting – a Peace Corps volunteer who taught in Malawi (falling afoul of the mad Classicist-Dictator Hastings Banda and getting kicked out of the country), teaching for a few more years before getting a book published and then winning […]
Kathryn Schulz’s Mythologizing.
26-Oct-15I have found a useful shortcut for dealing with intellectual debate, and since it has saved me time, I will pass it on to you: whenever two or three people write something on the internet in praise of person x for doing such-and-such a thing, know that the person in question was doing precisely the […]
Isak Dinesen – or, Karen von Blixen.
20-Jun-15June 15th, Dulles Airport. Starting Out of Africa, which features the untranslated epigraph EQUITARE, ARCUM TENDERE, VERITATEM DICERE. I have to admit it’s hard not to love anyone who starts a book with those words. “To ride a horse, to shoot the bow, to speak the truth.” It’s from Herodotus, describing the Persians – he […]
Hemingway’s Moveable Feast.
27-May-15Life has been moving terribly quickly of late. In less than two months I have managed to get married, go on a honeymoon, get my wife pregnant, work the all-important spring months in a plant nursery, install a garden for a friend, do a Latin tour of the Bronx Zoo, and get my own garden […]
Cheryl Strayed’s Vita Nuova.
12-Feb-15In my previous essay about Cheryl Strayed’s excellent book Wild, I took as my theme the nature of the experience Strayed had, a truly transformational one which ultimately changed her perspective on almost all the issues of importance. Tranformation of perspective like this is called in Greek metanoia, a wonderful word which implies both alteration […]
The Journals of Jean Sibelius.
21-Oct-17non prescription Misoprostol At a certain point in my college career I stopped worrying very much about my classes, and decided to get my education directly from the university library. One of the books I read at the time was Erik Tawaststjerna’s monumental three-volume biography of Sibelius. I often find that great musicians can also write, but Sibelius […]