Larry’s Pretty Good Journal

Wednesday, reading, meme, baa:

Finished The Wheel, the Horse, and Language by David W. Anthony, which was as crunchy and chewy as hoped to the end. I'm not competent to evaluate either the linguistics or the archeology, but if Anthony's account of both sets of evidence holds, it's a pretty compelling argument for the prehistory of the Indo-European peoples (especially the Indo-Iranian subfamily, where the archeological evidence is strongest).

Puttering on with The Library of the World's Best Literature ed. by Warner et al. From which, another "—the heck?" moment in poetry: for Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered they use a mix of Fairfax's vigorous Elizabethan translation (previously 1, 2) and minor Romantic poet Jeremiah Holmes Wiffen's into Spenserian stanzas. Yes, this is a real thing (link to scan of the 1858 (6th) reprinting). Reviewers at the time were critical of the choice, at least. But, still—the heck? (Wiffen was, btw, a Quaker, and also translated Garcilasso de la Vega.)

And at odd moments, scattered poetry from anthologies and collections by Edward Thomas and William Ernest Henley.

Amusing library find of the week: A Is for Activism by Innosanto Nagara, as a board-book. All the librarians were like, "Why didn't I know about this? It's awesome!" And yes, X is for Malcolm X.

---L.

Subject quote from "Call and Answer," Barenaked Ladies.

Reading Wednesday? Oh yeah, that. It's a meme thing.

Lessee -- in the weeks since I last posted, I read some more from Encyclopedia Britannica 11th edition (1911) volume 11, but spent far more time on:

The Library of the World's Literature ed. by Warner et al. (1917), which, yes, being from the same period has many of the same blindnesses as EB, but it DOES cover 19th century continental authors in greater detail than I've been familiar with. The alphabetical by author/topic makes a pleasing arrangement, as you never know what you'll be blindsided by served next.

I'm not sure whether the introduction to Japanese literature is from the first (1896) or revised for second (1917) edition, but I suspect from the chronology the latter -- either way, though, it's … interesting. The first part, the historical summary, is surprisingly less wrong than I expected, given the time (and many of the wrongs are omissions by apparent ignorance), but the evaluative second part is a hot mess, even with its appreciation of Japanese poetry. The poetry translations are, btw, pretty dire: tanka into rhyming quatrains. That they selected only seasonal poems from the Kokinshu is probably significant of … something.

Also, I am, to put it mildly, bemused to see that Melville has a handful of selections, all from Typee. That … would not be my first choice of representation.

OTOH, I've found at least one thing worth tracking down more of, the romance dealing with the life and legendary exploits of Antar aka Antarah ibn Shaddad. Especially if I can find a recent translation.

Anyway, this week, between bouts of World Literature, I've also found (hat tip to thistleingrey) The Wheel, the Horse, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World by David W. Anthony, which is an attempt to synthesize current archaeological and linguistic evidence about the speakers of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and their homeland. The linguistics stuff is of course fascinating, but the modern steppe archeology (drawing on current Russian and Ukrainian work) even more so. Am about ⅓ in.

(Maybe it's just Yuletide season, but I want fic about anthropomorphic PIE words, like *kʷekʷlo- arguing with
*rotā-.)

---L.

Subject quote from "The Pass of Kirkstone," William Wordsworth.

Reading, meming, meming, reading.

Mostly, more articles from Encyclopedia Britannica 11th edition -- right now, working through volume 11 (Franciscans to Gibson), where I am now being edified upon by French Literature.

But I've also started Parnasus edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson, a poetry anthology published late in life based on his commonplace book. As such, it has a lot of extracts not marked as such, supplied with editorial titles -- on the other hand, he includes entire several long poems, including Comus. His taste is, to my surprise, quite palatable. It turns out he was lukewarm on Wordsworth:

Wordsworth has the merit of just moral perception, but not that of deft poetic execution. How would Milton curl his lip at such slipshod newspaper style! … No great poet needs so much a severely critical selection of the noble numbers from the puerile into which he often falls. Leigh Hunt said of him, that “he was a fine lettuce with too many outer leaves.”

Well said, Mr. Hunt, well said indeed. (Emerson devotes several paragraphs to the issue, suggesting a certain defensiveness with this opinion.)

---L.

Subject quote from "To the Virginian Voyage," Michael Drayton.

Reading, reading. Not much, but some anyway.

In Tales of a Wayside Inn, in a discussion of whether artists should stick to local material or mine other cultures, which in 19th century America generally meant European subjects, one character says:

Poets—the best of them—are birds
Of passage; where their instinct leads
They range abroad for thoughts and words,
And from all climes bring home the seeds
That germinate in flowers or weeds.

Over his lifetime, Longfellow published five collections (called "flights") of poems under the general title Birds of Passage -- the second of which was tacked onto the end of the first installment of Tales. As suggested by the association, the subjects mostly range widely from the local, both in place and time. They also betray persistent anxiety over the purpose and power of poetry. Overall, the quality is good -- there are, in fact, a few anthology classics here, including "My Lost Youth" (which gave Frost the title for A Boy's Will), "Snow-Flakes," and my favorite, "The Children's Hour." I don't necessarily recommend reading all the collections, as I did, unless you already want to read more Longfellow. But I don't regret doing so.

In fiction, reread Earthlight by Arthur C. Clarke, which I haven't done since I was a teen -- when I read it a couple times a year (it was part of the handful of SF at our usual summer vacation place). It's a very white male future, without any women in sight (though a few are mentioned), and several aspects of how astronomy is done has been overtaken by technological progress. The story proper is sound, though, and I want to see a good writer (one who knows how to represent) to steal the plot revise it as a contemporary skiffy yarn of political intrigue. Possibly, along the way, adding some actual sense of tension to what is ostensibly a thriller.

In nonfiction, finished The Art of Fugue by Joseph Kerman, got only a little way into The Garden of Cyrus, and read ¾ of Books and Characters by Lytton Strachey, which is literary criticism in what I think of as the Woolfean Common Reader mode -- I got sucked into this because I was pointed to the essay on Beddoes. (I confess I end up skimming the French essays, as they include a lot of untranslated quotations.)

---L.

Subject quote from "The Kennebec," Anonymous.

Wednesday, the now-traditional day for reporting on what we've been reading.

In poetry, various anthology things mentioned before, plus Tales of a Wayside Inn to about 2/3.

In fiction, finished Dead Heat by Patricia Briggs. Decent character arcing, not so much on the political arc (or maybe I mean the meta-series arc?). A bit thin, overall, was my general impression.

In nonfiction, I finally admitted to a limitation of learning English history from 1066 and All That: that my understanding of what happened between Henry I and Henry II really was too vague.* Turns out there's only a single reign in the gap, but since it was disputed, there's enough confusion to go around. All by way of prefacing that I did some scattered readings on King Stephen and Empress Matilda/Maude.**

One of which was Holinshed's account in Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, which prose got me jonesing for something a wee bit better in the thinky style department. I failed to find it in Montaigne (who I otherwise like), but succeeded with Sir Thomas Browne: am nearly finished with Hydriotaphia: Urne-Burial and have more lined up after that till I run out of steam. (There's a lot of Browne available, all with those rolling baroque sentences building to a specific effect.)


* Filling in the gap between the first two Richards is for another time, as I already have a little better handle on that, thanks in part to Drayton.

** Alternate forms of the same name: in Anglo-Norman she splits the difference as Mahaut.

---L.

Subject quote from "Mencheres," Roden Berkeley Wriothesley Noel.

From a 1918 guidebook to Arizona and New Mexico:

[O]ne of the most interesting little cities of the Southwest—Tucson. It may be that not all will find this oasis town, lapped in the desert and girt about with low mountains, as much to their liking as I do, but I believe it possesses features worth going back on one’s tracks to see; for it has a decided character of its own. With an out-and-out modern American side, there is the grace of an historic past, whose outward and visible sign is a picturesque Spanish quarter in adobe, pink, blue and glaring white, clustering about a sleepy old plaza and trailing off through a fringe of Indian ranchería to the blazing desert.

The only local sight it then points up is the mission of San Xavier del Bac, which is actually a few miles south of town, on the reservation.

---L.

Subject quote from "Diamond Mountain," Luka Bloom.

Recent interesting read: Unbeaten Tracks in Japan by that indefatigable Victorian traveler Isabella Bird. This records, in letters to her sister, a 1878 journey through Tohoku and Hokkaido. Largely because I've never seen much by way of the conditions in the countryside mid-Meiji period.

Bird is not a completely reliable or unbiased observer (and I wonder just how much she's failing to see that I don't know enough to recognize), and when she reaches Hokkaido, among the Ainu, she becomes an Amateur Victorian Anthropologist, Wince-Worthy Variety. However, comma, she's a curious and generally sympathetic observer, is far less orientalizing than many Western writers of the period (AVAWWV aside), and has a lively and entertaining style.

Also, it's amusing to see her casually press "Dr. Hepburn" into use as an interpreter in Yokohama.

---L.