“Afternoon Read” would be more like it, today — although I did read almost everything before noon. (more…)

In the current issue of Bookforum, Paris Review managing editor Radhika Jones interviews writer and editor Daniel Menaker in his Upper West Side apartment, where she makes the following observation about his library.

The fiction that remains—a largely canonical selection—is shelved alphabetically by author or subject, from Aubrey’s Brief Lives to Zola: A Life.

I am sure that this is a slip, that Ms Jones meant to say “literature,” not “fiction.” But still!
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¶ In the Decameron (VI, vi), the ultimate nobility of a Florentine family is established by its ugliness: the ancestors were formed so long ago that God hadn’t yet mastered the art of fashioning human features.
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Monday Housekeeping Note: Two new books join the list today. That’s probably not a very good idea, because I often have barely enough time to get through four books, and six will be quite a load; but it’s early days at this enterprise, and we’ll see how it goes. The two new books are John Aubrey’s Brief Lives and the anonymous medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in a new translation by Simon Armitage.

Brief Lives is a title that I recall running into all the time in my student days, but I don’t think I’d ever seen a copy until one arrived in the mail a few weeks ago. Richard Barber’s edition dates back to 1982, but my Boydell reprint appeared in 2004. It turns out to be a more curious book than I expected. Indeed, its contents are more “construct” than “book.”

It might seem imbalanced to introduce one epic poem in the middle of reading another, but Sir Gawain does not appear here qua epic poem, in any kind of competition with the Aeneid. It is rather the book of English verse du jour. It very nicely follows on Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle. Mr Heaney, of course, is the most recent notable translator of Beowulf, and Mr Armitage hails it as one of the “gateposts” on the way to his own work.

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¶ Someone ought to publish a slim paperback edition of the Day Six of the Decameron — for the use of after-dinner speakers.

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The end of Blogging Heroes at last. I don’t think that I’ve ever read so boring a book about a subject that interested me. (Second place goes to the second volume of a Life of Harty-Tarty, written shortly after that gentleman’s demise in 1908, that was so deadly dull that I gave it away without making a note of its author.) As a conspectus of big-time blogging today (what I was naively hoping for), Blogging Heroes is so generally uninformative that only historians bother with it.  

Yippee.

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¶ The Decameron, VI, ii: No wonder the “tales” are short Today (on Day Six, that is): they’re really just set-ups for snappy comebacks. To have two G-rated stories in a row is also a novelty.

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Monday Housekeeping Note: With only two chapters of Blogging Heroes left, I’ll be revising the reading list this week. The new titles will be John Aubrey’s Brief Lives and Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium.

Coming up: the Aeneid will be followed by Simon Armitage’s new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Edith Grossman’s new translation of Don Quixote will follow the Decameron. These changes are weeks, if not months, away, so you’ve plenty of time, if you’re interested in following along, to arm yourself with either book.

On the horizon: James Merrill, Michel de Montaigne, Richard Burton, and the correspondence of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert.

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¶ And so the Fifth Day comes to an end, in the Decameron — with a tale about a “cattivo marito.” How things have changed. Today, the misery endured by heterogeneric couples whose marriage would never have occurred had the homosexual partner been allowed to marry someone of the same sex is put forth as as a plank in the platform of gay marriage, and I’ve no bone to pick with that. For Boccaccio, things are different — and rather merrier. (more…)

¶ In Decameron V, ix, we have an ancestor of O Henry’s most famous story, “The Gift of the Magi.” A lover, with nothing else to offer his “cruel” beloved, slaughters a prized falcon and serves it to her for lunch. Guess what! Her dying son had his heart set on playing with this very bird, and the lady is only visiting her hapless admirer in order to ask him to take pity on her boy — even though she knows that she has no right to ask. But first — before etiquette permits her to frame her request — a little fricassee.

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¶ Oy! You know how it is: you  know you’ve read something somewhere before — but where?! Decameron V, viii lays a comic story on top of a very grim one, and I know that I’ve encountered the grim one within the past year or so. The setting was Kazakhstan or one of the other big former SSRs, and I thought I might find it by flipping through Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan. No joy.

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An abbreviated read, hastily summed-up; and more’s the pity, because two of the items (Boccaccio, James) would merit the whole day’s study.

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¶ Decameron, V, vi: I wonder if anyone has studied what it is about the Fifth Day’s stories that sets them apart from the tragic love stories that surround them. Today’s tale begins with the usual young lovers, but by the time it hiccups into melodrama, the reader might have missed something.

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Today, I bid an inconclusive farewell to Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle. I also contemplate reading the rest of Blogging Heroes in one go, and being done with the blasted thing.

As for the Decameron, I find myself wondering how this book might be taught. Reading a story a day seems just right, and I expect that it was only the very odd medieval reader who went through it any faster. Most people, like the companions in the Decameron itself, heard the stories, at least until the printing presses got going. Here’s what I’d do if I were teaching the book: I’d have students read it over the summer! Starting in tenth grade.

Now, there’s a thought. Anyone who was exposed to Boccaccio in high school, raise your hand. I didn’t think so. The one classic that would appeal to adolescent audiences, scrupulously kept from them.  What waters of Lethe do teachers drink, anyway?

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Today, we have a dirty picture! I had to photograph it, because the scanner, while perfectly fuctional, won’t hook up with the computer at the moment. Yes, there’s another scanner (the very same model) in the bedroom, but to use it I’d have to boot up the laptop, and then cope with the Wi-Fi signal, which might or might not be registering… I am very anti-tech at the moment.

But even if you don’t ordinarily follow this feature, be sure not to miss the salacious woodcut from a Venetian Decameron of 1492.

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Although I cannot wait to be done with Blogging Heroes, there’s no doubt that it has prodded me to “purpose” The Daily Blague. What is my blog about, in one sentence or less? I’ve been squirming for more than a month now, trying to answer this question. Last week, I began to understand. The Daily Blague is a blog about being a reader. Not “about reading,” but “about being a reader.” There’s a difference. And one thing that The Daily Blague most emphatically is not: “a blog about books.”

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Today’s excerpt from Clives James’s Cultural Amnesia is about Edward Said. I’ve tried to read On Late Style several times since it was given to me, but I haven’t made much headway; the writing is clear and elegant enough but the thoughts are rebarbative. And I can’t help snorting at the idea of Mozart’s “Late Style” — as if the composer had the sense of an approaching end that so clearly inspired Beethoven (and Said’s book). By the unhappiest of accidents, Mozart happened to be fulfilling a commission to write a Requiem Mass when he died. But as this was composed for a knucklehead aristocrat who had the habit of passing off such purchases as his own work, the Requiem is not what we would call a personal project. Mozart was far more engaged with the professional projects that, in my opinion, cost him his health and then his life: two opera premieres, in the far from neighboring towns of Vienna and Prague, within the space of three weeks, and on the cusp of classically eighteen-month-long depression.   (more…)

A bit truncated, today’s report. I did all the reading, but I’m dashing off to the Rue des Médecins, where I’ll undoubtedly be late.
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¶ As this is no more than a reader’s diary, I’m allowed to make mistakes, I suppose — as long as I catch them quickly. The story of the two Guillaumes the other day (Decameron, IV, ix) was told not by Dioneo but by Filostrato. Dioneo, the cutup, tells naughty stories at the end of each day. So: today’s story about the doctor’s wife and Ruggiero, who drinks an anaesthetic by mistake and wakes up in a chest, placed there by his lady love, the doctor’s wife, who can’t think what else to do with his apparently dead body. Sounds awful, but it’s played for farce. Trying to turn over inside the chest, Ruggiero causes it to fall somehow; it breaks open and he is free. Free for a moment, that is; with his bad reputation, Ruggiero is naturally arrested as a burglar. The commedia dell’arte conclusion involves the lady’s maid singing a pretty song to the magistrate.

The judge saw that she was a tasty-looking dish, and thought he would have just one nibble before listening to what she had to say. Knowing that she would obtain a better hearing, the girl did not object in the slightest, and when the snack was finished, she picked herself up and said:…

Cheeky! I cannot make out the Italian euphemism for the “snack,” but it seems to involve a hook and religious reference. Of course. And on to the Fifth Day!

¶ In the Aeneid, Aeneas finally tracks down the shade of his father, whose ghost prompted him to visit the Underworld in the first place. The river Lethe is explained to him.

¶ District and Circle: Oh, dear, I hadn’t turned the page! I thought that the first sonnet was all there was to the title poem. But no, it goes on. I keep turning the pages. “To George Seferis in the Underworld.” The Internet is a great help. It not only tells me about Seferis, a Greek poet and diplomat whose death in 1971 occurred almost immediately after the setting of this poem, but to the biography that inspired Heaney. I wind up in Liddell & Scott, but don’t learn very much. According to Heaney, aspalathoi are reeds sharp enough to serve as scourges. According to the dictionary, aspalathos is “a sweet-scented shrub.” I also come across an article in the Telegraph that scoffs at Heaney’s professed reference for Gaelic, but I don’t really read it.

¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Kristin Darguzas, of ParentDish. I feel not unlike Aeneas in the Underworld myself. Parenting blogs! What a universe that must be! I can only wonder what it would have been like to be at home with Megan when she was an infant, only instead of watching soap operas while I took care of her and did the housework (I worked at night, when Megan’s mother came home), I’d had the Internet to check into.

I was explaining the other day to a very doubtful forty-something that car seats had just been invented when Megan was born. They were very simple affairs: plastic baskets, really, given a seat shape and held up with a collapsible wire bracket. Really quite exactly like one of today’s two-handled deli baskets, but shaped a little differently. No upholstery. No straps or safety belts. No rules against using the things in the front seat. And just the day before yesterday, there had been nothing at all. Babies were ferried in a passenger’s arms.

¶ Clive James, nominally on Virginio Rognoni, the Italian minister of the interior who tamed the Red Brigades without resorting to counterterrorism. James’s real subject is the efficacy of terrorism, most notably in the creation of the State of Israel. Italy, he argues, was a functioning democracy when the Brigades began their attack. “But it isn’t hard to name countries, calling themselves democracies, in which injustice, to the idealistic young, seemed so deeply institutionalized that terrorism occurred to them as the only workable response.” Very sobering.

¶ IV, ix of the Decameron is a horror story, plain and simple. Two knights, boon companions, are in love with the same woman — and the one who is married to her descends into homicidal malignancy with what can only be called warp speed, in the space of a paragraph. His former chum rather colorlessly if brutally done away with, we can proceed to the interesting part of the story, which concerns the transformation of the dead man’s heart into a succulent dish fit for an errant lady to feed upon. Boccaccio’s dispatch is — for Boccaccio — absolutely artless, and this tale holds the “slam, bam, thank you, ma’am” honors, at least until something lower comes along. The tale is told, of course, by the dectet’s cutup, naughty Dioneo.

¶ As Aeneas continues through the Underworld, questioning the Fury Tisiphone about the crimes committed by the damned consigned to Tartarus, we reflect on how much sophistication has gone into explaining the afterlife since classical times. Working on the foundations of heroic Mediterranean myths about hell, Christian thinkers thought through every detail of the situation, which was of course not really imaginary to them. Changing everything is the idea that sprouts in Paul and blooms in Augustine: we are all sinners. That is clearly not the case for Virgil; in fact, very few souls are wicked enough to be damned. There is no conception of “venial sin,” and even the mortal offenses are all contingent upon an idea of honor that has nothing to do with the great Christian engine of love.

¶ Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle came out two years ago. It’s your standard slim volume of verse, although one does wonder why such books aren’t formatted for genuine pockets. Eight and a half inches by five and a quarter is absurdly broad. You ought to be able to carry these things around with you, for declamation on the moors.

The title poem’s title alludes to the District and Circle Lines of London’s Underground. On his daily rounds, the poet passes a beggar with a tin whistle — another poet, in other words. It’s for this reason that he keeps his “hot coin” to himself: “For was our traffic not in recognition?” The sonnet is unabashedly well-constructed, as if it were permissible for Heaney to lavish his grand prosodic gifts only upon a correlatively humble scene, one lacking any associations with “poetry.”

I come to this poem with enough knowledge of the world to decipher its not very opaque references, but the poem on the facing page, “Rilke: After the Fire,” is lost on me, perhaps because I don’t know my Rilke.

¶ Clive James knows his Rilke — the nominal subject of today’s essay. The real subject is the fame of those who have been compromised by association with corrupt regimes. Brecht, Richard Strauss, Shostakovich — Rilke himself was gloriously apolitical, and so has nothing to do with this piece, really — the usual suspects. And then an interesting swerve: Charles Lindbergh.

… behind all the personae determined by events there was a personality that remained constant. He valued self-reliance, and possibly valued it too much: it made him hate collectivism so blindly that he thought fascism was the opposite, instead of the same thing in a dark shirt. Yet there is something magnificent about a man who could make a success out of any task he tackled. To complete Rilke’s observation — and it is an observation, because it answers visible facts — we must accept this much: to measure the distortion of life we call fame it is not enough to weight the misunderstandings against the understandings. We have to see through to the actual man, and decide whether, like so many artists, he is mainly what he does, or whether he has an individual and perhaps even inexpressible self, like the lonely flyer.

This is exactly the sort of essay that makes one long to rush off to a café, for group discussion with thoughtful friends. But one is stranded in Yorkville, with only the Internet as one’s lifeline. 

¶ Today’s Blogging Hero is Brian Lam, of Gizmodo. The interview is so pervaded by references to rivalry with Engadget and the popularity of Lifehacker (a site run by a fair lady) that I very nearly conflated this paragraph with the one about the Decameron. From the bottomless trunk of riches contained in the Points to Review: “Providing up-to-the-minute news can contribute greatly to a blog’s success.” No shit, Sherlock.

¶ It’s Corpus Christi in Le rouge et le noir, and we have a moment that reminds one inescapably of Tosca. As a church swells full of gorgeously arrayed celebrants, our hero swoons to one side, his mind utterly elsewhere. On a woman, of course. Tosca herself in the case of Scarpia, at the end of Act I of the opera; as for Julien, he has just run into Mme de Rênal in a side-aisle. I wonder how many members of Puccini’s early audiences were reminded of Stendhal’s novel, which until only recently it seems was a must-read classic, known to all educated people.