Morning Read
¶ There is an opera in there somewhere… The Decameron, IV, iii: the three sisters, their three lovers, and a miscellany of vengeance suggesting that it is early days, indeed, on the narrative front. Although one of the three sisters is tied up in a sack, the dramatic possibilities so adroitly exploited in the plot of Rigoletto remain entirely unexplored.
¶ The Aeneid, beginning of Book 5: The Cumaean sibyl’s cave. What I’m looking for — and may find tomorrow — is the prophecy explains what the Sybil is doing up on the Sistine ceiling.
¶ CK Williams: “Helen”:
His own body had long ago become a ruin, but beauty had never been a part of what he was.
What would happen to his lust, and to his love, when time came to savage and despoil her?
A Dream of Mind climaxes in a poem about the death of a lover that, without any explicit allusions, seems shot with classical mythology, most notably to the story of Orpheus and Euridice. My critic faculties busily protect me from this obviously powerful poem.
¶ Clive James, nominally on the subject of Jean Prévost, but really out to dish Sartre:
Unlike his fellow resistance hero Sartre, Prévost had been confident enough to follow his star in the direction of the German soldiers, but Sartre left that out. There was a lot, after the war, that everyone wanted to leave out. The spontaneous universalism that Prévost had so admirably represented in the Thirties was irrevocably passé. The division of labor once again became the rule in clerical work. What a man like Prévost had once integrated into a single joyous effort was now broken up into separate specialties, each with its resident panels of shamans and charlatans. The once very real prospect of a widely curious humanism had decayed and separated into literary theory, bogus philosophy and ideological special pleading on behalf of political systems which had, as their first enemy, the irreducible complexity of a living culture.
¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Robert Scoble, of the tech site Scobleizer. And today’s insight: “So thinking about the blog is part of the blogging process?” “Yeah.” I looked for this gem in vain among the Power Points. It appears that Mr Scoble is at Davos as we speak (or maybe not). I wonder if I’ll ever be invited to the humanist equivalent of Davos. Will there be an equivalent? Online, at best — humanism is very, very ill-paid.
¶ Le rouge et le noir: Sorel arrives in Besançon, and visits his first café — where he almost gets into a fight, little would-be Napoleon that he is. How understandably reluctant he is to toddle off to the seminary! If there were ever a young man without a “vocation,” it’s Julien Sorel.
¶ Over the weekend, I finished another section of The Mitfords, and now have only the last to read. We’re down to Diana, Decca, and Debo. It’s getting gowlish!