I have been reading too many epics

He sits in his bathtub, Prince

Hector of the city, when

wind comes by to prick, a wince

threatens, he bites it off, then

pants grasping for the golden

rails on the gossip walls. Ten

minutes pass he is shaven—

first shave, Hecuba, would you

believe it. Clang! The workmen

clang in the unseen (but to

clang in the visible our

Prince has yet this task to do).

Breakfast: the grapes are too sour,

and he makes it known with one

swift reprimand, for such pow’r

breathes rapt in his hand (not won,

but born with) and after milk

the sand outside in white sun

eats his sandaled feet like silk

until his plastic will brings

him to the pavement’s light lilt

but its gray stony scalp thinks

the shod ankles of the boy

are better off inside. Since

Hector follows Priam’s ploy

(or follows a boyish plot,

treats the hammer like a toy),

Athene pales as if in rot

and her shield lies decomposed.

Hector trundles forward not

ready. He stares at his toes.

The hammer in his knapsack

flies to Zeus and back, a roast

handle holding its head. Hacked

to the brain and pink his heart

Hector sees the  billow, slack

in step. The smiths’ fiery art

stinks, offense to him, but that

excused by his mind-tongue, tart.

Still, his arrogance never fat,

he enters in, tardy now.

He drops his bag on the mat

and explains glumly Just How

he got late. He doesn’t get

to finish. “Prince, please you bow.”

Hector’s child-hair tastes helmet.

He sees himself mirrored, Troy's

Prince Hector, and the onset.

___________

This poem was birthed only because of my inability to stop reading epics this year. I opted for fixed syllables in tercets (although not metered strictly), since I find free verse's liberty intoxicating and overwhelming. A fixed syllable scheme is also more fun for me: you begin with a rule—not necessarily with a story or even an image—then get surprised where it takes you. The (cheating) terza rima scheme is actually due more to Derek Walcott's Omeros than to Dante, because I'm not reading Dante in the Italian, and it isn't the Sayers translation either. Omeros is a postmodern epic, written in quasi-hexameter-terza-rima-variation, the incipit of which:

"This is how, one sunrise, we cut down them canoes."
Philoctete smiles for the tourists, who try taking
his soul with their cameras. "Once wind bring the news 

to the laurier-cannelles, their leaves start shaking
the minute the axe of sunlight hit the cedars,
because they could see the axes in our own eyes."

a-b-a b-c-d. Twelve syllables each line. Not Dantean terza rima, not Homeric hexameter, but a certainly more tractable fusion of both, and informed by free verse.

(Side note: Omeros is dazzling; not understandable entirely, but absolutely brilliant. I recommend it, if you have time to spare.)

The End (Midpoint) of Summer Reading 2015

The title is due to this period of time being singularly tricky to define. Well actually, no -- not if you consider the life of a pre-professional to be either During School or Not During School.

Oh wait, I forgot, I'm homeschooled. I could say it was Not During School for my on-off twelve years of homeschooling without a qualm, and still say it was very much School, equally without qualm.

Sure, that's just vacuous. And there is, even in the murky grid of the homeschool life, distinction between During School and Not During School and -- hah! there it is, I have been wasting time writing.

(*sigh* I am tired and bored a.t.m. No, actually not bored; writing is a stimulating activity, and I am just off reading David Foster Wallace, who is Caffeine. The two previous nights have been plagued by insomnia. Apologies if I am [exceptionally] incoherent.)

The point I'm trying to get at is I have an extended summer. I don't leave for school (read: College) til August. Extra reading this summer.

But it is borrowed time and it really feels like cheating.

Incipit the list:

1. Poems - Emily Dickinson
2. The Epic of Gilgamesh
3. The Lost World of Genesis One - John Walton.
4. Paradise Regained - John Milton
5. The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert - Rosaria Champagne Butterfield
6. The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes - trans. Robert Alter
7. The Chosen Ones - Alister McGrath
8. Lancelot - Walker Percy
9. Poems - Ranier Maria Rilke
10. Bach, Beethoven, and the Boys: Music History as It Ought to Be Taught
11. The Iliad - trans. Robert Fagles
12. Godric - Frederick Buechner
(Here's where my last post on summer reading ended, and thus resumit:)
13. The Hauerwas Reader - Stanley Hauerwas. Took me roughly a year to read. Provocative undeniably.
14. I Am an Impure Thinker - Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. 50% of this book was miles over my head. The other 50% was kilometers.
15. The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) - Jaroslav Pelikan. A very helpful account of the early development of Christian doctrine, and Pelikan isn't afraid to point out what he sees as problems in the nascent church.
16. Collected Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges. Borges is a hypnotist.
17. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte. I had absolutely no idea that this novel was Gothic, and when I read it I was disabused of the (very embarassing [see? I misspel to make it even more so]) notion that all 19th-century fiction written by women is Jane Austen
6. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert. Confession: I was bored by Flaubert's realism; or was it the translation?
7. Silence - Shusaku Endo. The translation leaves something to be desired, but Endo's story of two priests who attempt to minister to kakure kirishitan (hidden Christians) in a time of persecution in 17th century Japan and his exploration of suffering, apostasy, and silence (the perceived Silence of God in particular) are terrifyingly powerful -- disregard the title. And I keep the image of the book cover as my cellphone wallpaper.

13. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz. Diaz left an acerbic aftertaste, although it was long in coming. 
14. Both Flesh and Not: Essays - David Foster Wallace. My first D.F.W., and it was like tasting coffee or Toblerone for the first time over again.
15. Gilead - Marilynne Robinson. The sort of writing in Gilead is something I've seen only in some Japanese novels I've read (not Silence): quiet, and speaking volumes; modest, and more than estimable; restrained, and highly emotional. The protagonist of Gilead is perhaps someone who can stand shoulder to shoulder with Atticus Finch as a *human* character who exudes a refreshing Goodness.
16. Some poetry by Keats. (I was very vague with this last post.) I did read some of Keats: "Lamia" and some other poems whose names I've forgotten. He is, I think, a consequence of Dryden. I found the frequent rhymed enjambed lines disorienting, but decidedly brilliant at the same time.
17. The New Life (La Vita Nuova) - Dante. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's translation. The commentary between the poems feels really draggy. But the poems, as they are translated by Rossetti (brother of Christina Rossetti), are marvelous.
18. The Promise - Chaim Potok. I found much to relate with, although I daresay I enjoyed The Chosen more.
19. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe. Achebe is a dynamic chronicler of the profound change effected (yes, I use "effect" as a verb) by British imperialism. My first African lit ever (I think).
20. A Boy's Will - Robert Frost. Frost's first published collection of poetry, if I'm not mistaken. His poems have classicism (although an evolved one) and simplicity. Very enjoyable reads.
21. Collected Poems - Chinua Achebe. I revisited Achebe after Things Fall Apart. Achebe's verse on war conveyed effectively the harrowing experience of it all.
22. Death and the King's Horseman - Wole Soyinka. A play about a king's horseman in Nigeria who must commit ritual suicide but is stopped by British officials before he can finish. Soyinka dazzled me with his ability to Use Language. The tribespeople use poetry during the intricate ritual; the British imperialists use drab language all throughout. Soyinka effects (I'm going to harp on this) a striking contrast.
23. The Presence of the Kingdom - Jacques Ellul. Papa's notes and highlights are ubiquitous in this book (I think it is one of his favorites). (B.t.w. most of the books on this list are e-books.) Ellul wrote in this in the 1940's, but it is frighteningly relevant in 2015.
24. Girls at War and Other Stories - Chinua Achebe. That's a treble for Achebe on this list (novel, poetry, short stories). I still value Achebe as a chronicler of the African (Nigerian, specifically) colonial and post-colonial experience, but I am not impressed by his writing as much as I was by Soyinka's. Personal preference.
25. A Dance of the Forests - Wole Soyinka. This play lost me. It requires a degree of familiarity with Yoruba mythology, and w.r.t. this I am an ignoramus.
26. Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament - Christopher J.H. Wright. A fine, fine book on Jesus' OT identity, OT mission, and OT values, and how these affect our own identity, mission, and values. It was sort of like a confirmation of my other studies on similar subjects.

What I planned to read but did not (or haven't):
The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays - W.H. Auden 
How (Not) to Be Secular - James K.A. Smith
Imagining the Kingdom - James K.A. Smith
Dante's Inferno
The first part of Don Quixote
El Filibusterismo - Jose Rizal

What I am actually reading right now:
Selected Poems - W.H. Auden

Omeros - Derek Walcott

Noli Me Tangere - Jose Rizal. I "graduated" from high school in the Philippines without reading Noli. A reparative read.

Some Carlos Palanca Award-winning short stories

G.K. Beale's big fat New Testament Biblical Theology (at least 1000 pages! Not planning to read through.) 

thoughts on moving

we half a decade past
painted walls

we abraded our work
the paint today

we watched the walls
cry the orange green

red rivulets
tears run into and down themselves

we graffitists purged the walls
of our personal scribbles

extinguished the peculiar loudspeakers
we set up on those two insipid blank dimensions

we did not weep
with them

they stare out as they did before
we gifted them heartfelt impurities

those two dimensions are and will be enthralled
in themselves we did this to them we gave them back

we were not tinged
by dull and cutting regret

although we might have sometime wished we
hadn't bothered brushing keys onto their locks

we scraped their keys out of their faces
scraped them into their delapidated cells

do we have new walls
to paint we liberators perhaps no

Gilead's this-worldly Christianity

Reading Marilynne Robinson's Gilead is a slow business. Much like Frederick Buechner's Godric, the style and the pace of writing (quasi-memoir, almost "confessional") force the reader to control his or her reading speed (that is, if the reader wants to get anything at all out of the novel). There are no chapter divisions; it is framed as a letter by an aged Congregationalist minister to his son, who is not yet ten years old, having been born in the winter of his father's life.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel evinces a breadth of Christian influence. Robinson herself was raised a Presbyterian, but is now a Congregationalist. One recurrent theme is the minister's admission that he will miss this life when he is in Heaven (and, at seventy-four, he is very aware of his impending departure). He hardly downplays cavalierly the joys of eternity, but neither does he deny that he is likely to remember, and perhaps "miss," if that is possible in the next life, the "fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us.

In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don't imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try."

It's an interesting remark. It may be something out of the vein of liberal this-worldly Christianity (although I'm far too ignorant about twentieth-century religious mainline history), but it does make good food for thought. (But I do hope that I won't miss this life too much once it's over.)

Narrative Animals

"And it's so true it's trite that human beings are narrative animals: every culture countenances itself as culture via a story, whether mythopoeic or politico-economic; every whole person understands his lifetime as an organized, recountable series of events and changes with at least a beginning and middle. We need narrative like we need space-time; it's a built-in thing." ~ David Foster Wallace, "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young"

Will be reading D.F.W. over the summer. Question is: Can he ever underwhelm?

Troas

Burned by the middle-sun, we came unto a city
Walled as if by thoughts, yet unwalled, bare,
Still awaiting the Sack, when she would
Scream. We came unto those unwalls and found
The Gate-elders, whose craniums were on the verge of bursting.

We approached those languid kings and
Inquired: "What is this city called? who rules it?
Who built it? who are you?
Where are we? do you understand us?"
So we said, to whom one swollen, wrinkled mouth:

"This city, we knew its name
Once. Who rules it, we know no longer.
This country, this strand beside the sea
Of the world, this earth: now it is as if foreign
To us, wizened into abstracted cadavers.

We understand your speech, but already I begin
To forget what you said: it dies away and the memory of its sound
Floats into that ancient Argive's void. We have lost
Our bearings; we are as children lost
In the undulations of faceless monsters,

We were consumed and excreted by the present,
Now ever pressed by the question: 'Where is mother?
Oh, where, where, where, is mother?'
We cannot retrace our steps, can only move forward,
Our god is Progress, whom we revile -- no other to protest.

The walls, I think, are sound, as your speech is.
A tune three thousand leagues away to the west hints
The foundations are sound also.
This city was built on terrifying rhythmic drum beats,
Or the blare of a mad poet's voice.

We are haunted not by sound -- the walls crumble -- but by
Black letters on pale parchment, and,
Of late, by pictures and by moving images,
The memory of movement, the soundless swells
Of torpid river-torrents of shields, spears, and scrolls."

His feeble voice resumed: "Before I forget entirely --
I am Priam, Laomedon's son, or was Priam;
Or was I Atrides Agamemnon?
Or Menelaus? or the father, Atreus, Pelops' son?
I am too old, too old."

His finger pointing near imperceptible to the right:
"This is Achilles, man-slaying son of Peleus --"

His once long and glorious beauty
The sorry hairs of an overused broom.

"He is Achilles, and look!
Look at his hands --" his voice's timbre was unchanged

"-- The blood on his hands!" We looked, but
Pelides' hands were the brown of ancient paper --

Whether it was the blood of Priam's sons, or the atrophy,
We could not tell. The smell gave away nothing.

We thought we saw a crystal tear run down
Priam's face, muddying itself in its course.

Pointing to the left: "Nestor, who has slept since, since..."
His pallid head was flung back, and his great mouth lacked every tooth.

Pointing farther: "Ajax the Giant, and Ajax the Lesser,
But who is who, I can no longer tell."

"That sea-faring king, Odysseus, left us long ago.
I miss him, I miss him, or do I hate him? Neither that can I recall.

That is Idomeneus, and that Aeneas --
But he left, too, didn't he? He left as well..."

We said, in reply: "Are you not all dead?
Why are you unsure of who you are?
Why do you sit side by side, who were
Warring enemies, who wept because of each other's
Brutal, bloody work?"

The decrepit megacephalic: "I am Priam. I am dying.
I would like to be dead and not dying -- indeed, all of us --

But that thread, a single capillary, has not run its span."
(A decade later, we realized we were the reason.)

"There," pointing to a figure sitting solitary, "is
Hector, breaker of horses," and, unprecedentedly:

"We are all overladen Hector,
Murdered, violated.

And we are all Achilles,
Murderous and doomed.

We are all Priam,
Ragged, filthy, and hungry.

We are all Agamemnon,
Slain by treacherous dagger.

We are all Menelaus,
Whose wife was stolen way.

We are all Paris,
Who is execrated by all.

We are all Aeneas,
All Odysseus.

We are every soldier
Whose blood poured itself forth in the sight of these walls.

No one who has stood on this cursed soil
Stands in and of himself.

I am vanishing --" he croaked an attempt at a laugh "-- We here all live
This lengthy and evil process of dying."

We stood silent, being able to do nothing else.
Priam's eyes glistened, as they did at Hector's rape.

"We all returned here, to this burnt land;
There was no other country who'd keep us.

We took the gods by the hand, we found
We were a match, we drove our spears straight through their mouths.

We slew the Olympians together, in the name of
Progress," said the king, who before our sight visibly wasted away.

"It did nothing. Father Zeus' brood were phantoms
In the end. Other gods had risen with the new sun."

"Proceed, if you wish," he continued.
"You will find multitudes inside."

After a solemn, motionless, darkening hour, we did so.
With a faint "Halt who goes there" dogging our steps, we walked
Into the fading, torn-paper streets, ascended
The hellish rungs of descent. After years, we found
Ilus, son of Tros, erector of the city, a skeleton on his toilet.

Summer Reading 2015

Of the reading of books there is no end. Now that the summer violin workshop I was teaching at is over, it is time to read. More.

First thing, I have been reading already this summer, since summer began. (When it began is hazy. I think it started sometime March, but then again maybe it didn't.) I have read about ten books over the last four weeks, depending on how you do the math and whether you think summer begins in March:

1. Poems - Emily Dickinson. The Project Gutenberg edition is the first published edition, which means that a lot of Emily's idiosyncrasies -- dashes, bizarre capitalization, unorthodox syntax -- are edited out.
2. The Epic of Gilgamesh and Gilgamesh - trans. David Ferry, and trans. Andrew George. Read the latter a week after the other. George's is leaps and bounds better.
3. The Lost World of Genesis One - John Walton. Introduction to Walton's theory of the functional ontology of Genesis One. No, I'm not sure I really get it either.
4. Paradise Regained - John Milton. A disappointment in light of Paradise Lost. Go read the gospels of the KJV or Douay-Rheims instead. (But it does have some very insightful asides.)
5. The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert - Rosaria Champagne Butterfield. A startling account of a lesbian English professor's conversion to Christianity, which sheds new light on issues I never thought much about before.
6. The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes - trans. Robert Alter. Alter, comp lit professor at UC Berkeley, has some valuable notes on the passages, chiastic structures, and ideas of the wisdom books. The translation itself doesn't meet expectations, though. (A telling example: he translates the verse in Job, usually rendered along the lines of "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him," as something like "He slays me; I have no hope.")
7. The Chosen Ones - Alister McGrath. An uneven wannabe Narnia book.
8. Lancelot - Walker Percy. The more I read Percy the more I think he wrote a lengthy Variations on a Theme of Existentially-Crisised Middle-Age Southern Chick Boy. Lancelot is funny, perceptive, almost prescient, but not as much as Lost in the Cosmos.
9. Poems - Ranier Maria Rilke. Nice ethereal, almost mystical atmosphere in this collection.
10. Bach, Beethoven, and the Boys: Music History as It Ought to Be Taught. Impertinent humor and an off-kilter focus on the details. A book has not made me laugh so much in a long time.
11. The Iliad - trans. Robert Fagles. See blog post three back.
12. Godric - Frederick Buechner. See previous blog post.

So that's it.

And here's what I hope to finish this summer:

1. The Hauerwas Reader - Stanley Hauerwas. Started it last year.
2. I Am an Impure Thinker - Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
3. The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) - Jaroslav Pelikan
4. Collected Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges
5. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
6. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
7. Silence - Shusaku Endo. The book cover of which has to be one of my favorites:

On a side note, Martin Scorsese is currently making a film based on it.

Better read the book before it comes out.

8. The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays - W.H. Auden
9. Selected Poems - W.H. Auden
10. Gilead - Marilynne Robinson
11. How (Not) to Be Secular - James K.A. Smith
12. Imagining the Kingdom - Jamie Smith, who is the same person as above.
13. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz
14. Both Flesh and Not: Essays - David Foster Wallace
15. Some poetry by Keats
16. Maybe Dante's Inferno
17. Perhaps the first part of Don Quixote
18. Noli Me Tangere? In order to rectify one of the biggest failures of my high school reading life?
19. El Filibusterismo? See above.

And so ends this pessimistic idealist's reading list.

fin