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Jan. 28th, 2011 07:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoception15. The Husbands
16. All Day Permanent Red
Both Homer/Logue, Books 3-4 and 5-6 respectively. Husbands is much the funner of the two - not even Logue can make Homer's battle scenes that interesting.
I said I never cared about the Iliad but that's not exactly true. I got to book 11 in Pope's version, which I dimly recall reading on the city bus on a dirty snow day, then to about the same place in Fagles' a couple years later. They were both pretty grand for a while, in their different ways, but then became tiresome, probably because of the fighting.
I remember stopping at the same point in my first few stabs at Ulysses - right after the very exciting funeral sequence, I think, when everything is suddenly extremely boring. Other people I've talked to also seem to stop there, those undaunted by "ineluctable modality of the visible" and the ensuing beach delirium. I wonder if Book 11 is a notorious dead air patch? Or if I stopped there twice because 200's the page limit of my Trojan War tolerance.
I should be going on to Cold Calls, strictly, but a) it's more battle scenes and b) I have no access to it anyway, so I'll risk spoilers by going on to Logue's versions of 16-19. If anything's left to be spoiled after both Troiluses, the flashbacks in The Aeneid, Book 12 of The Metamorphoses and a zillion Greek tragedies. The Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead movie spoiled the Hamlet plot for me - ironically, since Stoppard wrote it assuming that was the only unruinable plot, that everyone in the universe knew it from infancy, which probably they did in 1960 England. My trouble reading Homer would probably be much less if I didn't feel like I already knew the whole story.
I read online Logue's also done part of 21, Achilles' fight with Scamander, available in his Selected Poems.
16. All Day Permanent Red
Both Homer/Logue, Books 3-4 and 5-6 respectively. Husbands is much the funner of the two - not even Logue can make Homer's battle scenes that interesting.
I said I never cared about the Iliad but that's not exactly true. I got to book 11 in Pope's version, which I dimly recall reading on the city bus on a dirty snow day, then to about the same place in Fagles' a couple years later. They were both pretty grand for a while, in their different ways, but then became tiresome, probably because of the fighting.
I remember stopping at the same point in my first few stabs at Ulysses - right after the very exciting funeral sequence, I think, when everything is suddenly extremely boring. Other people I've talked to also seem to stop there, those undaunted by "ineluctable modality of the visible" and the ensuing beach delirium. I wonder if Book 11 is a notorious dead air patch? Or if I stopped there twice because 200's the page limit of my Trojan War tolerance.
I should be going on to Cold Calls, strictly, but a) it's more battle scenes and b) I have no access to it anyway, so I'll risk spoilers by going on to Logue's versions of 16-19. If anything's left to be spoiled after both Troiluses, the flashbacks in The Aeneid, Book 12 of The Metamorphoses and a zillion Greek tragedies. The Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead movie spoiled the Hamlet plot for me - ironically, since Stoppard wrote it assuming that was the only unruinable plot, that everyone in the universe knew it from infancy, which probably they did in 1960 England. My trouble reading Homer would probably be much less if I didn't feel like I already knew the whole story.
I read online Logue's also done part of 21, Achilles' fight with Scamander, available in his Selected Poems.
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Date: 2011-01-29 12:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-29 12:59 am (UTC)