Knight's Reading List XXI: September 2008

Reading List:

Anonymous. Pervigilium Veneris.
Berton, Pierre. The Great Depression.
Tibullus. Tibullus.
Zegarelli, Mark. Logic for Dummies.

Non-Fiction:

Berton, Pierre. The Great Depression. 1990. xviii + 675 pages. Index.

With all the recent talk about the New Deal, I think was good for me to read Pierre Berton’s account of the Great Depression in Canada. Berton often draws a stark contrast between the experimentalism and optimism of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the stodgy conservatism and passivity of the two Canadian prime ministers of the period, Richard Bennett and William Lyon Mackenzie King. Bennett was a Conservative and Mackenzie King was a Liberal, but that made little different. They were afraid of communists, they were afraid of expanding the power of the central government, they were afraid of running up deficits, they were afraid of their own shadows. (In the case of Mackenzie King, who was heavily involved in spiritualism, this last was almost literally true. He backed away from anything his late mother might have disapproved of.)

The result was a terrible experience. Children on the prairies were reduced to eating Russian olives and thistles. The dole was quite intentionally stingy and humiliating. A lot of effort was put into moving young men into camps in the woods and keeping them behind wire, rather than putting them to useful work. This was a government, whether led by a Liberal or a Conservative, which was afraid of its own people, and which had no sympathy for them. Let us hope that Americans don’t forget how fortunate we were to have FDR, and that the fears of present-day “conservatives” don’t stifle the government’s efforts to solve our current economic problems.

Zegarelli, Mark. Logic for Dummies. Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2007. xviii + 362 pages.

Not everyone likes formal logic. I have recently read Quine’s Elementary Logic and Methods of Logic, and these are serious, useful books on the use of formal logic for sentential analysis. Mark Zegarelli has written a book which combines a systematic presentation of formal logic with a light touch. I’m not sure I understand formal logic better from Zegarelli than from Quine or Kahane, but it was more fun reading about it in Zegarelli’s version. I may even be more apt to apply these principles and techniques than I would have after reading the other texts.

Poetry:

Anonymous. Pervigilium Veneris. Translated by J. W. Mackail. Revised by G. P. Goold. Pages 341-359 in Catullus, Tibullus, Pervigilium Veneris, 2nd edition revised by G. P. Goold. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1962. Loeb Classical Library 6.

Tibullus. Tibullus. Translated by J. P. Postgate. With revisions by G. P. Goold. Pages 185-339 in Catullus, Tibullus, Pervigilium Veneris, 2nd edition revised by G. P. Goold. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1962. Loeb Classical Library 6.

It may be useful to point out that the Loeb Classical Library series from Harvard University Press comes in two colors: green and red. The books with green covers and dust jackets are translations of works in Greek. Those with red covers and dust jackets are translations of Latin originals. (Green = Greek; Red = Roman). Each work is presented in the original language on the verso, and the translation is opposite on the recto. The small format means that one can cover the translation with a 3” x 5” index card to focus on the original.

When Albius Tibullus died in 19 BCE, he left behind two books of poetry: Delia and Nemesis. These are reproduced here, along with a “poetic miscellany” called The Messala Collection. Tibullus wrote narrative poems with a rather rural flavor. “When the time is ripe, let me plant the tender vines and the stout orchard trees with my own deft hands, a countryman indeed.” (I, i) There are plenty of poems about love here, and fervent love at that, but at a more leisurely pace than that of Catullus. Given the martial nature of Roman society, I, x “Against War” is particularly interesting. “What madness is it to call black Death to us by warfare!”

The anonymous poem Pervigilium Veneris (The Vigil of Venus) is, the translator says, ascribed to one Tiberianus, and to the African school of the late third and early fourth centuries. It is a celebratory poem in ten stanzas, including three poems on Spring, three on the festival of Venus, and four litanies to Venus. The first poem is punctuated by a refrain: Cras amet qui numquam amavit, quique amavit cras amet!. (Let him love tomorrow who has never loved, and let him who has tomorrow love!) This recalls to mind one of the anomalies of the identification of Greek gods with Latin deities. Venus is usually identified with the Aphrodite of the Greeks, but I think it is fair to say that Venus is more of a Goddess of Spring and of the fertility of the Earth than Aphrodite.

Knight's Reading List XVIII: June 2008

Reading List:

Bear, Greg. Eon.
Berton, Pierre. The Last Spike.
Catullus. Catullus.
Coben, Harlan. The Woods.
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Kanon, Joseph. The Good German.
Orlean, Susan, editor. The Best American Essays 2005.
Stewart, Mary. The Hollow Hills.

Non-Fiction:

Berton, Pierre. The Last Spike. 1971. xv + 566 pages.

See Reading List XVII: May 2008 for a description of the first volume of this set. The Last Spike takes the story of the Canadian Pacific Railway up to the completion of the road. It’s a good story, and well worth reading. One thing these two books make clear is that the shape of modern Canadian geography, particularly where the cities of the West are located, was largely determined by the men who laid out the route for the CPR.

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Modern Library, 1993. Originally published 1961. xxiv + 598 pages. Index.

This is an amazing book. I read a review of it in Newsweek when it was first published, and I never forgot it. There was something about it that stuck in my head for years and years. I saw it in my local library last spring, and I started reading it in early May. It was all that I expected of it, and it illuminated a lot of questions I had been mulling for years.

Jacobs asserts that cities are for use, and that the proper use of cities requires a certain amount of density, a lot of activity in public spaces, and plenty of connections among the various destinations. Urban planners and reformers, such as Le Corbusier, Lewis Mumford, and others, set out not so much to reform and improve city life, as to abolish it altogether. Jacobs describes city life as fundamentally different from suburban or small-town ways of living, and as having requirements that are subverted when one tries to make a city act like a suburb or a small town.

One of the key characteristics of cities is that they much accommodate the interaction of large numbers of strangers. Thus, sidewalks are safest when they are busy and there are many pairs of eyes watching events. Parks are dangerous because they are thinly populated and, thus, short of observers, let alone defenders. This point struck me in light of Jared Diamond’s book Collapse, in which he described the behavior of New Guineans when meeting strangers. The first imperative is to establish some relationship so that one party doesn’t have to kill the other. The basic human response to meeting a stranger is defensive/aggressive. Big cities have to make it safe for strangers to come into the city and move around, and, at the same time, make it safe for residents to deal with transients who are unknown and untraceable.

Insights like this make The Death and Life of Great American Cities an invaluable resource. Among other things, one can see that the sort of small-town attitudes and prescriptions characteristic of the Sarah Palin wing of the Republican Party are utterly unworkable in the very different circumstances of big cities.

Orlean, Susan, editor. The Best American Essays 2005.

This is a terrific series of books, and the 2005 version is a fine example.

Fiction:

Bear, Greg. Eon. 1985. 436 pages.

Mediocre science fiction of the world builder/ancient artifact sort. Comparable to Michael Crichton’s Sphere, but without the sharp characterization. An asteroid modified for human habitation has turned up near the Earth, and a large and various team set been set to exploring it. Naturally, there is more to this artifact than at first appears, and it may hold the key to whether or not Earth is destroyed by a nuclear war. I suppose the worst thing about the book is that, when Earth is destroyed, we are so little engaged emotionally that it isn’t particularly moving. Bear has gotten so involved in constructing a stage setting that he has forgotten that “the play’s the thing.”

Coben, Harlan. The Woods. 2007. 404 pages.

I found this thriller interesting and disturbing. When I had finished reading, I realized that there is an enormous flaw at the heart of the plot. The story turns around the disappearance of a number of people involved in a crime committed at a summer camp, and the impact many years later of these events. The problem is that I don’t see the motivation provided by the author as sufficient to have caused the characters to act in the manner described, and certainly not to continue that course of action for twenty years.

Kanon, Joseph. The Good German. 2001. 482 pages.

This is a very fine novel about an American journalist in Berlin right after VE Day. The portrayal of the ruined city, its desperate residents, and its callous occupiers builds a great background to a persuasive murder mystery. Our hero finds that the greatest mystery isn’t the crime, but the human heart.

Stewart, Mary. The Hollow Hills. 1973. 499 pages. The sequel to The Crystal Cave. This is the story of Arthur’s growth to manhood and kingship, and his seduction by his half-sister. A fine story of age meeting youth, wisdom tempering energy, and good intertwined with evil.

Poetry:

Catullus. Catullus, second edition. Translated by Francis Warre Cornish. Cambridge, MA, and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1962. The Loeb Classical Library.

The Loeb Classical Library actually published three poets, each with a different translator, in this little volume. I finished The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus in late June. These are quite famous Latin poems, and the German composer Carl Orff followed his success with Carmina Burana with a setting of Carmina Cutulli (Songs of Catullus). I had run across a couple of the first poems in the book in a Latin instruction book. There are one hundred sixteen poems here, with the Latin version on the left-hand page and the English on the recto. (The translators make no attempt to render the English in verse. So you have an English prose translation of each Latin poem.)

Catullus, who lived from 84-54 BCE, wrote love poems, erotic poems, and some downright disgusting poems. One of the nicest is the second:

Passer, deliciae meae puellae,
quicum ludere, quem in sinu tenere,
cui primum digitum dare appetenti
et acris solet incitare morsus
cum desiderio meo nitenti
carum nescio quid lubet iocari,
credo ut, cum gravis acquiescet ardor,
sit solaciolum sui doloris,
tecum ludere sicut ipsa possem
et tristis animi levare curas!

Sparrow, my lady’s pet, with whom she often plays whilst she holds you in her lap, or gives you her fingertip to peck and provokes you to bite sharply, whenever she, the bright-shining lady of my love, has a mind for some sweet pretty play, in hope, as I think, that when the sharper smart of love abates, she may find some small relief from her pain – ah, might I but play with you as she does, and lighten the gloomy cares of my heart.