Prince Andrei Nikolaevich Bolkonsky, who in the context of St. Petersburg society seemed like an arrogant little toad with no hint of a lyrical turn of mind, seems brought to life by his first experiences of battle:

He closed his eyes, but at that same instant in his ears there crackled a cannonade, gunfire, the rattle of carriage wheels, and now again the stretched-out line of musketeers goes down the hill, and the French are shooting, and he feels his heart thrill, and he is riding in front next to Schmidt, and bullets are whistling merrily around him, and he experiences that feeling of the tenfold joy of life, such as he has not experienced since childhood.

He woke up…

“Yes, all that happened!…” he said, smiling happily to himself like a child, and he fell into a sound, youthful sleep.¹

Count Nikolai Ilyich Rostov’s experience was of a different sort. Glory was on his mind at the beginning of his first conflict, but his fantasies quickly yielded to confusion. He slipped and was muddied, he was yelled at by the regimental commander for being in the way, he stood by while others called for stretchers. But he, too, is a source of lyrical reflection. As cannister shot rattled across the bridge,

Nikolai Rostov turned away, and, as if searching for something, began looking at the distance, at the waters of the Danube, at the sky, at the sun! How good the sky seemed, how blue, calm, and deep! How bright and solemn the setting sun! How tenderly and lustrously glistened the waters of the distant Danube! And better still were the distant blue hills beyond the Danube, the convent, the mysterious gorges, the pine forests bathed in mist to their tops… there was peace, happiness… “There’s nothing, nothing I would wish for, there’s nothing I would wish for, if only I were there,” thought Rostov. “In me alone and in this sun there is so much happiness, but here… groans, suffering, fear, and this obscurity, this hurry… Again they’re shouting something, and again everybody’s run back somewhere, and I’m running with them, and here it is, here it is, death, above me, around me… An instant, and I’ll never again see this sun, this water, this gorge…”

Just then the sun began to hide itself behind the clouds. Ahead of Rostov, another stretcher appeared. And his fear of death and the stretcher, and his love of the sun and life—all merged into one painfully disturbing impression.

“Lord God! the one there in this sky, save, forgive, and protect me!” Rostov whispered to himself.

The hussars ran up to the handlers, the voices became louder and calmer, the stretchers disappeared from sight.

“What, bghrother, got a whiff of powder?” Denisov’s voice shouted by his ear.

“It’s all over, but I’m a coward, yes, I’m a coward,” thought Rostov and, sighing deeply, he took his lame Little Rook from the handler and began to mount.

[...]

“However, it seems nobody noticed,” Rostov thought to himself. And indeed no one had noticed anything, because they were all familiar with the feeling a junker experiences when he is under fire for the first time.²

Bolkhonsky and Rostov are very different men, but both reveal a poetic experience of the world around them. Bolkhonsky poeticizes and thrills with his closeness to death. For Rostov, it is not the possibility of death which excites so much as the poignancy of life which is brought into high contrast by the immediacy of death.

Though we are introduced to these men in their last days in St. Petersburg society, I have a feeling that this depiction of their social lives is not the true beginning of their characterizations. Instead, it is their first experiences of war which mark their beginning as human characters, and the introduction of them merely provides a contrast to this.

And the interesting question for both of them is… What happens next?

the sick and the wounded had been left on the other side of the Danube with a letter from Kutuzov entrusting them to the humaneness of the enemy;¹

The good old days of honor amongst soldiers? Or irony? Earlier Tolstoy alluded to the death sentence Napoleon ordered on four thousand Turkish soldiers who had surrendered in exchange for their lives.²

Build a foundation in Western classics through reading focused in order of importance on literature, philosophy, and history.

Method

Read the Western Canon in a series of widening passes over the material, beginning with Shakespeare. Each pass will delve deeper into the canon, building on the readings from previous passes, and including re-readings where desireable.

The reading plan will remain secondary to inspiration and enthusiasm. When interests wane, the structure is there to maintain focused movement.

Phase 1—Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

Time estimate: 4–6 months

Read through all of Shakespeare’s plays. Revisit the major plays and survey the available criticism. See Bloom’s Shakespeare Through The Ages series.

TODO

• Set additional goals for working through Shakespeare; i.e. a series of brief essays, maintaining a reading journal, etc.

Phase 2—The Western Canon

Time estimate: 2 years

Read the selected works from the remaining 25 authors discussed in Bloom’s book.

• Dante
  • The Divine Comedy
    • Preferred Edition: trans. Robert & Jean Hollander
    • URL:
      • Inferno: Amazon
      • Purgatorio: Amazon
      • Paradiso: Amazon
    • Status:
      • Inferno: Own
      • Purgatorio: Own
      • Paradiso: Need
• Chaucer
  • The Canterbury Tales
    • Preferred Edition: Chaucer’s English, not a modernization/translation
    • Status: Own
• Cervantes
  • Don Quixote
    • Preferred Edition: Don Quixote, trans Edith Grossman
    • URL: Amazon
    • Status: Own
• Montaigne
  • Essays
    • Preferred Edition: Michel de Montaigne – The Complete Essays (Penguin Classics), trans. M.A. Screech
    • URL: Amazon
    • Status: Need
• Molière
  • The Misanthrope
    • Preferred Edition: trans. Richard Wilbur
    • URL: Amazon (includes Tartuffe)
  • Tartuffe
    • Preferred Edition: trans. Richard Wilbur
    • URL: Amazon (includes The Misanthrope)
  • Don Juan
    • Preferred Edition: trans. Richard Wilbur
    • URL: Amazon
• Milton
  • Paradise Lost
    • Status: Own
• Samuel Johnson - Preferred Edition: Public Domain - Status: Need
• Goethe
  • Faust, Part Two
    • Preferred Edition: trans, David Luke
    • URL: Amazon
• Wordsworth
  • Prelude
    • Status: Own
  • “The Old Cumberland Beggar”
  • “The Ruined Cottage”
  • “Michael”
• Jane Austen
  • Persuasion
    • Status: Own
• Walt Whitman
  • Leaves of Grass
    • Status: Own
• Emily Dickinson
  • Poems
    • Status: Own
• Dickens
  • Bleak House
    • Status: Own
• George Eliot
  • Middlemarch
    • Status: Own
• Tolstoy
  • War and Peace
    • Preferred Edition: trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
    • URL: Amazon
    • Status: Own
  • Hadji Murad
    • Preferred Edition: The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
    • URL: Amazon
    • Status: Own
• Ibsen
  • Hedda Gabler
    • Preferred Edition: Four Major Plays: (Doll’s House; Ghosts; Hedda Gabler; and The Master Builder) (Oxford World’s Classics), trans. James McFarlane and Jens Arup
    • URL: Amazon
    • Status: Need
  • Peer Gynt
    • Preferred Edition: Peer Gynt: A Dramatic Poem (Oxford World’s Classics), trans. Christopher Fry and Johann Fillinger
    • URL: Amazon
    • Status: Need
• Freud
  • Works to be determined
    • Preferred Edition: To be determined
    • Status: Need
• Proust
  • Rememberance of Things Past
    • Preferred Edition: The 6 Vols from Penguin/Viking, alternately the Modern Library “Proust 6-Pack”
    • Status: Need
• Joyce
  • Ulysses
    • Status: Own
  • Finnegans Wake
    • Status: Own
• Woolf
  • Orlando
    • Status: Own
• Kafka
  • Amerika
    • Edition: trans. Hofmann
      • URL: Amazon
  • The Complete Stories
    • Edition: Metamorphosis and Other Stories: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition), trans. Hofmann
      • URL: Amazon
  • The Blue Octavo Notebook
    • Edition: trans. Max Brod
      • URL: Amazon
  • The Trial
  • The Diaries
  • The Castle
  • Parables, Fragments, Aphorisms
    • Edition: The Zürau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka, trans. Hofmann and Brock
      • URL: Amazon
• Borges
  • Fictions
    • Preferred Edition: Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley
    • URL: Amazon
    • Status: Own
• Neruda
  • Canto general
    • Canto General, 50th Anniversary Edition
      • or The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems w/ 7 of the 12 Cantos
    • URL: Amazon
      • “Essential” URL: Amazon
    • Status: Need
• Pessoa
  • The Keeper of Sheep
    • Preferred Edition: The Keeper of Sheep, trans. Edwin Honig
      • or A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems, trans. Richard Zenith w/ selections of The Keeper of Sheep
    • URL: Amazon
      • “Selected” URL: Amazon
    • Status: Need
• Beckett
  • Murphy
    • URL: Amazon
    • Status: Need
  • Waiting for Godot
    • URL: Amazon
    • Status: Need
  • Endgame
    • URL: Amazon
    • Status: Need
  • How It Is
    • URL: Amazon
    • Status: Need

TODO

• Complete list of works, with a list of specific books to acquire.
• Fit the list to a schedule requiring aprox 5 hours reading per week.
• Set study and writing goals

Phase 3—The Widening Gyre

Time estimate: 3–5 years

Read the most important works in the entire Western Canon. Proceed chronologically unless another organizational scheme presents itself.

TODO

• Complete list of works, with a list of specific books to acquire.
  • Adler's list may be a good boiler plate.
  • Bloom’s appendices to TWC will suggest others, particularly as Adler’s list approaches the 19^th–20^th centuries.
• Fit the list to a schedule requiring aprox 5 hours reading per week.
• Set study and writing goals

Phase 4—Filling in the Cracks

Time Estimate: The Rest of My Life

Focused reading to supplement existing knowledge/experience of the Western Canon, of philosophy, and of history.

TODO

• List to remain open and flexible
• Maintain a list of books of interest.
• Re-evaluate gaps in reading prior to beginning this phase.
• Set goals for longer writing projects

Las vanidades del mundo
Las grandezas del imperio
Se encierran en el profundo
Silencio del cementerio

---

The vanities of the world
The greatness of the empire
Withdraw into the deep
Silence of the cemetery

Our post-revolutionary youth are born under happier stars than you and I were. They acquire all learning in their mother’s womb, and bring it into the world ready made. The information of books is no longer necessary; and all knowledge which is not innate, is in contempt, or neglect at least.

The Fox Woman takes the form of an epistolary novel, with the events and—more significantly—the internal development of the characters being revealed through the journal entries of Kaya no Yoshifuji, his wife, Shikujo, and Kitsune, a little fox who is infatuated with Yoshifuji. The story develops slowly, rather like a tree awakening into bloom. While some readers seem to have been put off by this oblique development, I find that it gives breathing space for the characters, a narrative legitimacy, and helps give the reader time to realize that the real nature of this novel is not that of a neatly plotted series of events, but rather more a meditation upon the realities of our own lives, our fantasies ritualized into legitimacy, our own courteous lies and kindnesses.

The characters in this book are not heroic. Nor are they idealized. Yoshifuji has failed at court, and he is increasingly distant from his wife and son. Kitsune, his wife, who takes as her models the idealized characters of monogatari tales, is ever-perfect in her wifely courtesy, and unintentionally aloof in her perfection. The fox woman, herself, is not treated with the light hand of the fantasist, but is constantly faced with the all too real consequences of her actions. One reviewer expressed a desire “to stab all of the characters in the eye with sharpened sticks,” for their sin of irritating the reader. Others have indicted the characters of the crime of dullness. I think these readers are missing the point. Yoshifuji, Shikujo, and Kitsune act as we act, think as we think, dream as we dream. They are guilty of being infected with our own misguided mediocrity. If we recognize our kinship to them, we stand to gain from their painful if fictional lives. If we stand over them, accusing them, failing to recognize how we are never very far from their delusional mendacity, then we will continue to live as they lived–fictional lives, built on a thin and failing glamour, doomed to face the truth only when there is no less painful delusion in which to escape.

Kij Johnson gives us beauty and sensitivity. She gives us a chance to see some small way into the truth of our lives, and she does so gently and without judgment. In this, she gives us a gift worthy of reverence.

Only the best bagel ever...

This bagel is home-made using Peter Reinhart’s bagel recipe from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. It’s topped with red onion, asiago, pistachio nuts, fresh rosemary and extra-virgin olive oil. Ideally I would have used red torpedo onions and Parmigiano-Reggiano, but the torpedo onions I’d have to grow myself, and the Pargmigiano-Reggiano would have required some forethought and a trip to the store. It is excellent with asiago. It would have been transcendant with the parmesan.

Despite almost two and a half millenia worth of art theory and criticism since Aristotle’s The Poetics, the average response is formulated against the foundation of personal enjoyment. You could almost argue that the common definition of art is that it is “that stuff that isn’t science which makes me feel something”. The other definition, the “elitist” or “high art” definition, is that art is “what your crap isn’t”. There’s so much woolliness to our thinking about art, and it would be interesting to tug at that strand and unravel the unfortunate sweater vest of our current modes of understanding. But with respect to the games and art discussion, it isn’t necessary. This discussion has a lot more to do with the legitimacy of games than whether or not games are art.

Games suffer a worse fate even than comics as something that used to be “just for kids”. Now the kids have grown up and they still enjoy their games and comics. Thanks to the likes of Alan Moore, comics get a little respect every now and then. But video games? They’re still stuff for kids unless you’re talking about solitaire or Tetris. Claiming them as art gives them legitimacy, as if somehow bridge is a responsible adult past-time while Bioshock is merely a waste of time. Perhaps Tycho is right that this is just “generational bullshit”. But if it is, it’s the younger adults as much as the older that have the problem. It’s their problem because they want something that isn’t necessary. Why is it necessary to legitimize a past-time?

Probably the answer has to do with how our culture seems to invariably set up dichotomies and then expect everyone to align themselves on one side or the other. We are a society still absolutely addicted to right and wrong. But we’ve lost all context and proportion and so we frame right and wrong according to any manner of personal proclivities. We want people to disagree with us, to take up sides against us, the “wrong” side, because by having an adversary we seem to have a better sense of ourselves. In adversity, we exist. We know who we are by what brands we endorse, and by which ideologies we despise—it’s self-knowledge through our unique, individualized collection of Facebook pages. All these things we collect—artists, politics, cultural theories—are meaningless if they exist only as preferences, as charms on a bracelet.

If we can step away from a consumerist mode of self-definition, if we can allow things to have meaning that exists beyond our immediate experience of them, if we can neglect our question of self for just a short second, then we can discuss art and maybe have some glimpse of meaning. Then we can discuss games without having to defend our interests. Until then, it’s just a grown up version of “my dad can beat up your dad.”

So what is art? And who cares? Well, I do. And there are plenty others who do really care about art as something more than a bumper sticker. But it is damned difficult to have that conversation with strangers because the cost of entrance is so steep—it requires more than careful consideration and deliberation: it requires a respectful expectation that those with whom you are entering the conversation care as much for the subject as you do, yourself, and are ready to engage with honesty and depth. That is a lot to ask of a casual and anonymous forum—unlikely, but not unthinkable. Shall we engage in an unlikely discourse?

I still don’t know how I’m going to provide for my family. But I want to be awake. Aware. Feeling something other than anxiety, the pressure of responsibilities I can’t meet, despair, depression. I want to be aware of beauty. I want to participate in it, somehow, even if it’s just in a neatly organized square foot garden. Though the little things are never enough; the longing is never fulfilled. But it’s better to long and pine than to just want to fade into sleep.

When I got home from picking up the kids I cleared off my prayer corner which had become just one more surface to place stray things. I cleaned out the prayer lamp. The olive oil and water had dehydrated and turned foul. The wick had turned to mush. It was a sticky sludge that took lots of scrubbing with comet applied directly to my skin to get clean. There’s this thought that how you tend your prayer lamp is a metaphor or symbol of the state of your soul. If that’s the case, my soul was sickening sludge, in need of harsh cleaners, and volumes of fresh water. Maybe. It’s too easy to get melodramatic, and enlarge one’s circumstances into some sort of self-pleasing performance art. But the simpler thought is true: my soul needs some looking after, a bit of freshness, and some thoughtful tending.

Being a long-time reader of works in translation, I know how important it is to find a worthwhile translation before beginning the reading of any particular work. Poor, or merely dated, translation can render the life out of even the most vibrant and vital of works. My initial feeling is that Hugh Aplin has done a fine job in translating Pushkin here. I began simply by reading the introduction and a few of the stories, with attention to the notes.

As for the introduction, it is helpful and interesting reading, placing this work of prose within the context of Pushkin’s literary development, and of Russian literature in general. The stories are quite readable. They don’t suffer from strangulated translation. They don’t read like a 21st century writer wearing the affectation of 19th century “pantaloons, waistcoat, and frock,”—“these words are not of Russian stock…”—and therefore give relatively direct access to English readers of Pushkin’s stories.

Without making an exhaustive search for other translations of these stories, I did briefly compare them with the stories and notes as previously published in Norton’s The Complete Tales of Alexandr Sergeyevitch Pushkin (trans. Aitken, Gillon R., 1966) and found that Aplin’s version comes out favorably. The Aitken version feels dated and rather wooden, where Aplin’s dialog, for example, has a far more natural flow to it—at least to my modern ears. The notes, too, seem to be superior in the Hesperus publication, being more frequent, and somewhat more expansive.

As I stated at the outset, this is merely an initial evaluation of the kind that I perform for myself every time I set out to read a work in translation. My opinion of the book may change as I read it closely and thoroughly, but there is every indication that this will be a successful and enjoyable read.

[Originally written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers]

Pushkin, Alexander. The Tales of Belkin. Trans. Hugh Aplin. London: Hesperus Limited, 2009. Print. Hesperus Classics. Foreward Adam Thirlwell, 2009

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”