Jeff > Recent Status Updates

I backed up all my Goodreads reviews and it turns out I've written over 26,000 words since I started regularly writing about what I was reading at the start of 2025!

A really charming collection of anecdotes and mostly poetry associated with various Christian monasteries under Muslim rule. Needs more and better explanatory endnotes. Not at all the vibe I thought Christian monasteries would have. "One bender coming after another, / with sobriety put off till the wine had run out." Or "Yet while I live, to the moon and the flowers / I'll stay true for as long as they resemble you."

Hopefully this changes tack, but liberal assimilationism (other cultures and times: just like ours!) seems like the flip side of orientalism, but maybe worse because at least Othering acknowledges others which is a step above the endless, narcissistic reflection of the self.

Maybe I'm just a sourpuss but if there was pleasure in the language here I'd be fine. The Big 5 house style is just so ponderously dull!

Nothing really to add to the review I already have up from the last time I read this. Every time I read these stories I find new things in them. When I eventually go, someone should put a copy in my grave so I have something to pass the time while I wait for Chiron to carry me off.

Astonishing that so much of our cultural interests are prefigured in Borges' short stories, and that he handles them with so much more wit, creativity, and depth. I have a new favorite short story each time I reread this collection - last time it was Death and the Compass: "'The next time I kill you,' said Scharlach, 'I promise you the labyrinth made of the single straight line which is invisible and everlasting.'"

I'll try to do a proper review when I'm done with all the other Catullus translations, but this is definitely the go-to one for anyone wanting to read Rome's premiere lyricist of invective, love, and friendship.

"demiurges and gods would choose an infinite scheme: infinite stories, infinitely divided."

Taking a break from Catullus. Borges as a humorist is underappreciated.

Gives the impression that the translators have never fucked or been in a fight. Reeks of Oxbridge schoolboy sexuality. A couple of good lines here and there, I guess.

The most readable and with the least to criticize. Some of the translations are a little flat or bland, at worst. The notes and introduction are fantastic. I'm starting with this translation first in my Catullus summer extravaganza.

The effort to translate Catullus while keeping the original meters is admirable and occasionally works really well, but too often makes a mess of the meaning. The scholarly notes are useful. I want to like this one more than I am.

Eh

I honestly thought I was going to hate this one, but it is so charming and witty. Williams just gets Catullus even as she's remaking him. She's the only translator I've read so far who translates Catullus in the same spirit as Catullus translated others (Sappho, Callimachus).

A really good introduction with a generous overview of other recent translations, clear notes that include a gloss of each poem as well as information for specific lines, and the translations themselves are so far very readable! Probably the best of the bunch I've read so far for someone's first Catullus but I'm only a handful of poems in, so we'll see.

The handwritten chart in the introduction of who's fucking who is both hilarious and also extremely useful.

Da mi basia mille 😘

Every page has a bon mot which mediocre writers would kill for.

The translation inevitably adds a frustrating friction to the kind of polyvocal, multimodal writing that I can tell ought to be a smooth flow. There's interesting stuff here, but I'm working hard to not get lost.

Jeeves objects to Bertie's awful new mustache, which inexplicably attracts the brainy and beautiful Florence Cray. I didn't expect to find a Jeeves story that resonates with the Portland situation so much.

Violent and tender and devastatingly attuned to the soft totalitarianism of America in the period.

Acerbic edwardian cattiness. So much side-eye you'll need to see an optometrist. A healthy queer culture would have elevated H. H. Munro to patron saint status. I'm savoring every sentence!

Got this at the recommendation of a bookseller at the Harvard Bookstore on my last trip back east when I couldn't find the Wodehouse I was looking for. He was right - this is cunty Edwardian wit. Algorithms could never.

I'm so jazzed to go thru this again after all these years.

Menander walked so that Seinfeld could "what's the deal???"

I turn to right and left, in all the earth / I see no signs of justice, sense, or worth / A man dies evil deeds, and all his days / are filled with luck and universal praise / Another's good in all he does - he does / a wretched, broken man who. All despise.

"a man who disobeys God's commands abandons himself to bewilderment."

I'm always impressed by how Muslim theology seems much closer to ethics than the transcendental morality that Europe and by extension America has been cursed with since Christianity and probably neoplatonism if you wanna go that far back.

Made the mistake of getting 200 pages into this 900+ page translation and learning that the bastard editors excluded the introduction which has the Shahnameh's sources, cosmology, and acknowledgement of its patrons. IF YOUR EDITION IS ABRIDGED FUCKING LABEL IT AS ABRIDGED.

Now many horses / rattled between the channels of the fighting. / Their sturdy necks pulled empty chariots. / They missed their drivers, who lay on the earth, / more dearly beloved by vultures than their wives.

Traveling so I've got nothing but Jeeves with me. And in this one - no Bertie Wooster! The new characters are a nice change of pace and I like the group dynamic so far, but this is a much more placid affair than the madcap screwball antics of earlier Jeeves. Also, this is set in the 50s! How the times change.

"I smile to keep from howling, I sing so I won't pray or curse"