Joshua > Recent Status Updates

What if we didn't track all of the books that we read on the internet?

I'm staggered by the groundswell in force of Clifton's later poetry. If you want to encounter a powerful human presence and watch their poetic gifts transmogrify over the course of a career, this collection may be for you. Highly recommended and can't put down at this point.

I'll read say, 7 poems at a time, and every time around 5 will make me exclaim. I think I've been converted to the Bishop school in short order. She's a master of the free verse and I'm saying that after having just recently completed Leaves of Grass and the works of Hart Crane without having posted any other similar updates.

Let molten coin be thy damnation

Hard to tell what Gaddis really thinks about copyright. He's clearly aggrieved by misappropriation for vulgar or commercial use, but also seems to be saying that while stealing is against the Law, there's no such thing as stealing when you're making Art - even if, or maybe especially when, you are taking something from somewhere else and making it your own. Shakespeare copies Plutarch; Oscar Plato, but then sues.

Oscar has written a play, I'm not sure if it is supposed to be any good. But the only one who seems to have even read it, and even half understood what he is trying to say, is opposing counsel tasked with scuttling his infringement claim.

I've officially decided that my favorite Shakespeare is...whichever play I am reading at the time.

Elegant and melancholy - this is really a pleasure to read.

A lot of the blurbs characterize this as the "Japanese Iliad" but I'd say that, even though there is the central thread of a military conflict, this is actually more of a "Japanese Metamorphoses."

Just discovered this resource "Loebolus" - http://ryanfb.github.io/loebolus/ - it has downloadable PDFs of all public domain Loebs in one place. Very handy!

So László Krasznahorkai is winning the Nobel this week, right?

Strange new phenomenon in the world of literary reporting...citing unattributed GR reviews...

https://qz.com/quartzy/1674774/a-2019...

Okay, Statesman so far is a slog: "How do we define weaving" - "The making of a protective product from the sinews of plants?" - "No, its the making of a protective product from the sinews of plants that is put on a person, rather than around, see." "Whoa dude! - we almost made the grave mistake of lumping the act of weaving in with that of blanket making!" "Yea, we need to slow down and drag this out some more.."

Phaedo - what a powerful dialogue - Socrates consoling his friends (and us all) on the eve of death with poetic discourse on the immortality of the soul.

So the Phaedrus is a masterpiece

Was expecting to like Euripides the least, but that's hardly the case so far.

Done with Aeschylus. I can't compare these translations to any others out there, but this volume so far is really outstanding.

Will our 21st Century Golden Age of Television produce any works of everlasting artistry such as these?

ope!...dnf p 71

Only 50 pages in, but is this a realist novel?