Bud Smith > Recent Status Updates

“Your world frightens and confuses me! I'm just a caveman, I fell in some ice, and later got thawed out by scientists, but there is one thing I do know: we must lower the capital gains tax.” — Phil Hartman, Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer

Not too far off, did you know Viking Lawyers who settled lawsuits at the Law Rock? What? Your brother got his head chopped off during the raid? Sounds like a case for Viking Lawyer

Damn … this is incredible … Icelandic lawsuits, bad marriages, honor, outlaw axe-wielding foster-father maniacs, good men and their sensible decisions in a new society that works

First part just ended. I was reminded of things I loved about Wuthering Heights-- a stranger enters a strange house for shelter and now stands on the precipice of learning the household's secrets, or not. Going forward, like WH, our professor/narrator will read a strange missive, in this case, Freddy's Book called King Gustave and the Devil, which he was just had dropped inside his room on a freezing night.

“Why leave the ‘green shade’ as the poets called it, for the common, mindless glare?”

Freddy’s Book, vaguely American Nabokov-lite. A frame novel in which an academic goes to a weird house, gets snowed in, reads a bizarre allegory written by a boy giant. I liked Grendel. This one’s also about ‘monsters.’ Some critics dunk on Freddy’s Book because it followed Gardner’s controversial, On Moral Fiction. I don’t care. I’m here for the Scandinavian knight battling Satan. Pale Fire sans fire

Giving this a re-read after The Illiad, followed by the Oresteia. Couple that with learning more myths and contemporaneous folk tales from the time of composure—the Odyssey just keeps getting deeper and seems even more important. So fun

After finishing The Iliad last night, I went right into read The Aeneid. I wanted to read about the Trojan horse and fall of Troy, which we get into 75 pages into The Aeneid. Reading that section (Book two) was a very good continuation to the story in the Iliad, and a passing of the torch—Virgil writing his own sequel/contender 1000+ yrs later. I already miss the wild depths of emotion in The Iliad tho

Living up to the hype

Giving is translation a read. I liked Wilson’s Odyssey. 1st time reading The Iliad. Drops in media res, fills in why the Trojan War continues in its 9th year (wooing of Helen from Sparta by prince Paris Alexander of Troy). Battles galore. Heroes on both sides with the gods of Mt Olympus who help them win battles or just survive. Achilles who could win it all any minute refusing to play. Excellent reading

A letter to God from Augustine detailing all the ways Augustine is ashamed to be alive

All this Tristram stuff is simultaneously great and just a way to teach people how to read Lancelot and Guinevere when we get there soon, methinks

Malory is at once writing the first novel written in English and writing the first ‘historical’ novel in English; most of the material comes from ancient oral stories and later epic poems and epic adventures written in welsh and written in French (and lots of those stories coming from who knows, Viking and Germanic sources etc). Malory is just the collector, but puts it in the most compelling ORDER and lucky us

First read the Lancelot adventures (page 90-120) and saw the Bresson movie Lancelot du Lac (amazing btw) and got so hooked that all my other reading got set aside till I finish this Malory. And boy does it fucking RULE. Easy reading, flying through it. Re-started at the beginning (birth of Arthur) and now past the Lancelot I read the other day. The ‘first novel’ ever written in English, damn it’s great

There’s been some fantastic sections so far in Volumes 1, 2, and now 3 of Proust’s long novel. The part I just read, an unbroken narrative that stays with Proust’s grandmother, at the beginning of part 2 of Guermantes Way—yeah, that’s the great stuff. That’s the ceiling of what literature can do/why to write about one’s own life and family.

We’ve been hanging with Wizard-name Elstir, who is not a wizard at all, but one of the finest painters in the world, and the good news is Elstir knows Odette d’Crecy (painted her portrait in drag 25 years earlier) and knows the gang of little girls young Proust has tried to meet on the esplanade and beach all summer—small world—feels like George Lucas’s Star Wars, everything/everyone is Skywalker-related

further adventures at the seaside resort of Balbec: outgrowing/out-pacing a formerly advanced an old friend named Bloche; meeting a new friend, Robert Saint-Loupe and his aristocrat family; Francoise being a Sancho Panza-esque fool’s genius; waiting in vain for grandma to knock on the adjoining bedroom wall to say goodnight

June 9th — The House with the Mezzanine
‘One of the only stories I’ve read by him with any ‘political’ leanings. The Zemstro peasant liberal movement vs. what the landscape artist claims to hold dear and how it brushes up against communist thinkings … but you get the sense he’s just saying shit to say shit to argue with the hot lady he wants to get to convince to quit the organizing and marry him.’

My favorite thing about Chekhov so far is how he was a comedic sketch of a writer, oozing with talent, and he had to be screamed at by the guy who discovered Dostoevsky, in order to start taking his stories seriously after writing probably two hundred(?) lil three page sketches of goofy, tossed-off, ironic slapstick

Jumping around in this book, and a different collection called Fifty-Two stories (also by same translators), and a third paperback collection, Forty Stories, and the Project Guggenheim ebook of ALL the collected stories and novellas of Chekhov. I’ve decided to read thirty of what (from asking around) seem to be his best stories, to talk about them with friends.

Got waylaid for a couple weeks from Proust, read Wuthering Heights, a bunch of Chekhov stories, and T.S. Elliot. What’s my deal? Don’t I know there’s books that came out later than 1925?

If Shakespeare wrote a novel some time between the playwriting of Hamlet, King Lear, and MacBeth.

top ten of this coming soon