Bud Smith > Recent Status Updates

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

I enjoyed Far Journeys which I read last year. That was about a fella who figures out how to leave his body and travel through the astral plane. Felt like the book was a psyop ghostwritten over a couple tossed off weeks by a good 1970s novelist. That’s the best way to treat these kinds of books. A novel. If you don’t believe, imagine you’re reading a novel w/ strange ideas, and bless the humans who have em

I’ve been reading some wacky books, some of my favorites have been new journalism adjacent fringe books … UFOs, Bigfoot, astral projection, Mothman, all that stuff. And just read Jurassic Park. Probably a way to balance out how absolutely insane real life feels on any news channel. Retreat to the professionally bizarre make believe to be able to stomach the amateur bizarre god is a 3rd rate novelist real life

A history of milk, or at least how humans relate to it. 1st chapter focuses mainly on milk mentioned in ancient tales, for instance: the goddess Juno’s breast milk gave eternal life. Knowing this, Jupiter brought his ‘illegitimate son’ the mortal, Hercules, to the sleeping Juno—the shock of this suckling, woke Juno and sent milk spewing across the galaxy, creating the Milky Way

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

Oh and I should say, it’s a coming of age story, in linear time from early boyhood to now aged sixteen or so, and not mentioning school or at least setting any scenes in a classroom (a classmate does lend him some novels that change his life) (Bergotte). I’m not complaining about not ‘goin to school’ btw