Jenni > Recent Status Updates

Still Walking with Dante and noting some standout images for painting ideas. Here’s a favorite: the lunar Aurora standing in the eastern sky like a lady on her balcony with stars in the shape of Scorpio on her forehead.
“Her brow was starred with jewels manifold, Set in the likeness of the beast whose tail
Smites on the people, and whose blood is cold.”

If Omi sees me reading and asks me to read it to her I always do. So today she got a dose of Purgatory Canto VII. She listened patiently for a while and said “I don’t understand this book. Where’s my Winnie the Pooh?” walking away

Love meeting the lazy and curt Belacqua (Beckett’s favorite) at the bottom of mount Purgatory and looking up different translations for his “O brother, what's the use of climbing?” and "Now go thou up, for thou art valiant."

The thing about digging into dense historical literature is that you can find so many outlets of people absolutely giddy to talk about context, translations, interpretations, biographical information & the cattiness of academics who disagree with each other (ie some claim Dante never turns right in Inferno. WRONG!) I just love it.
Listening to Walking with Dante while reading

Would have loved more details for the Melville section, but guess I’d needed to be in the course for that. Morrison is expectedly insightful in exploring how Black and native characters existed in the white imagination and what the literature reveals about the writers and the developing national narrative. “Eddy is white and we know he is because he not identified as such.”

“Persons who pontificate about Dante without making mention of his Purgatory may reasonably be suspected of knowing him only at second hand, or of having at most skimmed through the circles of his Hell in the hope of finding something to be shocked at.”

Go ahead and drag me to hell, Dorothy L. Sayers, I was just there with Dante.

These are all very good so far, but the title poem is a haunting gorgeous thing and that will earn at least 4 stars for the collection.

Don’t know about this Ruth character

I just love centuries old gossip, especially when political/religious/sex scandals are involved.

In either getting sick or this book is making me feel physically weak. A toss up!

Have re-read the first 20 pages multiple times, a distraction-induced pleasure because the prose is very good and at times deceptively dense. Funny, too.

Into book II, I is Another, now and slipped into the rhythm much easier- and remembered much more— than I expected. Found the whole car fiasco hilarious, more so because I was not expecting to laugh out loud while reading this.

I risked taking this to a Christmas Eve family breakfast because I wanted to finish it before the end of the year (not happening) and it did not go unnoticed. Got one “whose book is THIS?” and another, “is it like the Kama sutra?” I simply explained it was not a manual, just a long anthropologists meet-cute story (so far.)
[removed book jacket so fam was not subjected to this cover art]

Just had a great time in cantos XXI and XXII with the demons Evilclaws, Wickedtail, Tangletop, Tramplefrost, Droopwing, Spikebeard, Lusthoney, Dragonsnout, Pigface, Scratchbitch, Littlehoof, and the crazy Rubicant.

I sometimes would read funny tweets to Steven before bed, now I read him selected passages from Moby Dick (usually about Ahab) and still get a lot of good laughs. Bought my own copy to mark up, a newer edition with a lesser cover but more and newer footnotes and essays. Guess I’m just a Moby-Dickhead now.

This shit rocks. Chapters 68 and 69 (the blanket, the funeral) were especially good.

Couple of resources I’m really enjoying: the Moby Dick Big Read, and the podcast Towards Thee I Roll.

Reading Moby Dick on a Florida vacation is funny because while trying to clean a large palm frond out of the pool I thought, “the leviathan!” And on the beach I felt entitled to spot a sea creature because I was reading about whale watching. felt like I held an advantage.