Alex Egg > Recent Status Updates

The Eugene Rayburn character is basically Simpole from Bleak House, but with the redemption arc...

Beyond the romance and satire, Our Mutual Friend hinges on the inheritance of a 19th-century recycling startup. Dickens doesn’t get nearly enough credit for launching the circular economy.

‘Stop him! Come back, you young villain! You’ve got a tooth among them halfpence.’

‘How was I to know I’d got it? You giv it me. I don’t want none of your teeth; I’ve got enough of my own.’ So the boy pipes, as he selects it from his change, and throws it on the counter.

‘Don’t sauce me, in the wicious pride of your youth,’

most Dickensian thing ever: an actual viable income steam in victorian london is the fishing out of the river dead bodies.... 😂

love the satire of this juxtaposition:

second hand descriptions of Tellson’s Bank via Mr Lorry:

* “a temple of commerce"
* "respected, not questioned"
* ivory tower of integrity

first hand accounts via narrator:

* "Very small, very dark, very ugly, very incommodious."
* wanted no customers to complain of it"
* "moldy bank notes"

A veiled critic of England (or the west today)?

great climax

you almost _have_ to read this book twice bc Dickens uses so much foreshadowing especially w/ the humor. I don't think it's possible to just read it once, you miss so much nuisance.

i'm a machine, a banking machine

The inferno is a great follow up to the Aeneid as the author of the latter becomes a main character in the former!

very obscure Aeneid references in the first pages #payoff

i read a meta analysis that this is basically Virgil fan fiction by Dante...

randomly during bath time my son let me read to him, the whole book 5 of the Illiad: parenting bliss!

loved Aeneas and Venus tag teaming against Turnus and Juturna

the action doesn't stop in this book:

* Book VII: you get the super creepy horror vibes Alecto story
* Book VII: you get an epic history of Hercules and an almost FPV into Vulcans forge w/ the Cyclops' forging Aeneas' mega shield thanks to his mom

Opposite, Cnossus’ island rises from the sea;
the cruel passion of the bull, Pasiphaë,
her furtive mating, the hybrid shape of the Minotaur,
her two-formed offspring, monument of monstrous love.

saw a great relief at the royal palace in amsterdam that reminded me of one of the scenes Anchises was describing from future rome: The Tarquinian conspiracy. where Brutus (ancestor of the famous one) condemned for execution his own sons to preserve the republic. The historian Sara Paine once said "the pillars of the Western Civilization: Greek logic, roman law, judeau-christian morals"....

loving this book: Aeneas just returned from his katabasis w/ the Cumaean Sibyl! Michelangelo painted her on the sistine chapel ceiling!

Sibyl's journey w/ Aeneas into the underworld is clear inspiration for Dante... some passages seem word for word...

we were Italians first. We just went east for a while. Now we’re back -- Romans

also a fun visit to Polyphemus' island where they encounter someone from Odysseus's crew that got left behind!

also the Lacoon snake scene which has a sculpture replica in Rijks museum of the original in Vatican

Paris:

* doomed Troy directly (via Helen)
* doomed Troy’s descendants (by getting Juno mad via The Judgement)

and besides shaming himself and his family in the battle of Troy, made himself look like the ancient world’s biggest himbo....

wow this book is a shameless ripoff of the odyssey! no wonder Dante put him in hell..

but i am now realizing that if they are in Libya, then they are not at the beginning of their journey and would have traveled though the straits of messina (Scyilla and Charibdis) already, so the reader is thrown in the middle of the story...

after they crash land at Libya Aeneas gives the men a pep talk in which he mentions surviving Sycilla and the Cyclop's boulders... but this didn't happen yet in the story....

i wrote down this quote from war & peace 2 years ago "A dreaded foe be thou, kindhearted as a man, A Rhipheus at home, a Caesar in the field!" bc I saw Rhipheus references in the past from the Jon Adams biography and it turns out that all the source material in the world on Rhipheus is like 2 lines from book 2 of Aeneid...

so Aeneas is escaping from burning Troy to eventually found rome. and then roman empire #2 goes back to Anatolia? very fitting!