Please note: I was trying out different themes for the site and a few recent comments got deleted. My apologies for this mistake.
I don’t think I’ll ever get caught up on what I missed this past week. I did want to highlight the articles on Miklós Szentkuthy in Asymptote journal while I work my way through everything. The first article is an overview on Szentkuthy by Rainer J. Hanshe titled Entering the World Stage: Miklós Szentkuthy’s Ars […]
I’ve been distracted from posting the past few weeks because of my mom falling and fracturing her collarbone. It’s amazing how much energy is required to take care of things from a distance. Fortunately I have two great brothers helping out. I’m traveling this next week and I’m not sure how much internet access I’ll […]
Thank a discussion on Neil Young’s Bridge School Benefit for this post, in particular the closing number of the Saturday evening concert of 1996 where Patti Smith joins many of the evening’s performers during the closing number “Helpless.” It turns out there is a YouTube video of this performance, which illustrates what I tried to […]
Mikhail Shishkin signing a copy of Maidenhair (sorry for the poor lighting)I wanted to post an initial impression on tonight’s event “Mikhail Shishkin’s Amazing Maidenhair” before I went to bed. I plan to post more about the event…maybe an extended post with a transcription. I thoroughly enjoyed the event and it turned out to be […]
Demosthenes of Athens and the Fall of Classical Greece by Ian Worthington Oxford University Press, 2013 ISBN: 9780199931958 Demosthenes (384-322 BC) profoundly shaped one of the most eventful epochs in antiquity. His political career spanned three decades, during which time Greece fell victim to Macedonian control, first under Philip II and then Alexander the Great. […]
Another post from the Institute of Contemporary Arts recordings (link is dead). This one is from April 18, 1986 with Primo Levi, timed to coincide with the release of the English translation of If Not Now, When? in Great Britain. I didn’t take too many notes since his answers didn’t really lend themselves to a […]
Three Percent has published Mikhail Shishkin’s April tour in the U.S. As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m attending the April 4 event at the Hotel Rex in San Francisco, which will include translator Marian Schwartz, too. If anyone would like to meet up before the event just drop me a line. From the […]
Another post from the Institute of Contemporary Arts recordings. This one is from May 17, 1990, with Julian Barnes introducing and conversing (through a translator) with Bohumil Hrabal (unfortunately the link to the conversation no longer works). The “conversation” is a little disjointed at times because of the need for translation, changes in plans on […]
I have enjoyed listening to some of the Institute of Contemporary Arts talks and wanted to share some notes on some of these recordings over the next few weeks. In this case it is William Gaddis talking with Malcolm Bradbury on February 20, 1986, soon after the release of Carpenter’s Gothic (unfortunately all the links […]
Diary of a Humiliated Man by Félix de Azúa Translated from the Spanish by Julie Jones Cambridge: Brookline Books, 1996 (Spanish publication – 1987) ISBN: 157129029X / 978-1571290298 At present I’m living here like a stranger, in spite of the fact that I’ve been an inhabitant of this city ever since I’ve had use of […]
Opening of De rerum natura, 1483 copy by Girolamo di Matteo de Tauris for Pope Sixtus IV Picture source Thanks to David Meadows at rogueclassicism for pointing to the series of articles at The Guardian on Lucretius and his De rerum natura. I enjoyed many parts of Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became […]
After both boys got the stomach crud it’s my turn and the last thing I feel like doing is reading or posting. I will add a few notes, though. I won’t get to posting about the Introduction of Paideia: the Ideals of Greek Culture (Volume 1) by Werner Jaeger for a few days. In the […]
The Flower Show / The Toth Family by István Örkény (New York City: New Directions, 1982) Matraszentanna is a small mountain town, so small, in fact, that it has no indoor plumbing. Anyone wishing an inside flush toilet has to install his own private pump. Only Professor Cipriani, the proud owner of the town’s one […]
The Flower Show / The Toth Family by István Örkény (New York City: New Directions, 1982) Although the scene and characters [of The Flower Show] are those of Budapest, the idea behind them came to Örkény in New York. Switching on the television set on the last day of a visit to America, he happened […]
Another YouTube videos post, where the videos have under 1,000 views, this time related to Andrei Platonov. I guess there is a tie-in between the previous post and this one: Vasily Grossman gave the main speech at the funeral of Platonov. The first video is Alexander Petrov’s animation of the Platonov story “The Cow” (which […]
Richard at Caravana de recuerdos has recently covered Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, a novel I give my highest recommendation to without any hesitation (see here for the summary of my posts on the novel). Both of us read the NYRB edition, translation by Robert Chandler. While poking around recently some of Chandler’s other translations […]
One Minute Stories by István Örkény, selected and translated by Judith Sollosy (Budapest, Corvina Books Ltd.) I had been reading about some Hungarian plays and ran across István Örkény’s name several times. The more I read about him the more I wanted to read something by him. I selected a collection of his shortest works […]
A few weeks ago I wanted to see how the boys (ages 6 and 9) would react to learning Latin…were they too young? Would they even be interested? We’re not quite a quarter of the way through William E. Linney’s Getting Started with Latin: Beginning Latin for Homeschoolers and Self-Taught Students of Any Age but […]
Off the Beaten Track in the Classics by Carl Kaeppel (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1936) Update: I have included links to the posts in the list of chapters. I may include links to other books that tie in with the chapter posts (such as N. M. Penzer’s essay on Poison Damsels) as I get to […]
Off the Beaten Track in the Classics by Carl Kaeppel (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1936) Except for the account of the west coast of Africa with Cerne and the trade in Attic pottery, to which we have already referred, the Periplus of Scylax is not a particularly exciting work, nor has it any pretensions to […]