Beck’s Books

Mr. Beck has a list of books he thinks are very worthwhile reading
Here’s some I’d suggest to supplement his (or, at least in one case, replace) choices.

[Links lead, either directly or through the Online Books Page, to online versions where available, or else to the relevant Amazon page]

Thucydides: History of the Pelopennesian War
It’s not so much a history of a war as an analysis of how the desire to dominate others ends up destroying everyone involved

Plato: Symposium
You may totally disagree with everything he said, but this dialogue is the foundation of at least half of Western intellectual history, and one of the great underpinnings of Christianity.

Machiavelli: Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
The Prince is the famous book, but this is where Machiavelli described his real political ideals

Shakespeare: The Sonnets
Milton: Samson Agonistes
Blake: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience
Eliot: Four Quartets
What poetry can do, these did. The Blake, if possible, should be read in a copy that contains Blake’s original engravings.

Cao Xueqin: The Story of the Stone (aka The Dream of the Red Chamber)
It’s one of the greatest novels ever written, even if in the full translation it comes (in the Penguin Classics edition)to five volumes (the last of which was written by someone else after the death of the original author), with the added benefit that you’ll learn almost everything you need to know about the Chinese in Imperial China by the time you get to the end–which means learning a lot about the Chinese in modern China

Jane Austen: Persuasion
My personal choice for the greatest novel ever written.

Edmund Crispin: The Moving Toyshop
Dorothy Sayers: The Nine Tailors
Two of the greatest mysteries ever written. In the first one, not only does the corpse disappear, but so does the scene of the crime. In the second, the question is not only who the murder victim was, but also whether he was murdered at all.

Barry Hughart: Bridge of Birds
Tim Powers: The Anubis Gates and The Stress of Her Regard
What fantasy can be: intricate plots set into the midst of human history (early Imperial China for Hughart; 19th century London for the first Powers and the lives of the English Romantic Poets for the second Powers)

William Manchester: The Last Lion: William S. Churchill–Alone 1932-1940
Manchester intended to write a three volume biography of Churchill, but became too ill to write the third. Instead he wrote “A World Lit Only By Fire”, and we are the loser for it (which is why I’d kick it off the list). “Alone” is the second volume, in which Manchester focuses on Churchill’s “Wilderness Years”, and in doing so portraying the appeasement movement of the 1930s in damning detail: the elite of Britain acting on the premise that Britain was not really worth defending.

Simon Schama: Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution
One of the best histories of the French Revolution: the culture and society of France in the last third of the 18th century and how it produced the prototype of Soviet Russia and all other modern totalitarian states

There, that should give you enough to read for a week or so…

Footnotes in Gibbon

Mr. Beck muses on a passage of Gibbon:

This, ladies and gentlemen, comes with all emphases original at pp. 682-683 of volume I of Oliphant Smeaton’s edition of “The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire” (Modern Library — Random House). It precipitates this footnote:
“Socrates acknowledges that the heresy of Arius proceeded from his strong desire to embrace an opinion the most diametrically opposite to that of Sabellius.”
Do not, dear readers, confabulate this Socrates — the late fourth century writer — with the Greek sage of some seven-plus centuries earlier. I’m just telling you: Gibbon simply presses on as if one knows these things.

I too have Gibbon cum Smeaton featured prominently on my bookcase.
Good old Oliphant Smeaton, product of an age when Oliphant was accepted as acceptable first name, and not reduced to a halfing’s wonder–and he writes like it. He finds plenty to correct in Gibbon, but such is the progress of knowledge that his corrections need many corrections themselves–and sometimes Gibbon turns out to have been more right than Smeaton.

But half the joy of Gibbon is his footnotes, where he feels himself free (even more than in the main text, where his own opinions shine out on almost every page) to snark at passing pedants, praise obscure scholars, damn unreliable chroniclers and rhetoricians, relate a life history in one paragraph, consider whether an obscure city is located in this province or that province of what was then the Ottoman Empire or the fragments of Italy, or, in summing up the knowledge of that era on one topic or another, compress more information than might be found in some entire Ph.D. dissertations–the trimmings of a narrative that manages to cover the history of almost all Eurasia as it flowed over twelve centuries. The only real shortcut he allowed himself was to elide much of later Byzantine history on the grounds that all those scheming Byzantine emperors were much of a muchness. It’s a wonder that he kept it as brief as he does, and probably no historian of our time, even if they accumulated the necessary erudition, could come close to repeating the feat. It is one of the pinnacles of the Enlightenment. And that’s not taking into account his achievement as a literary stylist, a summation of the best the 1700s could offer, and a model for almost every writer for the next hundred years.

Poetry slam

There is some gnashing of teeth online about a column by the television critic of the London Times, and its defamation of Beowulf:

Most people have only read Beowulf because they were forced to under threat of being made to do manual labour for the rest of their lives, after being sent down from university. It is by convention and degree syllabus the starting block for English literature, albeit that it is written in a defunct Germanic language about a Swede who goes to Denmark. Only a few hobbity university bods can speak it, and having learnt Nordic Elvish they speak little else and share a particular accent that sounds like something from The Lord of the Rings or the Muppets. They wear odd clothes, usually involving a great deal of leather, hoodies, amulets on thongs and a lot of buckles. Beowulf should be spoken out loud — indeed, it should be bellowed, otherwise the people trying to get out of the room won’t hear it.

Well, it is true that I’ve never met any Anglo Saxon students or professors dressed like refugees from a RenFaire, but Beowulf (pace to Dr. Nokes) is not to everyone’s taste. My Spenser prof once said that Beowulf was the only poem he knew of which read better in translation. (But then, there are those who would say equivalent things of The Fairie Queene.)

But the column does have a larger point: whether poetry should be part of TV (the poet being specifically referenced is Donne):

But… Didn’t you just know there was going to be a “but”? The life and the analysis were all fine, but then there were the poems. Whatever you think of the man, his words are immortal. To be shagged by him was probably transitory and rather demeaning, but to be wooed by him must have been sublime. I imagine some conclave of Tristrams saying: “Do we have to have the poems? Couldn’t we just dramatise the sex and have him writing naked in the morning to music?” But the poems are inescapable. And so one of them must have suggested just doing quick quotes, the best bits, and then slapping his head and saying: “Hey, out of the box, off the menu, but why don’t we get a woman to read them? Most of our viewers are housewives. What about Fiona Shaw?”

Brilliant. That’s exactly what you want. An Irishwoman reading the words of a cockney man. How much accessible and relevant can you handle? It was way, way beyond horrible. Shaw is already responsible for the second most awful versicide on television, Deborah Warner’s laughably grotesque The Waste Land (the worst was Steven Berkoff’s masterclass on Shakespeare villains). She mums and poses, she emotes and declaims, she underlines and emphasises, she huffs and she puffs and arranges her face like a Bisto commercial and her limbs like an exhausted heron. All this projected sighing and intense, gurning coquetry makes her look starkly mad. The sense, the lustre, the subtlety, the feeling of the words, are drowned. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it is the ambulance coming to take away Shaw.

In fairness, almost all actors are appalling versifiers. They come to poetry as if it were drama, an audition piece, a soliloquy. They make poems performances. In short, actors act, so we shouldn’t be surprised. But poetry isn’t drama: the imposition of a character, the inflection of emotion and opinion, diminishes it. Despite its origins, the whole business of out-loud poetry is problematic. Nobody will ever read you Donne or Shakespeare’s sonnets or Eliot with more poignancy and meaning, more beautifully, than the voice in your head.

—————

I’ve always vouched that there was no human activity that was above, below or beside the box, but after this week I’m beginning to think maybe poetry is the exception. Television is a show-and-tell medium, and so, in a completely different sense, is poetry. The BBC has been confronted with the quandary of what you actually show when the poetry is showing itself. The visions collide, and what you get is the equivalent of old masters printed on T-shirts. Bad art and bad fashion. Poetry won’t be filleted into soundbites. The words remain, but the poetry evaporates. Poetry is hard. It exists at the ceiling of comprehension and feeling, and when you come down with the sense of it, it’s as miraculous as anything man has conceived. Having it delivered to you like pizza by Fiona Shaw isn’t quite the same thing.

It’s not television’s job to tease and trick reluctant folk to open poetry books, just as it isn’t poetry’s business to make people watch television. We get to poetry by our own circuitous routes, and the enjoyment and awe are greater for it. Finally, though, poetry doesn’t belong on television because it isn’t a mass medium.

And then, typical of a TV columnist, it immediately segues into a discussion of ER. (shake head)