Thank you for reading this newsletter. I only produce it once a month because books take a long time to read, but on the same subject though books take a long time to read. So, I really appreciate your following along.
Right up front, the latest news from Random Number Lit is that I have a PangoBooks site @randomnumberlit. I think PangoBooks is only a mobile app but I will see you the copies of the books I have read with a personalized short reflection, a bookmark and a sticker. I think you have to have the mobile app to participate in that.
I also have a Youtube Channel that I post to more frequently than a once a month newsletter. Check that out for more up-to-date posts. I also have a Post Rock Playlist that I add to every once in awhile.
I also have a Twitter and Instagram that I have been trying some different things.
This month I finished 3 books which is fine for me really but I’d like to finish more. I am in the hunt to finish one right now as I am typing this. Lets see if that gets finished before the end of the month to be included here.
In order to remember which books I was reading this month, I go back to last month’s newsletter to see what I put into the Currently Reading box and go from there. So according to that metric I read:
Louis MacNeice - Selected Poetry
Sigrid Undset - Kristin Lavransdatter: The Wreath
Plato - The Republic
Anonymous - The Peach Blossom Fan
Louis MacNeice - Selected Poems
Louis MacNeice came to me from the Small Works List - British Authors - 1900 to Present. I didn’t know the name and so I did my cursory research and found that he was considered during his time right in between the line of a major and a minor British poet that knew more famous poets like W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender. MacNeice was a public figure during his time and spent a great deal of time on the BBC both in television and in radio. By the time I think he gets to the BBC he was already an accomplished poet but the BBC work really shaped the later part of his poetry.
In a strange twist of fate, one of the most notable BBC Radio Dramas that he produced is Christopher Columbus which he wrote the entire script for in verse. The other famous production he made for radio was The Dark Tower based on Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”.
It was hard to figure out which set of poetry to read from MacNeice as no one particular work stood out for me in my early research. I settled upon a Selected Poetry which MacNeice did of his own poetry perhaps in the middle to late period of his career. It was in the ordering process of that text that I found that friend of the project, Michael Longley, was tasked with compiling a selection of MacNeice’s poetry and wrote a short introduction to the work. Longley’s commentary and insight into MacNeice’s poetry somewhat overshadowed MacNeice’s work as I did not see the same level of intricacy in MacNeice’s verse.
In someways, my experience with MacNeice was entirely predictable and the poems that resonated with me were the ones you would find in a Norton Anthology. I keep a tally mark system in a spreadsheet, imagine that, of the table of contents of a book of poetry and then as I am reading I will put a series of asterisks next to a poem that in the moment I respond to. I give them zero to three asterisks so that I can remember and go back to poems that I felt any level of attachment to. As I am writing this section, I opened that spreadsheet and saw that all of any of the asterisks I gave and there a lot less than I thought were early in MacNeice’s career. Towards the end, there were almost none. “Train to Dublin” and “Eclogue by the Fire-Barred Gate” were the only two that I gave three “stars” to. “Train to Dublin” is really the only poem that stands out to me in my mind as of yet. It is a beautiful poem about a train journey in the bleary eyed, majestic fury of youth it seems. One image stood out to me from that poem is:
The train's rhythm never relents, the telephone posts
Go striding backwards like the legs of time…
This idea is wonderful and captures a real ordinariness of MacNeice’s observations. What I would find from his poetry is that it isn’t that his observations or style were particularly avuncular in nature but that he would one small but incredibly keen insight into a common and often overlooked thing. Even this line from this poem goes onto to talk some overly specific experience that I think does not invite the reader in but it is describing such a common and almost sort of ‘ho-hum’ experience in a way that everyone has thought but no one has been able to crystalize into such a beautiful image.
The other moment from this poem that I think bares repeating is:
It is we, I think, are the idols and it is God
Has set us up as men who are painted wood
This is a fairly sophisticated sort of treatise on the nature of God and man of the likes of which Milton would have struggled to put so succinctly. These two images keep this poem and MacNeice locked up in my heart forever. I don’t know that I will remember much of MacNeice’s work 35 years from now but this poem or this line from this poem will stay with me the whole way through.
Plato - The Republic
Plato, in my mind, is the epicenter of classic literature. This is not to confuse the terms Classic lit and Classical lit or studies. When I think of classic lit and its purpose and function in the world, Plato, is the pool of ideas through which much of the modern world was formed. Not brick by brick mind you, but once you read the Republic - you now have to contend with it as a document. This will not be an exhaustive treatment of this document as that would take a lifetime to write. I read it because a philosopher professor friend of mine was going to reread it for his research and I thought that was cause enough to do so now.
Plato sketches out a ways of proper governance from timocracy through to philosopher king but not in the way you might think. This very practical part near the end of the text is where my mind really bit down. He draws the through line of the progress of human society from merit to oligarchy to democracy to tyranny. I don’t know if that would have been the way that I would make that negotiation but it strikes me as logical in a way that replaces whatever my previous local minimum would have been. What I think about in this moment is that the founding fathers would have read this document. I found one resource online Classical Wisdom that has a short reflection on what Jefferson and John Adams thought of classical literature. Jefferson despised Plato which is hilariously on brand for Jefferson. Adams worshiped Cicero which this project has not undertaken yet. Jefferson, according to Francis Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans which was one of the first texts in the history of this project describes Jefferson as a natural born villain and for Jefferson to forsake the text that places at its center the pure form of justice is derisible in the extreme. I imagineJefferson would have read himself the character of Thrasymachus and felt mocked by the text.
Stuff I Totally Missed
Classic Wisdom, as an Internet Resource into Greek and Roman literature feels to me now that I am aware of it, an indispensable sourcebook. I tooled around on the website and read a sort bit of the “About Us” page that I wish Classic authors would have written about themselves. Apparently Classical Wisdom is an offshoot of Les Belle Lettres which is a French publishing house dedicated to the classic literature. On the front page of this website, I found that the produced a recent translation of none other than…wait for it…Kokin Waka Shu - you know our old friend, Ki No Tsurayuki. What a delight.
This is the work of classic literature. I don’t feign to know the inner workings of Thomas Jefferson and the titanic work this genius did to create the modern world. I don’t think it is fair to reduce a man to the effects of his having read a book in common but like Hemingway’s read on Turgenev - I think to see what a person has read and how they react to it is to know a person at an intimate level. This is the blessing of classic literature in a way that I love very much. Also, it is astounding to me that anyone could read The Republic and see how the natural “way leads onto way” as Robert Frost would put it, that the founders read how democracy leads onto tyranny and to start the American experience with democracy. That is a fascinating choice to me.
If you haven’t yet, read Plato’s The Republic. There is a bit of this text that is tough going for awhile. I just forced myself to get through and I got through it fairly quickly. I had a philosopher prof to read it with and so I would often have questions, especially early just to see if I was getting it. I was. I posed him a question he had not heard before and we went down a little rabbit hole to see if I was right. The jury is still out on that one. More later perhaps. I have used the example of the Allegory of the Cave in writing classes before having read the whole text. I think it still hangs together but I have a different sense as to what that moment is doing in the text now than out of context when I would use it previously. Read this book. It is worth it.
Post Rock JukeBox
Post Rock Jukebox is back in session. I have listened to a lot of post rock recently. It is hard to decide what to write about here. I am going to go with early Mogwai. I have only listened to the first three albums. Mogwai is one of these bands that everyone puts on their list of favorite bands that I think no one has actually listened to. I could be wrong. I have never listened to them in any sustained way. I tried this month to do so and didn’t get really far because there is a lot but the first 3 albums are solid as a rock though there is a lot of vocal tracks. The vibes are right on and I skipped the vocal tracks to get to the good slow chill vibes of the more atmospheric tracks.
Sigrid Undset - Kristin Lavransdatter: The Wreath
I had no idea about Sigrid Undset. I didn’t know how profoundly this book would move my little 21st century Midwestern heart. At one point I was stopped in my tracks like someone had read my cards and had gotten them right in an eerie way.
I pulled Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter from the Big Book List. I had just finished Interior Castle which I think of as a misstep for this project, honestly and I wanted to get a good old fashioned novel that will move me to tears sort of a book. That’s what I got here.
I pulled the whole trilogy here. When I put it on the list, I put the whole book because that is what I found for Undset. Undset clearly comes to the project via the Noble prize list. She won in the 1920s mostly for this totemic work. I put the whole book down, all 1200 pages, and thought I would try to get through this book before my semester started. I decided to get a new job in the mean time and some stuff got pushed around in my day to day life. I decided to simply read the first book in the trilogy, The Wreath, and then put back onto the list the other two. I think that I could pick up the second book sort of unannounced to the progress of the project or wait for it to be repealed I am not sure which I will do. What this allows me to do is give this enormous work its due by giving it three separate entries. I imagine I will do this with Lord of the Rings when I get there.
Kristin Lavransdatter: The Wreath is an incredible book. It is at once a deeply enjoyable reading experience that moves so effortlessly off the page that I have to stop myself and take stock of the experience I am having in the moment. There are a few moments from this book that I have described to multiple people many times since reading it.
The first is when Kristin is young, maybe seven years old perhaps, and she is on a hunting trip with her father. The book is set in the 1400s in Norway. Her father is a wealthy and well respected farmer/landowner. They go out on this journey and make camp in the woods. Kristin is awoken in the night by their horse Guldsvein who runs off suddenly into the deeper woods. Kristin follows him and gets lost. Back into the woods, Kristin sees an elf woman in a moment of true otherworldly horror. She runs back to camp startled and changed for life. The hunters make it to a monastery where Kristin is left with an old monk for the day. The monk takes care of her well, and they have one of these long, listless days the kind that seem to go on forever in your mind. This monk will be important to me later.
The next moment is when Kristin is bethroed to Simon Anderssen. On that same hunting trip, there was a blacksmith’s boy, Arna, who became Kristin’s best friend. Arna comes back before Kristin’s wedding to plead his case and declare his love. They can’t be together because of property rights, more or less, and Arna shoves off back to the military to fight for the king. They had slipped away to the roads to have this secret, though chaste, meeting and a real ne-er-do-well, Bentine, sees them. After Arna leaves, Bentine takes his chance to take advantage of a young woman not being where she is supposed to be. This moment is electrifying and tense. Kristin gets away after being injured and injuring Bentine badly and flees back to town. Kristin knows she cannot go to her father because she shouldn’t have been out by herself anyway. Kristin goes to Bentine’s mother for assistance, and the woman assists her but castigates her for drawing Bentine’s ire in this way. It is victim blaming in the extreme, but Bentine’s mother has a read on this situation that I astounded me as if we hadn’t been reading the same book. The masterful skill of an author to undermine their own story in this way and represent to you - the reader - with this separate appraisal of the same information is something I am not sure I have ever seen in literature. It was staggering.
The last moment is when we come back into contact with the old monk. We meet him one other time before this where Kristin confesses her sin with Erlond to him. The monk refuses to hear the confession as a confessor but Kristin feels compelled to tell someone. It felt in that moment that the monk lets Kristin down because he does not absolve her in that moment but the scene passes and more truly tragic things happen. Before Kristin’s marriage to Erlond, Kristin has to go out at night for some reason and she happens upon this old monk lying in the snow on the verge of death. Kristin revives him and helps him back to town. On their way, Kristin says to the monk how much she would have preferred to live as pious a life as the old monk. The old monk acknowledges Kristin’s poor choices but then adds that he has not been all that pious himself. Kristin reacts astounded and asks him for what could he need forgiving, and the old monk replies that he has loved the road too much. That there is always someone else to save or some other adventure to have and he felt in his feet that he had to keep walking. This is the road and it is long. I was stopped in my tracks at this. This is a moment of truth that I don’t know if I were to have ever encountered in quite this way without this weird old book.
Currently Reading
Currently Reading:
I pulled from the Small Works List, after MacNeice, the 17th century Chinese drama The Peach Blossom Fan. It is wonderful so far and I may finish it before month is out. I discovered a strange thing in it that is totally unrelated to everything but might make for an excellent “Rabbit Hole” next month.
Seamus Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist is from the Big Book List but it is a tiny single volume of Poetry that might get kicked back to the Small Works List and replaced with something else. I haven’t started it yet.
If you have read this to point, well then - thank you. I really appreciate it. I am going to keep this newsletter going although I will have significantly less time to do so for the next, short chapter in my life. I look forward to seeing what I am able to get accomplished in this new role.
Thank you again.