Decadence and la nostalgie de la boue

Part way through 'The Liar' by Stephen Fry and am starting to lose interest slightly: the bits where he writes of his protagonist's youth are excellent, and thus I am assuming that it is mostly himself that he is writing about, but the episodes dealing with his later life are much less amusing or convincing. Time to start on something fresh: Huysmans' 'Against Nature', or 'A Rebours' as it is in the original. The prose is gorgeous, in the same sumptuous and slightly over-rich vein as Italo Calvino's 'Invisible Cities' (which I never finished, having had a surfeit of gorgeousness and the same feeling as if I had gorged a box of Belgian chocolates in one sitting). I rather like the 'hero' and his neurasthaenic extreme aestheticism. I am reminded of my late teenage years when I immersed myself in Gauloises, Pernod, Baudelaire and a nostalgie de la boue which lead me to mistakenly marry a complete idiot thus bringing my young self back to earth with a nasty bump! Fortunately, that is all far in the past and having extracted myself from la boue I became a wiser and more cynical person. One lasting influence from that bout of teenage Francophilism was an abiding interest in the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. I ascribe a lot of my determination to her and her refusal to allow her sex to interfere with her intellectual pursuits. Unfortunately she harnessed herself to the toad-like Sartre and lived for much of her life in his shadow, despite the fact that she was the one whom Sartre trusted to critique his work, and whose ideas he often purloined and passed off as his own. Their relationship was lifelong, hardly exclusive and they often conspired to seduce and manipulate those who should have been able to trust them. I've not read the book detailing their correspondence: I fear that I would lose any faith that I had in 'Castor' (Sartre's nickname for de Beauvoir) left by Deirdre Bair's uncompromising biography. Suffice to say that two of my favourite comfort books are still de Beauvoir's 'Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter' and the follow-up volume of her autobiography 'The Prime of Life'. Obviously it is written from her point of view, and leaves out that which is inconvenient for her to remember or write about, but her spirit shines through - the spirit that motivated a younger self to Get The Hell Out.

Serendipity

Although still not completely clear of virus I am attempting to get back into some academic reading after the Christmas break. The 'to-be-read' pile has increased significantly since my package of book-requests arrived from uni. the other day (see previous post), so some headway has to be made, whether I'm under-par or not. The most obvious candidate is Constantine Campbell's 'Basics of Verbal Aspect in Biblical Greek' which has attracted a lot of online interest; some positive, some negative and a lot of interbloggular arse-kissing. I have to say that I am finding it rather interesting, somewhat didactic..but not necessarily in a bad way. In fact the repetiton does go some way to fix CC's principles in the mind (off-screen howls of protest that 'the dust has not settled on this particular field yet, so how can you talk of principle-fixing' yada yada). However it is not my intention to go into detail in this blog: any serious stuff will appear on 'metalepsis' when I have had a chance to cogitate, nay, pontificate, further.

Having finished 'The Raw Shark Texts' (ho hum: promising start, last two-thirds in need of a good editor), I was lacking a good 'bedtime' book: nothing too demanding. Not really wanting to lash out on 3 for 2 (there's usually only ever one on offer that I vaguely want), I trawled around the charity shops for suitable candidates. Nearly bought Michael Gruber's 'Book of Air and Shadows' but then remembered how disappointed I have been in this genre recently, so put it back on the shelf. Nothing else turned up, so I called into the library on the school-run and picked up 'The Liar' by Stephen Fry. The protagonist is so obviously Fry thinly disguised, and the print quality is atrocious, but I was actually laughing out loud within a few pages, so it will do the job nicely.

The daughter, now on maternity leave, wants an easily digestible book for comfort-reading so we tried to get hold of Victoria Hislop's 'The Return', but both Waterstones and Borders only had it in superlarge paperback format (at £12.99!). Sure that we'd seen it at normal size we went into some charity shops. No joy, but I did get hold of a Penguin Classics copy of 'The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English' - a bargain at £1.50, although slightly crumpled. It is currently being corrected under LSJ, the Oxford Classical Dictionary, Moulton and Geden and Funk.

A Salutary Tale

My new uni has the facility for dispatching up to four books, for a small fee, to distant students like me. This is most useful as I can peruse the online library catalogue and select some likely looking tomes without the expensive 3 hour train ride involved to get to campus. I compiled a list and submitted it with the appropriate money. Just before the Christmas break, I received an email from the library requesting that I return to them one of the books that I had borrowed on my last trip there at the beginning of the month. Grumbling somewhat I packaged it up in a jiffy-bag and sent it back recorded delivery, then set about bewailing the fact that I had scarcely had a chance to look at this seminal work. Oh well.
Yesterday, a knock on the door and the Parcelforce man passed over to me a big package from the uni library containing my requested books including.....yes, you've guessed!...the very book that I had returned by post a couple of weeks earlier. What an idiot.

Christmas and Thereafter

Well that's Christmas over for another year, and as usual I am already wondering whether I could have appreciated the whole experience more. I think it must be an age thing: no sooner is an event over than I am filled with angst and regret that I maybe didn't make the most of it. Not that I could have this year (conditional perfect tense there!) as I spent most of the holiday break feeling distinctly ill with some kind of nasty virus that emptied me of energy and enthusiasm and left a nasty cough that is still lingering some two weeks later. Still, normality beckons.

I really enjoyed Hardy's 'The Well-Beloved' which proved a good comfort read in the circumstances, possibly not one of his greatest books but distinctly Hardy-esque in its concerns and characters.

The surprise arrival of a new laptop from my wonderful husband led me to the purchase of a couple of 'Dummies' books to ensure that I get to make the most of the programmes and make myself more efficient during the forthcoming academic term.

I wanted to get another Scarlett Thomas novel - 'PopCo' or 'Going Out' but, unsurprisingly, the local Borders store did not have them in stock so I ended up buying Steven Hall's 'The Raw Shark Texts'. I am glad I am no longer running a temperature as I'm not sure that I could handle its weirdness whilst feeling as 'off it' as I did. As it is, I am thoroughly enjoying it - a good contrast to my other current read - 'A Daughter's Love' - John Guy's study of the relationship between Sir Thomas More and his daughter Margaret, which is OK but not really what I'd call rivetting. I guess that tomorrow I am going to have to get a grip and start some academic reading: not something that I am really looking forward to at the moment. Doubtless I'll get into the swing of it in a couple of days. I hope!

Christmas Books Past and Present

Christmas usually brings me at least a few books. Whenever quizzed about what I would like for Christmas, my list is ever-simple: good espresso-ground coffee, wine, dark chocolate or a book. I'm easily pleased. This year I already know that I am getting the second Loeb volume of Epictetus (books III & IV, plus the Enchiridion). Hurray! I love the Loeb series: the handy-size, the small, neat font, the air of studiousness that they give out. I strive to collect them and have serendipitously bought a number from charity shops which tend to price them cheaply (best buy: 2volumes of Aristotle's Historia Animalium; £7 for both. I use small chunks to teach Greek to The Boy). With Christmas books I generally have to make specific requests and direct the purchaser to the most appropriate outlet. I remember one year asking for 'Spartan Women' by Sarah(?) Pomeroy and saying that it could be bought from the classics department at a certain bookshop (I'd actually seen it on the shelves). However I got a story back that it wasn't in stock, they'd never heard of it so they couldn't order it. All patently untrue. I sulkily took myself in, the week after Christmas, picked off the very shelf where I'd last seen it and bought it for myself. Not sure what happened there.

I often ask for easy reading at this time of year: Stephen Fry's 'The Ode Less Travelled', 'Pistache' by Sebastien Faulks, Alan Bennett, that sort of thing. Last year though, my Christmas reading was the New International Greek Testament Commentary on the Gospel of Luke by I.Howard Marshall. Fascinating.

I have finished 'This Breathing World' by Jose Luis de Juan, purchased last week. It was well-written (or at least, well-translated) but I'm not really sure what was going on with the plot: two parallel storylines nudge up against one another, but there is no satisfying unifying denouement (which it cries out for), just a low-key trailing off. I was (and still am) running a temperature whilst reading it, so it was all a bit vague and fever-dreamlike. I should get on with some serious reading: Constantine Campbell, Stanley Porter and Bernard Comrie, but I think I'll wait until I feel better for those heavyweight guys.

I'm going to start my Hardy novelette ('The Well-Beloved') either today or tomorrow, if my eyes stop aching. It always takes me a while to get into Hardy's idiolect, but I do love his writing so.

The annotated Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass was a revelation: so interesting, and Lewis Carroll's wordplay breathtaking. It can be savoured so much more as you get older. Sometimes I think that childrens' books are wasted on children!

I am trying to resist the newspaper book supplements: there are always so many books that I fancy reading at any given moment. I used to note them down for future reference, but the backlog is now just getting ridiculous. My dog-chewed (as opposed to dog-eared) notebook must remain firmly closed for a while.

...and the Greatest of These is Charity

Aren't charity shops great? Particularly our local Oxfam shops which have two dedicated second-hand book shops in York. A lot of students hand in their course books and it was obviously as a result of one such clear-out that I managed to source Bernard Comrie's book 'Tense' as recommended by my supervisor. How cool is that?

Yesterday also saw me pick up a copy of Moises Silva's commentary on Galatians - a most excellent find as I was beginning to worry about my lack of date-spread commentary-wise. This has an interesting section on discourse and literary structure which I am looking forward to digesting over the next few weeks.

Meeting a friend in Borders, I arrived early and idly looking through the shelves found that they finally had in stock a paperback copy of 'This Breathing World' by Jose Luis de Juan - I'd asked last year if they could get hold of one but, unsurprisingly, they could find no mention of it on their database.

Lexicomania

And again. The Christmas shopping season is not conducive to abstemiousness on the bibliomania front. And yesterday I was put at risk of overindulgence when a friend cried off our coffee/chat at the last moment. Since I was in town anyway with the intention of picking up a few festive wotsits, I suddenly found myself with a couple of extra hours spare until the parking ticket expired. As I wanted one of those Advent candles with the dates marked off (yes...we had to have a massive burn-up to get to the appropriate date last night), I went down to the Barbican book shop which not only stocks That Sort of Thing, but has an extensive second-hand theology/religion section. I just popped upstairs to survey their latest acquisitions (recalling my luck with the two ICC's last week) and nestling on the Biblical language shelves...lo and behold! Thayer's Greek-English Lexicon in pristine condition! There's something funny that happens to my brain when I see (a) a lexicon and (b) Greek script....I don't know what it is, and if the font size is sufficiently miniscule, I actually start to hyperventilate and fiscal prudence flies out of the window. I bought it, on the grounds that it was 'coded with Strong's concordance numbers' and the definitions and cross-references seemed superbly detailed. In my defence I did have it open on my desk today and did use it for my analysis of the Galatian verb forms. OK...shall I tell you what else I was using (i.e. had open) whilst I was working, so you can see the extent of my mania? Here's the list, and it does not take into account the shut-up ones in the small book stand adjacent:

i) The Interlinear KJV-NIV Parallel New Testament

ii) Hans Dieter Betz's 'Hermeneia' commentary on Galatians

iii) Bauer's Greek-English Lexicon of the NT and Other Early Christian Literature

iv) The Oxford Classical Dictionary (to look up Grammarians)

v) Moulton and Geden's Concordance of the NT

vi) Han's Parsing Guide to the Greek NT (see last week's post)

vii) E de Witt Burton's ICC commentary on Galatians

viii) Swete's 3rd volume of the LXX (for looking up a cross-ref. in Isaiah)

ix) NA27

You see....I just can't be trusted around small Greek print.

I shan't tell you that I actually put an illustrated Jeromite missal back. It was volume 3 of 3, and the others were not there. DG.