Be honest with me: how serious are you about the serial comma? Do you wade into discussions on language forums and social media brandishing citations from your favourite authorities? Do you dismiss dissenting authorities as heretics? Are there style and usage guides on your bookshelf with sticky notes and bookmarks
Continue readingTag: What I’m Reading Now
Scripturient: Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics
You might think, while reading Henry VI Part 2, that Shakespeare was writing about recent events, the writer merely masking them in archaic historical dress. Okay, even if you have read some of the Bard’s plays, the three Henry VI plays probably aren’t among the ones you read in university
Continue readingScripturient: Reading the Iliad
There was a moment when I was reading The Iliad that I thought to myself, “This is it. This is what the epic is really all about.” Somehow it all seemed to come down to one particular scene and all the rest was just leading up to it. Why I
Continue readingScripturient: Seven Faces of Marcus Aurelius
I am going to assume that you, dear reader, already know who Marcus Aurelius Antonius was. I have respect for both the intelligence and education of my readers, enough to feel I can avoid making pedantic explanations and reiterating his biography that is more fluently available on dozens or hundreds
Continue readingScripturient: Reading Animal Fairm
Animal Fairm is a 2022 translation into Scots of George Orwell’s classic satire on Stalinist (and in far too many ways, modern conservative) politics and ideology. As the cover of this edition says, it was “translatit intae Scots by Thomas Clark.” I recently purchased the book for my reading entertainment.
Continue readingScripturient: A Brief Review of Two ERB Books
I am deeply disappointed in the quality of these two ERB books received from Amazon yesterday in my efforts to complete my collection of Burroughs’ novels. Both are noted as “Manufactured by Amazon.ca” in Bolton, ON. Production quality is poor, particularly in the designs and layout: they are more like
Continue readingScripturient: Musings on Collecting and Reading ERB
As some readers here know, I’ve been a lifelong aficionado of Edgar Rice Burroughs (ERB, born 1875), particularly of his Barsoom (Mars) series, but also his Pellucidar and Caspak series. Well, I’ve enjoyed pretty much all of them, including, of course, the iconic Tarzan novels for which he is best
Continue readingScripturient: Books for the Kaiju Aficionado
With possibly two new Godzilla films coming to theatres in 2023*, it may be time to refresh your memory and appreciation of the previous films in the franchise. And what better way to do it than with a brand-new book about them? And perhaps re-reading some of the content in
Continue readingScripturient: Bread Machine Cookbooks
Among my shelves of books on baking bread by hand, is a smaller selection of books about using a bread machine to craft loaves and other items. I admit I’ve been somewhat lax in my creative uses of the bread machine, using it only to bake somewhat plain, whole loaves
Continue readingScripturient: Real Bread, Slow Dough, Bread Books
Making bread is a small passion of mine, has been for many years as readers here will know*, although the results of my efforts do not always match my optimism. It’s always a bit of a guessing game what will result when I put the dough in the oven. That
Continue readingScripturient: Hobbesian vs Benthamite Politics
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was not an optimist about human behaviour. Writing more than a century after Niccolo Machiavelli, the English political philosopher argued in his masterwork, Leviathan (1651), that the quest for power was the main motivation for humans. And that our quest to acquire more would never cease until
Continue readingScripturient: The Book of Knowledge: 3
Back in the Mesozoic of my life, I came across a quotation from Giacomo Casanova that, as far as I can remember these days, went “No man can know everything, but every man should attempt to.” For many decades, I didn’t know the source, or whether it was misquoted, misattributed,
Continue readingScripturient: Ars Poetica
Horace’s Ars Poetica, or the Art of Poetry, was written as a 476-line poem in a letter to his friend, the Roman senator Lucius Calpurnius Piso (Lucius) and his two sons, around 19 BCE. It was known for a time as the “Epistle to the Pisos” until 95CE when the
Continue readingScripturient: Milton Was Wrong
In 1644, the English poet and pamphleteer John Milton wrote an impassioned defence of free speech (or, more factually, against censorship of print and in favour of restriction-free publication) called the Areopagitica. It was subtitled A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament
Continue readingScripturient: Smith, Rock, and the Trivialization of Western Culture
If Neil Postman were alive today, sitting in a bar or café with Chris Hedges, I wonder which one would say “I told you so!” first after seeing social media this past week? The story that clogged the social media pipes this week was the slap one actor gave another
Continue readingScripturient: Kerouac’s Haikus
Haiku is like a razor blade: small, light, but yet strong and incredibly sharp. Haiku says “Look over there!” and then smacks you from the other side. Haiku is the neutron star of poetry: stunning density combined with astounding brightness. Haiku swims in a sea of metaphor, darting like quick, bright
Continue readingScripturient: Wild Fruits
When he died of tuberculosis in his mother’s home, in 1862, 44-year-old Henry David Thoreau had already made his mark on the world with the publication of several books and numerous essays, including Civil Disobedience, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, The Maine Woods, A Yankee in Canada,
Continue readingScripturient: Musings on the First Tercet of Dante’s Inferno
Back in December, before Godaddy broke my blog through technical incompetence, I had written a piece about the first stanza in Inferno, the first book of Dante’s trilogy, The Divine Comedy. Since that post seems irretrievably lost, I decided to write another in the same vein. So please bear with
Continue readingScripturient: Midway Through This Life’s Journey V.2
For some inexplicably serendipitous reason, I pulled Mary Jo Bang’s translation of Dante’s Inferno (Graywolf, 2012) from my bookshelves this week and began re-reading it. I didn’t like her version at first read, and am still not convinced her modernization is up to the task of conveying the poem’s beauty
Continue readingScripturient: The New Odyssey
Much has been made of the fact that Emily Wilson’s recent translation of Homer’s The Odyssey (Norton, 2018) is the first translation of that great work by a woman. But for me what matters is how well she renders the text into modern English and makes what can be a
Continue reading