Berkeley Workout

Foray

Homer's Iliad: Anti-Indoctrination

Reading Homer’s Iliad is anti-indoctrination.  Is Homer praising war and heroism or questioning their value?  Is Homer advocating for the gods or calling faith in Zeus and his family into question?  Is Achilles or Hector the true heroic model?  Both? Neither?

Aside from the urgent questioning, we are given urgent empathy as well.  The Trojans, the putative enemies, are not the Other, but they are brothers and mothers, fathers and sisters.  All are mortal, and wrath is understandable, but not entirely justifiable in action and effect.

Read Homer’s Iliad and be mortal in the best sense.

Erikson's Fisher: "Clothes Remain"

Steven Erikson’s Poetry in the Malazan Book of the Fallen Series:
A Sample

One of the pleasures—and there are many—in reading Erikson’s Malazan books is the poetry that Erikson uses as headnotes to many of the sections and chapters.  The poems are presented as composed by characters (not Erikson himself, per se), and most of these characters are off-stage personae, not seen in the action of the various novels, but because the poets’ work appears over and over, the conscientious reader gains a sense of each poet’s character, each psychology and style, at least for the major contributors.

Here’s a favorite example from a favorite poet—Fisher—from the ninth book in this ten book series, Dust of Dreams (headnote to Chapter Nine).

Down past the wind-groomed grasses
In the sultry curl of the stream
There was a pool set aside
In calm interlude away from the rushes
Where not even the reeds waver
Nature takes no time to harbour our needs
For depthless contemplation
Every shelter is a shallow thing
The sly sand grips hard no manner
Of anchor or even footfall
Past the bend the currents run thin
In wet chuckle where a faded tunic
Drapes the shoulders of a broken branch
These are the dangers I might see
Leaning forward if the effort did not prove
So taxing but that ragged collar
Covers no pale breast with tapping pulse
This shirt wears the river in birth foam
And languid streaming tatters
Soon I gave up the difficult rest
And floated down in search of boots
Filled with pebbles as every man needs
Somewhere to stand.

--Clothes Remain
Fisher