Morning Paddle

 

Read This Book: "The Truth Against The World"

 

Read this book!

Mythopoeic apocolyptic crime thriller with ancient Celtic resonances. Something like that--but better.

David Corbett is the real deal -- as a novelist and as a teacher.

Sunshine Felines

 

Adventures in Book-History!

 

Seriously, this best-selling non-fiction volume begins with book-hunters from the Library of Alexandria seeking scrolls far and wide, never-say-die.

And the story gets more exciting from there.

I may be teaching this book in my college classes when the paperback comes out.

Also, quite frankly, if you have come to this blog on purpose, you will want to read this particular volume.

Thanks,

MD

Rereading Steven Erikson's "Deadhouse Gates" Again

 

670 pages into this, my third, reading of Steven Erikson's Deadhouse Gates.  I have always been a rereader, weaned on such practice visiting relatives as a child with only a handful of books--Tarzan, Conan, Bond, and/or Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser--in my bag for weeks or a month at a time.

(I am 62 now, so my formative strategies and psychological structuring predate e-books and devices by decades.)  

I love rereading, and this venture through DG is no exception. More than anything, this time Fiddler's and Felisin's sections resonate with greater volume on the one hand and with more nuance on the other.

I've read Gardens of the Moon half a dozen times, for it's a particular favorite (quirky though it is), but after DG I will be on my first rereading of the rest of the Erikson's Ten, the remainder of the massive series Malazan Book of the Fallen.  

Looking forward!

P.S. That's Lady, by the way.

Sunny Paddling

 

The first morning sun over the inner harbor in weeks, I think.

Trickster? Berkeley Still Berkeley?

 

Berkeley Still Berkeley:

As I was putting money in my parking meter, the grizzled guy beside his battered pickup in the next slot over caught my attention and then asked, "Should Lilith tell Adhura Madhza the route to the proper path, or is Lilith the true hero of enlightenment herself?"

Or something like that, but longer. Four full sentences or so.

He didn't wait for an answer, but climbed into his truck and drove away.

From the way he'd carefully watched the parking officer slowly drive past us before addressing me, I don't think he'd put any money in the meter.

But then a trickster wouldn't, would they?

Shelf-Love

 

,Garage-edition

Did Homer Have War Experience?

 

Had Homer been to war, himself?

That's a question I have to ask veterans with firsthand experience of war.  I have not been there, to war, and so I can't judge that element of truth in Homer's epic.

(I come from a military family, a police family--my father was a cop--so I feel I have some understanding, but only a partial understanding, though great respect. I went to college, as the youngest, not into the military as my two older brothers did. My grandfather was a  Captain in a division of tanks in WW2, and I learned appreciation and respect for the military from my beloved grandparents.)

I feel that I go to war before the walls of Troy with Homer. I feel that Homer educates me about war in profound ways, but that is not necessarily the brute, true experience.

What do veteran readers and readerly veterans think and feel and believe when you read The Iliad?

Caveat: a good artist, a true artist, can listen to and represent the experiences of others, experiences beyond their own.

Thanks,

MD

Post script:

In response to certain friends I would like to clarify that I have taught Homer's Iliad half a dozen times at the college level, and certain veterans in my classes have so far a lot of appreciation for this work of art. They, so far, feel heard. I have to keep asking, though, and I do.

Also, there are legends of Homer being blind, but I have to ask from what age?  Or, even if blind, what power the empathetic mind and listening ear must this poet have had?

Formative Texts: Adventure and Character and Narrative

 

Three favorite books from age 13 that I have been rereading happily for almost 50 years.

And, the narrative structures in these books prepared me for being Major English, as some friends would have said, at Berkeley.

Cats!

 

Tinker

Tinker, tailor.

Lady and Captain

Captain, comrade while I drink coffee

Lady and Captain.

Heroic Fantasy

 

A favorite, though deeply painful, novel by Steven Erikson.  

(The almost-comparable experience might be rereading Euripides' The Bacchae.)

Lady

 

Rockfish Stew

 

WIP

 

Harbor Gray

 

Stack-Love, Garage Edition

 

Three Cats

 

Captain

Lady

Tinker

Checking In

 

62 and change.

The Biggest Puzzle of My Teaching Career?

 The biggest puzzle of my teaching career?

How to teach respect for the intuitive.

Not mere relativism.

Not mete projection.

Not any kind of fantasy.

Patterns are what humans are best at, are what we are designed to recognize in action, in behavior, in communication.  Intuition recognizes such patterns.

Intuition is devoid of bias, devoid of advantage.

Intuition is truth, empathically and emotionally realized.

In the above post, I was trying to capture the essence of the intuitive, its deep nature, but my comments are a draft at best. A person's own intuitive sense will be partial and peculiar, biased by and to fit the shaping of their own circumstances and experience.

The real puzzle in teaching respect for the intuitive lies in whether a person is open to and aware of the intuitive or not. Reading and analyzing literature has been my own road to understanding how intuition can help us to make sense in the world. Working with the seemingly "undemonstrable but true" aspects of a poem or short story or whatever is one way to foreground how our emotions and empathy (or its lacking) and the back of the brain actually matter for feeling and understanding.