Onomatopoeia

Everyone is familiar, I take it, with the following passage:

the natural grammatical transition by inversion involving no alteration of sense of an aorist preterite proposition (parsed as masculine subject, monosyllabic onomatopoeic transitive verb with direct feminine object) from the active voice into its correlative aorist preterite proposition (parsed as feminine subject, auxiliary verb, and quasimonosyllabic onomatopoeic past participle with complementary masculine agent) in the passive voice

None of the sources I’ve seen propose an onomatopoeic explanation for the verb in question here (and I’m actually curious about who the first person was to spell that out in print), and I wonder if that’s not a curious intrusion of Bloom’s incomplete information about the world and word, similar to “aorist.”

First Laws of Heroic Fantasy

Though not actually an avid reader of heroic fantasy, I have nevertheless have high standards for it. If you want to call Wolfe’s New Sun, Vance’s Dying Earth, Harrison’s Virconium, Mieville’s New Corbuzon, and Le Guin’s Earthsea “heroic fantasy,” then that’s what I’ll tend to compare new things I read in the genre to, however unfair that might be.

So when I came across a recommendation from Cosma Shalizi about an epic, witty fantasy trilogy that included an inquisitor as one of the main characters and which seemed to be morally ambiguous throughout, I thought that I had never actually read anything by anyone who aspired to be an epigone of Wolfe, so why not try this out? I ordered one book at a time, as to get around my serialism and completism requirements, which I last explained in this review.

Christine Brooke-Rose on Pound

Pound was proceeding by poetic intuition, and who knows, his may be the only comprehensible poetry to the twenty-first century, when a new economic order, unimaginable to us now, may have emerged from the present apparently irreconcilable dogmas; it may be, for that matter, a post-McLuhan age, an age of mixed media and ideogrammic thinking in quick cut, when we may all be speaking Chinese, with nothing of our civilization left but the fragments he has ‘shelved (shored)’ against our ruin. (236)

The Discus of Odysseus

Among the Phaeacians, Odysseus, with athletic vanity piqued: “Up he sprang, cloak and all, and seized a discus,/huge and heavy, more weighty by far than those/the Phaeacians used to hurl and test each other” (Fagles’s translation, 8.216-218).

Why is this too-heavy discus there? Did the man-formed Athena create it beforehand? I expect no Homeric discus is left unflung, so I’m sure there are centuries of weighty scholarship on the issue. I suppose it could just be one on the pile, so to speak, or a reminder of the mighty men the Phaeacian ancestors were.

Running with the Devil

I’ve been intermittently reading Richard Posner’s judicial opinions. They have been less witty and piquant than I had been expecting, but there are moments. Consider his decision to retell this, for example:

James Gilles (“Brother Jim”) [. . .] is a traveling evangelist–the latest in a line of Christian itinerant preachers stretching back to Saint Paul and prominent in Methodism in nineteenth-century America. Born near Vincennes, Gilles gives the following account of his salvation. As a result of Satan’s machinations, he devoted himself as a youth to drugs, sex, booze, and rock and roll. At a rock and roll concert at which the well-known Van Halen band performed, singer David Lee Roth shouted to the crowd: “Not even God can save your soul at a Van Halen concert!” Gilles saw the light, called on God to save him and thus refute Roth, and was saved.

Private Midnight, A Novel by Kris Saknussemm

I requested a review copy of this after reading an interesting-sounding solicitation from a PR outfit. Now, I have to read a lot of things. It’s important to understand this. I have muscles for reading that many people don’t have. I am also a completist and a serialist. If I start something, I finish it; and I read it straight through. I don’t read anywhere near as fast as this mutant; in fact, I think I may read fiction considerably slower than the average person. Not only do I give authors the benefit of the doubt, I assume that they are infinitely clever. Omniscient. Inerrant. That everything will come together in ways that I can only begin to anticipate.

Study Guides for Contemporary British Literature, ca. 1921

Specialists may recognize John Matthews Manly’s and Edith Rickert’s Contemporary British Literature: Bibliographies and Study Guides from Harcourt Brace, 1921. It refers to Joyce as a defrocked priest, for example, and sees fit to mention about Woolf only the apparently inexplicable fact that she is the daughter of Leslie Stephen. In spite of this, I found the most amusing entry to be devoted to Ralph Hodgson:

Born in Yorkshire, 1872.

[. . .] Is a leading authority in England on bull terriers. His favorite poet is Shelley.

Denis Johnson's Nobody Move

I’ve looked around a bit at some of the reviews that’ve been posted of this to date, and not many of them, as I remember, invoked Already Dead as the most likely ancestor of this material, though that book is far denser and perhaps as strange as this. The style of Jesus’ Son, which I’ve always guessed–without having any real evidence—to be the most influential of American books published in the 90s in the workshop is on display here as well, though in a looser form. None of the characters have the capacity for heightened perception that the protagonist of that book does, so it’s not necessary a flaw in art.

The Giraffe

We took Henry to the local zoo today. At one year of age, he seems to have no instinctive fear of snakes, large carnivores, or even baleful maras (“Patagonian cavies,” according to the plaque, which also amusingly suggested that they could run at over 65 mph for an hour. They very much had the aspect of creatures who wouldn’t hop a yard to piss on you if you were on fire, as the saying goes, but who am I to judge?)

Gene Wolfe's Pirate Freedom

It’s understandable why a veteran Wolfe reader would be both constantly vigilant and forgiving when reading one of his new books. Many of the short stories, Peace, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, and (probably to a lesser extent than the commentaries would suggest) The Book of the New Sun have subtle and significant details that the reader must be very careful to notice. Much of his fiction contains subtle details even when they are not in fact significant. I am thinking here of An Evil Guest and Pirate Freedom, his two most recent novels.