Travels With Herodotus

Here's one for the ol' shopping cart at Amazon:

In Travels with Herodotus, Kapuściński interweaves episodes from his career as a reporter with the great historian’s accounts of the ancient world, culminating in the dramatic 5th century BC conflict between Greece and Persia. Although Kapuściński clearly sees himself as a modern Herodotus, he avoids grand comparisons and constantly depicts himself in modest terms, emphasizing his confusion and ignorance in the face of the cultures and traditions he confronted during his career.

To learn more about Kapuściński , who died this past January, you could do worse than the Guardian UK's obituary.

Byzantine Cisterns in modern Turkey

Concern about impending drought leads two writers for the Turkish Daily News to wonder about the feasibility of aqueducts, the potential for Byzantine cisterns, and ultimately their practical use today: as markets and reception halls.

They never did decide what to do about the drought.

Holy Wisdom

Through bizarre imagery like 'a giant Jedi helmet' (whatever that might be) and 'robotic arms doing pushups' (i.e., flying buttresses), Melik Kaylan tries to evoke for the WSJ the Beautiful Chaos of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul (the city formerly known as Constantinople).

Despite the opening imagery it's not a bad piece.

DailyLit

Here's something for those of you who are glued to your monitors but would still like to take a break with a good book now and again: DailyLit. (This one comes courtesy the Seattle Times.)

I haven't looked it over extensively, but I did notice Jowett's translation of the Republic (part of the corpus that Housman called 'the best translation of a Greek philosopher which has ever been executed by a person who understood neither philosophy nor Greek').

The site, while offering nothing you can't get elsewhere, offers it in novel way, and I think I may actually find some use for it.

Carthage's Legacy?

Reading languagehat, as I often do, I was pleased to see a post linking to some discussions on Latino-Punic inscriptions. St. Augustine and Plautus should be enough to pique the curiosity of at least a few of you, not to mention the provocative arguments of those who believe Punic survived as late as the 11th century.

Bakhtin Again

In the first part of his review, Eagleton gives a sketch of Bakhtin's difficult life under the Stalinists. At one point, he writes:

Here [in St. Petersburg], as always, he was surrounded by a close group of anarchically minded writers and eccentric polymaths. Indeed, the story of his life is the tale of one such coterie after another; they seemed to form spontaneously around him in whatever godforsaken backwater he happened to wash up. He was a man who practised dialogism as well as preached it. By the late 1920s, however, the kind of religiosity which his circle promoted [a form of Russian Orthodoxy] was in increasing disfavour with the state; and in 1929 Bakhtin was arrested for membership of a religious circle, anti-Communist proclivities and corrupting the young by his teaching.

If you think this sounds suspiciously like an ancient gadfly featured in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, you'd be right, for that is the connection Eagleton goes on to make explicit:

The thinker whose notions of dialogism, subversive irony and indirect speech ran back to Socrates now seemed about to suffer his predecessor’s fate.

But he didn't. To find out why, you can read the rest here.

Housman's Ideas about Poetic Inspiration in Later Writers (1)

Since Dennis has such a great interest in Housman, I usually try to make a mental note when I come across references to him in other writers. This is the first in a series of (at the moment) only two passages that I have come across lately in reference to the source of poetic inspiration. From Auden's Letter to Lord Byron (p. 82 in the Vintage edition of his Collected Poems, which does not include line numbers):

Professor Housman was I think the first
To say in print how very stimulating
The little ills by which mankind is cursed,
The colds, the aches, the pains are to creating;
Indeed one hardly goes too far in stating
That many a flawless lyric may be due
Not to a lover's broken heart, but 'flu.

How's that for the deromanticization of the Muse?

Bakhtin

You may occasionally run across Mikhail Bakhtin in the footnotes of more recent works of criticism on ancient authors. Terry Eagleton has a review of a new book about him by Graham Pechey in the London Review of Books. The lead paragraph:

For the past three decades, Mikhail Bakhtin has been more of an industry than an individual. Not only an industry, in fact, but a flourishing transnational corporation, complete with jet-setting chief executives, global conventions and its own in-house journal. In the field of cultural theory, this victim of Stalinism is now big business. Most of the mouth-filling terms he coined – dialogism, double-voicedness, chronotope, heteroglossia, multi-accentuality – have passed into the lexicon of contemporary criticism. A cosmopolitan coterie of scholars, some of whom have devoted a lifetime to his texts, have long since struggled to appropriate him for their own agendas. Is he a Marxist, neo-Kantian, religious humanist, discourse theorist, literary critic, cultural sociologist, ethical thinker, philosophical anthropologist, or all these things together?

(L/v A&L Daily.)

Stegner and the Lacrimae Rerum

There is a nice oblique reference in Wallace Stegner's novel Crossing to Safety to Aeneas' reaction to the depictions of Troy in Book 1 of the Aeneid. At this point in the novel, the narrator, Larry Morgan, has just received a letter informing him that his first novel has been enthusiastically approved for publication:

I pass her the letter. It says that Harcourt Brace and Company have found my novel provocative and touching. They think my characters are cut from the real, unassuming stuff of everyday life. They like my combination of irony and pathos, they like my feeling for the tears of things. They want to publish my book in the fall, and can offer me an advance of five hundred dollars against royalties. (p. 114)

Now Vergil:

Namque sub ingenti lustrat dum singula templo,
reginam opperiens, dum, quae fortuna sit urbi,
artificumque manus inter se operumque laborem 455
miratur, videt Iliacas ex ordine pugnas,
bellaque iam fama totum volgata per orbem,
Atridas, Priamumque, et saevum ambobus Achillem.
Constitit, et lacrimans, 'Quis iam locus' inquit 'Achate,
quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris? 460
En Priamus! Sunt hic etiam sua praemia laudi;
sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.
Solve metus; feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem.'