Books read recently by J. Zimmerman.

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Why read a book? . The Mental Health of George W. Bush First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

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{ December : diciembre (see also books on learning Spanish) 2008 }

(12.28.2008)

• Annual year-end contribution to other libraries concludes with:
  • Choruses (1999), poems by Quincy Troupe, which are perhaps better on his voice than on his page.
  • Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico (1995 updated edition) by T.R. Fehrenbach. Detailed and informative from the pre-history from about 2500 BCE (according to the oldest carbon dates) to the present in the world's region called Mexico today.
  • Handbook of the Tibetan Culture, A (1987) (as mentioned at basic Buddhism) compiled and edited by Graham Coleman, preface by H.H. The Dalai Lama.
  • History of Western Philosophy, A (1945; 1972) by Bertrand Russell.
  • Initiations and Initiates in Tibet (1931; 1993) by Alexandra David-Neel.
  • Interbeing: Commentaries on the Tiep Hien Precepts (1987) by Thich Nhat Hanh (an author helpful in guidance on basic Buddhism). Precepts:
    1. "All systems of thought [even Buddhist ones] are guiding means: they are not absolute truth."
    2. "Do not think the knowledge you presently possess is changeless, absolute truth. Avoid being narrow-minded and bound to present views."
    3. "Do not force others ... to adopt your views, whether by authority, threat, money, propaganda, or even education. ... through compassionate dialog, help others renounce fanaticism and narrowness."
    4. "Do not avoid contact with suffering or close your eyes before suffering. ... Find ways to be with those who are suffering."
    5. "Do not accumulate wealth while millions are hungry. ... Live simply and share time, energy, and material resources with those who are in need."
    6. "Do not maintain anger or hatred. ... practice the meditation on compassion in order to deeply understand the persons who have caused anger or hatred."
    7. "Learn to practice breathing in order to regain composure of body and mind, to practice mindfulness, and to develop concentration and understanding."
    8. "Do not utter words that can cause discord and cause the community to break. Make every effort to reconcile and resolve all conflicts, however small."
    9. "Do not say untruthful things for the sake of personal interest or to impress people. ... Do not spread news that you do not know to be certain. Always speak truthfully and constructively ... even when doing so may threaten your own safety."
    10. "Do not use the Buddhist community for personal gain or profit, or transform your community into a political party. ... take a clear stand against oppression and injustice ... strive to change the situation without engaging in partisan conflicts ... with a clear voice and based on the Four Noble Truths."
    11. "Do not live with a vocation that is harmful to humans and nature."
    12. "Do not kill. Do not let others kill. Find every means possible to protect life and prevent war."
    13. "Possess nothing that should belong to others. ... prevent others from enriching themselves from human suffering or the suffering of other beings."
    14. "Do not mistreat your body. Learn to handle it with respect."
  • Tibetan Handbook of Living and Dying, The (1992) by Sogyal Rinpoche (an author helpful in guidance on Tibetan Buddhism). Leads you into the bardo and other realities. Introduces tonglen practice.
  • Oblique Prayers (1984) poems by Denise Levertov. Nothing as original and striking as some of her earlier books such as The Jacob's Ladder (1961).
  • Mapmakers, The: The story of the great pioneers in cartography — from antiquity to the space age (1981) by John Noble Wilford.
  • Mathematical Tourist, The: Snapshots of Modern Mathematics (1988) by Ivars Peterson.
  • Pacific Crest Trail, The (1973) (the National Forests of California include parts of this trail) by Jeffrey P. Schaffer et al. A sensible and practical book.
  • Recycler's Handbook, The (1990) by Javnarama.
  • Religions of Man, The (1957; 1986) by Huston Smith. It main sections are: Hinduism; Buddhism; Confucianism; Taoism; Islam; Judaism; Christianity Smith writes that this is not a text book (for which he recommends John B. Noss' Man's Religions) and not a balanced view. It is "a book about values" but "not a balanced view".
  • Room (1977), poems by Henry Shore.
  • Short History of Nearly Everything (2003) by Bill Bryson.
  • Writer's Craft, The (1975), edited by John Hershey. An informative text with commented essays by creative writers of the last two centuries. Topics:
    1. The Aim of Art. (Conrad, James, Tolstoy, Faulkner, O'Connor)
    2. The Whole Intricate Question of Method. (Lubbock, Forster, Bowen, Robbe-Grillet)
    3. Words Have to Do Everything. (Stein, Orwell)
    4. Writing and Survival. (Grass, Solzhenitsyn)
    5. The Writing Process. (Coleridge, Poe, Housman, Kipling)
    6. The Writer's Life (Gorky, Sartre, Cummings, Pasternak, Trollope, Auden, Ellison, Bellow, Burroughs)
    7. The Writing Itself. (Flaubert, Mailer, Mann, Woolf, Wolfe, Fowles)

• Finished dipping into The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), by Steven Pinker, author of a book popularizing linguistics: The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language.

An interesting juxtaposition of two types of novel, told in short lines:

• The Golden Gate (1986) a novel in about 600 sonnets by Vikram Seth.

• The phenomenon (arising in Japan) of cell-phone novels.

• Behind my eyes (2008) by Li-Young Lee.

  Brilliant new collection of poems.

• The annual year-end clean-out begins with Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (1952), John Steinbeck's letters, selected and edited by Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten.

  These letters are full of his personal angst over relationships, with relatively little about his writing. A much more helpful book is Steinbeck's Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath, which was immensely valuable for

  • the 2005 National Novel Writing Month,
  • 2006 NanoWriMo, and
  • 2007 NanoWriMo.

Finished dipping into (so I can return this long over-due book to the library) Elementary Greek: An Introduction to the Study of Attic Greek by Theodore C. Burgess. Useful supplement for an Ancient Greek Course. But I prefer the larger type size and the organization of the recommended text: An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach by C. A. E. Luschnig.

• The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within (2006)
  by Stephen Fry.

  A rip-roaring roller-coaster ride through poetic form, how it can work for you, and the joys and other benefits of using it.

• Misquoting Jesus: the Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why by Bart D. Ehrman.

  A good seasonal book.

• Abandoned Across the River and Into the Trees by Earnest Hemingway, mainly because of its repetitive writing, its misogynist tendencies, and protagonist's preference for an aristocratic lover thirty years his junior who gives him emeralds and whom he can address as "daughter" in his apparent fantasies about incest.

• The Calcutta chromosome : a novel of fevers, delirium and discovery by Amitav Ghosh, whose Sea of Poppies was a short-list nominee for the 2008 Booker Prize (won by Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger: a Novel.

• The Black Book (1993) by Ian Rankin.

• The Falls (2001) by Ian Rankin.

• Fleshmarket Ally ['Fleshmarket Close' in UK] (2004) by Ian Rankin.

• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (1997) by David Foster Wallace.

  His best collection of essays, showing his brilliance without overly self-lauding his Top-Of-Mensa intellect. His humor and footnoted footnotes smack of the precocious (intellectually if not socially) young nerds that all too many of us encounter at Thanksgiving or Solstice or Christmas celebrations. A nice place to visit; a scary place to live.

• Dipped into: The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman he Loved by Judith Freeman.

  Chandler's wife, Cissy (whom he married two weeks after his mother died) was a decade or two older than Chandler, and Freeman emphasizes her age difference and therefore mother-substitute qualifications. A lot of speculation and gossip; also a LOT of unwanted information about Ms. Freeman, who wrote the book with the intent that she would be "free to imagine their lives", which sounds like creative non-fiction rather than biography.

  Raymond Chandler is featured in The Weekend Novelist Writes a Mystery, a much more interesting book than Freeman's.

• Finished dipping into: Life-study: Experiencing Creative Lives by the Intensive Journal Method by Ira Progoff.

  Recommended in What It Is by Lynda Barry.

• Abandoned skimming Infinite Jest: a novel by David Foster Wallace.

  1079 pages (97 of which are filled with small-type "Notes and Errata").

  Crystal Eitle's review at Amazon is particularly helpful for someone that wants hints on how to read this book.

  The core idea ("The novel centred on a lost film cartridge called Infinite Jest that is so entertaining that unwary viewers lost interest in everything else in life" from James Bone in Times Entertainment online) may have been "borrowed" from the addictive Artificial Reality games in:

  'Red Dwarf' -- the complete 18-DVD collection by Grant Naylor and others.

• Abandoned skimming Consider the lobster and other essays by David Foster Wallace.

  Favorite piece was "The View from Mrs. Thompson's" because the wit, insight, and humanity of DFW shone through, particularly as he was not over-protecting some insightful and heartfelt material by too much of a barrage of word-geek-dom (or SNOOT) over-long paragraphs and footnotes.

  One of my favorites of his essays remains his " Introduction: Deciderization 2007 — A Special Report" with which he introduced The Best American Essays 2007, and for which he perhaps raised his game.

• A Question of Blood (1993) by Ian Rankin.

• The hitch-hiker's guide to the galaxy: the tertiary phase by Douglas Adams, the 2004 BBC recording (extended for CD), with Douglas Adams himself playing Agrajag.

  This is perhaps the darkest and least funny of the series. But, as ever, full of social satire.

  See also:

  • Douglas Adams live at the Almeida (1995).
  • The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul (1995).
  • The Salmon of Doubt (published postumously).

• other side river, a compilation of free verse by modern Japanese women; translated and edited Leza Lowitz and Miyuki Aoyama.

  Favorite work is by:

  • Toshiko Hirata (particularly "My Most Exquisite Color" and "Snafu").
  • Noriko Ibaragi (particularly "When I Was At My Most Beautiful").
  • Rin Ishikagi (particularly "Three Fish").

  See also her A Long Rainy Season: Haiku and Tanka (1995), volume two in contemporary japanese women's poetry, containing free verse.

• The 12-Step Bush Recovery Program by Gene Stone, with vignettes from 12 guest writers, including Gail Evans (on feminist issues), Tony Henderson (on humor in Step 5 — "Undergoing Detox"), and John Hartman on music in Step 6 — "Find a Sponsor").

  For anyone hurt by the deeds of President George W. Bush, this may help.

Day 27 of Ancient Greek Course. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach by C. A. E. Luschnig.

• Read Hubert's Freaks: The Rare-Book Dealer, the Times Square Talker, and the Lost Photos of Diane Arbus, by Gregory Gibson.

  My favorite quote attributed to her in this book:

  I need to be forlorn and anonymous in order to be truly happy.

  And, good for any artist:

  It was my teacher, Lisette Model, who finally made it clear to me that the more specific you are, the more general it'll be.

Day 26 of Ancient Greek Course. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach by C. A. E. Luschnig.

• Read One Hundred Poems from the Japanese (1964) translations and notes by Keneth Rexroth of haiku and tanka from poets of 7th to 13th century Japan. A remarkable sampling.

Day 25 of Ancient Greek Course. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach by C. A. E. Luschnig.

{ November : noviembre (see also books on learning Spanish) 2008 }

(11.30.2008)

• Eucalypt: A Tanka Journal (issue 5, 2008) which includes Tanka of J. Zimmerman. Excellent specialty journal.

• Finished dipping into Loneliness and Time: the Story of British Travel Writing Mark Cocker.

  For the British people, confined to a green and damp archipelago, abroad seems to be an especially significant place. ... Travellers, by contrast [with tourists], generally insist that their activity depends upon the absence of the familiar. It is the very otherness of the visited country that makes the journey valuable. ... travellers thrive on the alien, the unexpected, even the uncomfortable and challenging. [pp. 1-2]

• Finished dipping into The Path Ahead: Readings in Death and Dying assembled by Lynne Ann DeSpelder and Albert Lee Strickland, and originally read for a class on Death And Dying.

(11.26.2008)

Day 24 of Ancient Greek Course. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach by C. A. E. Luschnig.

(11.26.2008)

• Read Lilliput Review Issue 165 (November 2008), the tiny journal of tiny poems edited by Don Wentworth. My favorite is David Lindley's "Chrysanthemums"

  He was a Japanese tourist. At the checkout they had to take his check without proof of signature. For all they knew he might have written: In the eastern garden frost on the late chrysanthemums.

  Also good is Mike Dillon's "Inklings at Winter Solstice" which ends:

  Still we breathe. And we will, once again, hike out of this.

• Read Lilliput Review #166

• Finished dipping into The Feminine and the Sacred by Catherine Clément and Julia Kristeva, translated from the French by Jane Marie Todd.

  Catherine Clément is a French critic, essayist, and novelist.

  Julia Kristeva, is a French psychoanalyst, author, semiotician, and professor of linguistics at the University of Paris. She introduced the term "intertextuality" in the late sixties, deriving the term from the Latin intertexto (interwoven, as in weaving or a web).

  The book transcribes a set of letters written by the two to each other during one year (November 1996 to October 1997).

  An example of their differences are in Kristeva's seeming support of the cult of Diana (the one-time wife of Prince Charles):

  The cult of Diana is rooted in the melancholia of a humanity of orphaned children, children of divorce, abandoned children, as we all are. The courage to live with that psychic discomfort is truly the sacred little flower under the accumulation of losses and gains produced by the society of the spectacle. A sort of sorrowful feminism, but one proud of its struggles, is now replacing the militant feminism of a short while ago. [p. 172]

  Catherine Clément responds:

  What a letter burning with devotion. ... Since when does popular support determine canonization? The sacred can suffice, for the love of Pete. ... I believe 'id' is what people starving for Being have come to seek: tears. As for her [Diana], as you can tell, she doesn't touch me. Too much posing. [p. 173]

Day 23 of Ancient Greek Course. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach by C. A. E. Luschnig.

• Finished Love Poems from the Japanese translated by Kenneth Rexroth edited by Sam Hamill.

  Product Description:

  Drawn from classical, medieval, and modern sources — including the imperial collections of the Manyoshu and Kokinshu — the poems in this collection are some of the greatest love poems from the Japanese tradition. The poems range in tone from the spiritual longing of an isolated monk to the erotic ecstasy of a court princess — but share the extraordinary simplicity and luminosity of language that marks Kenneth Rexroth's verse style.

• Abandoned Star Dust, poems by Frank Bidart.

  Fragmentary, but without the alluring leaps of good fragmentary poetry.

  Seems to slump rather heavily on quotations of others' work. e.g. "Young Marx" (p. 6) is all in italics except the final three lines, and thus is presumably 80%+ quoted from (whose translation?) Karl Marx' writing.

  But professional poets like Louise Glück and David Lehman praise him.

Day 22 of Ancient Greek Course. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach by C. A. E. Luschnig.

• Finished The White Tiger: a Novel (2008) (winner of the 2008 Booker Prize) by Aravind Adiga.

  It's good, somewhat cute in its form -- a modern Shaherazad (for a few nights rather than a thousand) who is a self-declared Indian entrepreneur and murderer, e-mails his life history, cultural advice, and political and social criticism, in nightly messages to a Chinese official. I found myself impatient and decided to speed read some of the earlier and middle portions. And cut to the chase of the self-justifying psychopath, who believes that, by his killing his rich master, he has sacrificed his entire family (17 members?) to death.

  The narrator meditates (p. 160 of first edition hard-cover):

  Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love — or do we love them behind a facade of loathing.

  The power for the narrator begins with his schooling and his learning to write, so that eventually books become electrical for him (p. 175):

  So I stood around that big square of books. Standing around books, even books in a foreign language, your feel a kind of electricity buzzing up toward you, Your Excellency. It just happens, the way you get erect around girls wearing tight jeans. Except here what happens is that your brain starts to hum.

  Yes, it's this energy that leads Balram Halwi in his murderous path from servant to entrepreneur.

  However, in the end, the madness of someone writing nightly to His Excellency Premier Wen Jiabao sounds too much of a fable to be true. Unless, perhaps, His Excellency Premier Wen Jiabao would like to sign his own death warrant. Unless, of course, he could be a sufficiently cruel boss to intimidate even Balram Halwi.

Day 21 of Ancient Greek Course. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach by C. A. E. Luschnig.

• Finished listening to as much as I could take of A Short History of the Korean War by James L Stokesbury. Dry material but well read by Richard Poe.

  A lot of detail; makes some sense of a complex situation. A little jingoist to a noncombatant, but perhaps the U.S. soldiers and politicians involved would find it consistent with their experiences.

Day 20 of Ancient Greek Course. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach by C. A. E. Luschnig.

• Read poetry of Archilochos (an ancient Greek poet who preceded the poet Sappho) in preparation for Ancient Greek Course. Translations by:
  • Guy Davenport: 7 Greeks.
  • Whillis Barnstone: Sappho and the Greek Lyric Poets.

• Read haiku of Marianna Monaco.
• Also the smaller page of haiku by and for James "Ouzel" Arnold.

Day 19 of Ancient Greek Course. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach by C. A. E. Luschnig.

• Read Exit Music (2007) by Ian Rankin.

  What a delightful fast-paced story, with a grumpy Scottish detective in his last fortnight at work, with a supporting and/or hindering cast of Scots, English, and Russian characters to keep the story turning. The politics of Scottish Independence and of the Edinburgh police interleave with two deaths and one near-death.

  A poet is murdered:

  "What do poets give to the world? Do they provide jobs, energy, raw materials? No ... merely words. And often well remunerated in the process — certainly lionised above their due. Alexander Todorov had been suckled by the West precisely because he pandered to its need to see Russia as corrupt and corrosive." [p. 335-336]

  Enough 'border' phrases (northern English and southern Scottish) to make the story feel companionable. Includes:

  Binning:	"I'll be binning the crime kit along with everything else." [p. 356]
  Bolshie:	"You know the English word 'bolshie'? ... but these days bolshie just means awkward or stubborn." [p. 245]
  Butty [buttered sandwich]:	"Strangest bacon butty I've ever seen" [p. 288]
  Right as rain:	"I'm not saying I wasn't here — I'm saying he was right as rain when I left him." [p. 276]
  Rattling on:	"Sorry, Todd, I'm rattling on, aren't I?" [p. 374]
  Shot off:	"I seem to think he shot off. Nobody hangs around. It would make meaning small talk with each other." [p. 300]
  Wangle:	"How did you wangle that?" [p. 229]

Day 18 of Ancient Greek Course. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach by C. A. E. Luschnig.

• The secret life of words : how English became English by Henry Hitchings.

  Interesting to dip in to this enthusiastic and swirling and detailed history of the English language and its influences from the Nordic and the Greek to the American and the African. And in turn, the influence of English elsewhere.

Midterm of Ancient Greek Course. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach by C. A. E. Luschnig.

• Abandoned Brief interviews with hideous me by David Foster Wallace.

  After dipping into this collection for a couple of weeks, finally bogged down in the density of the prose and returned it to the library.

• Abandoned Oblivion: stories by David Foster Wallace.

  After dipping into this collection for a couple of weeks, finally bogged down in the density of the prose and returned it to the library. Wallace's art form is the run-on-sentence (discouraged in Online Writing Programs), but the only way I can read these stories is to speed read (a few seconds per page) to get the gist: that makes more sense than

Day 16 of Ancient Greek Course. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach by C. A. E. Luschnig.

• Run (2007) by Ann Patchett.

  One of the best books read this year.

  The book (except for the first and last chapters) takes place over a 24-hour period. The father (a former mayor of Boston) of a old Boston family wants his kids to be in politics or doctors. His two youngest sons are adopted black children. One of them is nearly hit by a car when an unknown woman charges to push him out of the way, saving his life. Who would do such a thing? ... Read the book, not just for the plot but for the characters and their interactions.

Day 15 of Ancient Greek Course. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach by C. A. E. Luschnig.

Day 15 of Ancient Greek Course. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach by C. A. E. Luschnig.

• Abandoned State of fear, (2004) by Michael Crichton.

  Repetitive and (worst in a novel) preachy ... especially in the author's note where he denies human influence on climate change.

{ October : octubre (see also books on learning Spanish) 2008 }

(10.30.2008)

• Source (2001), poems by Mark Doty.

  Two good ones: "Brian Age 7" (pp. 51-52) and "Source" (pp.73-76), which ends:

  and down which they descend, in good time, into the source of spring.

Day 14 of Ancient Greek Course. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach by C. A. E. Luschnig.

• Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995-1998 by Adrienne Rich.

  This continues my year-end habit: my 2007 clean out sent her What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics to the donation box. And below, Fox: Poems 1998-2000 was recently released this year.

Day 13 of Ancient Greek Course. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach by C. A. E. Luschnig.

• Finished listening to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay a Novel by Michael Chabon, fairly well-read by David Colacci.

  Interesting in a Ragtime-lite way: it must be a blast for these writers to see their word-count kick up when they use considerable historical material, and (for Chabon) to endow characters with super-comic skills and with inventions that seem to anticipate later creativity.

  Won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It's good, but everyone that has talked to me about this book finds it more special than I do.

• Fox: Poems 1998-2000 by Adrienne Rich. Two poems of interest: "Waiting for You at the Mystery Spot" and the back-cover poem, "If Your Name is on the List".

  This is getting to be a year-end habit: my 2007 clean out sent her What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics to the donation box.

• Ancient Greek Course MIA so instead read The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs and Pictograms by Andrew Robinson. A fascinating book with a wealth of clear photographs and diagrams. Chapters:
  1. Reading the Rosetta Stone.
  2. Sound, Symbol, and Script.
  3. Proto-Writing.
  4. Cuneiform.
  5. Egyptian Hieroglyphics.
  6. Linear B. This is of most interest with respect to the Ancient Greek Course and hence these notes:
     • 1900: Archaeologist Arthur Evans begins digging at Knossos (Crete) where he will discover caches of tablets marked in a script dissimilar to the later Greek alphabet (or Sumerian cuniform or Egyptian hieroglyphs). He names the language 'Minoan' and the script 'Linear B'.
     • Evans identifies word-divider marks and a system of counting. But he treated the remaining pictures as logograms (semantic symbols). Later Evans recognizes the similarity of many Linear B symbols to the syllabic symbols of Ancient Cypriot, and that Linear B was a syllabic script. But Evans rejects the idea that the Minoan language was Greek.
     • 1936: Schoolboy Michael Ventris attends Evans exhibit on the Minoran world and learns that Linear B has not been deciphered. Begins his fascination with Linear B.
     • 1939: Linear B tablets discovered in cache at Pylos on mainland Greece.
     • 1941: Evans dies, leaving "a disorganized legacy with regard to Linear B. Of the well over 3000 tablets excavated by him and others, less than 200 had been published."
     • 1940s: Alice Kober identifies groups of symbols that showed similar patterns in word ending, suggestion noun declensions and verb conjugations; also she proposes "the beginning of a tentative phonetic pattern".
     • 1951: Michael Ventris applies many analytical techniques (besides Kober's 'triplets', which appear on the tablet from Knossos but not those from the mainland) to develop "Linear B syllabic grids", which he circulates to scholars.
     • 1952: British architect, Michael Ventris, deciphers Linear B as Greek. See the text for Ventris's series of inspired guesses, ranging from what sound appears with high frequency in the initial position through what are the names of Cretan towns such as the Knossos port of Aminiso, Knossos itself, etc. Kober's 'triplets', it turned out, were not conjugations or declensions, but the name of a town, and the words for men of that town and women of that town.
     • 1953: Michael Ventris, aided by Greek scholar John Chadwick, completes the deciphering Linear B: 5 symbols for pure vowels; 12 different consonants combine in pairs with the vowels (giving 60 possible combinations, of which 56 are found).
     • 1956: Sadly, Michael Ventris dies in a car crash.
     • 1964: Linear B tablets discovered in Thebes on mainland Greece.
     • 1966: Linear B tablets discovered in Tiryns on mainland Greece.
     • 1984: Linear B tablets discovered in Khania on Crete.
  7. Mayan Glyphs.
  8. Undeciphered Scripts (including Linear A, the Phaistos Disc, Etruscan, Rongorongo, etc).
  9. The first alphabet.
  10. New alphabets from old.
  11. Chinese writing.
  12. Japanese writing.
  13. From hieroglyphics to alphabets -- and back.

• Finished Netherland (long-listed for the 2008 Booker Prize) by Joseph O'Neill.

  Well-written with original and precise wording. But the two main characters are not quite believable. They seem unlikely friends, the easy-going banker protagonist, Dutch Hans van den Broek, who makes huge amounts of money apparently legitimately, and the scruffy hoodlum, Trinidadian Chuck Ramiskoon, cricket addict and entrepreneur, who seems to be making money fairly illegitimately. Chuck believes:

  [p. 211] People, all people, Americans, whoever, are at their most civilized when they're playing cricket.

  Which maybe means that Chuck is often fairly uncivilized when he's not playing cricket.

Day 12 of Ancient Greek Course. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach by C. A. E. Luschnig.

• Finished the book-on-CD of Crabwalk by Günter Grass.

Day 11 of Ancient Greek Course. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach by C. A. E. Luschnig.

• Read the poetry book It's Time (2002) by Reginald Gibbons, whose "Creatures of a Day" is one five finalists for the 2008 National Book Award for Poetry.

  It's Time includes:

  • 29 poems in 61 pages.
  • A cover with jacket illustration by the poet and an untranslated citation in Ancient (?) Greek. It shows that he knows far more Ancient Greek than I do in three weeks ... or else he copied it from somewhere.
  • A lot of intellectualization. The poem "Envoi", for example, includes: "metaphysical slopes", "Opposite poles of history", "a phylogeny of feeling" "the hands of my thoughts and those of the tree's thoughts", "our scarred coevolution".
  • One interesting poem: "Stop".
  • A poem called "Envoi" as the last poem. Is this a 3rd-millennium fashion? (Billy Collins's Ballistics did the same.

Day 10 of Ancient Greek Course. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach by C. A. E. Luschnig.

Day 9 of Ancient Greek Course. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach by C. A. E. Luschnig.

• Finished dipping in to The Enneagram of Passions and Virtues: Finding the Way Home by Sandra Maitri.

Day 8 of Ancient Greek Course. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach by C. A. E. Luschnig.

Day 7 of Ancient Greek Course. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach by C. A. E. Luschnig.

• Reread the amazingly brilliant: Autobiography of Red: a Novel in Verse by Anne Carson.

  It means even more and is even more outrageous now I'm starting the Ancient Greek Course.

Day 6 of Ancient Greek Course. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach by C. A. E. Luschnig.

• Finished dipping into Mistakes were made (but not by me): why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, which has quite a lot of cognitive psychology.

  Tavris' chapters are:

  1. Cognitive dissonance: the engine of self-justification
  2. Pride and prejudice ... and other blind spots
  3. Memory, the self-justifying historian
  4. Good intentions, bad science: the closed loop of clinical judgment
  5. Law and disorder

     [pp. 140-1] The most powerful piece of evidence a detective can produce in an investigation is a confession ... Detectives are proud of their ability to trick a suspect into confessing ... The greater their confidence, the greater the dissonance they will feel if confronted with evidence that they were wrong, and the greater the need to reject that evidence. Inducing a person to confess is obviously one of the most dangerous mistakes that can occur in police interrogation ... Whereas an interview is a conversion designed to get general information from a person, an interrogation is designed to get a suspect to admit guilt.

  6. Love's assassin: self-justification in marriage
  7. Wounds, rifts, and wars
  8. Letting go and owning up

  A chatty book: pretty readable, even though several of its examples are anecdotal rather than hard-core research. See also a more scientific book of this ilk: On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not by Robert A. Burton.

  See also Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things by Madeleine L. Van Hecke, who compiled a list of ten blind spot:

  1. Not Stopping to Think
  2. What You Don't Know Can Hurt You
  3. Not Noticing
  4. Not Seeing Yourself
  5. My-side Bias
  6. Trapped by Categories
  7. Jumping to Conclusions
  8. Fuzzy Evidence
  9. Missing Hidden Causes
  10. Missing the Big Picture

Day 5 of Ancient Greek Course. Vocabulary and grammar quiz. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach by C. A. E. Luschnig.

• Two pages in, realize that I just don't want to bother reading A Prison Diary (2002), by Jeffrey Archer. (Written in the first three weeks of his working the system in his four-year sentence for perjury.) So back to the library with that book. Um, he had been a member of the House of Lords (U.K.) but don't they have to leave if they are convicted.

  Oh, for Dame Edna, who, maybe 20 years ago, cackled as she ejected a smug Jeffrey Archer of the stage, rocketing his chair backward. One might not otherwise think of the term 'speechless' in the same sentence as Mr. Archer.

• Ballistics (2008), by Billy Collins. See review of Ballistics.

Day 4 of Ancient Greek Course. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach by C. A. E. Luschnig.

• False impression (or Fun With Knives?) by Jeffrey Archer (5 years in Britain's House of Commons, 14 years in the House of Lords, and 2 years in Her Majesty's Prisons, according to the MP3 blurb.
  Ably read by Byron Jennings.

  My favorite and perhaps most appropriate Jeffrey Archer memory: a Dame Edna show, maybe 20 years ago, when Jeffrey Archer was dumped out of his chair and cackled over by Dame Edna.

(10.01.2008)

Day 3 of Ancient Greek Course. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach by C. A. E. Luschnig. Book blurb: C.A.E. Luschnig's An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approachh prepares students to read Greek in less than a year by presenting basic traditional grammar without frills and by introducing real Greek written by ancient Greeks, from the first day of study.

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