Literary Forge

I’ve been reading and enjoying Not All Dead White Men, Donna Zuckerberg’s book on misogyny in the Classics.

“[N]obody denies that our society owes a debt to the Greeks. The question is how that debt should be treated. Should we romanticize that debt, as Shelley did, and as one can find men on Red Pill websites doing today? Or is it more of a complicated and problematic legacy?”

1. On war, War and Peace, and rereading books.
2. Anika Prather on the role of the Classics in understanding Black history.
3.  “As a librarian and a writer I am here to tell you that it’s OK to stop reading a book you aren’t feeling.”
4. Summary and Analysis of George Orwell’s ‘My Country Right or Left’.
5. A novel for life after the pandemic.
6. A writer’s fellowship for unpublished, underrepresented women. “LitUp will provide five emerging writers with an all-expenses-paid retreat, a three-month mentorship with a published author, and marketing support from Reese’s Book Club.” Apply by May 30.

Maybe it’s just that it’s been a few days since I did one of these, but it seems like there’s a lot of material…

1. An argument for deleting your Goodreads account.
2. Sylvana Tomaselli, a tutor at St. John’s, discusses Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman on the National Review podcast.
3. 10 Books You Pretend To Have Read (And Why You Should Really Read Them)
4. “There is a sordid history of white supremacists denigrating Black people for supposedly being incapable of learning Greek and Latin. The presence of the Classics Department at one of the nation’s leading HBCUs has offered powerful evidence that disproves this pernicious, racist lie.”
5. New (to me) — seven books that Peter Thiel recommends. Speaking of, there is apparently a new book on Thiel coming out in September.
6. Haven’t had a chance to listen, but Agnes Callard was on EconTalk!
7. The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars.

I’ll write a longer thing on Beowulf shortly, but over the weekend I read Toni Morrison’s excellent essay “Grendel and His Mother,” which helped me understand the story more.

1. Are star ratings worthwhile?
2. Rebecca Futo Kennedy, a professor of ancient Greek and Roman studies at Denison University, on the what, who, and why of the Classics: “Critical Classics is about not promoting antiquity as idealized models to underpin modern American exceptionalism, but instead, encourages us to look to the broader realities of that past (warts and all) and to the various ways that past has been used and has influenced our present–not because we are the “natural” heirs of ancient Greece and Rome, but because we chose to build some of our political and social (and scientific) assumptions and practices upon parts of antiquity we liked.”
3. New (to me) genre — “philosophical fiction,” and 20 recommended works.
4. Some notes on Thomas Foster’s “How to Read Novels like a Professor.”
5. “My not very deep or insightful review of Dune.”
6. Interview with Molly Swetnam-Burland, a professor and recipient of the 2020 Award for Excellence in Teaching of the Classics at the College Level by the Society for Classical Studies:

[W]e can ask questions about the ancient world inspired by our own modern experiences and have rich enough evidence to get some answers. […] When we adopt an approach like this, it reminds us that Romans and Greeks were real people — and I think it also helps us understand what they wrote, whether epic poems or funny satires, because we see that these texts were written by people who were dealing with issues of their own – from food scarcity to plagues to civil wars.

They might escape from reality by reading and reciting Virgil (there’s a lot of evidence that Pompeians knew their Virgil!) in the same way I might re-read a favorite novel over and over, just because it provides me motivation, relaxation and enjoyment. For the record, my favorite novel is Richard Adams’ “Watership Down.”

1. Jeremy Tate on the classics for National Review.
2. Ross Douthat: “Where have all the great thinkers gone?”
3. Also, “Where have all the Great Works gone?”
4. Top 10 creepiest gothic novels, if that’s your cup of tea…
5. The movement to save the classics department at Howard now has a website! SaveHUClassics.org.
6. New (to me) book: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature.

1. Another argument added to the debate of “What Are the Classics For?“
2. Dr. Anika Prather, a Classics professor at Howard University, is talking about fundraising to save the Howard Classics department. There’s talk of a website being set up, which I’ll share.
3. On the problems of reading classic literature today.
4. Things I Learned After a Brief Foray into BookTok. (For the uninitiated: “Book” + “TikTok.”) A followup to “How Crying on TikTok Sells Books” in the NYT.
5. Napoleon: the ultimate bookworm.
6. New grant: “The GFU program will employ a format based on text, writing and discussion focused on the essential aspects of freedom and citizenship. It will feature a number of Spanish-language authors in a great books curriculum and students will be expected to engage in question-driven seminars tackling big life questions[.]”

And, for something a bit different, I loved this Wall St. Journal article on chess masters obsessing over the chairs they use.

1. Summary and analysis of Agamemnon.
2. “Like Prose’s essay on the Comey hearing for NYRB, The Vixen makes an implicit argument for good writing, and even good editing, as a form of political defiance.”
3. David Goodman has a good quote in response to the news about the Howard University classics department.
4. Speaking of Howard, here is Dr. Anika Prather: “Howard University’s classics department is an incubator for Black equality. Don’t close it.”
5. And, last thing on Howard, a counterpoint to the Washington Post op-ed: “Testing the West at Howard University: Thoughts on a Very Strange Op-Ed.”
6. Is The Canterbury Tales the first place in literatures, chronologically, we encounter undeniably bawdy stories that have made it to us today in such acclaim? Please feel free to jump into this discussion on Twitter.