Oatley:
McCullough's Rome books are terrific. I really wish someone would just adapt
them for a mini-series and spare use crap like ABC's nitwit mini-series. I haven't seen the HBO/BBC collaboration yet (I don't get HBO but I understand the debut will be during one of their free preview weekends), but I'm not hopeful. From what I've seen they haven't even got the togas right (they never do.) If someone would have read one of McCullough's novels they could at least have fixed
that detail.
I read collected the
Masters of Rome books in hardcover as each came out, so I envy you the ability to read them straight through. (And probably save a small fortune if you've bought them in paperback.) Anyone who thinks waiting months between episodes of
B5 is painful should try waiting three years or so between books in a favorite series.
I love the historical discussion that makes its way into the author's notes and even the glossary. A novelist, unlike an historian, cannot fall back on "acccounts differ as to whether Marius or Sulla won this battle". She must choose one or the other, and tell the story that way. When McCullough explains such decisions in the back of the book I am almost always persuaded by her reasoning, and sometimes think the novelist's feeling for human behavior gives her an edge in figuring out what is most
likely to have happened in a given situation, given the circumstances and the people involved. The relationship she establishes between Sulla and the Julian clan is a example of a literary choice that suddenly makes sense of a number of otherwise puzzling historical events. Later in the series she suggests that ordinary human vanity led Cicero to break chronological order when publishing a group of speeches he had givn - to end on a "stronger" note - and that this has led historians to misdate an important event in Gaius Julius Caesar's life. Similarly the most sensible solution to the so-called "Third Murderer Problem" in Shakespeare's Scottish Play came from an actor and director, not an academic, who understood that a play is not a text to be analyzed but a score to be played. None of the academic candidates for the 3rd killer would have meant anything to someone in the audience watching the play for what was probably the first and only time in his or her life. And
that's who Shakespeare was writing for. So if he was going to bother to slip in a third murderer, he was going to use a character the audience would recognize right off and whose identity would mean something to them. (If you want to see the theory fleshed out read
Bullets for M***** by Marvin Kaye, in which an actor is murdered during a performance of the play, and to solve the mystery the amateur sleuths have to first figure out who the third murderer was.)
Quagmire: Assume you're reading
The Republic in translation (English?) If so I recommend Alan Bloom's. I'd also recommend (after you finish reading the dialogue) Eva Brann's*
The Music of "The Republic", a collection which includes a revised version of her classic essay of the same name along with other reflections on Plato, Socrates and the Dialogues, which was published last year. One of them is a fine piece she co-authored on the problems of translating Plato. Ms. Brann was one of my teachers many years ago and I found the book by accident on Amazon.com along with another,
Open Secrets/Inward Prospects,, a collection of thoughts and essays that amounts to an intellectual sketchbook. It was just published this year and I'm mildly suprised to see that she's still teaching, giving how many years have passed since she introduced me to the wonders of Homer, the riddles of Plato and the flinty logic of Aristotle.
The two books are actually among the ones I'm reading at the moment. (I usually have a couple going at any given time - one by the nightstand, one in the bathroom, one at work for rainy or too hot lunch hours when I forward my calls and eat at my desk.) I have
Open Secrets on the nightstand,
Music at work. This week's bathroom book is G. K. Chesterton's
Orthodoxy, a witty and charming book well worth reading just for the prose, even if you have no interest in the subject matter or are actively hostile to religion in general and Christiatiny in particular. I've probably read it a dozen tilmes. It is one of those books that I tend to go through every year or so, it always gives me new things to think about.
Besides, who could resist the man who wrote the following:
"I have always believed - I still believe - that sincere pessimism is the one unpardonable sin. Insincere pessimism is a social accomplisment, rather agreeable than otherwise."
Or
"Mr. Blatchford is not only an Early Christian, he is the only Early Christian who really ought to have been eaten by lions."
Chesterton and his wife were close friends of George Bernard. Shaw ("if I had to describe my friend Mr. Shaw I should say that he has a heroically large and generous heart, but that it is not, alas, in the right place.") Shaw was a militant anti-cleric who loathed Christianity and disagreed with Shaw on nearly every subject. The two often publicly debated various topics in lecture halls, as well as in newspaper and magazine articles. I wonder what strange gift they found that allowed them to disagree without being disagreeable?
My other "current" book is David McCullough's
1776, a follow-up to his award-winning (and wonderful)
John Adams. I've always been interested in the period, and McCullough (no relation to Colleen) is a magnificent writer. (As well as a maginficent speaker. If you've ever watched a Ken Burns PBS documentary you've heard his voice somewhere in the narration. He was the prinicple narrator for
The Civil War and
The Brooklyn Bridge, for example.)
Regards,
Joe
