News and Reading

The news cycle continues to be disturbing.  Somewhere between the revelations about January 6th's insurrection, someone contrasted and compared Trump, the Proud Boys, and the D.C. Insurrection to Mao Zedong, the Red Guards, and the Cultural Revolution -- which resonated with me in a horrible way.  

At least Trump has been impeached twice now.  I can only hope that the Senate will convict him so that he is unable to hold office ever again.  

I keep thinking that once the inauguration is concluded, things will settle down... but I fear the damage to our social structures will take a long time to fix -- if only "The Scouring of the Shire" were so easy. 

I am finding that I need to step away from electronic devices after nine PM, or my sleep suffers.

On the more fun side:  

I finished "Beowulf."   I know that I should appreciate it more, but I don't.  I should contrast and compare it to "The Epic of Gilgamesh," because they both have that weepy royal bromance feel to them that isn't speaking to me.   I imagined asking my Old-English and Medieval Scholar friends, "Am I a bad person for not liking something in the canon?" (and "Am I an elitist for not being in raptures about this latest translation?")  but I couldn't imagine what their responses might be other than "This is a literary example of how one should lead a virtuous/good life" (and is the earliest existing example of literature with a fire-breathing, gold hoarding dragon in it).   Beowulf worked better for me when I read it in small snatches that would allow me to admire some of the more clever phrasing and word choice.  (Coincidentally, I had re-read the part of The Hobbit where Bilbo brings out a cup from Smaug's horde, and I noticed the parallels.)   I wanted to like the modern idioms, but ultimately the use of "bro," "fuck," "shit," "my main man," and "daddy" were too jarring and distracting to me.  

I've paused in "The Ancient Egyptian Netherworld Books."  It's kind of fun--the spells and addresses spark all sorts of writing ideas--and kind of exhausting (we're blasting Apep, the Snake of Chaos again?).  I keep wanting to read the source materials, and it looks like I have to do some kind of Inter-library Loan to do so.

I've been reading "This Is How You Lose The Time War," by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, and I've been enjoying it so much that it took me a while to realize that it's got a strong epistolary element, which doesn't usually work for me.  Part of the reason is that the formats of the letters--feathers, tree-rings, lava, seals--are intriguing; part of it is that the authors are having lots of fun with language.   I'm about half-way through.

I just got a hard-bound edition of "Reynard the Fox," by Anne Louise Avery, and, while I've only read the introduction and first chapter, the binding (with a purple ribbon sewn into it!), the dingbats, the footnotes, and the feel of the paper hits all the aesthetic points of owning a physical book.  I've been following Ms. Avery's Old Fox micro-fiction on Twitter, and I'm hoping the printed Reynard will equally please.

Reading Ancient Texts

I'm having a quiet Sunday morning, the sun has just now broken free of the clouds rimming the horizon, and the day has gone from grey to golden; the felt swaddling of yesterday's rainfall has become gilded netting over the trees and grass.   The house is mostly quiet; Mark is uncharacteristically lounging in bed, The Child is sleeping in after a Very Late Night of Video Gaming, and the cats are happily going in and out of the garage after their breakfast.  Aoife has been mostly resting, curled up against me on the couch as I surf social media and listen to the Sunday Baroque radio program, and has only just now gotten up to bark at some intruder perceived through the drawn window shade.  

This has been a weekend of reading.  I've been alternating between Maria Dahvana Headley's translation of "Beowulf," and John Coleman Darnell and Colleen Manassa Darnell's "The Ancient Egyptian Netherworld Books."   I'm about a third of the way through "Beowulf;" Beowulf has just pulled Grendel's arm off.   I'm mostly liking it, it's very accessible, and the language choice and tone are putting me in mind of the musical, "Hamilton."  I am at times put off by the choice to use "fuck" and some other modern idioms, but this is more a reflection of my taste and not Headley's craft. 

I had extremely high -- and unreasonable -- expectations for "The Ancient Egyptian Netherworld Books." Despite some forewarnings that there would be no images of the original texts, I was hoping for a lavishly oversized tome with panels of hieroglyphic text, underneath which would be phonetic translations of the words, underneath that which would be translations into English, and underneath that a transliteration.  In color.  Bound in the Coptic Style.   And footnotes with footnotes.   And a few more timelines and maps.  The book in reality is a textbook reference volume in the series (titled with the ubiquitous "I'm-a-book-about-ancient-stuff" Papyrus typeface), "Writings from the Ancient World," and is summary of a large body of separate works --  I'm wishing I had access to the publications in the lengthy bibliography, because that appears to be where the technical analysis is being done.  That said, the summary is interesting and the line drawings extensive.

 I've seen John C Darnell on YouTube demonstrate how cryptographic or ambiguous hieroglyphic writing's meaning is echoed in the accompanying imagery of certain passages, but so far I haven't seen that in the book.  Cryptographic hieroglyphs are kind of puzzle texts, where normally used hieroglyphs are swapped out for ones that look the same, or have a similar sound, or are puns; sort of like writing "B-leaf in trees" or "eye wood dye 4 U."    I'm not quite sure how they differ from biliteral -- like "djah" -- or triliteral   signs, and it may be that they are mostly a case of not using determinative signs.  It appears they were used to hide religious mysteries.   I'm only just through the general introduction -- which has an interesting survey of New Kingdom tomb architecture -- and am going through the introduction for "The Book of Adoring Re in the West."  I still have five more ancient netherworld books to go through, and my understanding is that the last two make more use of cryptographic hieroglyphs, so there may be more on them later.

I'm hoping there will be more contrast-and-comparison with the texts in "The Pyramid Texts," started (probably) in The Old Kingdom, and developed into the later "Coffin Texts," and still later "The Book of Going Forth By Day."  The Netherworld Texts seem to be an 18th Dynasty development, and between Thutmose III, Hatshepsut, and Tutankhamen there is a lot of variation in texts used in funerary architecture.