Books 11 and 12 of 2018

Shirley Jackson is the best. If you drew a triangle with Edith Wharton and Flannery O'Conner and Dorothy West at the three points and muttered an arcane incantation Shirley Jackson would pop up in the triangle like in the window of a Magic 8 Ball.

Her stories are often witty and acerbically so, critical of social mores and hypocrisy in a most delightfully precise manner. Distasteful characters are deflated and humiliated. Most often there is a supernatural twist of the sort later associated with Rod Serling. I was pleased to note that a few stories in here are thematically similar to The Haunting of Hill House, which is my favorite novel of all time, and the one I've re-read most often.

I recommend this tight little volume. Some guffaws, some gasps, some grins.




Read this as part of a graduate course on Greek History. I'm taking it in a rush to try and get another few credits to prevent my teacher certificate from expiring in June.

This is a breezy series of lectures about Greek History from the Minoans forward to the Hellenic Period. There are interesting asides about archaeology vs. myth vs. contemporary accounts.

I found it mostly valuable as a refresher in all that shit I read in Herodotus 25 years ago. If you've not read Herodotus, read him first, and then 25 years from now listen to this to remind yourself what you learned. But if you don't intend to ever read Herodotus, and want to know about the Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian Wars and Alexander and all that jazz, then just go ahead and listen to this now.

Recent Reading

I'm trying in my mind to "see" Miriam, but can only summon her outline. Toby is tall and broad, Miriam is tiny beside him. I can see hair but no details. Her face is a blank. She and Toby are at a party--Joan Mellon's penthouse in Philadelphia? It is the early '90s. Toby is my teacher in the Temple University Graduate English Department. He smokes in his non-smoking office, sitting with the window cracked in the bitterest cold.

Toby tries to fill out Miriam's outline in this rich memoir, but she has declined and dissipated and become another woman who is at once still Miriam and at once not her at all.






Three schoolgirls from rural Kansas enter their local National History Day contest with research about a forgotten hero of the Warsaw Ghetto. Their simple play about Irena Sendler--"Life in a Jar"--leads them on an incredible voyage. Makes me want to tackle NHD with my students!



Isha was married to R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz, who taught Fulcanelli, among others. He had made a study of the statuary and reliefs on medieval cathedrals, and had learned anew the secret of the blue glass at Chartres. He realized the great Gothic cathedrals encoded an ancient knowledge also visible in the monuments of Egypt. Isha and Schwaller worked for more than a decade at Karnak, attempting to re-construct the ancient ritual practices of Earth's most enduring and successful civilization. Here she uses a novel to demonstrate the initiation of modern men into these ancient mysteries--"when the student is ready, the teacher will appear."

Noam if You Want To

One of the chapters in Chomsky's latest slim volume of ponderings is called "What can we understand?" My response is: MOST of this book.

It's deep.

Chomsky, with elegance, marshals his profound knowledge of science, philosophy, and history and distills all of this down to about 120 pages on problems and interesting avenues for exploration in the cognitive sciences. Hold onto your hat because the first chapter with its scientific linguistic jargon might have you squirming!

I have read dozens of works by Chomsky, but with one exception they were all books about politics. Politics only makes a brief appearance here as a slim chapter called "What is the common good?" This was the most accessible chapter, but the most interesting IMO was "The Mysteries of Nature: How Deeply Hidden?" Chomsky spends a lot of time explaining the concept of mysterianism and how some attempts to understand the origins of language and consciousness might indeed be doomed as scientific enterprises, with mere speculative "storytelling" taking the place of actual proof.

So if you are up to finding out what one of history's most interesting and sophisticated minds is thinking about--Noam if you want to!