Random Number Lit

 I felt the snake bite here of wandering to far afield from the original intention of this project. I had a very underdeveloped list of ancient writings in one of the segments of the Small Works List. Because of this, I thought that I should find some way of coming to terms with this lacking in the list and find a way to fold in a more robust catalog of the literature of the ancient world. I have studied Christian theology and Church history at the graduate level and so I thought I might have some sense of what might be hiding behind this veil but I was woefully mistaken at my purchase into this arena. I was confronted by this with the issue of simply getting my hands on a readable copy of this text.  I am not sure where I went to flesh out these category, but I had a smattering of readings especially from Ancient Egypt on the same list as the Greeks. The time frame that these things exist in are as far away as modern American writings are from early Christian writings and so I don'

This is probably the most research I have put into a Small Works List entry. It often happens that I have no idea who the author is and what they have written that is most significant. I am thinking here of Ki No Tsurayuki and trying to track down what he wrote inside of the Kokin Wakashu. Then I think about Guaman Poma whose name couldn’t have been more obscure from me, but it was clear what the document he would be known for. Isaac Newton also presented some problems for me to get a document that I could actually understand.    Christopher Columbus is probably one of the most famous, or infamous, people who ever lived. Towns, Countries, parks, statues, a national holiday that has recently been renamed (and for good reason), and there isn’t a clear book or text that he wrote? How odd is that? I did a bit of Googling and I found that Penguin Classics has a collection of documents that they package together and call it the 4 voyages. I ordered this book to find out th

The next entry I pulled from the Small Works List was from what feels like the most popular list on that spreadsheet, the World Literature List 1000 to 1600. I have only pulled one other name at this point on the list but I have consistently been involved with World Lit from around this time period pretty consistently. Kadambari was on the list just before this one as well as Ki No Tsurayuki. The crazy thing is the connection between this text and Guaman Poma.    The Huarochiri Manuscript represents a strange node in the make up of this history of this time period, and also happens to be the second indigenous authored text from the same region and the exact same time period. So, let me lay this out for a second. Guaman Poma is one of the only native Incan authors in the historical record. Guaman Poma’s 1200 page letter to King Phillip III was lost for hundreds of years as it was accidentally stored in the Royal Danish Library. Guaman Poma would have written his “letter” in 1615-1616.