Random Number Lit

I hope that every book in this project will be as fascinating a item to think about as have been in the course of this project so far. Certainly, there are a few that have not revolutionized my life as have some in this project, but some have been a revelation to me that will sit with me for a long time. The Book of the Courtier is a book that may be with me awhile, almost despite itself at times, but fascinating. Baldassare Castiglione was a courtier in the northern Italian court of Urbino and seemed to have had a transformative experience during this time and that he brought with him throughout his life. He, then, goes onto serve in other courts and accumulates the accolades due to someone in his station in life through grit and a good nature, and ends up in Spain where he writes this book. Castiglione yearns for his life in in his home court, even his home court, Urbino and drafts this work shortly before his death in Spain which would serve as a handbook of sorts for courtly life h

Lady Mary Wroth – first reflection on this author – the first image I find on Wikipedia is one of her holding a lyre that looks a lot like a modern day guitar which is awesome. Also, she knew Ben Jonson quite well and Jonson wrote one of his famous poems about her castle in London which is fascinating. Here are some selections of the of the longer work that I enjoyed as I read them.  from Song 1:   The Barke my Booke shall bee, Where dayly I will write, This tale of haples mee, True slaue to Fortunes spite. The roote shall be my bedd, Where nightly I will lye Wailing [inconstancy], Since all true loue is dead   from Sonnet 42:   I am that heartlesse Trunck of hearts depart;   from  Song 7:   Nor let me euer cease from lasting griefe, But endlesse let it be without reliefe; To winn againe of Loue, The fauour I did prooue, And with my end please him, since dying, I Haue him offended, yet vnwillingly.   Sonnet 3 from Part 4:   Then did the God {33} , whose

Alfred Corn: A Call from the Midst of the Crowd   This post comes from finishing one of the works from the Shorter List, like my post on O'Neill. There is a whole raft of authors, poets, essayists, historians that would appear on the longer list because their works do no rise the occassion of a significant work on their own. I am thinking here largely of poets that some of their individual poems may have stood the test of time, but not a longer, contained collection of these poems, I am thinking here of Coleridge or Pope that the "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" or "The Rape of the Lock", respectively, would not make it onto 100 books you have to read before you die, but are significant enough to be considered.  For this time out, I pulled the name Alfred Corn of which I was wholly ignorant of. Corn is an American poet who is still with us. During this phase of the investigation, I will read the Wikipedia page and the Poetry Foundation page and any pertinent and r

I started this project sort of out of the blue during the first part of the pandemic disturbances. I realized that a lot of what I do is out of the house work, lecture, grading and student conferences in my office on campus, and the craft beer related stuff all bring me away from my house and so when it was just us in the house as many people experienced, I had the time to reflect on what it was that I wanted to be doing, that question for almost my entire life has been that I would rather be reading. As is the case with this project, this blog, the Youtube videos and the like, I would rather be reading. I saw someone post something some where that let people know that Amazon was allowing access to some audiobooks online, and I thought to look it up. I was reading Jeanette Winterson's book Frankisstein  which is fantastic at the time in my AI research sort of momentum, and I realized that I did not not know nearly enough about the original source material for that book so that coup