Random Number Lit

  I want to start this blog post by saying that I had not idea what to make of this document when I drew this name at random from the Small Works List. These names come to me completely stripped of context and I have to do some work to reassert them back into an original context. With this book, I did the most outside research to get a sense of just what I should read from this person, but then also who this person was, where and when was this book written, and what would have been thought about it at the time. I talked with several other professors about this book, one professor said that she would read this book with me which will be recorded later hopefully for a bonus video. I settled on David Frey's translation instead of Roland Williams as the Frey translation felt more user friendly to me though I ordered both from I-Share. “There he had spoken by signs. A report had been sent to Wayna Capac Inca in Cusco, saying that the first men had gone ashore, that they wore very long...

  JACOBUS VORAGINE - Golden Legend From the Big Book List, I drew Jacobus Voragine’s Golden Legend which is the 13th century French collection of the hagiography of the early church. I have to be transparent here and say that I have study Christian theology in a mainline Protestant seminary, and I was wholly unaware of much of the work in this text. Hagiography – noun – the writing of the lives of saints. Here is what is weird about the word hagiography. It seems in modern parlance it means something that is obviously false and fantastic but sort of benign and whimsical in a way that is nonthreatening. I could be wrong here, but my first experience with hagiography was in my undergraduate days when I came across the story of the life of Brandon which is a magical tale of the first Europeans to make landfall on the North American continent. Brandon’s life is not recorded here in the Golden Legend version from Penguin I read for reasons I don’t understand. It is not in t...

 I went on a roller coaster ride with this pick. As it is often said about the Small Works List, I have no idea where this name came from or in what context it was meant to be read. I imagine if I went back to find where I found this name it would be from the Norton World Literature Anthology and it would be a short clipping of the incident that this whole text swirls around. What I find enchanting about this idea is that it sort of places as the fulcrum of Korean history this family drama and from the locus of this event there is a father and son struggling to understand their humanity together, the nature of good and evil is being wrestled with and the hope of a family and a nation hang in the balance of one simple act. Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong   When I pulled this name in the Henri Michaux  Youtube Video , I was a 0% knowledge of who this person was, I didn’t even know how to pronounce the name and did not try in that recording. I watched a few Youtube videos to get a ...

Henri Michaux represents a particular type of problem that is woven into the fabric of this project. What is essentially at stake here in a project like this is that I will have a passing understanding of a lot of things and try as hard as I can to bring within myself the ability to know very little about a lot of things. This works for Abelard's letters which are as they state themselves to be. This works for the Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong which is a straight forward retelling of the history of her country from a very speciifc experience. This approach does not work for Faulkner or what we have in front us now, Henri Michaux.  First the problem was what to read. As I may state often in this project, the effort itself took and continues to take a great deal of forethought to make sure what I am doing is even remotely worthwhile. So far I think that it is, but that isn't to say that there are no wrinkles in the rug so to speak. When I put together the big book list, I realized tha...

This project evolved over time and it is my hope to try to capture the length an breadth of this project even some of this work started before I formalized this whole thing.  Some portion of why this project started was the pandemic, as is with everything now. Right before the Pandemic, and I mention this in my post about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein , that I was reading Jeanette Winterston's latest novel, Frankisstein, which is a retelling of the famous story featuring a trans character. It was riveting stuff. As I read it though, I found out that I did not know nearly enough about the original story to be conversant in the retelling's version. This is when the pandemic hit last spring and so I decided to listen to an audiobook version of the original. Audible had just given access to free audiobooks during this time because of the stay-at-home order and I decided then to embark on something that was leading towards this journey.  From Frankenstein, I decided to try my hand...

I pulled this book after some time and fatigue in this project. I am not very far in now, but I have pulled some real wild works so far but then I get a book like Augustine’s Confessions and it really puts my mind and attention in a bad place. Faulkner was truly a delight to say that I have read but at times it felt like a chore to get through at times. Then a breath of fresh air arrives in Robinson, and I am fully recharged. What I think is significant about Robinson’s writing is to read it in reverse. The two tent poles of her writing stand distinct from one another between 25 years of history. Housekeeping is published in 1980, Gilead is published in 2005. The first book is the story of a family of women, with each iteration of that which is traditionally understood to be the roles of women with each other, there is the Grandmother, the absent mother, the carefree Aunt, the busy body Great Aunts, and the sisters. The grandfather is gone from the very first pages of the book. The f...

Just after pulling William Faulkner's name for the Small Works List, I pulled John Adams. Obviously the reason this name appears on this list is probably because (though I am never sure) is probably because some letter of his or some address of his was featured in an early American Literature volume of the Norton Anthology took a snippet from him. I get these names cold, unknown and without context. Here is what I knew of John Adams before pulling his name. He was a president, probably the second. His son was also president, maybe the fourth? John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were friends and wrote a lot of letters to each other. I have heard that the died on the same day, July 4th but I don't remember if it was in the same year. Abigail Adams, the second first lady, was a significant figure in the history of the country, she may have saved some paintings and it was clear that they loved it each other very much in the old timey way of expressing it through letters. I do not Other...