It took me a minute to find this one in The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works because the editors insist on calling it by the original title, The First Part of the Contention of the two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster with the Death of the Good Duke Humphrey. That title rolls right off the tongue, but I think I’ll keep calling it Henry VI Part Two. Also, I have to appreciate the spoiler right in the title.
As longtime readers may already know, I majored in Literature but went to a university with only a token arts and humanities department. The professors I had were generally good, but to give an idea of what the school was like, there was no classicist on the faculty, and I managed to graduate without reading much of anything not originally in English or written prior to 1800 or so. The two best instructors were well aware of this, and though neither of them specialised in the period, they did make sure that one of them would offer a class on Shakespeare every semester - inadequate as the school was, it at least wouldn’t be so inadequate that graduates would entirely miss out on Shakespeare.
Fujishima Kosuke’s Oh, My Goddess!, a series approximately as old as I am, has finished; Dark Horse published the last volume earlier this year. I was a relative latecomer to the comic, picking it up only in 2007, I believe, when it was already approaching twenty years old. I was able to blow through most of it that had been published up to that point fairly quickly, since someone must have dumped the first twenty volumes or so at a local Half Price Books. I had to pick them up a few at a time, since I didn’t have that much spare cash in college, and also had to figure out what order Dark Horse’s initially unnumbered volumes ought to be read in. Still, the best way to read OMG is probably to marathon several volumes at once, take a break, read several more, and so on.
Writing about Dante’s non-fiction Monarchia not once, but twice on this blog, and once at length on the main site, made me want to revisit his poetry. I haven’t had time to tackle The Divine Comedy this year, but was able to get through the fairly short La Vita Nuova over Christmas weekend, when not visiting with my kinsfolk.
La Vita Nuova is a bit of an odd work; the poetry makes up the centrepiece, but the work as a whole is autobiographical, and concerns Dante’s relationship, such as it was, with Beatrice. His love for Beatrice is famous, and plays a large part in The Divine Comedy, but as intensely felt as it was for Dante, from the outside not much seems to have come from it. They never really do anything together, barely so much as even a short conversation, and Dante deliberately hides his love for at least the first part of this story. If anything, the style of the book reminds me of the Hyakunin Isshu, which I just wrote about, in that it’s essentially a collection of occasional poems that Dante wrote capturing or commenting on moments with Beatrice, her friends, love in general, and so on. Basically, as the hundred poets would write a tanka as almost a matter of course whenever something subjectively interesting happens, Dante does the same but typically in sonnet form. As for the poems themselves, each is preceded by a paragraph or so of prose explaining the context, and is also accompanied by a short explanation of the poem itself. Most of these, about 4/5, are sonnets, though Dante occasionally uses a longer form. Though I wouldn’t call this light reading, they typically aren’t very difficult to follow, especially compared to the much more allusive, ambitious Divine Comedy. Again, I’d compare them to the Hyakunin Isshu in that the main goal seems to be capturing a moment or feeling in more elevated language.
There are only two groups of Americans who are likely to know about the Hyakunin Isshu, literature enthusiasts who’ve taken an interest in Japan, and fans of the comic and anime Chihayafuru. I’m certainly the former and like the latter enough to have imported the French edition, so Frank Watson’s One Hundred Leaves: A New Annotated Translation of the Hyakunin Isshu seemed like a must-have to me.
If you’re not in either of those groups, the Hyakunin Isshu is an anthology of one hundred poems, each by a different poet, compiled by poet and critic Fujiwara no Teika around 1237. For readers, myself included, who don’t have a lot of experience with Japanese poetry, Watson does offer a few things to help us out. There’s a short introduction on appreciating this style of poem, annotations explaining the intricate wordplay that characterises these works, and a “literal” translation of each poem to supplement the main translation. He also includes the original versions, both in Japanese script and English transliteration, for those who either know a little Japanese or want to read them out loud. Finally, he also provides a painting from traditional Japanese art to complement each poem. Unfortunately, a few aspects of the presentation do fall short of the ideal. The pictures are in black-and-white with no indication of the title or artist, and it’s sometimes hard to see what the picture has to do with the poem it ostensibly illustrates. Not all poems have annotations, either; some stand on their own well enough not to need much explanation, but it would be nice to at least get a short biographical note about the writers. The annotations also get a little repetitive; for example, he explains several times that the image of “wet sleeves” indicates wiping away tears. As for the translation itself, my Japanese is nowhere near strong enough to speak for the accuracy, but Watson does have some poetic sense, and when faced with multiple possible interpretations of a poem he typically uses the more literary, which I think is the best approach. Comparing them with Joshua Mostow’s translation, which you can find with annotations at this blog, he’s often a little more clear. Compare Watson’s translation of poem 31, by Sakenoue no Korenori:
Heretics, by G.K. Chesterton, is another book that I read back in college but decided to revisit recently since I’ll also be reading its follow-up, Orthodoxy, in the near future. That may have been unnecessary, though, because as enlightening and entertaining as Chesterton is, one always knows what to expect from him in his essays, and if you’ve read, say, Tremendous Trifles, What’s Wrong with the World, or any of his other non-fiction work, you know what you’re in for. Here, he goes through a set of erroneous modern ideas put forward by various prominent people, such as Rudyard Kipling or H.G. Wells, and demonstrates why they’re wrong typically by way of a paradox and with several asides.
Education at the Crossroads is a revised version of a series of lectures Jacques Maritain gave at Yale University in 1943 in which the author discusses, in four parts, “The Aims of Education,” “The Dynamics of Education,” “The Humanities and Liberal Education,” and “The Trials of Present-Day Education.” In other words, what education is, where it is now, and where it will, or at least ideally should, go.
Maritain’s idea of and approach to education is one that was probably moderate or Conservative by the standards of 1943, though by today’s standards I suppose one would call him a Paleoconservative. In any case, he’s a believer in a Liberal education (not a Progressive one, in today’s confusing terminology), and he defines the aim of education early on:
Kio Shimoku’s Genshiken: Second Season is a tough comic for me to review, because I can’t help comparing it to the original run of Genshiken. Part of what I liked so much about the original, though, was that I could relate to it back in college. Since then, though, not only has the comic changed significantly, but I’ve changed as well.
I first read Genshiken early in college, and loved it right away. The setting, a college anime club, doesn’t sound all that exciting, but it has a few things going for it. At the time, anime was just starting to take over as my primary hobby, and I was also getting very involved in one of the student organisations at my university. Furthermore, I could see a lot of myself in two of the main characters, Sasahara and Madarame, and the whole cast seemed like a group I could see myself hanging out with.
I first read Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle back in college, and at the time I loved it. The recent hype around Amazon’s adaptation of the novel made me think of it again, and I decided to re-read it to see how it holds up.
Overall, it’s still very good. The setting is 1962 with an obvious alternate history premise where the Axis Powers won the Second World War, with Germany occupying the Eastern United States, Japan the Western, with a more-or-less autonomous zone between them. How this apparently came about is plausible enough, though I must say that some of the things the Nazis have been up to are rather far-fetched. They apparently have a space programme going to Mars, have drained the Mediterranean, and have wiped out most of Africa (though something apparently went wrong with this project, but details are never explained). They’ve only just invented television, though, so reality has the advantage in idiot box technology.
Alright, one more foray into the world of fitness blogs with another short book by P.D. Mangan, Best Supplements for Men’s Health, Strength, and Virility. It comes as-advertised, first explaining why one should consider taking supplements, then devoting a chapter each to discussing why, creatine, zinc and magnesium, vitamin D, testosterone and aromatose inhibitors, omega-3 fats, resveratrol, vitamin C, and N-acetylcysteine. He then closes the book with a chapter on diet, fasting, and exercise.