Impressions

For Christmas I was given a copy of John Carter’s ABC for Book Collectors. Apparently my family thinks I really like books or something, though I don’t know where they may have gotten that impression. In any case, it’s a popular reference work for collectors, so I thought it would be worth a brief discussion here.

First, I specifically have the ninth edition, revised by Nicolas Barker and Simran Thadani. Though ABC is essentially a dictionary of book collecting and could have included terms from related fields, Carter was careful to limit the book’s scope to collecting, so he excludes terms from bibliography, printing, and so on unless they’re relevant to collectors. What makes ABC useful not only as a reference work but also pleasant to thumb through is that besides giving straightforward definitions he also offers some advice and personal observations here-and-there. Not enough to get in the way of the book’s main purpose, but enough to give it some added value. This is also where later editors’ revisions to recent editions become interesting. Obviously, a book first published in 1952 requires some added entries and a few revisions to older ones. Carter’s commentary, though, is part of the book’s appeal, and so Barker and Thadani are careful to preserve that as much as possible. See, for example, the entry for “Issue-Mongers.”

Note: This is the final repost from Thermidor, originally published June 5, 2018. As with all of these, this is presented with only minimal editing.

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Last time we talked about Roman poetry, it was on Catullus’ “stately bawdiness.” Today, we’ll move forward roughly a century to Martial, who was born in what’s now Spain in A.D. 40. He moved to Rome at twenty-four years old to pursue a literary career, with some success, but eventually grew tired of life in the capital and so moved back to Spain in 100. We don’t know the exact date of his death, but it was no later than 104.

There are two important parts of the Christmas holiday; the first, of course, is the Nativity of Our Lord. Second is a focus on family, and children in particular. Christmas puts me, and many others, into a nostalgic mood, thinking back to Christmas Mass, exchanging gifts on Christmas morning, then going over to my grandparents’ house to have dinner and play with my cousins. God willing, I’ll be able to extend these experiences to a new generation, but with last year’s addition of my nephew to the family children are once again part of the Carroll family’s Christmas.

Note: This is another republication from Thermidor, where it first appeared on March 20, 2018.

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“The classics have more and more become a baton exclusively for the cudgelling of schoolboys, and less and less a diversion for the mature.” Ezra Pound’s observation, from a 1920 essay on translations of Homer, may have been true at the time but has, in the following decades, become somewhat optimistic. Often, schoolboys aren’t really taught the classics at all, but insofar as they are, “cudgelling” is still about right. I can’t completely blame those reluctant to read old books, since the very sight of anything from the Odyssey to The Scarlet Letter is apt to bring back memories of chapter quizzes and book reports due by next Friday.

Over the past year, I’ve read through a lot of academic analyses of anime and anime fandom, some on my own out of curiosity and others for academic purposes (yes, really). The overall state of academia in the anime studies field is pretty similar to what you’d find elsewhere, that is, abysmal and embarrassing. I’d say that Bl. John Henry Newman wouldn’t be impressed, but then, neither would anyone who isn’t fully embedded in the university system. Most readers probably don’t need a lot of examples, but I’ll provide a couple selections anyway just because they’re so bad they’re actually pretty funny. This is from Steven Brown, in Tokyo Cyberpunk, discussing Ghost in the Shell.

Note: This is another old Thermidor post, originally published on January 18, 2018.

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Having covered some of the great Greek poets, including Hesiod and Sappho, it’s time to move on to some of the Romans. With the Greeks, I tried to approach their literature roughly in chronological order, but here I’ll begin in the late Republic with Catullus. He’s among the Classical world’s most popular poets, at least among those who don’t have the mixed blessing of being frequently assigned to bored high schoolers like Homer, and perhaps the best way to introduce Catullus and see why is to jump right into one of his poems:

If you have a good memory, you may recall that I published a review of Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried over at Thermidor Magazine on July 27, 2017. With Thermidor in the same condition as Old Howard, I’ve been republishing my old articles here, but for this one I’m making an exception - you can find it over at The American Sun. I think it was one of my best reviews from last year, so please give it a read, then give The Things They Carried a read.

Note: This is another repost from Thermidor Magazine, originally published on December 20, 2017. As usual, it is republished here with minimal editing.

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When looking at an outline of Chinese history, one of the most striking things is the longevity of China’s imperial structure, lasting from the unification of China in 221 B.C. all the way to A.D. 1912. As far as I’m aware, the only Western state to even approach this record is the Roman Empire, beginning (to use one common starting date) in 27 B.C. and not fully collapsing until 1453. Now, China was obviously not a serene empire, as dynasties certainly did rise and fall, sometimes with anarchic periods in between these the collapse of one and rise of the next. Nonetheless, each succeeding dynasty adopted the basic structure and governing ideology of its predecessor. Not until the Twentieth Century was the imperial structure  fully destroyed and left behind. How was this possible?

Note: This is republished from Thermidor Magazine, where it was originally posted on November 19, 2017.

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When looking across the Western literary canon, it quickly appears that writing is, in a sense, a man’s game. Take a list of recommended authors from before the era of political correctness, and one generally finds only a few women represented. To take a convenient example, Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren’s list of essential authors from the first appendix to How to Read a Book (which includes fiction and non-fiction) has only one female author, with Jane Austen standing alone to represent her entire sex. Now, that doesn’t particularly bother me; I don’t believe that we should grade on a curve so that we can include mediocrities like Maya Angelou or Rupi Kaur on “great authors” lists. There are, however, a handful of women who even a vile Reactionary like myself will gladly give credit to. Besides Austen, works by Flannery O’Connor, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and others all have a space on my bookshelf.

It’s Halloween night (well, in my time zone, which is the only one that matters anyway), and when I think of Halloween, I think of Christopher Lee. I imagine that most readers will be aware that he made his name at Hammer Studios, starring in films like their Dracula series or Rasputin: The Mad Monk, and though I certainly think he was great as both Rasputin and the second-most famous Dracula (following, of course, Bela Lugosi), the film that comes to my mind first is also the one that he considered to be best he’d ever been in, The Wicker Man.