As readers of Cobb know, I swore several years ago that I will not spend another dime on movies with posters of a man with a gun and a woman wrapped around his leg. Unfortunately, they don't do movie posters any longer, so it's harder for me to judge. And, quite frankly, I enjoy movies with heroes. Movies need to have heroes and we would be a poorer society without such heroic narratives upgraded with car chases, defenestrations, explosions and machine gun fire. Why? Well, imagine what kind of place this would be if a Saturday night date consisted of vegetarian dinners and movies by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The suicide rate would triple. Hell, we'd be Greenland.
But the point is that I cannot resist heavy reading, at least in literature. So I have taken it upon myself to shoulder the burden of W. H. Auden's syllabus which had been making the rounds of the Chatting Class & Cool Kids recently. In fact, I've already eaten my first slice of that hearty bread in Kafka's 'The Castle'. Strangely nourishing - review soon to come. Here's the rest of the meal:
- Dante - The Divine Comedy
- Aeshylus - The Agamemnon
- Sophcles - Antigone
- Horace - Odes (Loeb)
- Augustine - Confessions (Loeb)
- Shakespeare - Henry IV pt 2
- Shakespeare - Othello
- Shakespeare - Hamlet
- Shakespeare - The Tempest
- Ben Johnson - Volpone
- Pascal - Pensees
- Racine - Phaedra
- Blake - Marriage of Heaven & Hell
- Goethe - Faust
- Kierkegaard - Fear & Trembling
- Baudelaire - Journals
- Ibsen - Peer Gynt
- Dostoevsky - Brothers Karamzov
- Rimbaud - Une Saison en Enfer
- Henry Adams - The Education of Henry Adams
- Melville - Moby Dick
- Rilke - Journal of my Other Self
- Kafka - The Castle
- TS Elliot - Family Reunion
All that and 9 Opera Libretti.
And thus my Auden Project.
With today's news that Iain Banks has terminal cancer, I had to fly to John C. Wright's page to discover where I might ever find his like, or at least those authors that the Cool Kids know which will get me by rights to participate in the Long Talk. So as we speak I am downloading somebody named Gene Wolfe, who apparently has a universe, and we begin with the Shadow of the Torturer. So this may be a light side trip, or maybe even a detour. We shall see.
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