Reading Journal

I'm most eager to share the results of my Classics Club Spin.  Spin #39 was announced last Saturday, and I have been agog with anticipation awaiting the results.  As of this morning, the Wheel has spoken, and I will be reading The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer!  I have only read selected tales, so I am excited to read this work in its entirety.  My list is always compiled using a random number generator, but, weirdly, it generated several Gothic tales this time.  I was convinced that I'd get one of those, but I am not disappointed.

This week I started making my way through Tremendous Trifles, an essay collection by G.K. Chesterton.  There is no writer quite like Chesterton, in style or substance; he's always an interesting read.  I particularly loved a passage from the essay "A Piece of Chalk," which, on the surface, is about young Chesterton drawing with chalks upon brown paper out in the countryside:

They are much better worth drawing than Nature; also they are much easier to draw. When a cow came slouching by in the field next to me, a mere artist might have drawn it; but I always get wrong in the hind legs of quadrupeds. So I drew the soul of the cow; which I saw there plainly walking before me in the sunlight; and the soul was all purple and silver, and had seven horns and the mystery that belongs to all the beasts. But though I could not with a crayon get the best out of the landscape, it does not follow that the landscape was not getting the best out of me. And this, I think, is the mistake that people make about the old poets who lived before Wordsworth, and were supposed not to care very much about Nature because they did not describe it much.

They preferred writing about great men to writing about great hills; but they sat on the great hills to write it. They gave out much less about Nature, but they drank in, perhaps, much more. They painted the white robes of their holy virgins with the blinding snow, at which they had stared all day. They blazoned the shields of their paladins with the purple and gold of many heraldic sunsets. The greenness of a thousand green leaves clustered into the live green figure of Robin Hood. The blueness of a score of forgotten skies became the blue robes of the Virgin. The inspiration went in like sunbeams and came out like Apollo.

I love nature art of all sorts, from Romantic landscape to medieval manuscript borders to natural history illustration, so I was dubious about the start of this passage.  By the end, my breath was taken away.  I love where Chesterton went with this - artists and poets were always taking inspiration from nature on the plane of symbol and emotion, if not as direct copyists.

I finished three books this week, two of them on the same day!  On Wednesday I finally wrapped up Vanity Fair, which I have been reading for weeks, and also finished We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which was a short read.  On Friday I came to the end of The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton.  Reviews to follow.

I did read some spooky stories from The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre by John Polidori and others, but nothing that has really thrilled me yet.

COMMONPLACE QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past." - G.K. Chesterton, "A Piece of Chalk," from Tremendous Trifles

ART OF THE WEEK

Jane Morris: Study for "Mariana" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1868

Chalk on brown paper, in honor of Chesterton's essay. :)  This is a study of Jane Morris which Rossetti later referred to for his painting of Mariana, completed in 1870.  "Mariana" is a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, based on the character of Mariana in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.  Tennyson's poem very much inspired the Pre-Raphaelites, with Millais and John William Waterhouse also creating paintings based upon it.  The subject of a poem is a woman weary from waiting for her lover to return, forlorn, isolated, and despondent.  I actually prefer this chalk drawing to Rossetti's later painting - it better captures that expression of melancholy weariness on Jane's face, and her very posture seems listless and tired.  What makes you weary, Jane?  Is it your marriage to William Morris?  Is casting you as Mariana a sly comment by Rossetti that you should prefer him?

Reading Journal

It's October, so it's time to pull out my collections of ghost stories and classic tales of horror for some spooky seasonal reading.  Where to start?  Perhaps "Green Tea" by Sheridan Le Fanu, or "The Wendigo" by Algernon Blackwood.

Perhaps the biggest news in reading this week is that I finally finished The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan.  It certainly feels good to have come to the end of that particular pilgrimage.  I also read Rasselas this week, completing my first book by Samuel Johnson.  

On Monday morning, I woke early and read Treacle Walker by Alan Garner in one sitting.  Some of Garner's books can go quickly like this.  I have been a fan of Alan Garner ever since discovering the 1969 Granada television adaptation of his novel The Owl Service, in which the Welsh myth of Blodeuwedd manifests in the lives of three teenagers in 1960's Wales.  Treacle Walker and Garner's novel Elidor also explore the theme of myth, folklore, and ancient landscape memory intersecting with the modern "ordinary" world, making our world seem not so ordinary.

I have just started We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson.  The story is told from the perspective of a young woman named Merricat Blackwood.  So far all I know is that the Blackwood family are decidedly unpopular in the small town, for some mysterious reason.  This is my second book by Shirley Jackson.  I absolutely loved The Haunting of Hill House.  I plan to re-read it again someday, and would highly recommend it for spooky season reading.

I have been distressed by the loss of Open Library and Internet Archive this week, as I'm sure many readers are.  How can I read my York Mystery Plays and my Mircea Eliade??  Hopefully both will be back online soon.

COMMONPLACE QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"The best safeguard against bad literature is a full experience of good; just as a real and affectionate acquaintance with honest people gives a better protection against rogues than a habitual distrust of everyone." - C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

ART OF THE WEEK

Landscape with Grave, Coffin, and Owl by Caspar David Friedrich, ca 1836

Something for Halloween season!  The German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich is best known for his landscapes of mist, craggy mountains, blasted trees, and Gothic ruins.  He sought to experience the sublime in the contemplation of nature.  Full of symbolism and sometimes religious mysticism, his art sought to evoke an emotional response in the viewer.  Several of his works explore themes of mortality, the transience of human endeavors, and the endurance of nature, as in this sepia drawing from 1836.  An owl, long associated with wisdom and death, directly confronts the viewer and serves as a living memento mori, a pale moon rising above his horns like a ghostly crown or halo - or a rising spirit, as birds have deep associations with Spirit and spirit-flight, as well as the wisdom of the Holy Spirit.  No human being is visible in the drawing; we can only infer human presence by the coffin and the discarded tools of the gravediggers.  In the foreground grow two thistles, known for their wild beauty and hardiness: nature endures when man's spirit has flown.