Greg Correll
@gcorrell
Writer, Artist, Skeptic. CUNY Writers Center Fellow, CAPS board member. Father to three ferocious daughters.
Weird chapter; facsimile with side columns. I get this tho, having read the Landmark editions. Pitch-perfect satire of scholastic publications. Finnegan is a treasure trove.
An exemplar pg (151) of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. My breakthru for reading came with Jos Campbell’s insight: this is all within the liminal space between awake and asleep, the way we imagine life in fragments.
Finnegan’s Wake. A typical page. Even Jos Campbell’s key to the Wake can barely contain/explain this work. Far more difficult than Joyce’s Ulysses. I will endeavor to persevere. At least 8 mins per page, 650 pgs. I read, then read aloud to catch his puns, allusions. Pessoa will be easier after Wake
What have i committed to? J Campbell’s comprehensive guide to Finnegan’s Wake is itself a labyrinth. My brain will be challenged for two weeks! Read these idiosyncratic excerpts.
Starting Joyce’s Finnegan’s wake with two supports: Campbell’s prodigious Skelton Key, and the spare but useful SS Study Guide. As dense as literature gets, the Wake is. Girding my loins.
A delicious page. See how Flaubert builds the renewed romance between Mm Bovary and the absurd Leon
Finished Milton’s Paradise Lost, quite a slog (convoluted lines and meanings throughout); now starting Bovary, the Marx-Aveling translation
Milton describes how Satan raped his daughter Sin, who gave birth to Death, who then raped her, bringing forth myriad goblins. Whoa.
Finished Lot 49, Pynchon—weird and brilliant—and now beginning ‘Paradise Lost’
Finished Ellroy’s ‘Red Sheet’—wow, one of his best, about commies and nazis in postwar LA—we were in amazing Montreal for a week and i did not read—now starting Pynchon’s ‘Lot 49’.
Read. This. Page. Ellroy is a magnificent writer, integrating deep research into the 60s with brilliant drive, and flat prose for the strange political landscape of mid-century USA
Finished Karamazov Bros—wow—now i’m taking a break from classical literature to Ellroy’s newest
This. Dostoevsky, Karamazov. Brother Ivan, nonbeliever, lectures brother Alyosha, on why humans need bread, not prayer. Brilliant.
Reading The Karamazov Brothers while sipping Evan bourbon dosed with Hendrick’s (white) gin (orange peel and cacao powder). Sublime.
My next two books: Garnett’s translation of ‘The Karamazov Brothers’, Dostoevsky; and the Pevear/Volokhonsky transl of Chekov’ stories. I love both authors.
From Kagan’s Open Yale Course book, “Death”. Read this. Such lucid writing about the unknowable.
My next book set: Yale’s ‘Death’; Baudelaire’s ‘The Flowers of Evil; and Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘Regained’
Near the end of Statius, ‘The Thebiad’. Here is an exemplar page, Thebes in a citadel, besieged. The immediacy and strange humanity is compelling.
My next sequence: Thebaid by Statius, then the Theban Trilogy by Sophocles, then Tacitus’ portraits of Agricola and Germania. My recent book was Lucan: turgid and unconvincing, methinks. Fascinating contrast with Julian war reports.
Finished Landmark Julius Caesar, about the Roman Civil War. Now i read Lucan’s, who writes a graphic history from Pompey’s pov
re: Dante and Julius Caesar: the Hollander transl of Commedia is long, dense and labyrinthine, a real challenge. I will re-read it soon, without annotation. Caesar’s war journals are direct, easy to follow. Frontline reports. Julius was literary.
Started Lucan’s Civil War and realized i must read Caesar’s personal accounts first. Deep background for Lucan. Lucan demonizes, appropriately, Caesar, but emerges from his own writing as a real person. I love the Landmark series
Finished all of Dante (whew!), now turning to Lucan’s Civil War, a stark epic of Caesar and Pompey, condemning civil strife. Written during the reign of Nero. Translated by Susan Braund
Trying to choose my next read from these choices. Most have a connection to the Commedia, Dante’s, which i will finish soon. Leaning towards The Thebiad or Orestian/The Illiad. Dying tho to read Faust or Finnegan’s Wake.
Immersed in the famously difficult ‘Paradiso’, Dante. It would be impenetrable (compared to Inferno & Purgatorio) if not for the superb ‘Reading Dante’ from Yale. Even so, this is a silly, profound, and dense book. Poetry used to be Writing itself, in ancient and medieval tomes. Allusive language.
Finished ‘The Consolation of Philosophy’; tackling ‘The Thebiad’ as an insertion before Dante’s final ‘Paradisio’. Joyce’s Thebiad is comprehensive; Lewis’s Thebiad is a facsimile with Latin and Greek commentary. Challenging.
Boethius, arrested & condemned to a brutal death, wrote “Consolation of Philosophy” in prison, in the months before being bludgeoned to death. His interlocutor was the divine spirit of philosophy, appearing in his cell. His book explores the problem of evil. Brilliant. Read the top of this page.