January 2018 posts updates

If I see something interesting—post, video, etc.—that ties in well with a book I've posted about on the blog, I'll go back to the original post and update it with the link to the new item. I realize not everyone will go back to something they have already seen, so I thought an occasional "Update" post would be good. Here are a couple of updates I made in January that might be of interest.

Primo Levi The Periodic Table, posted almost ten years ago.

Carole Angier provides not just a nice overview of the book, but also includes the chapter “Cerium” with detailed commentary, at Aeon.

Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England by Thomas Penn

I didn't realize it, but Thomas Penn narrated an hour-long 2013 documentary titled Henry VII: The Winter King. It is currently available for Amazon Prime viewers, with several versions of it on YouTube. It is a good overview and introduction of Henry VII, but if this documentary piques your interest you'll want to read Penn's book. He goes into much more detail on every aspect covered in the show.

Books I plan to post on in February:
The Disappearance of Émile Zola: Love, Literature, and the Dreyfus Case by Michael Rosen
The White King: Charles I, Traitor, Murderer, Martyr by Leanda de Lisle
Brutus: The Noble Conspirator by Kathryn Tempest
The Gargoyle Hunters by John Freeman Gill
I've also been winding my way through The Landmark Julius Caesar and thoroughly enjoying it. I'm not sure how or when I'll post on it, but I definitely will.

On a side note, I want to thank everyone for their kind words. Things have returned almost to normal after my last surgery and it is such a blessing not to be in constant pain anymore. Now if my days were only half again as long so I could get caught up on everything...

I was going to do what?

Well, August has been anything but fun...two trips to the hospital and some surgery, for starters. Hopefully the pain levels will recede and I'll feel like reading and posting again soon. I apologize for the break but I'll get going again soon.

Still ending, and beginning still

After swearing I'd never work for another startup company, I've agreed to work half-time for another startup. I think we all know what half-time will actually mean, though. Plus I'll continue homeschooling the boys. How all of this is going to work I have no idea. I guess I was worried that I was becoming too complacent or something.

So if the posts are even more sporadic and erratic than they currently are and the focus is lacking (more than normal), you'll understand why.

A little late, but birthday pic as promised

Three used books and one used bottle of wine (magnum). Expect more on the Alas and Galdós soon. The Chave, sadly, did not survive the evening.

Coincidentally, His Only Son's round-about journey to me started at the Auburn University at Montgomery library. It may have been on their shelves while I was taking classes there at night during my senior year in high school.

Recent updates

If I find articles that relate to older material here I’ll add an update to the original post. I’m not good about letting anyone know about the updates so I’ll take this opportunity to note a few from the past few months.

Parade’s End on BBC Two
Update (12 Sep 2012): Parade’s End, the BBC way by Thea Lenarduzzi in the Times Literary Supplement

The Katyn massacre
(posted on the summary post for Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin
Update (10 Sep 2012): At the National Archives: Records Relating to the Katyn Forest Massacre

Forced relocation after World War II
Update (11 Aug 2012): Andrew Stuttaford's review in The Wall Street Journal of R.M. Douglas’ Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

BBC4’s radio adaptation of Ulysses
Updates: a review of the adaptation.
And another.
An article on why Ulysses is suited for radio.
Robin Brooks talks about the challenges adapting the novel to radio.

Satantango
Update (12 Sep 2012): László Krasznahorkai Reads from Satantango and discusses the novel with James Wood (courtesy Now That it's Now, the New Directions blog)

For the record, I made it through the first thirty minutes of the first DVD of Satantango. I couldn’t watch any more despite it being a faithful adaptation of the book.

The Stories of Bruno Schulz
Many thanks to zmkc for the pointing out the link to Nicole Krauss reading Bruno Schulz’s “Father’s Last Escape” (from a podcast at The New Yorker).

At the closed Giornale Nuovo, mr. h posted on Schulz, covering various aspects of his work with special emphasis on his artwork.

On the movie The Hour-Glass Sanatorium, Steve Mobia sent me a link to a trailer on YouTube that is much better quality than what I had watched. Short, but an excellent presentation of the weirdness of the movie as well as great quality... click here.

On the sesquicentennial of the Battle of Shiloh
Mental Floss had an article on the Angel's Glow that some soldiers experienced after the battle:

Some of the Shiloh soldiers sat in the mud for two rainy days and nights waiting for the medics to get around to them. As dusk fell the first night, some of them noticed something very strange: their wounds were glowing, casting a faint light into the darkness of the battlefield. Even stranger, when the troops were eventually moved to field hospitals, those whose wounds glowed had a better survival rate and had their wounds heal more quickly and cleanly than their unilluminated brothers-in-arms. The seemingly protective effect of the mysterious light earned it the nickname “Angel’s Glow.”

Pericles’ funeral oration
Update: Rhetoric as Ritual: The Semiotics of the Attic Funeral Oration

Travels with Herodotus
Update (2012 Aug 6): In the wake of Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life by Artur Domosławski (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) there has been a lot written about Kapuściński's inaccuracies (to put it nicely) and his collaboration with the Communist intelligence agency in Poland. A good overview on the dust-up can be found in Neal Ascherson's essay on the book and Kapuściński's writing.

Update (2012 Aug 28): A review of Artur Domosławski's biography by Peter Englund at Financial Times

Carl's Premium Deer Processing, Loxley, Alabama
August 24, 2012
Text message: "Just to let you know I arrived OK"

Recent updates

I occasionally go back to posts, especially the online resources posts, to update them with additional information or links as I find them. Here are some updates to those posts:


The podcast for the April 5th conference call in the Marathon2500 series. This podcast covers “War and Sports" with Professor Thomas Scanlon. I enjoyed it and even got a question in on the call.

RFI and the French National Centre of Scientific Research have collected the stories of 120 survivors in the first ever sound archive devoted to the Gulag experience. I add the link to the post on the summary on Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands

The complete list of posts at Forbes (to date) by two of the historians that assisted with the Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander: James Romm and Paul A. Cartledge

Several updates to the online resources for Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War

An update to last year’s posts to note that the annotated version of Some Do Not... had been released. It looks like Carcanet Press has finished releasing all the annotated volumes of Parade’s End by now. I definitely want to revisit this work with the annotated versions, but it may have to wait a while.

Additional links in the resources for The Histories by Herodotus

I added a link to an article at American Heritage looking at additional aspects of Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God

Added a link to additional English translations of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin that includes over 30 translations of the opening stanza

My online resources post on Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying now includes a link to Faulkner reading from the work, courtesy of Open Culture

Some additional links added to the Tristram Shandy online resources page

The online resources page for Gilgamesh adds a link to Steven Riddle’s review of The Buried Book by David Damrosch

I added a link to another blogger’s review of Joyce's A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man

A link to information on nineteenth-century Portugal which will help in reading Eça de Queirós’ The Maias