Category: Literature
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California's Bestseller, and Its Author
What’s the most popular and influential book in the history of California? An 1884 romance called Ramona, by Helen Hunt Jackson. It’s a longish book that follows the misfortunes of a beautiful young orphan who is half Scottish and half native American. She is raised by the Spanish rancheros of Alta California in the days…
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Literally, Plato
“This is intended to be a literal translation,” says Allan Bloom in the preface to his 1968 edition of Plato’s Republic. And it is, famously, or infamously, literal. Bloom puts his head down and digs out as word-for-word a translation as he can. What drove him to do so? He explains his motivation in the…
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Tragedy of King Saul
Reading the story of Israel’s first king this week, it occurred to me that this story in 1 Samuel has all the makings of a classic tragedy: his early promise, his fatal flaws, his downfall, the lament sung over him by David his successor. It’s got the epic sweep of salvation history, the dark mystery…
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Go To The Ant
Not long ago my whole family listened to a remarkable audio book. It’s a reading of Evelyn Sibley Lampman’s 1960 The City Under the Back Steps. It’s a great adventure story about two kids who get shrunk to bug size, and spend a few days working and fighting alongside the members of an ant colony.…
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Three Reasons to Write Out Your Ideas Now
Three authors who knew a lot more when they were older, but were glad they had written their books when they were younger: John Wesley: “Nay, I know not that I can write a better on The Circumcision of the Heart than I did five and forty years ago.” C. H. Dodd in 1958: “I have…
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Menand: Uncommonly Successful in Keeping the Felicities of Prose
I just finished a very fast read-through (with permission to skip some sections) of Louis Menand’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2001 book The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. It’s a 500-page book about one school of American philosophy. I picked it up used and have had it on the shelf for a few years,…
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Erasmus, Born to Bring Back Literature
Today (October 27) is the birthday of Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, known simply as Erasmus, famous in his own time as Mr. Renaissance. He was “born to bring back literature,” his contemporaries said of him: ad restituendas literas natus. The Renaissance was a defining event in Western intellectual history, precisely because it looked back into antiquity…
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What’s a Nice Christian Girl Like You Doing Reading Homer?
Two sisters sit at home, talking. The younger sister does needlework and arranges flowers picked from the garden, as she passes the time until her boyfriend comes to visit. The older sister, on the other hand, is trying to make some kind of sense out of her wasted life, having an emotional crisis brought on…
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Czeslaw Milosz’ Birthday
Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet who lived his last decades in California, was born on this day, June 30, in 1911. I am told on good authority that we should pronounce his name “Chess-wov Mee-woash,” but I can’t get used to saying those L’s as W’s, so now I stumble over his name whenever I…
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning Was One Theological Poet
Elizabeth Barrett Browning died on this day, June 29, in 1861. She was the most famous female poet of the Victorian age, easily outpacing other luminaries like Christina Rossetti and Jean Ingelow (who?). During her lifetime, the rumor was that she only missed the post of poet laureate because that Tennyson fellow was an unstoppable…
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3 from GKC
On the birthday of G. K. Chesterton (May 29, 1874), here are my three favorites from among his many poems. One for the not yet born, one for those of us making our ways through the everyday, and one for the very old. By The Babe Unborn If trees were tall and grasses short, As…
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April: An Argument in Poems
April is the cruellest month. So begins, famously, T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, a prophetic and incisive poem (albeit abstruse and alienating), capturing in word and image some of the losses and decadences that marked the modern world. April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out the of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire,…