hotchpotch
A few notes on current reading:
- Jung’s The Archetypes and the Collective Unsconscious. Assertions sparsely supported by evidence; or, wishful thinking. Allusive, sometimes unconvincing, but an enjoyable romp through the murk of someone’s unconscious, even if it isn’t necessary ‘collective’.
- Richard Butterwick’s Lithuania: A History. Chatty history, with more minute parenthetical digressions than even I care for, and also more references to video games than I expected (for a chapter on medieval/early modern history).
- Christmas Humphreys’s Buddhism. In addition to a name that is always surprising to see, Humphreys has a peculiar tone to his writings that combines sparks of keen insight with a wide-ranging, self-contented blindness.
- Dorothy Sayers’s translation of the Song of Roland. I don’t think the Song of Roland is very good; in this it is much like Beowulf. Roland also appears to have deserved the whupping he got.
- Eileen Chang’s Time Tunnel. Acute images interlarded with tedium. I cannot tell, writing that, if I mean the stories as experienced by the characters or the reader.
- D.C. Lau’s translation of The Analects. I think I still prefer the Daodeching, as what the Master says usually seems to be a bit tiresome and irritable, as though interrupting a secretary, currently on the phone with some remote VIP, with a banal question about the napkins for a small party to bid farewell to the latest batch of unpaid interns. But you know the secretary would be mad if you got the wrong ones, even though it isn’t at all important.
- A short biography of Michelangelo, with some of his poems and letters. The politics of education has not, apparently, changed all that much in spirit.
- Rebecca Perry’s May We Feed the King. The closest comparison I can think of is Wendy Walker’s The Secret Service, and I mean that as a high compliment, even though the books are not at all alike in their details.
