...lookout for that "bob-war", folks.

Wow, another dozen posts.  I'm going to have to start a round-up post of round-up posts at this rate.

There are so many translations of THE ILIAD. Ambitious, reverent, respectable translations compiled by similarly-natured men and women.  Too bad. Because this translation has what most of those scholarly tomes lack: verve, pizazz, clarity, and bluntness.  To be fair, those traditional translations are by adults for adults.  The version I'm talking about here is for children. 

Nick McCarty's retelling of THE ILIAD is a bare bones story version.  Reading this version is like watching a soccer game -- non-stop action, reaction, blow-by-blow...he's calling the game!  Not a wasted word nor gratuitous comment anywhere.  And here's a word I rarely ever use -- GRIPPING!  The way he tells the story is gripping.  McCarty has distilled the story down to all the action bits.  THE ILIAD is about an interesting war to begin with, but that quality of bloodthirstiness is tamed and faded by the time the traditional scholars get through with it.  This version designed for children has all the imagery, action, power and range of emotion you might find in an oral telling in the original Greek.  Every word counts.  Every sentence paints a picture.  Every paragraph drives the action forward.  Nothing is wasted nor superfluous. 

"So they came -- swan-prowed, open boats crashing through the deep, green sea and over the sparkling dawn waves...They rode, like carrion birds swooping the swelling waters together, close by the black cliffs and foaming spray."

F**k, yeah!  Bring it on! 

I absolutely love how the story namedrops like crazy.  It's crazy with labels, too. 

• Agamemnon, King of Men, son of Atreus, High King
• Nestor the Wise
• Idomeneus the Cretan, the spearman
• Zeus, Lord of Lightning
• Poseidon, the Earthshaker
• Apollo, the Archer God
• Thetis, Goddess of The Silver Feet

It's not that this is new stuff, it's that this version has done a superior job of putting all the action at the forefront. It's all the best bits.  I'm surprised this is being marketed as a children's book.  I would put this up against anything Loeb or Penguin has to offer.  It's easy to follow the story.  The language is vivid to a high degree.  The qualities that make ILIAD a magnificent poem are here as well.  In several places during the story, the sentence structure or imagery closely echoes the original poem, such as the section of the thousand ships. An amazing feat of scholarship.  McCarty does that wherever he can.  He pulls the feel of the original poetic tale in, instead of dumbing it down as most children's versions of classic stories tend to do.

Another writer who has brought Greek mythology to children is Mary Pope Osborne.  She has done a respectable collection of Greek myths retold for children and I use them.  Very reader-friendly.  But this ILIAD far outshines her Odyssey stories.  It's the language.  The language is what makes all the difference.  Again, the vividness, the straighforward, no wasted words, picture-painting prose.  I'm excited about this book. Reading it gives me such a rush. It grips you from the beginning and hooks you from chapter to chapter.  It's a stimulating read that's great for reluctant readers.  You can read it aloud or let your students read it.  Your class can make skits from it.  This is a book that should be used in the classroom.

CH. VII:

Hector hurtled into the field in full battle armor.  His chariot had bronze rails and ivory fittings on the reins.  The reins were made of oxhide, strong enough to curb the wildest horses.  With his long spear in his left hand, Hector surged through the men fighting hand to hand, jsut as they were about to retreat.

"Stay!" he called.  "You won't fight for nothing.  Be real men, not cowards.  Don't give another step."

Oh yeah, it's ON!  One of the things that's so fun about this version is you can play with sports idioms.  I could go on about all the lessons that are possible with a story like this, but that's not exactly my point.  It's a fun book to read and it's a great story to teach. Go for it.

A caveat: the edition I got from www.scholastic.com has a different cover from the one shown here.

Other books in the Kingfisher Series:

Children's Greek mythology by Mary Pope Osborne:

Related posts:

Pen & Paper in Perfect Accord

IF CATS COULD READ...

I was introduced to this book back in 2003 by my then principal.  He used it as a guidebook to make sure students were getting their educational needs met.  I agree with a lot of the principals in it because they are sound devices for intellectual development.  It's not anti-modern, not anti-technology.  It's a theoretical foundation to guide parents.  I am going to defend this book.

It's a hefty hunk of idealism, not without its critics.  The author, William J. Bennet, is a former Secretary of Education. He was in the news some years back on account of his gambling addiction and other peccadilloes.  So he gambles. Does that mean he doesn't know anything about how to educate children? Michael Jackson is a child molester.  His concerts sell out even though he has not been musically viable for over a decade now.  You can be a snob and turn your nose up at this guy and his book, but that would be stupid and ignorant.  A reviewer on www.amazon.com called Bennet, et. als. views "elitist".  So it's elitist. So what?  It glorifies Western Civilization. er...that's where we live, isn't it?  It's not anti-universal.  It's pro-America and the literary culture that has brought us to where we are, for better or worse. 

One of the clear messages of this book is that parents should ask questions, be interested and active in their child's education: learn to discern good from mediocre teachers, make them read, and read with them.  It provides helpful lists -- not dogma -- ADVICE.  You're free to take it or not. You don't even have to read the whole book from cover to cover.  Take from it what you need.  It's a reference book, not a novel.  Parents should educate themselves in the education of their children.  As a parent, just like a classroom teacher, you can't teach what you don't know.  If you are afraid of mythology or philosophy, you might pass that fear on to your kids and that's just wrong.  TEC is not just about making sure your child is educated enough to hold their own intellectually, it's about active parenting. 

TEC provided me my professional mantra for teaching writing: Scribendo disces scribere: By writing, you learn to write. It underscores every lesson that I teach.  It has helped me be more conscientious about how and what I teach.  There is a problem with this philosophy, though.  It puts me completely and utterly at odds with the testing frenzy mentality that is strangling public school education.  TEC used to be what public school was like back before the data junkies took over everything.

When I finished reading the chapters on what 6th, 7th, and 8th graders should know, I felt a lot better about my ideas for teaching.  I'm an old-fashioned idealist where education is concerned, even though I love, love, love using technology.  This book validated many of my ideas.  Other books will come and go, glorifying, deifying, demonizing, and prophesy-ing, but this book is for educating human children. Not overstimulated, socially crippled, techno-fixated, test-taking trendoids.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE EDUCATED CHILD:

• "You are your child's most important teacher."
• "Early Moral Training"
• "Social Skills"
• "Ten Signs of A Good School"
• "How important is penmanship?"
• "What is the place of Western Literature in the classroom?"
• Questions to ask the teacher
• Teaching core subjects at home
• "Is memorization outdated?"

Children who are good readers in school tend to come from homes that are print-rich environments.  There's newspapers, magazines, kiddie books, whatever.  They are within reach and they get discussed.  Good readers tend to come from parents who are readers.  When children see parents reading, talking about reading, shopping for books and magazines, it shows the child that that is an acceptable way to live.  They see it as normal and accept it mostly unquestioningly.  They don't notice discrepancies until they come in contact with non-readers.  The reason for non-readers is the same, but in reverse.  Parents don't read or they read garbage.  They don't care about it, don't talk about it, or worse -- verbally nullify it. They might even ridicule the child if he/she shows an affinity towards reading.  (Those parents should be horsewhipped, btw.)

I was lucky. In my house, my parents had bookshelves in their closet. It was full of paperbacks, my dad's college books, a set of Collier's encyclopedias (remember those?) and mom's high school yearbooks.  Every room in the house had books in it -- bathroom and kitchen included.  And since our town was very boring and summers were long, guess what we did all day.  We sat looking at page after page of storybooks, dictionaries, the encyclopedias, comics, Readers' Digest, my mom's Harlequin romances and dad's car and gun magazines -- anything to pass the time.  When my siblings and I got to school, we could talk about anything you threw at us.  We were always in the highest reading level of our grade.  We lived "The Educated Child". My parents were on a first name basis with most of my teachers all during my school years.  They knew each other from high school.  I wasn't thrilled about it as a kid, but it made me check my behavior more often than not.

That's what this book is about.  Don't raise ignorant children.  You ruin the environment when you do.  The ignorant, uneducated, and anti-intellectual damage society as a whole by their barbarism.  Don't let "elitism" keep you from doing what's right.  Don't let the author's human failings keep you from seeing the truth of his words.  Harold Bloom writes in Where Shall Wisdom Be Found: "Societal pressures and journalistic fashions may obscure these standards for a time, but ...The mind always returns to its needs for beauty, truth, and insight."

Harold Bloom's lunch meat-thin book (that I picked up for a song at Half-Price Books) is like an eyedropper of nitroglycerine. This amalgamation of observations and elucidations booms and reverberates with intellectual stimulation. It’s better than the average graduate dissertation at one-tenth the size.  I don’t know that reading poetry is an “art”.  Understanding poetry may be. This book certainly makes a case for it being art. Bloom’s writing style is an art form in itself. He’s read so much and it shows. I sense that in his more convoluted sentences, the ones with dashes and semi-colons, clauses within clauses and all manner of noun phrases, he’s still holding back information. His dry prose bleeds intent.

AoRP succeeds in explaining the cavalcade of “tropes” and image architecture that is poetic language. Teaching English itself is an extraordinary experience because the language is so flexible, so multi-purpose…so maneuverable! Teaching English poetry is like showing students how to build a Rube Goldberg -- to create an elaborate simplicity.  It’s interesting that Bloom describes language as “concealed figuration”. I hear an echo of Orwell’s “Why I Write” when he explains how writing conceals intent and distorts the truth. In the case of poetry, language “exploits” using figures of speech. Take "exploit" how you will.

I feel sorry for people who live and think like cement wheels. Poetry is nothing to them. Not worth a second glance. A doorknob is more useful than an ode. People whose minds are like popcorn or flowers can be reached by poetry. This book, for all its good intentions, will probably not reach cement wheel people. Bloom’s sentences are too luxurious, his vocabulary too celestial. And….AND he does my absolute favorite Bloom-thing: he makes adjectives out of people’s names. Heehee! I love it! Blakeian, Yeatsian. Epic! Mozartean, Popean! Stop! You’re killing me!

One of the things I like best about the writing in this book is that in several instances, Bloom talks about poetry like it’s music. It’s an auditory treat. He uses the language of music to opine on Blake, Pope, and Milton. It's a real pleasure to read. Another reader-friendly trait is that it all sounds like a lecture – but a good lecture, with lots of examples. Too many examples, probably. It’s a really, really thin book. If it was any thinner, it would have only one side. It’s thinner than Funny Jokes to Make You Popular by Franz Kafka. Whole pages are given to long poems and index of poems.

If you are afraid of poetry, this is a decent book. It’s thin. It’s not intimidating – until you open it and start reading. Then watch out. You'll be blinded by the light (hey, that would make a great song title...).  If you are okay with poetry, beware of phrases like “a benign haunting in poetic tradition.” “Repressed reference is a defense against overinfluence.” Qoi? Then it’s so cute how he comes back down to earth: “I can chant Poe by the yard, from memory…”

“Arnoldian”! Woo-Hoo! THAT'S what I'm talkin' about!

The word “inevitability” shows up a lot. Since he paints poetry in musical terms, I take that to mean a “resolve” as in a musical resolve -- when a melody comes back to the note where it started. Every image or figure that comes next should strike the reader as natural, inevitable. Not jar as jazz might. Although, if you jar and make it work, that is good poetry too. Maneuverability.

From reading all the shameless name-dropping throughout the book, I get the impression that Bloom read Critical Theory Since Plato, or more likely, has read everyone in it. It feels good to think of Longinus and Wimsatt, and Pope being quoted by Bloom. I feel connected to good ideas. It gives me perspective and that great feeling you get from riding the same wavelength with another mind, a mind I greatly admire.

April is National Poetry Month.

Related posts:

• ROOTING OUT BLOOM'S WRITING ROOTS
• ROOTING OUT BLOOM 2: The Western Canon
• ROOTING OUT BLOOM 3: Where Shall Wisdom be Found?
• CHAUCER'S FAMOUS ROAD TRIP  
• CRITICAL THEORY SINCE PLATO

For a change, I'm just going to blog about one book, instead of my usual mass blogathon o'books.  This one book is, on its own, worthy of a blogathon.  It's critical theory since freakin' PLATO! Unfortunately, it's too big and heavy to carry around in my purse. I've been out of college a long time, but this was the one book I made sure survived all my life milestones.  I bought it for a special topics class "Literary Theory and Criticism" taught by a wonderful professor named Nancy Grayson. I wasn't too conscientious about getting my work done, but I loved reading the book and discussing it.

The TOC is like a timeline.  Check it:

Classics represented:

1. Plato (duh!)  (The Philosopher's Song, verse 2)
2. Aristotle (The Philosopher's Song, verse 2)
3. Horace
4. Longinus
5. Flavius Philostratus
6. Plotinus

Early Christian and Medieval:

1. Boethius
2. St. Thomas Aquinas

Renaissance:

1. Dante Alighieri
2. Giovanni Boccaccio
3. Julius Caesar Scaliger
4. Lodovico Castelvetro
5. Sir Phillip Sidney
6. Jacopo Mazzoni

1600s

1. Sir Francis Bacon
2. Henry Reynolds
3. Thomas Hobbes
4. Pierre Corneille

1700s

John Dryden; Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux; John Dennis; Alexander Pope (lovingly highlighted with pink highlighter); Joseph Addison; Giambattista Vico; Edmund Burke; David Hume (The Philosopher's Song, verse 1); Samuel Johnson; Edward Young; Gotthold Ephraim Lessing; Sir Joshua Reynolds; Immanuel Kant (The Philosopher's Song, verse 1);

1800s

William Blake; Friedrich von Schiller; William Wordsworth; Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; John Keats; Arthur Schopenhauer  (The Philosopher's Song, verse 1); Thomas Love Peacock;Percy Bysshe Shelley; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (The Philosopher's Song, verse 1); Thomas Carlyle; John Stuart Mill  (The Philosopher's Song, verse 2) ; Ralph Waldo Emerson; Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve; Edgar Allan Poe (really? seriously?); Matthew Arnold; Hippolyte Taine; John Ruskin; Charles Baudelaire; Karl Marx; Friedrich Nietzsche; Walter Pater; Emile Zola; Henry James; Anatole France; Oscar Wilde; Stephane Mallarme.

Turn of the century and 1900s

George Santayana; Leo Tolstoy; William Butler Yeats; Benedetto Croce; A. C. Bradley; Sigmund Freud; Edward Bullough; T. E. Hulme; T. S. Eliot; Irving Babbitt; Carl Jung; Leon Trotsky; Boris Eichenbaum; I. A. Richards; Samuel Alexander; John Crowe Ransom; R. P. Blackmur; Edmund Wilson; Paul Valery; Allen Tate; Kenneth Burke; Lionel Trilling; Wallace Stevens; Robert Penn Warren; Ernst Cassirer; W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley; Cleanth Brooks; Jan Mukarofsky; Jean-Paul Sartre; Eliseo Vivas, Ronald S. Crane; Philip Wheelwright; Roman Jakobson; Northrop Frye; Gaston Bachelard; Walter J. Ong, S.J.; E. H. Gombrich; E. D. Hirsch, Jr.; Roland Barthes; Sigurd Burckhardt; Georges Poulet; Murray Krieger.

Whew!

Even though the classical Greek and Roman are not well represented individually, there are numerous references to other writers of that period, as well as the Bible. Lessing's Laocoon (the second "o" should have an umlaut over it), for example, is an analysis of art that mines Chapman's Homer quite deeply to illustrate his ideas.  Luckily, Greek bits are translated in the annotations at the bottom of the page.  Unfortunately, the parenthetical expressions are not.  Hmmm...

Contributions from writers of the 1800s and 1900s outweigh the rest by far, but it evens out because most of them mention critics of previous centuries.  So you get more than you pay for.

This is not a book to be read from cover to cover.  You need time to digest and "recollect in tranquility".  Not every contributor is a philosopher, as such.  Most writing genres are represented.  Pope, Yeats, Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Eliot -- Poetry.  Frye, Barthes, Trilling, Richards, Krieger -- professional critics.  Von Schiller, Schopenhauer, Lessing, Goethe -- German literary royalty.  Painter Joshua Reynolds.  Essayist Emerson.  Psychologists Jung and Freud.  Political rhetoricists Marx, Trotsky, and Mill.  Journalist Joseph Addison.  Wits, novelists, social critics, even just plain ol' storytellers.  Finally, full-on, f***-off, hardcore philosophers -- Nietztsche, Sartre, and Kant.  It's a banquet!

And the jargon! OMG! Depending on how you feel about terms like aestheticism, phenomenological, structuralist, post-structuralist, deconstructionalist, contextualist, the overused and under-understood "existential", psychoanalytical, and trancendental, you'll end up with either a hard-on or an aneurysm.  One of the best things about the writers in this voluminous volume of ideas is that most of them are fluent in more than one language, and they use it.  They reference writings in German, Greek, Latin, Italian, and French.  Again -- a bargain!

I love Sir Kingsley Amis's gripe that being rich sucks because you're forced to hang around rich people.  The same goes with writing.  Being a writer sometimes sucks because you're forced to read a lot of writing, a lot of which you might not agree with.  Don't kid yourself.  If you put even five of these guys together in a room, it would be seafood forks at 10 paces.  Unless they are all too drunk.  (The Philosopher's Song).  It was a refreshing relief to see Thomas Carlyle use the expression "mumbo-jumbo" in his chapter "Symbols" from Sartor Resartus.  Sometimes they can surprise you and be down to earth.  You'd never see Alex Pope using an expression like that. 

It hasn't all been nose-in-the-air, ivory-towered intellectualism reading this book over the years.  I can't think of Jean-Paul Sartre without mentally quoting the Monty Python skit about him, his "wife" Betty-Muriel, and Beulah Premise.  I get an endorphin high every time I watch that sketch.  Then there's the epic classic Philosopher's Football (Soccer) Game where Confucius is the referee, and it's the Greeks vs. the Germans.   I think it was Euclid's idea to finally kick the ball.  Then the iconoclastic "World Forum" with Marx, Mao Zedong and Che Guevara answering questions about soccer.  It's because of "back-door" perspectives like that that I can understand what I'm reading in a book like this.

Take a look at your book shelf.  This one tome can replace a lot of what you might already have.  It's a book to pass down the generations.  As if this book didn't have enough information, there's a selected bibliography that spans genres.  There's also a painstaking index.  Aristotle alone is referenced from page 1 through page 1248.  That's some street cred!  The idea of beauty is discussed by 49 authors.  Even something as ordinary as pleasure is discussed by at least 29 authors.  There are so many reasons this book is a treasure.  Get one. Now. No, for reals. It's all good.  (I'm not going to link the names because you can pretty much Google any of the names and get hundreds of hits.)

Buy Critical Theory Since Plato -- My Amazon.com review of this book

Buy Critical Theory Since 1965

Recommendations

Loeb Classical Library

I Tatti Renaissance Library

Monty Python's Flying Circus (The 64-Ton Megaset at www.amazon.com )

Related Posts

THE PHILOSOPHER'S SONG, VERSE 1

THE PHILOSOPHER'S SONG, VERSE 2

ROOTING OUT BLOOM 3: Where Shall Wisdom be Found?

ROOTING OUT BLOOM 2: The Western Canon

ROOTING OUT BLOOM'S WRITING ROOTS

Teaching Core Writing Skills

Good Professional Books for English Teachers

WHY I WRITE -- BONDING WITH ORWELL