In which I reread poetry because I was drunk. I think Saturday is the closest I've come to missing a day.
Quick review on this week's readings:
April 15 "Oh Captain My Captain" and others by Whitman: 3/5 Exactly meets the bar for an acceptable selection. Would've probably gone up a point if Elliot added the other two "Lincoln Poems" which are both short and good.
April 16 The Divine Comedy by Dante: 2/5 I like The Divine Comedy well enough, but Elliot picks the weirdest sections and puts them out of order.
April 17 Autobiography by Franklin: 3/5 For once, I'll blame this one on Franklin, not Elliot. All of the sections that make up this selection are fine and interesting, but they don't really flow together well.
April 18 Don Quixote by Cervantes: 4/5 A CHAPTER ONE, HOLY CRAP! And it's a good one.
April 19 "Concorde Hymn" by Emerson: 3/5 Better sung than read, but a fair piece either way.
April 20 Assorted Poems by Byron: 2/5 I sort of read these drunk the night they were assigned. I went back and reread them sober tonight. They're not great.
April 21 Introduction To The History of English Literature by Taine: 2/5 Art is a fossil of a person/culture is a neat metaphor. Art is pointless except as a way to study the people who made it is questionable.
Weekly Average: 2.71 I spend a lot of time in these reviews whining about good piece-bad selection, but it really stands out with DQ and TDC this week. Give us the beginning for context, or an especially strong part that illustrates the whole piece! Instead, we often get seemingly random middle chapters (and then get first chapters after two or three others). The poetry selections are similar. Whitman gets pages to ramble on in "When Lilacs...", but we couldn't get the less than one page for the other two Lincoln poems?
Overall Thoughts on The Project:
I like when we get readings on subjects similar to T5FSOB. Obviously you can't have too many, but reading Taine and his comments were interesting to compare to the notes in the reading guide. I think Elliot and the other people who worked on T5FSOB would agree with me that using literature to learn about a culture is valuable, but not the only reason to read. They talk a lot about entertainment, if nothing else. I don't know if learning about philosophy, morals, etc. directly counts. On the one hand, you learn about the philosophy of the writers, but if you care more about philosophy for its own sake than philosophy in 1750s Manitoba or something.
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