Mar 6– “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe (1845)

 The James Earl Jones version gets the most love, but I'm partial the Christopher Lee.

Mar 6– “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe (1845)

Summary: A creepy raven crashes a dude's reading session and reminds him of his dead girlfriend. 

Commentary: I will, again, lament the choice of The Poetic Principle instead of Philosophy of Composition, especially since The Raven is the model text for it. 

Beyond that, it's "The Raven." You've probably already read it, and I don't know that I have any criticism to share that hasn't already been written 1000 times. 

I've enjoyed "The Raven" for as long as I remember. I've said before how I don't like most poems, but I do enjoy a lot of narrative/epic poetry, and I think Poe's "Unity of Effect" might be the simplest way to explain it. If the ideal for a piece of art (Poe specifies mostly poetry, but I think it's broadly applicable across mediums and genres) is to convey something, then it would be foolish to casually discard any aspect of that art without good reason. But that's exactly what "traditional" poetry does. You wouldn't (without a specific good reason) try to write a prose story without a plot or dialogue, anymore than you'd try to make a painting without any straight lines. Yet it's "normal" for poetry to almost completely remove plot, dialogue, and often severely turn down character, in the hopes that the artist will somehow convey something via pretty word choice alone. 

Mar 5– From "Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini" by Benvenuto Cellini (1563) translated by John Symonds

 No Music

Mar 5– From Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini by Benvenuto Cellini (1563) translated by John Symonds

Summary: Cellini escaped prison, his jailors are idiots, and he uses urine for first aid.

Commentary: Cellini is the worst sort of creative non-fiction writer . He starts off with a story about a guy thinking he's a bat and how he wants to build bat wings, but doesn't even escape prison with them! It wouldn't be any less believable than the story anyway.

Mar 4– "From Some Fruits of Solitude" (1682) by William Penn

 Pennsylvania

Mar 4– From Some Fruits of Solitude (1682) by William Penn

Summary: Know thyself, smell the roses, inner beauty is more important, remember that you're not perfect, moderation in all things, discipline, marry for love.

Commentary: Ben Franklin definitely read these. I changed my wife's tire and then had a drink with dinner. I'm tired. Pretty good advice for the most part.

Reflections on Week 9 (Feb 26- Mar 3)

  Link to this week's readings

Back to being a little ahead again!

Quick review on this week's readings:

Feb 26 Preface to Cromwell by Hugo: 2/5 The assorted contradictions (perfection of pastoralism vs truth of Christianity) here are interesting to think about, but overall not a particularly interesting or well written piece.

Feb 27 Assorted Poems by Longfellow: 5/5 I think this is the first 5/5 I've given, and it's to poems. Just goes to show strong writing is still great, even if its outside your normal genre.

Feb 28 “On The Institution and Education of Children” by Montaigne: 2/5 We had another education piece on Wednesday. Like a lot of the other essays (particularly by the French writers) I don't necessarily disagree with most of this, I just didn't need to read an essay so long on speculation and short on actual points.

Feb 29 From Hermann and Dorothea by Goethe: 2/5 Passable "my dad doesn't want me to marry you" story. We get mostly the end, and I'd like to have seen more of the middle. Interesting dialogue

Mar 1 “The Spectator Club” by Richard Steele: 3/5 I'm more interested in reading some of the later Spectator pieces than this one, but I can respect the desire to grab an introduction.

Mar 2 From Two Years Before The Mast by Dana: 4/5 I'm still amused that the first excerpt we get here has them off the ship for 90% of it, but a good piece overall. 

Mar 3 From Life of George Herbert by Walton: 1/5 Poorly written and uninformative biography.

Weekly Average: 2.71 Pretty average week overall. Not to repeat last week's summary, but I don't really get a lot of Elliot's selections here. Hermann and Dorothea, "The Spectator Club", and Two Years Before The Mast feel like odd excerpts to pull out, and Life of George Herbert is a bit like like picking Measure for Measure as the only Shakespeare in a collection.

Overall Thoughts on The Project:

The best part of any reading list is getting to find pieces you wouldn't normally read, but wind up enjoying. Second is giving you an excuse to read something that you've wanted to for a while, but never got around to. This week had both with Longfellow and The Spectator in the first category, and Two Years Before The Mast in the second. This is the second or third time a poem selection has surprised me in T5FSOB, and I'm glad I'm getting a chance to appreciate poetry a bit more, and to start to identify what I like (and why I dislike so much poetry). On the whole, I think it comes down to both subject and format. So much poetry is just overwrought and cliche. Great, you love X a lot. We get it. No one else has ever loved something as much as your love X. Mmmhmmm. Combined with shoehorning in words that don't really fit to match rhyme or meter schemes that make them awkward to read, and it's not a fun experience. When we get poems with more interesting/aspirational content, and either a looser pattern (or just make better use of the existing one) I enjoy them more. It's interesting, since I broadly like the use of limitations in art (found footage/epistolary, rough pencil sketches, etc.) but the rules for poetry generally don't seem to pay off. 

It occurred to me this week that I never really explained my scoring system. In truth, I don't think I ever really thought it through myself. Moving forward, I'm going to attempt to calibrate it as follows.

1/5: Should not have been included in T5FSOB in the first place. Poorly written, not particularly intellectually stimulating, historically unimportant.

2/5: Valid for inclusion in T5FSOB but not a good selection for the reading list. Might be a poorly chosen excerpt from a stronger piece, or an okay piece that has value but not in the top 20% or so that a piece (by napkin math) should be to get into the reading guide.

3/5: A passable choice for the reading guide. Well enough written, and at least somewhat historic or thought provoking. While not spectacular in and of itself, suitable as a starting point to discover other pieces or start thinking about a subject.

4/5: Actually good. A selection that works without needing other pieces to prop it up. Writing quality is decent, and it has some sort of critical/educational value.

5/5: The best of the best. Something that immediately prompts me to want to find more on the subject/author or otherwise changes my perspective on life.

Mar 3– From "Life of George Herbert" (1670) by Izaak Walton

 No Music

Mar 3– From Life of George Herbert (1670) by Izaak Walton

Summary: A biography of a poet/priest.

Commentary: Another odd selection. Walton's most famous work, by far, is The Compleat Angler. I think that'd be a charming diversion from the norm in T5FSOB, and developing a hobby, like fishing, is good for a well-rounded liberal education. Volume 15 isn't even biographically themed (it's got another one of Walton's bios, and The Pilgrim's Progress) so it could've fit right in there. Might be an nice palate cleanser after the relatively heavy allegory in TPP.

Not really a great piece. It's a biography that tells as much about his family as it does him (part of this is due to the part Elliot selected) and it's full of awkward "Now I'm going to tell you about..." intros to sections that're only a paragraph or so long anyway. Complemented by the also common, "I will later write about" it feels like only half the reading is actual content. The inclusion of the love letter and sonnet were a nice touch. A biography-via-correspondence probably exists, and would be neat to read.

Mar 2– From "Two Years before The Mast" (1840) by Richard Dana

IT'S SHANTY TIME!

Mar 2– From Two Years before The Mast (1840) by Richard Dana

Summary: A sailor goes for his first shore leave in California.

Commentary: This is one I've really been looking forward to. I read a fair amount of naval fiction, but it's interesting to get the real life perspective, and Two Years Before The Mast is still consistently recommended almost two centuries after its debut. 

Enjoyable enough read, Dana is a fine writer. Conversational, with a good balance of detail. Like several other selections, it's kind of weird to have the first part we read being mostly them off the ship, but we'll get more later in the year.

There's quite a bit of non-English in here, and it makes me wonder how the audience in the 1800s would've handled it. Some of the selection we've gotten have a hefty sprinkling of Latin, and were written (I think) with the intent that an educated person would be able to read it. Here we get a little French, but quite a bit of Spanish. AFAIK, Spanish wasn't a super common second language back then. Did people just muddle through from context clues? If you were upper crust, would you have a Spanish>English dictionary in your study or wherever? Did Dana just not care about accessibility and go for authenticity?

Mar 1– “The Spectator Club” by Richard Steele (1711)

 Spectator Music

Mar 1– “The Spectator Club” by Richard Steele (1711)

Summary: An introduction to the characters of The Spectator

Commentary: I suppose it makes sense to introduce the characters in the first entry. I don't know that it's the most exciting thing to read. At this point, they're more or less stock characters, but maybe they were a bit more original at the time. The Wikipedia article on The Spectator is interesting, and I believe we get more later in the year.