Category: Wordery

The Aeneid: a not even pseudo-intellectual review

venusAeneas
gods are always pretty much naked all the time.

After I finished off the excellent Rubicon (detailing the events and people leading up to the death of the Roman Republic) by Tom Holland, I delved into some pulp stuff for a bit but was itching to complete my reading of Robert Fagles’s Aeneid to tie in the fantasy with the reality.  It was a long haul this one.  I think I started reading it in 2010 got a bit into it and moved on to other things–lots of other things.  Modern translations of the classic trilogy (Iliad, Odyssey and the Roman Aeneid) are amazing compared to the shit we had in the 80’s when I was struggling through some early 1900’s direct translation in High school that had no ear for the words.  The modern translations take a lot of liberties with the text and come out amazingly readable in comparison. I started with Stanley Lombardo’s version of the Iliad years ago and immediately went in for his version of the Odyssey.  Apparently he actually PERFORMS these stories for audiences.  That’s heavy stuff and the lyricism used in actual telling was not lost in his translation.

My dad gave me the Robert Fagles’s version of the Aeneid and I was skeptical at first but it turned out to be an excellent read– though Virgil is much longer winded than Homer I felt.

The plot is this– Troy gets sacked after the Iliad ends (we never get to see the sacking from Homer though) and apparently a bunch of Trojans survive and head out to found a second Troy.  Aeneas is their leadeger and he knows he is destined eventually to found a city in Latinum (Italy).  He fucks around a bit on his boats and ends up in Carthage betrothed to the queen there: Dido.  He’s fucking her all across the palace for months and months and then has a vision of his destiny and clears out that night with his fellow Trojans.  Dido tries to stop him and then kills herself.  There’s some more stuff on boats (sounds like the Odyssey doesn’t it) and Aeneas goes to talk to his dad in the underworld, seeing future Roman leaders in the process (?!).  His dad tells him to go kick ass.  Eventually, the Trojans get to Latinum and the Latins are at first amicable, with the King betrothing his daughter to Aeneas.  Unfortunately the gods all get involved because Juno (Hera) is still fucking raging pissed at the Trojans over the whole golden apple thing that started it all (if you trace it way back, it was the seduction of Atalanta that began this whole bloodfest) and they fuck up the betrothal and everyone starts throwing down.  The rest of the book is the Iliad again with fighting on chariots and 99% of the characters dying in the paragraph that they are introduced.  This is an amazing part of the book with the gods trying to help out their favorites, chicks fighting with bare breasts on chariots, people using magic weapons and armor and a lot of people, surprisingly, getting brained to death by rocks and boulders.  The book ‘The sword decides all” is probably the best in the entire thing with just a massive dust up after an attempt at a peace treaty is fucked up by the gods again.  And the end, like the Iliad, just sort of stops when the main antagonist (Turnus) is killed.  That’s the end. No denouement or anything like that.  Turnus hits the ground and that’s the last paragraph in this giant tome. Amazing.

So how is it?  The Iliad and Aeneid are sort of tied for good reads, while the Odyssey is by far the best because it’s just about this one guy and his desire to get home, and I really felt I could relate to that a ton more than all the hero fighting.  There’s not a lot of confusion in the Odyssey about all these other characters and their motivations as well. You really don’t know what’s going to happen to him in the end– what the COST will be for him to get home and what home is like. Whereas the Aeneid, you know Rome is going to be founded (not by him though) and it’s really just watching Aeneas kick ass to get there and having his friends die. Yet, once he started balling Dido– I was like “Who is this guy?”  The whole Dido distraction doesn’t make as much sense as the Circe one in the Odyssey.  In the Iliad, there is this huge group of Greek heroes that you start to figure out CANNOT BE KILLED and every time they fight they just kill everyone.  Achilles? Ok badass, but there are so many Greek heroes that are made to seem just as powerful, the Iliad seems like an episode of the Superfriends to me.  The verdict?  Don’t bother with the Aeneid if you haven’t read the Iliad.  You could skip the Odyssey, but since it’s the best one you may as well read it before the Aeneid as well.   The Fagles version is excellent and I will likely pick up the Lombardo one for a comparison of the translation.  Don’t mess around with stuff not translated by either of these two. You will die of fucking boredom.

You are kickstarting my balls

Ok so you have convinced me to back your shit via kickstarter– I already think it’s a good idea and I think you’ll get it done (someday) so there is my fucking money.  While I am interested in your progress I am really not interested in anything but the finished product, i.e.: when the fuck it’s coming out, when the fuck I will get to play it or have it and if there are any delays about points one and two. I have no interest in my inbox being peppered with constant emails about the minutiae of your development process or any of the cool stuff that will be in your game or piece of art– I will see ALL that shit when it gets into my hot little hands.  Don’t want your interim artwork, don’t want your videos about stuff, don’t want your backslapping about how great your kickstarter went either.  All that is fine, but I really just want YOUR PRODUCT.  What’s more, if you have an inkling that your kickstarter is going to fail, please stop sending me the pleading emails to tell all my friends.  I have already pinged you on some social networks, I have already told people of like interest I know about it and they either chose to throw some cash in, or did not.  Sending me constant emails with banners to slap all over my site to back the kickstarter just displays an underlying anticipation of failure.  And if you think your kickstarter wouldn’t generate enough $$– why did you GO SO FUCKING HIGH SO THAT THE GOAL CANNOT BE REACHED?   Sure Kingdom Death went to some insane levels of funding, but they were only asking for 35,000$ to start– it’s not their fault that they are incredibly talented modelers and had SEX EVERYWHERE (not death at all)

That said, I did back the above 40K rehash and also recently backed the Cortex Plus Hacker’s Guide.  I am just having so much fun using the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying system (if not the setting) that I just can’t help myself but hope for more shit for that system.  While I really like FATE, I’m starting to lean a lot more towards Cortex because it really does supers well and with the eventual goal to be running Exalted again with a better system than 2nd edition, Cortex is much more suited for it than FATE is (Kerberos Club is close though).

Next up for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

After reading 2009, I was sort of WTF about the series– it was good and all but tough to compare to the insanely awesome 1910 and everything that had gone before.  Needless to say, going from 1910 to 2009 with the group, there are a lot of gaps and the next book, out Feb 2013, starts to fill in those gaps with a one off story about the daughter of Nemo (introduced in the 1910 book) who heads to Antarctica.  Since they’ve already done the whole Blazing World bit in the north pole– I’m assuming some Cthulhu stuff in the south…

One thing that should be noted: I really think the Gally-Wag should have his own comic.  Moore took a pretty crazy (and potentially racialist) character and turned him into a perverted, cross-dimensional being with his own language.  What could be better?

It came from the wave 10/24

In addition to being the one week in the next month or so where the gaming industry hasn’t forced us to spend our hard earned cash, this weeks theme, if themeing of such randomness is even possible, would be “I MOUNT MY PLATYPUS!”

Apparently there’s going to be a micronauts film.  I don’t really think this is possible, but what the heck.

Some awesome color photos from the late 30’s and 40’s.  http://extras.denverpost.com/archive/captured.asp

Some dude despecialized the first Star Wars movie, i.e.: keeping as close to the original film while bringing it to HD quality.

I wouldn’t mind getting telefragged in this type of situation.

Close to the worst indy game I’ve ever played.

Beta stats for BF3.  Pretty amazing how many people played.  Makes you feel a bit like dust in the wind, except of course then you think again about the fact that you are a sentient being living out what is, compared to most other organisms in the biosphere, limited immortality,  in a universe that is largely filled with absolutely NOTHING — then you can feel like a unique little flower again like they taught you in the 70’s.

And then this, posted in it’s entirety:

At my old house I had this old man neighbor that would wait for me to rake my yard and then come out and use his air blower to blow the leaves from his yard into my yard. I was confused the first time I saw it happen so I didn’t think much of it. I thought to myself, “Oh he’s just an old retired boob and is sloppy with his leaf blower.” the first time it happened. But then when I went back out to rake up the leaves he had blown over I saw him in the fucking window watching and giggling.

When I went back out to rake my leaves later that month, I caught a glimpse of him in the window watching me rake the yard so I was aware that he was specifically waiting for me to be done. Sure enough, as soon as I went back in the house he came back out and did it again. I was fucking pissed. So I came back out and he wasn’t outside so I went and knocked on the door but there was no answer. The neighbor that lived on the other side of him saw me and noticed my hulk smash expression and came over and started chatting with me and said that he’d been living next door to the guy for 12 years and it has been happening the entire time he lived there. His retaliation, which I got to watch in action shortly after our conversation, was to buy a leaf blower of his own that was more powerful than his neighbor’s version, and blow all the leaves back into the guy’s yard and when the guy came out to blow them into other people’s yards again he would stand out there with his more powerful leaf blower and they’d have some super fucking silly old man leaf blowing duel shooting the shit back and forth at each other.

I didn’t have the money for the leaf blower, so I just took all of the leaves and raked them up and flipped them all over his bushes and shit so he couldn’t blow them out of there. I also started pissing all over his wife’s garden every night and killing all of the flower and sleeping soundly knowing that they were eating vegetables that had grown thanks to drinking my piss.

In the winter, the fucking guy would do the same thing with his snow blower. He’d wait for me to hand shovel the sidewalk and then blow the fucking snow from his section of sidewalk all over my front porch, walkway up to my house, and the sidewalk in front of the house. I hate shoveling, even more than raking, so I wanted to slaughter him but Midge thought that maybe if I did something nice for the guy and chatted with him he’d stop doing it. So I gave it a try and helped him out with fixing some shit in house, including his broken ass computer, and the thanks I got was he started plowing in my fucking garage door back in the alleyway. At that point I had to give him a quality sensless style shouting until he went in the garage and started brandishing some shovel or ax or something at me. This just made me even angrier so I started making a physical move towards him so he ran back in his garage and locked himself in there for awhile. After that, I started taking ALL of the dog shit from my back yard, which there was a huge amount of (two black labs worth) and threw it all over his fucking yard and continued to piss through the fence all over the areas that his wife’s gardens were

Summer Reading – Cropper’s Cabin

Yes, I know summer is over, but I finished this bad boy just after the solstice so it counts dammit!  Jim Thompson– crime writer, very under-read, if not underrated.  I find while reading his stuff that I have many V-8 head slapping moments of “oh THAT’S where they got that from!”   El Rey from The Getaway is referenced in From Dusk Til Dawn, and the whole “son is the father of the man” thing in Blood Meridian is straight out of The Killer Inside Me (not that Thompson made that up himself).  I’d say No Country for Old Men is almost a homage piece to Thompson’s style.  Though there is no doubt in my mind that McCarthy is the better writer overall, a virtuoso with diverse novels like Suttree and All the Pretty Horses, but for crime novels, Thompson is the best I’ve read, blowing away even Hammett in terms of construction and language.  That said, Cropper’s Cabin is not Thompson’s best, but it is a great fast read delving into the psychology of a kid that is pushed to the absolute brink by those around him, and like a powder keg, the reader is just waiting and waiting for him to implode or explode.  I won’t spoil it, as it has a few twists and turns to get to the inevitable conclusion, but suffice to say it has a pace change in the middle and some horrific revelations.  What I dug most about it was the window into the cropper’s (and their Indian landowner’s) world and lifestyle as a backdrop for the events.  In some of the other crime novels by Thompson, the place and situation don’t matter all that much, but in Cropper’s Cabin, the cultural context is crucial to the story.  I’d put the book slightly above The Getaway due to that book’s almost tacked-on ending (the El Rey bits), but not quite as good as After Dark, My Sweet.  If you’re looking for an intro into Thompson’s work to see if you’ll dig his stuff, Cropper’s Cabin is a good one.  Unfortunately this was last published in ’92 as part of the Black Lizard line of crime stuff so might be tough to find– but with electronic books (bleh!) it’s instantly available.

 

DC’s new 52

Yeah, I’m a weak person.  I broke down under the hype (and phone calls from MATT) and picked up a few issues of DC’s re-numbering of their popular titles (some had gotten into the 700’s so it was about time).  I was skeptical because, like a lot of people, I remember the awful Marvel New Universe.  So DC put out a new Batman N0. 1, Action Comics N0. 1, Justice League, etc.   With the exception of Swamp Thing, back in the day I discounted DC’s stuff during the heyday of Xmen (mid 80’s but before the X-splintering into so many titles it was impossible to collect or follow).  When ROM ended (shittily I might add), I picked up a Batman here and there and it was ALWAYS good, in addition, I got into the Justice League International madness when that was going through a really awesome period of writing and art.   With the normal Justice League, you knew they were going to just kick everyone’s ass once they got through the curtain of bullshit surrounding an enemy or problem, they had Superman after all.  With JLI, typically their ineptitude and lack of communication was a huge part of the curtain of bullshit between them and the real enemy.  What’s more, they were typically totally outmatched by their opponents (with the exception of times when Guy Gardner was around) once they actually found out where and who they were.   Anyway, it had a good run, and the new 52 one was meh.  The Batman one I got was good but extremely grotesque, I can’t leave that around for the kiddos to see.  Still sort of meh.

At the counter there was a free mag going through all the comics in the new 52 and though I feel a bit blase on the first couple, there are a few in the list that look like winners.   First off is Justice League Dark– dealing with spellcasters  (of course Zatanna is all up in there) and the like (John Constantine from Swamp Thing for example).  The cover is just gorgeousity itself so that’s a must buy.  Second is a title that I think is totally new: Red Hood and the Outlaws.  It looks very Image-esque (which is good for the art, but bad for the writing) and is in fact penned by a guy that worked on WildC.A.T.S.  Last is, and this is really showing my personal weakness, the oft-cheesy (especially back in the day) Legion of Superheroes.  While I’m aware of it’s cheese potential, I think this is the closest thing in print to the Alien Legion, so yeah, that’s my excuse.

There’s a bunch I’m on the fence about: Suicide Squad, a new Jonah Hex title, Animal Man (awesome cover there) and Batgirl (yes–batgirl) that I’m going to have to page through to see if their up to snuff before buying.  I know people are huge fans of Justice League, but I’m not one of them.  While FAR better than Marvel’s Avengers as a team, when you have a character involved that could punch the planet out of orbit, it just loses it for me.

Perusing the comic shop: what on earth happened to the fantastic four?  Spiderman?  White suits?  No Johnny Storm?  Well if any series needed a change, this was one (the Avengers can’t be made right so they shouldn’t even try).

Summer Reading: The Unfortunate Traveller

Free floppy hats for anyone who's left.

I did my time in college trying to get an English minor and why I don’t know, I knew I sucked real bad at the style of deconstructionist writing that got all sorts of ate up by most of the professors I had.  What’s more, lots of the kids in class had been actually exposed to the literary criticism quarterlies in high school while I, thankfully, had not.  The quarterlies is where professors from all over the place argue in the most exclusionary language possible outside of a medical journal over minutiae regarding subtextual male marginalism within some unfortunately phrased sentence from Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland.   As a student, you have to read stuff that and write about it.  You don’t write about the actual original text at all, only about the body of work out of these literary quarterlies surrounding the original text.  I turned in at least two papers that got passing grades without ANY familiarity with the original work outside of contextual inference from the quarterlies.  Once you start down the deconstructionist path, your brain is always thinking in those modes when reading anything light and especially when plowing over something heavy: and this is madness.  My cure right after college was to read everything William S. Burroughs published I could get my hands on as quickly as possible– you cannot possibly deconstruct cut-ups from say Soft Machine or The Ticket that Exploded (there is no illusion of complete understanding to undo).  I found that Burroughs stood in absolute defiance of the paradigm of literary criticism I fell into (oh ya know, only as an undergraduate) and just blasted that shit away from my brain forever so as I could go back and read my Thomas Hardy for enjoyment and not to figure out if he was writing out of some cultural paradigm that needs to be studied (which of course he was and it does, but not by me).

However, I don’t regret as it was a good, though ultimately pointless, mental exercise to be sure; the bonus was exposure to original works that I came to love and have gone back to many a time. John Gardner’s Grendel, The Virginian and what I’m eeking through for the third time over the summer: Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller.  This is not an easy read, Latin all over the place, extremely archaic language left and right, page upon pages of ‘what the hell is he talking about’ abound, but I believe this is the first picaresque in the English language, and may even be the first novel.   The book is about a page named Jack Wilton who is telling his stories to a group of people in a public house. He has a bunch of random adventures, some which applies his cunning (convincing a captain he hates during a siege to surrender to the French and tell them he is trying to kill the King,  acts which get the captain instantly hanged) and others he just observes (a peasant religious uprising that is put down harshly in Wittenburg).  I compare it most to The Golden Ass by Apuleius (where a guy porks a ‘witch in training’ and gets caught and in trying to turn into an owl to escapte, turns himself into a donkey), except with Jack Wilton, there is no apotheosis, no redemption and in a way, no essential meaning to the stories he experiences– he just sees crazy stuff, rips people off here and there, and gets himself into some bad trouble (almost used as a cadaver in some experiment).  That’s it, it’s the stories themselves that hold their own meaning individually, and Nashe goes to town in some of them with scathing social commentary, but no overall point to the whole work exists.  If you’ve read The Golden Ass, and leave off the last chapter (which sucked anyway) where Lucius turns back into a human and becomes a priest of isis, that’s about what you’ll get when you finish The Unfortunate Traveller, but the road there is filled with the comedy of pillage and freaks and bloodbaths that only a picaresque can deliver.