Reading List for SS #21
This is a first sketch. If you read nothing else, you must read the Boethius text. If you have questions or comments, you this post and subsequent posts on the same subject.
Category: Free Content
Herodotus, Books II-IV, Part One
Herodotus’ theme, as I observed in the first installment, is the conflict between Europe and Asia or, more properly, Greeks and barbarians. (In a day or two, we shall have a podcast on what barbarians are.) In a way, his work can be treated as a kind of essay in definition, that is, he is defining Greekness or Hellenism partly by describing Greek behavior and partly by the contrast, often merely suggested, with barbarians.
Tune Out
FB friend Patrick Mulvey posted a great comment on my previous scribbling:
“It may a small sample size but many of my babyboomer contemporaries and younger extended family members who suffer from ‘real’ mental illness…manic depression, bipolar disorder and worse…….all used illegal drugs regularly in their teens, 20’s and 30’s. I’m not saying this is the only cause of mental illness but one only has to look at our homeless problem and know that lack of housing is not the major reason.”
Hemingway, Stinker and Writer
Some people on FB are gassing on about what a stinker Hemingway was, and concluding therefore that he couldn’t write. Treating novelists as either heroes or demons, ideologues or intellectuals, is a grave mistake that is generally made by people who do not read, much less understand literature.
Herodotus, 0: Introduction
Since the Persian Wars—like the Punic Wars, the Crusades, and the West’s ongoing struggle with Islam—serve to define who we are, it will be useful to reread Herodotus, particularly the books that are directly relevant to the cultural struggle between the West and its enemies. For those who are picking it up for the first time, I must warn you that reading Herodotus, the most entertaining of historians, may become a habit.
Picking Next Book, May 2021
It’s time to pick another book. I propose either a selection of Tennyson’s Arthurian Idylls or else Gulliver’s Travels, which I have been intermittently rereading. My wife and I have been working through Herodotus after breakfast and have at last hit Book V, where we can turn from Scythians and Libyans and read about Macedonians and Greeks on the eve of the Ionian Revolt that leads to Darius’ invasion of 490. This week I’ll be welcoming expressions of preference on any of the above.
Sloth, Spandex, and Goose Cassoulet-A Neophyte’s Hunting Adventure, Part One
I have a chronic reluctance to get up before dawn to perch myself in a tree-stand at first light in the middle of deer season, but, as I faced the final week of hunting, my sloth yielded to an insatiable venison-jones which drove me, regardless of moon phase or feeding schedule, temperature or precipitation, to go out early every morning of that final week, shivering in wind and rain, before work hoping for the arrival of a doe into my kill zone.
The South–and the Kennedy Brothers–Still Right, Part One of Two
The first time I personally witnessed cowardice at high levels was upon the occasion of the first edition of The South Was Right being introduced into my high-school library. In 1993 my father and I joined our local Major John Pelham Camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Jacksonville, Alabama. It was at a meeting of that camp that I spoke with a man (whose name I cannot recall) who told me he was a past principal of my school. He spoke to me about a new book by a pair of Louisiana twins that was a scholarly and...
