Humans and their Symbols

~ 500 words

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acerbic - adj - of sour or astringent taste/severe temper.

vivisect - v - to dissect the living body of an animal.

codicil - n - an addition, appendix, post script, or afterthought.

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Carl Gustav Jung, an influential early 20th century psychologist, came up with a number of interesting theories, some of which have been misinterpreted and misrepresented over the years. I find it informative in such instances to go back to the source (as my regular readers are no doubt aware).

To set the tone for this post, I'd like to share a quote from Jung's 1948 essay "On Psychic Energy"

"We must always bear in mind that despite the most beautiful agreement between the facts and our ideas, explanatory principals are only points of view, that is, manifestations of the psychological attitude and of the a priori conditions under which all thinking takes place"

Man and His Symbols (aka Mankind, aka Humankind) serves as a magnificent compendium of his life's work, though he didn't live long enough to see the volume compiled.  The book is comprised of five sections, the first written by Jung, and the remaining four written by his closest colleagues (those he trusted to accurately relate his theory of psychology). These topics range through discussions of the nature of the unconscious mind, the importance of myth and symbol, the process of achieving psychological maturity, symbolism in the visual arts, and a case study.

Despite being written by five people, the book is unified by the importance of symbology.  There is an enormous gulf between the subconscious of Freud and the unconscious of Jung.  To quote Jung,

"The ideas of Sigmund Freud confirmed for most people the existing contempt for the psyche.  Before him it had been merely overlooked and neglected; it has now become a dump for moral refuse.

This modern standpoint is surely one-sided and unjust.  It does not even accord with the known facts.  Our actual knowledge of the unconscious shows that it is a natural phenomenon and that, like Nature herself, it is at least neutral.  It contains all the aspects of human nature--light and dark, beautiful and ugly, good and evil, profound and silly.  The study of individual, as well as of collective, symbolism is an enormous task, and one that has not yet been mastered.  But a beginning has been made at last.  The early results are encouraging, and they seem to indicate an answer to many so far unanswered questions of present-day mankind."

It's the sort of book that, once you start quoting, it's hard to cut him off.  That by the way is the last bit of Jung's own section.  

Anyway, very interesting read.  Very accessible, too, which is not commonly said of books of psychological theory.  Worth a look for anyone interested in myth, symbolism, dream interpretation, or theories of mental functionality.

You can expect more posts on Jung.  I know I've said that before, but this time I mean it. 

Today's mildly disturbing graphic is the middle of "The Spirit of Geometry" by René Magritte (1937).  Surrealists like Magritte are lauded in Man and his Symbols for their unparalleled combination of realism and dream-like symbology.  

Also, just as a side note, I have decided to stop contributing to Blogcritics for a couple of reasons:

1. They have "rules"

2. Their interface is a pain in the ass.

3. Their site is chock full of trolls and it's even more of a pain in the ass to get them to remove trollish comments.

4. I published an apparently decent article on The Brothers Karamazov with them and it has redirected all my traffic for that post away from my actual site.  They said posting with them would increase my site traffic, but they lied.  Not that I'm making any money off of you (I do this purely to slake my colossal ego), but I like my site better.  You get the pictures, you get my interesting words and quotations, and most of all you don't have to put up with me trying to sell you anything!  We can talk about books without commercial pressure and I rather like that (exceedingly uncommon these days).  Also, I like to see my counter go up.  Thanks guys!!!

4. I'm not sure I even like the idea of being a member of a sinister cabal of (self-evaluated) superior writers. 

An Elegy to the Elegies of Theognis

~ 700 words

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obsequious - adj - servilely compliant or deferential.

paroxysm - n - any sudden, violent outburst, as of action or emotion.

dissonance - n - an inharmonious or harsh sound; discord.

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I recently polished off a book that has been on my "to read" shelf for some years now, the 1973 translation of Hesiod's "Theogeny", "Works and Days", and Theognis' "Elegies," translated by Dorothea Wender and published by Penguin Classics. It's a tidy little volume at just under 150 pages of unrhymed iambic pentameter. I'd like to talk about Theognis presently (I will probably deal with Hesiod in some later post).

Now. I don't like to give bad reviews, to a certain extent because I don't like to read bad books. Every once in a while, though, one sneaks through, as is the case with this particular translation of this particular poet.

Theognis, so far as we know, was a ancient Greek poet, who lived somewhere in the vicinity of 550 BC, around 200 years after Homer. He was a well educated aristocrat who lived in a city named Megara, (of which there were evidently several), and at some point lost his money and was exiled.

Now, I've read some poetry in my time, and this translation of the Elegies of Theognis is at best dull, repetitive, and inherently self-contradictory. The elegies produce the impression of an arrogant, whiny, self-indulgent man in the grip of whatever passed for a mid-life crisis in the iron age. One moment he's saying that all rich men have unjust hearts, and the next he's lamenting how poor he is and how he wishes he still had his riches. One moment he says that an honest friend is worth their weight in silver and gold, the next he advises to always be duplicitous, and never tell even your friends the whole truth. The one thing he universally agrees on, though, is that youth is wonderful and being old is worse than being dead. In fact, one gets the distinct impression in a couple places that Theognis is a pedophile. I know I can't make a claim like that without some proof, so here you go:

1335-1336: "Happy the lover who exercises, then / Goes home to sleep all day with a handsome boy."

1341-1342: "I love a smooth skinned boy, who shows me off / Against my will, to all his friends."

1345-1346: "The love of boys is sweet. Even the king / Of the gods, the son of Kronos [that is, Zeus], loved a boy / Ganymede, and he took him to his home / Olympus, and he gave divinity / To him, because he had the lovely bloom / Of youth. Don't be surprised, Simonides, / To see me love and serve a handsome boy."

Now, I know it's not entirely fair to brand these ancient poets with our modern moral sense, (I'm sure there was no legal age of consent in ancient Greece), but that doesn't make it any more palatable to our modern tastes.

The translation isn't terribly good either. I can not read Greek, I have never read the Elegies of Theognis before. However, the translator makes the mistake of including prose translations of certain verses in her translation notes when she is particularly liberal with her interpretation. She should have left it in prose!

I am currently reading Eugene Onegin, by Aleksandr Pushkin (you may have noticed the quote at the top of the screen). It's translator, Vladmir Nabokov, says some things I agree with. (He penned a literal, unmetered, unrhymed translation of Eugene Onegin.) He puts it bluntly, "can a rhymed poem [...] be truly translated with the retention of its rhymes? the answer, of course, is no. To reproduce the rhymes and yet translate the entire poem literally is mathematically impossible." He gets quite angry towards the end of that paragraph. When I read Homer, it is Homer that I want to read. When I read Dostoevsky, I do not want to read the translator's interpretation of Dostoevsky. I want to read Dostoevsky.

Eugene Onegin, by the way, I recommend to anybody currently alive. I would only recommend Theognis to a person who loves classical Greek poetry, who doesn't mind loose translations, and who has read every other poet of the era, and then I would recommend it only for the sake of completion.

Many thanks to ~plastic11 of Deviant Art, who shared with the interweb this striking picture of an ancient Greek amphitheatre, where poets would have their works performed... with varying degrees of success...

Article first published as Poetry Review: "Elegies" by Theognis, translated by Dorothea Wender on Blogcritics.

Reflections on Crime and Punishment

~ 1300 words !!!Major Spoilers!!!

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bravura - n - a display of daring, a brilliant performance

sacrosanct - adj - sacred or inviolable

conspectus - n - a general or comprehensive view, survey

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I finished Crime and Punishment this week, and I have to say it is definitely one of (if not the) best book(s) I have read.

In the first place the ending was fantastic. This man, crippled by ambition, intelligence and circumstance, finds redemption. If you've read the book this comes as no surprise, and you might even have thought it a bit corny. Love saves him in the end. Well, I'd just like to point out that love is not what saves him. At the end of the book (after going to prison), Raskolnikov falls ill, a sort of lack of will or purpose in life. Psychosomatic illness occurs frequently throughout the book. He misses his visit from Sonya (who followed him all the way to Siberia) because she is ill (notable because it is one of only two occurrences of illness caused externally in the book. The other is Katerina Ivanova's tuberculosis). She has a cold. At this point he realizes how much he relies on her for emotional support, he had been snubbing her up to that point, more or less. Of course, realizing his love for her is only the first step. On her next visit, when none of the guards are looking, he throws himself on her feet. In the end, he overcomes his pride, which up to that point had prevented him from making public (or any) displays of emotion. I thought that was a very good ending. Raskolnikov learns that just because you have an idea, that doesn't make it a good idea, even if you can rationalize it. It takes him the murder of two innocents, incarceration in Siberia, and him causing the death of his mother for him to realize this. Lots of people, young people in particular, could benefit from this wisdom I think.

I would also like to share with you a paragraph that appeared near the end. It really stuck in my mind for some reason.

He lay in the hospital all through the end of Lent and Holy Week. As he began to recover, he remembered his dreams from when he was still lying in feverish delirium. In his illness, he had dreamed that the whole world was doomed to fall victim to some terrible, as yet unknown and unseen pestilence spreading to Europe from the depths of Asia. Everyone was to perish except for a certain, very few, chosen ones. Some new trichinae had appeared, microscopic creatures that lodged themselves in men's bodies. But these creatures were spirits, endowed with reason and will. Those who received them into themselves immediately became possessed and mad. But never, never had people considered themselves so intelligent and unshakable in the truth as did these infected ones. Never had they thought their judgements, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions and beliefs more unshakable. Entire settlements, entire cities and nations would be infected and go mad. Everyone became anxious, and no one understood anyone else; each thought the truth was contained in himself alone, and suffered looking at others, beat his breast, wept and wrung his hands. They did not know whom or how to judge, and could not agree on what to regard as evil, what as good. They did not know whom to accuse, whom to vindicate. People killed each other in some sort of meaningless spite. They gathered into whole armies against each other but, already on the march, the armies would suddenly begin destroying themselves, the ranks would break up, the soldiers would fall upon one another, stabbing and cutting, biting and eating one another. In the cities the bells rang all day long: everyone was being summoned, but no one knew who was summoning them or why, and everyone felt anxious. The most ordinary trades ceased, because everyone offered his own ideas, his own corrections, and no one could agree. Agriculture ceased. Here and there people would band together, agree among themselves to do something, swear never to part--but immediately begin something completely different from what they themselves had just suggested, begin accusing one another, fighting, stabbing. Fires broke out; famine broke out. Everyone and everything was perishing. The pestilence grew and spread further and further. Only a few people in the whole world could be saved; they were the pure and chosen, destined to begin a new generation of people and new life, to renew and purify the earth; but no one had seen these people anywhere, no one had heard their words or voices.

The first time I read this I thought, this is Dostoevsky's vision of a world consumed by the philosophical forces he sought to counter. As I read this again, however, I'm not so sure. Certain elements certainly have an anti-rational lean (such as the epidemic having the ability to reason), but in general it's almost like the tower of babel all over again. For those in my listening audience unfamiliar with the story of the tower of babel, it occurs in the Bible after Noah's flood. Essentially, a bunch of people band together after Noah's flood to design and build a gigantic tower that would protect them from another great flood. In punishment for their insolence, God makes it so that no person can be understood by any other. To a person "love" may mean "hate", and "war" may mean "peace". Stymied by their inability to communicate with each other, they all sort of meander off and went back where they came from, and that explains why all sorts of different languages exist in the world.

Among Biblical stories, this one (in my humble estimation) is extremely influential. Off the top of my head, "babble", our word for incoherent nonsense, bears striking resemblance to "Babel". The organism that slips into your ear and translates for you in the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the Babel Fish. In Final Fantasy II, one of the core environments is the tower of Babel, which supposedly reaches all the way to the moon. It's an interesting game, what with the whole walking on the moon thing, but final fantasy almost doesn't count in this regard. It seems to me as if the people who make those games actively pursue world mythology to integrate into their content, no matter how obscure the source. Granted the old testament isn't exactly obscure, but I've seen references to Homer's Odyssey (in the form of Scylla).

Here is a picture:

Not exactly congruous with the description in the Odyssey (something about seven heads), but undeniably final fantasy material.

Oh, and while I have you here, I'd just like to mention that my good friend Jeff Chapman (his blog) has a short story in an anthology up for preorder! The anthology is The Midnight Diner Volume 3 and the story is "The Princess and the Vampire", which I believe I mentioned actually. Jeff has a sample of his story up on his blog, so check it out if you have a taste for astounding tales!

Also, he has had another short story accepted, "The Master and the Miller's Daughter". I haven't read it myself, yet, but Jeff given the quality of Jeff's fiction (and the fact that it was accepted after all), I have reason to believe that it is very good. Check it out if you get the chance!

The image today came from a pop art blog if you can believe it. It's unfortunately been derelict for more than a year, but still has an interesting archive of pop art. I don't know if it's really art, I'm not exactly an expert, but here's the link anyways.

Necrology 2

~ 700 words

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New Interesting Words!

salutary - adj - favourable to or promoting health.

solecism - n - a breach, error, impropriety or inconsistency, esp. in grammar or etiquette.

inimical - adj - unfriendly, hostile, adverse in tendency, harmful.

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This post, as one might gather from its title, is the second in my Necrology series, based on a series of essays contained in "Death and Dying: Challenge and Change", edited by R. Fulton, E. Markusen, G. Owen, and J. L. Scheiber. Today's blog post is based on the essay "Life and Death in the USA" by Melvin Maddocks.

Let me preface by saying that I am not American in the traditional sense. That is to say, I'm Canadian. Thus, some of the more regional themes were not readily apparent to me as I read this essay, but thankfully the majority of the article is not of regional interest.

Maddocks' purpose for this article is mainly taxonomic, as he is almost exclusively interested in segregating people into groups based on their views and beliefs about death. While such systems beg for exceptions, it is interesting to note the author's perception of general trends in society. This article was originally published in 1974, so one might argue that the 70s were an entirely different time and place. I would stipulate that the 70s were the last social revolution I'm personally privy to, and much of what was decided forty years ago is still relevant in today's society (not only because people who lived through the seventies now run things. Scary thought?). We still make references to hippies, though they have long been extinct, or at least, the only surviving specimens are kept in captivity.

He groups people into three categories.

1) The Pragmatist.
These are people who act to thwart death wherever it occurs. Immortality is possible if you try hard enough, or at least, death can be managed out of existence. Hence you get a plethora of how-to books, guides, handbooks, pamphlets etc. all espousing their particular theory on death and the grieving process (which you pay for of course, they are pragmatists after all). Maddocks calls this politicizing. Here's one of those how-to books for free.

manuscript: How to Die for the Incurable Imbecile

-Step 1-

Stop breathing.

end manuscript


2) The Optimist
These are interesting folk who hold that death "could be the best thing that ever happened to you". Death is not a disease, it is the natural course of life. You are going to die anyway, you might as well embrace it. Life's end can be a beautiful experience, as beautiful as life's beginning. These are the sorts of people who tend to pull the plug on people on respirators. Why would you suffer, they might say, when you could simply die and end your sufferings. It is from this mode of thought that power of attorney came into being. You should make your wishes known. You should have the right to choose the manner of your death.

3) The Existentialist
This group, comprised primarily of young 'uns (according to Maddocks) are melancholics. Suffering is to be honoured, case by case, and death gives meaning to life. Death, therefore, is authentic, and kids these days crave validation. Hence, Maddocks neatly explains his theory of teen suicide. I think kids still crave validation, correct me if I'm wrong. I die, therefore I am. To these sorts of people, if they are authentically depressive by nature and not simply lured in by the lethargy of melancholy, the possibility of living forever would be philosophically castrating.

The extrapolation of this, as seen by Maddocks, is that you get one of two futures. You either get a society advanced enough (remember, this was in the seventies, when resources were limitless and science would advance indefinitely) to create the "Anti-Death Machine", or you get a society sensitive enough to extract death's sting, the "Age of Compassion".

Anti-Death Machine? Unlikely. We are no closer to immortality now than we were forty years ago when the article was written. It all seems a bit like science fiction to me.

Age of Compassion? More likely. At the very least there's much less overhead. It could arise as a natural consequence of religious (specifically Christian) beliefs. Compassion is undeniably espoused in the Bible, and Maddocks says that "imitation of Christ [is a habit] that post-Christians have inherited in spite of themselves."

I would like to close with a little verse that closed Maddocks' article.

Xerxes the great did die,
And so must you and I.

Youth forward slips,
Death soonest nips.

Raskolnikov's Napoleon Complex

~ 800 words -- !Minor Spoilers!

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New Interesting Words!

philander -v- to make love without serious intention, to carry on flirtations.

reticent - adj - disposed to be silent, reserved.

samovar - noun - A metal urn, used for heating tea in Russia.

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10th post! Someone bake a cake!

This illustration, which I found on www.deviantart.com, is a rather artistic depiction of the crime in Crime and Punishment. For those of you who have not read the book (or have not read it in some time), Raskolnikov's first victim, that little old lady, was in fact brained by the blunt end of the handle, not the blade itself. So no, he is not holding the axe the wrong way in this illustration.

I wanted to take this opportunity to discuss some of the philosophical underpinnings of Crime and Punishment, while at the same time presenting some context to these ideas, as I'm sure was Dostoevski's intent when he wrote the novel.

Raskolnikov (our central character) is the quintessential melancholic. That is, melancholy as defined by humourism, an ancient mode of medicine that (on the grand scale of things) has only recently fallen into disrepute. Humourism divides a person's physical and mental health (concepts more closely correlated a hundred and fifty years ago) into four humours: blood, yellow bile, phlegm, and black bile. The theory is very old (think ancient Greece), but later evidence arose to support it. Apparently, if you let blood sit for a while, it separates itself into four distinct layers, which resemble the four humours. Each humour is associated with specific personality traits, and many diseases were at one point diagnosed and treated as imbalances in the humours. Hence, you get practices like bloodletting. I digress. A person with too much black bile, under humourism, is irritable, depressive, independent, and takes his philosophy personally. This describes Raskolnikov's personality quite thoroughly. He often has half-mad depressions which cause him to lay on his couch fretting. He is frequently rude to nearly every important character. His most ardent desire is just to be left alone.

And he takes philosophy very seriously. In order to really understand any book written in the 19th century, you have to know who the author was arguing against. While I'm not educated enough to know who specifically he was fighting (though I'm sure the translators of my edition are), I'm familiar with the concept he makes his case against. The name of the game is rationalism, and if you don't believe me, check some of the quotes I've posted on my "Interesting Quotations" page penned by our friend Fyodor.

The murder, as an act, is perfectly rational and completely justified by some of the larger principles that were (and still are) natural consequences of rationalism. Alyona Ivanovna, the unfortunate axe-ee, is an old crone, a moneylender and pawnbroker, who jealously hordes several thousand roubles (currency, ten roubles will by you a thrifty but serviceable wardrobe including boots, one hundred kopecks to the rouble). Raskolnikov is troubled by the human suffering that he encounters in his daily life. At one point he comes into thirty five roubles (an advance on his mother's pension) and twenty five of it goes to the widow of a man run over in the streets by a carriage.

So he asks himself this question. If several thousand roubles could do so much good in the world, why is it allowed to stagnate in some old crone's stash where it does no good to anyone? If these funds were distributed among the poor, and their lives improved, would that not be worth the life of some bitter old hag? Can we equate the life of a human being, even one so stale and abusive of the poor, with the well being of dozens of families?

Combine this with Raskolnikov's Napoleon complex and you have murder and robbery. Silly guy doesn't even rob her properly though, stealing only pawned trinkets that he subsequently hides under a rock.

Raskolnikov writes an article, before the book's timeline begins, theorizing that the world is divided into two groups of people. First, you have ordinary people, for whom crime can not be justified. Second, you have extraordinary people, for whom crime can be justified. If one of these extraordinary people, by the performance of a crime, can remove a barrier to the betterment of mankind, then he has the right to do so. That is, not a legal right, but the right to a clean conscience. If by killing ten people an extraordinary person could improve the lives of one hundred thousand, Raskolnikov believes this would be justified.

Raskolnikov views himself as one of these extraordinary people, commits murder for the benefit of mankind, and spends 5/6s of the book being punished (and punishing himself) for it. Dostoevski is illustrating that there are more considerations than simply the faculty of reason, and that there are forces internal to the human mind that can rip a person apart if offended.

I haven't quite finished the book, so you can expect one more post from me on the subject.


Image credit to ~PoohateQ of www.deviantart.com, who posted this rather dramatic scene. It is apparently an image from the movie "Crime and Punishment" by Peter Dumala.

Necrology 1

Just to let my loyal listeners know, I have set up a separate page on which I will post interesting vocabulary when I come across it. You may have noticed one such digression in my post "From Bleeding to Brooding." Well I have two more, and I am now keeping them in a neat and tidy, alphabetized list for quick and easy reference. Somewhere near the top of your page should be a little link that says "Interesting Words." It will actually likely be more interesting to people who don't read my posts on a regular basis, but having more content is a plus, even if it is recycled old content.

{insert joke about politicians / news media / re-run channels}

Might as well get the two I found out of the way then. I suppose I will try to begin each post with such an entry. We'll see how it goes. Depends on whether I find any.

moribund - adjective - 1. near death 2. In a state of stagnation or obsolescence

nescient ('nay-see-ent) - adjective - according to Webster's a bit of a catch-all, but primarily ignorant, uneducated, lacking knowledge or sophistication. Also, unenlightened, innocent, artless, gutless, and illiterate.

As in, my friend finds my opinion nescient.


I was having an interesting discussion today, stemming from a short story I've been working on. The story roughly concerns temporal mishaps, and without giving too much away, death is involved. He recommended a book called "Death and Dying - Challenge and Change", an anthology of essay excerpts, all about the various aspects of death as they relate to individuals and societies. Or at least, the individual and society thirty years ago when the book was written. It was a textbook for a course my friend had taken in University, and he was more than happy to lend it to me. It is organized into various sections (one or two of which I might skip), and the first concerns itself with the changing meanings of dying and death. The angle that interests me is how the changing meaning of death alters the underlying mythological framework of modern society.

The first article I read, "On the Dying of Death" by Robert Fulton, I will be blunt, was not Dostoevsky. His academic leanings were evident in his endless run-on sentences. Nevertheless he mades an interesting argument.

Fulton asserts that death is dead (or dying) due to the removal of death from daily life. He has some more provocative (and therefore more interesting) opinions toward the end of the article, but that is the main point. His attack is two pronged.

The industrialization of America (which effectively [and ostensibly] includes Canada, henceforward I will refer to them collectively as "the continent"), brought about a radical change to both the organizational structure and underlying philosophy of the continent. This included the centralization of medicine, whereby patients travel to doctors, doctors no longer travel to patients. Effectively, people die in hospitals far more frequently these days than they do at home. Back when the continent was predominantly rural, a person was allowed the dignity of cashing in their chips from the comfort of their own bed. In this case, the family would deal directly with the dying person as they were dying, and the family generally had to take care of the funeral service and burial themselves as well. These days, someone about to die is rushed to a hospital where select family members hold their hand in a foreign environment. Fulton suggests that this works against a natural and healthy grief cycle.

He also says that this continent has raised an entire generation (by now two) that is(are) emotionally stunted. Children are protected from death. They are often not allowed into the rooms of dying people, and are actively discouraged from attending funeral services (when indeed they occur at all). Children are denied the chance to engage in this ultimate expression of the natural course of life. This makes it very difficult for a person, later in life, to come to terms with their own mortality. Fulton says this is like sweeping the problem under the carpet. Programmers might call this the ostrich method. It is evident in the very language we use. We have one thousand and one euphamisms for death, and to discuss death is a social tabboo.

When Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, or rather, when he constructed his absolutely stable society in which every adult was conditioned to achieve regulated emotional states, he recognized this need. I seem to remember a scene, the noble savage is in a hospital wing with his dying mother, and suddenly a whole class of four-year-olds are released into the room to be "death conditioned". Essentially, the children were exposed to death so they would come to terms with their own mortality, which destroys a great deal of angst and worry. I don't know if the reader has read Brave New World (I highly recommend it), but this utopia is all about not worrying about things. Just take a Soma holiday. These preschoolers are found repugnant by the noble savage, who represents the world as it was before the social apocalypse that produced the utopia. It is interesting, Huxley said we should abhor it, and Fulton says we should embrace it.

I just googled it, and apparently some drug company actually named a drug after Aldous Huxley's Soma. Incredible.

Being a person who occasionally reads obituaries, I have noticed a recent trend in ceremonial burial. A lack thereof. Increasingly people are rejecting funeral services, opting for direct burial or cremation without wakes or visitations, processes useful for the grieving family. Again, it is denial of death, an unwillingness to accept that grief has power over our lives. It is my opinion that insisting on a direct burial without thought for your family is narcissistic, but that is beside the point. Here is an experiment, ask your boss how many weeks you get off in the event of a death in your immediate family.

The net effect is that death, by and large, becomes meaningless for the average citizen of the continent. Look to the news. Death every day. Look to books and films. Violent, gory, tragic, sudden, comic, death. Real death is inaccessible and entertainment is filled with artificial death, I think to fill the void. It would be interesting to compare the number of deaths on television and in reality over a couple of months. The problem with this of course is that if death is meaningless, then so is life, and by extension the entire concept of immortality. Homer used to tell very long epics about immortal people. Today the only reason you would talk about an immortal is to prove their mortality.

Of course, I have been interested to note that Mario has gone from mortal to immortal. If you lose all your lives in Super Mario Brothers, you start again from the beginning. Ever since the "infinite continue", Mario has been effectively immortal. And don't even get me started on saving your game.



image by ~xiaobluexz of http://xiaobluexz.deviantart.com/. An excellent artist who posted an excellent study of human anatomy.

From Bleeding to Brooding

I started Crime and Punishment today, even though I didn't get half way through the Iliad. Normally I would never flout the Schedule so openly, but I have simply had enough of my particularly abysmal translation.

I bought the book because I liked the Odyssey, more accurately a late 19th century translation thereof, and imagined that buying from the same publisher would yield a book of similar quality. I was wrong. My brother warned me of the peril of buying thrift editions. I ended up with a early 20th century translation that makes several grievous, systematic, and unapologetic offenses on my opinion of the degree of liberty a translator should have when interpreting a story.

Offense number one. The translator, in his infinite wisdom, decided to replace all of the Greek names for their roman equivalents. If I'm going to read the Iliad, I want to hear about the Greeks, not the Romans. If I want to hear about the Romans I'll read Cicero. Yes, they are essentially equivalent, and yes, I could have survived without the Greek names. It's just irritating.

Offense number two. He decided to take a plethora of the ancient Greek phrases and insert what he perceived to be their twentieth century equivalents. Everyone who has ever been in a high school English class will know that filling your work with cliches does not make for a very engaging story. No, I'm not even going to throw a cliche in there to prove my point. That is also cliche. The worst part is I have no idea what Homer actually said, and half the fun in reading an ancient text is learning how people used to speak.

A possible three, call it two point five, would be that he doesn't include all the epithets. I know they're there, I read the Odyssey. For those of you in the blogosphere who have no idea what I'm talking about, an epithet is a word or phrase that precedes a character's name to provide description. They were used abundantly in Homer's Odyssey and Iliad because the original Greek is in verse, not prose, so epithets were used to correct the metering. Some examples: clear-eyed Athena, god-like Odysseus, rosy-fingered Dawn (who is more than once personified in this manner), and my personal favourite, Aegis-bearing Zeus. Don't paraphrase/disperse the epithets! They are important!

The book was also getting a bit onerous to read, because for pages and pages you see nothing but detailed accounts of the gruesome deaths of every single soldier who died. I'm sure it picks up later on, but it is not unusual for me to pick at Homer. Homer is my Brussels sprouts. I know I have to read him, and I do, but in manageable pieces.

At any rate, I cast aside my Greek epic (at least momentarily), and pick up Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Having only read the introduction and the first chapter at the time this post was published, I can assure more detailed and interesting posts to follow.

Some months ago, I was in a bookstore, and saw a copy of Crime and Punishment sitting innocuously in the bargain bin. Having heard of the story (who hasn't?) and wondering what the fuss was about, I read the first page. I came to the instant conclusion that I must at some point read this book. That day has come. The first page was better than I remember it, and the rest of the first chapter was pretty good too.

I also read the introduction, which was informative but left me slightly apprehensive. I seem to have stumbled upon a multi-layered, multifaceted work of artistic genius that penetrates deep into the brooding soul of humanity. It was all a bit too ostentatious for me, I was more interested in Dostoevsky's political and philosophical leanings. The turning point in his life, as I gather, was spending ten years in prison for fostering anti-governmental sentiment. Before that he was a liberal-minded writer, pro-communist, and enjoyed arguing with people about their political opinions. shortly after being released from prison he wrote a book entitled "Notes from the Underground." I gather it was a condemning satire of everything, including itself, and a stab at rationalist thought. One quote they quoted which I now quote: "Two times two is four is no longer life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death."

I have another book on my shelf that is of similar opinion. It is called "Voltaire's Bastards", by John Ralston Saul, and it is essentially a criticism of the entirety of western society for the last five hundred years. More on that when I start reading it again, which, I'll be honest, might be a while. It's another one of those sorts of books I pick at now and then. To be fair though, the thing is a monster (in terms of length and density of text).

By the way, here is your word of the day:
Polemic(puh-'lem-ik)- noun - A controversial argument, or, one who takes up a controversial argument.

"Notes form the Underground" echoed itself in just about everything Dostoevski wrote from that point on. Crime and Punishment was originally a grand argument against the Nihilists. He later revised it (i.e., used his first draft for kindling) and it transcended his somewhat dubious philosophical debates.

Crime and Punishment, in case you hadn't heard, is a murder mystery told from the perspective of the murderer. What makes it interesting is that the murder is as mysterious to the murderer (if not more) than it is to everyone else.

Should be a good book.