Platypus of Truth

This is the first summer in three years where I'm not live-blogging a read through one or more of the Shannara books.  Nonetheless, I am disposed to be communicative, but without a ready-made excuse for a post what shall I say?  Let's start with where the Summer Reading has gone thus far. I've handily dispatched Paul Cartledge's two popular-level books on Sparta's role in the Persian Wars, Thermopylae and After Thermopylae .  Cartledge comes out swinging for his side here and no mistake.  When push comes to shove, he thinks that the Spartans decisively won the Persian Wars and that the Athenians stole the glory.  That's controversial, to say the least.  The Athenian victory at Salamis cut the Persians' supply lines and also kept them from using the fleet to raid the Spartan coast or lend superior maneuver to the Persian army.  I also have to wonder, given what Herodotus account, if the Spartans could have won at Plataea without the support of the ba...

Two skulls sat in the earth, each with a hole (quite prominent) in back, and gossiped (as only skulls can) for only the Earth hears them: Have you heard my lady, the Princess Dai, stayed so well in her twenty shrouds that she would not rot until they dug her up? Now scholars write learned disquisitions upon the worms that ate her gut and in life made her the terror of the palace. They’ve even put her on display, -like a breakfast table- with a cover for her modesty, which is fitting; though there was never much to show. Just the sort of fuss she wanted. And the Earth ate these words (as it eats all things): in season, with a little indigestion now and then –except those bits it spits back up to grace the breakfast tables of men (and women) of refinement.

My reading of Calvin and Hobbes has progressed to Attack of the Deranged, Mutant, Killer, Monster Snow Goons .  Watterson reached a new level of art and story-telling in this volume, and it's been one of my favorites since childhood.  There's a sharp and cynical Yankee wit that pervades the pages culminating in Calvin's calling upon "the mighty and awful Snow Demons" to animate a frosty homunculus.  Of course, he gets his faustian, yet comical, comeuppance for his meteorological-theological blasphemy.  This sort of warped humor makes sense to kids who spent most sixth-grade lunch periods discussing the finer points of world domination and arguing over who would rule which subject populations when we inevitably succeeded. While we're on a trip down memory lane, I'd also like to give a nod to the sledding scenes.  Watterson writes sledding in the way I experienced it as a kid (particularly the big blizzard of '96).  We had those awful little sleds tha...

I don't think historians are at their best when they limit themselves to abstract thinking.  There's something sensible and salubrious when Jim Lacey takes a look at the Battle of Marathon from a quartermaster's perspective ( The First Clash ) and asks where the Persians put their toilets (the next question is given the sub-prime location for said outhouses, how long could they have stayed on the beaches before having to decamp in the face of the enemy).  Some things only become clear by doing.  I have a great respect for interpreters, the docents at living museums like Plymouth Plantation, Old Sturbridge Village, and Colonial Williamsburg.  By re-creating the old ways of doing things they preserve (and sometimes recover!) knowledge of the past that can't be communicated by mere letters on a page. Lacking an organic farm or a stone oven limits my undertakings, but I am determined to make some things with my own two hands this summer.  To that end, I have som...

Doing the math the other night, I realized that I am older than Calvin's parents as they appear in the strip.  That's odd: realizing that I have an edge on the immutable authorities of Calvin and Hobbes' world.  It's not that I haven't realized I'm aging or anything.  In grad school I noticed that I was starting to look quite a bit like Calvin's father.  Now I'm older.  I have a beard and all my hair is gone.  That's the thing about art: we age but it remains the same.  Achilles will always be young and powerful, but we won't, and therein lies an opportunity.  Art freezes time so that we who are moving in time can continue to look at the frozen moment.  The art doesn't change, but each change in us offers the opportunity to reengage with the work and draw fresh insights from it. Bill Watterson said that the world of a comic like Calvin and Hobbes is very fragile.  I think I'm beginning to see what he meant.

Christopher Tolkien says that in compiling the commentary to accompany his father's translation of Beowulf he intended to paint a portrait of his father's thought.  That portrait, as it emerges in the commentary, is very much of its place and time.  One observes all the tools and habits of fin de siecle philology: questions of multiple traditions being stitched together, inquires into lost Teutonic mythology, careful reconstructions of corrupted portions of the text.  On the other hand, we can also see in Tolkien's treatment of Beowulf the unitary impulse (that is the desire to view texts as the work of one mind organizing traditional material to serve its purposes rather than viewing texts as accretions that evolved under the hands of innumerable redactors with conflicting agendas) that was simultaneously arising in Homeric scholarship in the 1930s and 40s (see Milman Perry and A.B. Lord).  The unique factor that J.R.R. Tolkien contributes is to blend these two a...

So it looks like my recent spate of Calvin and Hobbes nostalgia is fortuitous.  Bill Watterson is back from outer space with a series of guest strips for Pearls Before Swine .  The intervention (if you haven't seen it already) begins here .  The back story can be found here .  What we're all wondering is "does this signal Watterson's return to comics"?  It's a magical world after all.

As and addendum to my post on Tolkien's translation of Beowulf , I'll add a note about his Sellic Spell .  A "sellic spell" as defined by Tolkien is a "wonder tale" or "fairy tale" and appears to have constituted a genre of Anglo-Saxon oral tales of which we have no attested examples.  The word "syllic/sellic spell" comes from a description of the various entertainments in Hrothgar's hall in Beowulf .  Tolkien theorized that a lost "sellic spell" might account for some of the "fairy-tale" elements in Beowulf (ie his great strength, comparisons with a bear, his odd follower Handshoe and opponents sea monsters, Unpeace and the ogre).  Tolkien worked out this theory in the way you'd expect: he wrote his own version of the lost "sellic spell" about Bee-Wulf the bearish hero, his three friends, and the Ogre -in Old English.  Both the Old English version of this fairy story and its Modern English translat...

There's something I noticed while working my way through the first two Calvin and Hobbes collections: the regular appearance of certain trees, streams, and logs in the background.  There's the big tree that Calvin and Hobbes spend time sitting under.  There's the big tree with a smaller fork that they pass on their way into the woods.  Finally, there's the stream with the log bridge that Calvin and Hobbes spend so much time crossing with their arms spread wide for balance.  The repetition of these items began to frustrate me this time through: too many repeated scenes.  At first, I began to think that they might have metaphorical meaning -and that may be true- but then a simpler answer hit me: Watterson is drawing a real place.  I knew that the comic is set in Ohio and often has Easter eggs from the town where Watterson grew up.  The connection I'd failed to make is that Watterson isn't pulling random images to create backdrops for jokes, but (I th...