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The Platypus and a Pile of Secondary Sources: The Platypus Reads Part CXLII

The 2011-2012 school year has been for me the year of the secondary sources.  I have determined that it is high time I go back to my professional roots and continue in earnest my study of Ancient Greece.  This has meant countless trips to the used bookstore to catch anything the universities are dumping and getting a helping hand from some very kind family friends.

In preparation for my great trek, I started off at the popular level in an attempt to build up my interest and ease back into the swing of things.  To begin with, I chose The War That Killed Achilles by Caroline Alexander and The Spartacus War by Barry Strauss.  Once the wheels were in motion, I picked up the pace a bit with a tour through Oswyn Murry's Early Greece, Robin Lane Fox's Traveling Heroes in the Epic Age of Homer, and Vassos Karageorghis' Early Cyprus.  Now that we're full-steam-ahead, I've turned to Gregory Nagy's The Best of the Achaeans, and A.B. Lord's Epic Singers and Oral Traditions.  Once Lord is out of the way, there'll be plenty more to come.

I iz rEdin mushEn

To balance things out a little (other than a heavy dose of Doug TenNapel, Ethan Niccole, and Mike Mignola comic books), I've also picked up Tom Shippey's Road to Middle Earth and begun reading it in tandem with Tolkien's Unfinished Tales and Correy Olson's lectures over at "The Tolkien Professor."

In the midst of two out of three of my favorite subjects (the other being Tennyson), I was reminded of something I hadn't thought of in some time: the purpose of a good secondary source.  One of the frustrations with higher academia is that one spends so much time dealing with the conversation about what one loves and little time actually dealing with the thing one loves.  I think this can grow into a sort of academic disease, a love of mere talk, or a debased Scholastic interest in hairsplitting and organizing.  It was one of the things, frankly, that turned me off about the academe.  I've spent my time with primary works whenever I could, preferring to get as close to the thing loved as possible.  Uncharacteristically inundating myself with high-quality secondary material then, I was suddenly reminded why this genre exists: at it's best it fires us with a renewed love for the primary material and opens up new vistas of engagement.  A truly good secondary source is like finding a friend who shares your admiration of a given thing; you draw together in fellowship as you combine your powers in pursuit of the object loved.  This is a bit easier to remember with people, but books are people via proxy.  There is still a mind and a person behind the words on the page.  The friendship may be a little one-sided unless you can strike up a correspondence with the writer, but that's still what secondary sources are: friends who share in your pursuit of what you love.
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