A most pleasurable third reading of an old favourite of mine. Edgar Pangborn’s gentle and humane novels had a tremendous influence on me. The book that really hit the mark was A Mirror For Observers, but the Davy stories were almost as good. This novel introduces the character at the age of fourteen, but hops back and forth in time. The background is post-apocalyptic, with the human population of upstate New York and New England reduced to an early Medieval level of technology and the Huly Murcan Church providing what little social cohesion exists. But this is not a remake of Miller’s A Canticle For Leibowitz. Pangborn saw organized religion as more of a repressive and regressive force than Miller did. Nothing rings false in Pangborn’s imagined world. The young Davy is a randy little ragamuffin, and his picaresque progress is more along the line of Fielding than Bunyan. But unlike most picaresque writers, Pangborn never placed sex in opposition to love, or to morality. Rather, he understood that sex stands at the heart of morality. Spider Robinson has remarked that “Edgar Pangborn said again and again in his books that love is not a condition or an event or even a state of mind — that love is a country, which we are sometimes privileged to visit.”
Category Archives: B - READING - Page 24
18426. [3] (Elias Lönnrot) The Kalevala: Epic of the Finnish People; 18427. [2] (F. R. Kreutzwald) Kalevipoeg: An Ancient Estonian Tale
As my December reading has concentrated on the related subjects of shamanism, Finno-Ugric linguistics and folklore, it’s appropriate for me to start off the year by re-reading the Kalevala and the Kalevipoeg. The Finnish Kalevala has been a constant, haunting presence with me for most of my life, but the less well known Estonian Kalevipoeg is something I’ve gotten into more recently. Read more »
Sibelius’ Kullervo
As I’m beginning the year with a re-reading of the Kalevala, the Finnish mythological epic that has haunted me since childhood, it’s logical for me to begin the year’s musical listening with Sibelius’ largest scale work based on it, the spectacular unified sequence of tone poems about the Kalevala hero Kullervo. I have two recordings of Kullervo, Symphonic Poem for Soprano, Baritone, Chorus and Orchestra, Op.7: Jorma Panula conducting the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra, and Paavo Berglund directing the Helsinki Symphony Orchestra. They’re both fine, but I prefer the Berglund. Eeva-Liisa Saarinen’s soprano in it is superb.
Read more »
READING — DECEMBER 2009
18261. (Émile Souvestre) The World As It Shall Be [Le Monde tel qu’il sera; 1846;
. . . . . tr. Margaret Clarke]
18262. (Neal Ascherson) Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland
18263. (Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne) La découverte australe, Vol.2 [1781] Read more »
18295. (John B. Roberts II & Elizabeth A. Roberts) Freeing Tibet ― Fifty Years of Struggle, Resilience, and Hope
For anyone with a serious interest in the Tibetan resistance against Communist Imperialism, this book is a must. Most books on the resistance focus almost entirely on the Dalai Lama, and are suffused with a sentimental image of Tibetan culture. This book is not. It’s a hard-headed analysis of the political events since the Conquest. Read more »
READING — NOVEMBER 2009
18206. (Lawrence Schoonover) The Burnished Blade
18207. (Frank Rich) The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York [article]
18208. (Robert F. Worth) Thirsty Plant Dries Out Yemen [article] Read more »
Three books on Michael Servitus
Michael Servitus was a strange, and admirable figure in the early Reformation. He made important contributions to medicine and cartography, but is best known for questioning the Church’s idea of the Trinity. He did not, in fact, offer a Unitarian theology, but merely a different interpretation of the Trinity. Read more »
18227. (Alan Weisman) The World Without Us
Many years ago, when I was a callow science fiction fan among other callow science fiction fans, we used to walk about the city, talking about this and that. A topic that often came up was: What would happen to the city if all the human beings in it suddenly vanished? What would become of the buildings? Read more »
READING — OCTOBER 2009
18093. (Robert Sheckley) Journey Beyond Tomorrow [= Journey of Joenes]
18094. (Glen W. Bowersock) The Nabataeans in Historical Context [article]
18095. (Peter J. Parr) The Origin and Emergence of the Nabataeans [article] Read more »
18180. [2] (Anon. 1st Century AD) The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea: Travel and Trade in the Indian Ocean by a Merchant of the First Century [translated from the Greek and annotated by Wilfred H. Schoff]
I first read this in 1989, when I became fascinated by ancient India. Along with the work of Megasthenes, it gave me a vivid picture of the travel, commerce, and cultural connections between India and the Mediterranean world in antiquity, and this in turn awakened me to my present attitudes toward the nature and origins of democracy. The Periplus differs from most other documents from the era in that it wasn’t written by an aristocrat or an intellectual. It’s a set of sailing instructions and observations on products for sale and purchase in the Indian Ocean and its adjacent gulfs, written by an Alexandrian merchant sea captain. His name is unknown. But he was a keen observer, with an orderly mind. The book was gathering dust in the Shastri Indo-Canadian Collection of the University of Toronto Library, when I first looked at it — few people were interested in such things then. Read more »