reading updates

After the Umberto Eco I started reading The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius, or De vita Caesarum, as it's known in the original Latin, which, of course, was Nicky's thoughtful gift to me on my birthday last year. I once made a feeble effort with Alexander Thomson's translation, since it was in the public domain, but found it little more than an involuted obstacle course, the reward for passing which was getting to read the book, rather than a thing to read by itself. Bad writers of the past tended to follow the following algorithm when writing:

1. Start off with a simple sentence: John licked the parrot.
2. Insert subordinate clauses between words: John, who was hardly a tenor, licked, extending his tongue out of his mouth, the parrot, which convulsed as it came into contact with John's moist appendage.
3. Repeat step 2: John, who was, his mother liked to say to him, hardly a tenor, licked, extending his tongue, of which he had two, out of his mouth, the parrot, which convulsed, repeating words it had heard that morning, as it came into contact with John's moist appendage.
4. Again: John, who was, his mother liked to say to him, wagging a finger in his face as his sisters looked on with pity in their soft eyes, hardly a tenor, licked, extending his tongue, of which had two, one pointing up and the other pointing down, out of his mouth, the parrot, which convulsed, repeating words it had heard that morning, reminding John that Jesus was waiting for him in the back room with a bottle of brandy, as it came into contact with John's moist appendage.
5. And so on. 

Unfortunately it is impossible for me to adequately recreate the level of deliberate anfractuousness that mediocre writers of an age tended to put on their prose, even after several iterations of this algorithm. To really drive home the point, I have sought out a particularly memorable passage from Jacob Abott's Cleopatra: 

The long series of patient, careful, and sagacious observations, which have been continued now for two thousand years, bring us results, by means of which, through our powers of mental conception, we may take a comprehensive survey of the whole scene, analogous, in some respects, to that which direct and actual vision would afford us, if we could look down upon it from the eagle's point of view. It is, however, somewhat humiliating to our pride of intellect to reflect that long-continued philosophical investigations and learned scientific research are, in such a case as this, after all, in some sense, only a sort of substitute for wings. A human mind connected with a pair of eagle's wings would have solved the mystery of Egypt in a week; whereas science, philosophy, and research, confined to the surface of the ground, have been occupied for twenty centuries in accomplishing the undertaking.

Alexander Thomson was no different. His Twelve Caesars may well have been the One Thousand Seven Hundred and Twenty-Eight Caesars. The book Nicky gave me, however, was translated by Robert Graves, a sensible twentieth-century scholar with no patience for artifice, and further refined by James Rives, and I must say, it is a masterpiece of readability - and very engaging, too. Suetonius was no puritan when it came to describing the sexual tastes and depravities of the Roman emperors, which are always essential to understanding their character, whereas Alexander Thomson, I was amused to observe, expurgated the book of references to anything remotely sexual, consigning passages that described the horrific things Tiberius and Caligula did to ominous footnotes preserved in the original Latin. A person who read Alexander Thomson's translation without bothering to sit down with a Latin-to-English dictionary, since his all his faculties would have been been engaged in trying to parse Thomson's recursive prose, might come away with the impression that Tiberius was not all that bad. These heavy-handed editorial executions without trial committed by Thomson et alia are a dishonor to scholarship and literature and any profession remotely connected with them. It's one of many things we can claim to do better today than our ancestors did.

James Rives is careful to remind the reader in the foreword that Suetonius was more biographer than historian. Gore Vidal summed up his appeal perfectly in an essay on the subject of Graves's translation. As contemptible as it is to put forth the opinions and impressions of another as if they were one's own, without having done the necessary mental labor to come up with them, I nevertheless quote Vidal: "[It] is not for his political convictions that we read Suetonius. Rather, it is his gift for telling us what we want to know. I am delighted to read that Augustus was under five feet seven, blond, wore lifts in his sandals to appear taller, had seven birthmarks and weak eyes; that he softened the hairs of his legs with hot walnut shells, and liked to gamble. Or to learn that the droll Vespasian's last words were: 'Dear me, I must be turning into a god.'" Those looking for a cold hard history of the Roman Empire may turn to Tacitus, Dio Cassius, and Livy and come back to Suetonius for everything else. Vidal's essay also contains a brilliant and cynical line that perfectly describes a lot of human history: "World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual." Partition of India, anyone?

I recently bought the book A is for Alibi by the author Sue Grafton, of whom I heard for the first time when I read the recent news of her passing. She was known for her series of mystery novels whose titles spanned the English alphabet - a series that rather tragically ended with the letter Y. Her obituary was rather moving. "As far as we in the family are concerned," read a quote from a family member, "the alphabet now ends at Y." And so I felt moved enough to buy the first book in the series. It's fun light reading. Sue Grafton evidently belonged to the school of writing that holds that a good writer must describe everything that a verisimilar narrator must have seen. Dan Brown belongs to this school. But unlike Dan Brown, Grafton is discerning, and her narrator's voice and personality are believable and unpretentious. I'd much rather listen to Kinsey Milhone describing the folds at the bottom of an interlocutor's pant legs than hear another peep about Robert Langdon's fucking Mickey Mouse watch.

Finally, a Sunday morning conversation with Nanochip, in which he urged me write more original fiction, inspired me to come up with an idea for a detective story. I would set it in Seattle, for then I would get to describe the city in the dreamy literary way that London is often described by British writers. Or New York. Or Los Angeles. How would I distinguish my detective from other run-of-the-mill detectives? He would be blind. And he would have a dog named Jascha. No offense to the great violinist Heifetz or anyone else named Jascha. But how to write a blind character? It might be worthwhile to do a Google search and see if this niche has already been filled. Ladies and gentlemen, that's when my unnamed detective was thrown out the window and I learnt about Max Carrados. I duly downloaded several free ebooks by Ernest Bramah, and now I find myself starting on more books than I can possibly finish in a reasonable amount of time.

As a happy footnote to the whole thing, I've also started William Tell Told Again by P. G. Wodehouse, which is a humorous retelling (or telling again) of the William Tell legend by the master humorist at the age of twenty-three.