06/18/08

I am wearing out. Mostly, I think, from the computer screen. I love having this big screen, but man does it put out a lot of light.

I'm getting back into Juvenal. Or at least, getting back into getting through Juvenal. At least reading him in English makes me realize how much better I like the Marston--I'll have to see how I feel once I've read it all and turn back to it, but at least in this translation, I say eh.

But I see what people were responding to--I wonder if I'd like the Johnson better if I went back to that again. It's a pretty decent rendition I think and it does rhyme, which may well be what I appreciate in the Marston.

I'm trying the red book now, in keeping with my two books per genre theory. It's requiring me to know the Romans, though, so it's kinda a pain. But that's all right, I guess--if I'm going to work on satire, I need to know the Romans anyway--even if neo-classical satire wasn't big until later, it's still important.

Actually, now that I mention it, I'm surprised we didn't get much neo-classical satire in Love's book. I guess that's a field that's pretty thoroughly covered, and so he hasn't felt the need to do so, but I'm curious how Dryden's Juvenal relates to his other satires. I actually think I'm gonna run to Firestone this morning and grab Dryden's Juvenal if I can find it and find that bawdy version of To His Coy Mistress. I need to look up the textual history in the Love to be able to find it--it was in the Haward MS. I can handle that.

And reading Juvenal off a screen won't be bad for me either.

This is the sort of post that's useless to me later, but it's helping me at least to get the words to come out smoothly. In her opening chapter she shows people as having done approximately this for six or seven months and an idea gradually developing. I think that's what I'm gonna try--if I do this for six months and it doesn't help me, I'll stop.

Of course, in a lot of ways, it is already helping me, because it's forcing me to put what I read into an ongoing context. I think figuring out a system for reading can only help that--it'll keep me from getting into those books that don't really relate to my topic but that I refuse to relate to on their own terms.

I'm looking forward to working through the Fineman. I know it's going ot be a huge amount of work, but I think I can handle it. And if not, I can always go read web introductions to Lacanian thought.

That's one of the main things I'm picking up here--a work ethic and the belief that I can go learn anything given a couple weeks of free time. Which is cool. Now I just have to prove it true over and over again over the next five years.

(Tangent:I keep wondering how much of the difficulty of learning German is the oddity of English. This is a topic for another day.)