Back from travels

Spent January 4-9 in San Antonio, soaking in the stuff of academic novels, that is, the Annual Meeting of the American Philological Association.  At the APA, especially if your calendar is crammed with committees, it's difficult to focus on reading at a much higher level than space opera, so it was Iain Banks on the iPhone for me: his new book, Surface Tensions.  Then a few days of skiing in Utah, including a glorious time on the steep upper cirque of Snowbird.

Now back home, I'm reading John Mulgan's Report on Experience (1947) -- a marvelous work, mailed off from Athens in the spring of 1945 to his wife in New Zealand just six weeks before Mulgan shot himself up with a fatal dose of morphine in a Cairo hotel room.  At times the book slips into Hemingway overload -- "bright streams running down the sharp green hills to the clean sea" -- but when Mulgan is reflecting on the pleasures men derive from going to war, the tragic dilemma that binds New Zealanders who want both to stay in the most beautiful land on earth and to escape its narrow, narrow bounds, and on the harsh friendliness of Greek villagers, his prose compels.  Mix the Ford Maddox Ford of A Good Soldier with a less self-indulgent Siegfried Sassoon; add C.K. Stead for local color and Jill Lepore for sharp wit and Martin Amis for brushes of humor that add surprising lightness to an otherwise dark and grieving work.



"This was an odd period, the beginning of World War 2.  It is not a time that the English talk about a great deal now.  It's passed now into the family annals, the volume that you keep in the cupboard and hope your executors will destroy.  Everything that occurred in that long eight months was like an ugly caricature of what had gone before.  It had elements of humour, but you needed to be an American to laugh at it."