Short version: 1) I gave a bunch of lectures this month, and had the privilege of hearing thought-provoking presentations by Ineke Sluiter (rumor, gossip, and theory of mind in Greek epic and tragedy) and Tazuko van Berkel (how economic concepts like exchange colonize and trouble representations of friendship and other human relations in classical Athenian drama and philosophy) here at the NIAS on Friday.
2) Go read John Williams' Butcher's Crossing, a mid-20th century Western about an 1870s Harvard student who heads to western Kansas to join a buffalo hunt. I was turned on to Williams by Michèle Lowrie, who recommended his epistolary novel Augustus. That was perfectly good, but the Western is more to my taste these days (I've been hoovering up Elmore Leonard short stories late at night lately, e.g., "The 3.10 to Yuma"). I'll save Williams' semi-autobiographical novel Stoner for another day: college novels (with the striking exception of Amis' brilliant and hilarious Lucky Jim) rarely hold my attention for long -- or if they do, I can't escape the feeling that the pleasure is just omphaloskepsis.
At a recent dinner a fellow classicist/hiker made me reconsider the joys of bushwhacking. I tend to aim for a telos when I hit the countryside, evidence of which is that my partner and I are gradually knocking off all 48 of New Hampshire's 4000-footers. But his inspired Thoreauian descriptions of what it's possible to see, hear, and smell while off-trail -- animals, animal sounds and traces, tiny flowers, mushroom patches, the deepest of mosses, trickles of water too small to call a stream -- resonate with the rich descriptions of the Kansas plains and Colorado mountains in Butcher's Crossing. You can read the novel as a psychological study of postbellum (and contemporary) youthful malaise, and it surely is that, but its pictures of nature also tap into the woe of the taming of the American West.
