Some random links: coming soon to a bookstore near you

Is too much Virgil a bad thing? I’d have to say no, even though the number of new translations of the work of Caesar Augustus’ favorite poet will steadily increase this year, despite the fact that there doesn’t seem to be a mad rush on Latin poetry at bookstores.

Oxford University Press has just released an exemplary translation of "The Aeneid" by Frederick Ahl; now Yale has one set for May by translator Sarah Ruden--and don’t forget Robert Fagles’ version published last year and just released in paperback. Also forthcoming in the spring is a related book by Ursula Le Guin, the novel "Lavinia," about the woman who fueled hatred between Aeneas and Turnus (shades of Helen of Troy!). Where is poet David Ferry? For Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Ferry has already translated "Eclogues" and "Georgics"--he seems to be building steadily toward the magnum opus. No word yet from his publisher.

What explains this fascination with the classical Roman poet? A favorite response of critics is that Virgil’s imagining of Rome’s imperial ambitions mirror our own today--in a decidedly more successful way. Another explanation is that there seems to be a continuing call for epics. Recently, Hollywood has given us Homer ("Troy") and "Beowulf." Can an animated version of "The Aeneid" (think George Clooney as the voice of the conqueror!) be far behind?
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The name is Faulks, Sebastian Faulks: Death doesn’t mean the end of a series, as publishers see it. Though Robert Ludlum is gone, his characters continue in stories written by other writers; the late Mario Puzo’s "Godfather" saga has been taken up by Mark Winegardner; and now James Bond is set for a new adventure in "Devil May Care" (Doubleday) penned by Sebastian Faulks and coming in May. Faulks enjoyed immense success with the historical novels "Birdsong" and "Charlotte Gray"; now he’s been asked by the Ian Fleming estate to write a Bond adventure set during the Cold War to honor the centenary of Fleming’s birth.
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Who the devil is Inger Wolfe? Coming this spring from Harcourt is "The Calling," a mystery set in the small Scottish town of Port Dundas featuring Hazel Micallef, a detective inspector trying to solve the murder of a terminally ill woman. As intriguing as this might be, so also is the biographical information about the author in the announcement: Inger Wolfe, we’re told, "is the pseudonym for a prominent North American literary novelist."

Nick Owchar

A winning combination of words and illustrations ...

"The Invention of Hugo Cabret" is a superb children's book that Brian Selznick designed using a simple strategy: Illustrations wouldn't be in service to the prose but would share equally in the narrative duties. A page of prose, then, gives way to an image on the next page that continues the sequence. Our children's books reviewer, Sonja Bolle, called the book "cinematic" in its approach to the life of an orphan living in a Paris train station.

This week, Selznick received the 2008 Randolph Caldecott Medal for what PW calls a "thick, genre-busting book." It is also significant to remember that, at a time when so many people say old-fashioned reading is being threatened by a culture increasingly dominated by the visual, a creator like Selznick has found a way of deploying words and images in a triumphant, vibrant way.

Nick Owchar

The once and future Spenser

Queen Elizabeth I made him England’s poet laureate. But the complete works of Edmund Spenser, whose epic poem, "The Faerie Queene," so dazzled the 16th century monarch whose Tudor dynasty it limned, are hard to find these days.

Kessinger Publishing, the Montana-based reprinter of rare, antiquarian books, last January put out a copy of the century-old "The Complete Works of Edmund Spenser," with apologies for "imperfections such as missing and blurred pages, missing text, poor pictures, markings, dark backgrounds and other reproduction issues beyond our control."

Thanks to Oxford University Press, a coterie of Spenserian scholars and a $150,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an updated--and truly complete--collection of the English master’s prose and poetry is now underway.

Joseph F. Loewenstein, an English professor and Renaissance literature expert at Washington University in St. Louis, is leading a team of graduate and undergraduate students in the project to compile, edit, annotate and digitize Spenser’s oeuvre, including "The Faerie Queene," which vaulted him into the pantheon of English literature alongside Chaucer.

University of Colorado professor Katherine Eggert, president of the International Spenser Society, welcomes the project, saying it could go a long way toward making the poet more accessible to modern readers.

"Edmund Spenser is, along with William Shakespeare and John Milton, one of the three most influential writers of the English Renaissance," according to Eggert. " ‘The Faerie Queene’ was on Shakespeare’s mind when he wrote ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and paved the way for ‘Paradise Lost.’ Spenser’s poetry influenced Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron. Traces of his plots and characters are clearly visible in Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings.’ "

But Spenser goes "largely unread today," Eggert laments, in large part because of the "difficulty of his language, which--like James Joyce’s later on--not only bristles with erudition but also engages in brilliant wordplay, employing archaic words and inventing new ones."

Consider this stanza from Spenser’s "The Shepheardes' Calender":

To kerke the narre from God more farre,
Has bene an old-sayd sawe;
And he that strives to touche a starre
Oft stombles at a strawe.

Spenser, who helped in the colonization of Ireland, is a controversial figure historically for advocating the destruction of Irish literature and culture in the late 1500s. His inflammatory pamphlet, "A View of the Present State of Ireland," was kept out of print during his lifetime because he proposed scorched-earth tactics to dominate through famine. His views must have been known, though, because Irish rebels burned down his castle in 1598. He died the following year, reputedly penniless but beloved by fellow poets who bore his coffin and tossed verse, pens and tears into his grave. His tomb in Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner is near Chaucer’s.

Loewenstein first pitched the project to Oxford in 1999, the 400th anniversary of Spenser’s death, with colleagues Patrick Cheney at Pennsylvania State University and David Lee Miller at the University of South Carolina. Their proposal envisions it as the "standard edition for the century to come," not to mention "a pioneer for other editions on other writers and works." Also working with the team are Elizabeth Fowler at the University of Virginia and Andrew Zucher at Cambridge University. The first of three volumes of the print edition and a substantial portion of the Spenser Archive are expected to be ready by 2010. Run softly, sweet Thames, until their work is done.

Kristina Lindgren

                                              Photo: Washington University in St. Louis

Invocation of my demon brother

Zachary Lazar’s second novel, "Sway" (Little, Brown: 260 pp., $23.99), which Mark Rozzo reviews in this Sunday’s Book Review, interweaves three iconic stories--the rise of the Rolling Stones from 1962 through Altamont; the long, strange trip of underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger; and the sorry saga of Charles Manson associate (and convicted killer) Bobby Beausoleil--to get at the dark side of the 1960s, the moment when the Age of Aquarius imploded into Luciferian light.

It’s an odd book, all glittery surfaces and collapsing possibilities, but what may be strangest is that it involves so much history we can actually see. As I read "Sway," I kept using the Internet as an enhancement, a way to make some pieces of the story come alive.

After finishing Lazar’s account of Anger’s 1947 film, "Fireworks," I looked the movie up on YouTube and watched it for myself. I did the same with "Scorpio Rising," the 1964 biker film that made Anger a minor celebrity when it was banned in California.

As for Beausoleil, I discovered that he’s still in prison, where he makes art and music, which he sells on a website that offers only glancing reference to his role in the 1969 Manson-directed murder of music teacher Gary Hinman. ("During the commission of an absurdly misconceived drugs transaction, things went terribly wrong, and BeauSoleil killed a man.")

Then, of course, there are the Stones. We all know what they look like, but even 38 years later, it’s shocking to watch violence explode as they play "Sympathy for the Devil" at Altamont, as if they’ve invoked a force they couldn’t control.

This is the point of Lazar’s novel, that the 1960s were a time in which all sorts of children (the Stones, Anger and Beausoleil among them) got involved with things they didn’t understand. It’s also the idea behind Anger’s film "Invocation of My Demon Brother," which suggests that every invocation is followed by an evocation, desire become action and then unleashed upon the world.

That’s a fascinating concept, but "Sway" also raises a number of wholly contemporary questions about the way literature (or, for that matter, history) operates in our own digitized and archived time. Does it enhance or diffuse the power of Lazar’s novel to read it in conjunction with the computer, to look up and literally watch many of its scenes? What does it mean for memory, for reading, for our own power as writers and readers to invoke and then evoke a shared fictional dream?

I don’t know the answers to those questions; it’s just that I’ve never read a book in quite this way before.

David L. Ulin

Ghost in the machine

I was an admirer of Theresa Duncan; her blog, the Wit of the Staircase, was one of the smartest, least predictable aesthetic experiments on the Internet, a mash-up of intellectual rigor, artistic attitude and fan-girl obsession, filtered through a world-weary yet endearing voice. After Duncan committed suicide last July at age 40, Wit remained online as something of a virtual memorial, a ghost-like reminder of what could have been.

Yet Duncan, it turns out, seeded the site with two posthumous entries--the first, an odd and disturbing anecdote about Basil Rathbone and the spirit world that posted just before Halloween, and the second, an extended excerpt from T.S. Eliot’s "East Coker," which went live on New Year’s Eve under the title "New Beginning."

It’s impossible to look at either of these items without the suffocating sense that Duncan knew exactly what she was doing, that she was using technology as a way of talking to her readers from beyond the grave. But if on its own that’s just a gimmick, what makes it all so affecting is what she chose to communicate. The Rathbone story involves a friend of the actor who dies in a car crash and delivers the following message through a medium: "Traveling very fast. No time to say good-bye." And then, "There are no dogs here."

The Eliot, on the other hand, is both more hopeful and (as a consequence) more heartbreaking, the reflection of someone standing in the middle of life, looking back at past experience and ahead at all that’s left to do. "And so each venture/Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate," the excerpt begins. It continues:

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years —
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres —
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate — but there is no competition —
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our
business.

Exactly. For us, there is only the trying. How sad that Duncan could not see it that way.

David L. Ulin