Odd BooksJan. 18, 2004
Additions, revisions, and
elaborations Recently Eszter Hargittai of Crooked Timber solicited readers' nominations of unusual or obscure books that deserve more attention. The estimable Steven Baum already had an Unusual Literature page posted, so I felt impelled to produce my own.
The definition of the term
"unusual literature" was already controversial on the Crooked Timber
thread, so I can do this any way I want. My list will primarily consist of
books I have read that others perhaps have not heard of, but might enjoy
reading. (These will include a few books which are central to my areas of
special interest but not well known outside it.) Second, I will include
books that I have not read, but which are downright weird, including a few
which are just plain awful. Finally, I will list books I have read and
enjoyed which others have probably heard of, but not read. CLASSICAL PULP FICTION AND TRASH
(More recent authors who make the cut but who are too popular to be called odd include Gombrowicz, Dineson, Kafka, Bulgakov, Melville, Gogol, and Kleist.) Addition (from Letter From Gotham): "My candidate: Ali and Nino by Kurban Said, a Jew of Baku who converted to Islam and died in wartime Italy."
Burnt Njal
Saga It can be deduced from the literature that Frenchwomen have never been chaste at any period of history. "Old French does not have grammatical rules, but tendencies".
Boccaccio:
Decameron A hundred stories of many kinds, usually involving ingenuity and wit. The form is reminiscent of The Arabian Nights, The Canterbury Tales, and many other collections of tales from many cultures. Few of the stories are completely original, but all are well told. Boccaccio was classically trained and wrote many serious works in Latin, but he is remembered for this one. The following story is reminiscent of Polynesian courtship practices, and at first glance at least, seems highly uncharacteristic of Italian custom. Summary: An wealthy older man becomes the father of a daughter, whom he loves dearly and watches closely according to the custom of the time. She reaches her teens and inevitably falls in love with a nobleman's son who is a frequent visitor of the family home. She arranges to meet the boy on her balcony as soon she is able to, and they agree on a signal to tell him that the coast is clear. When she complains about the heat, her mother denies that it is very hot. "Mother, you know that young women feel the heat much more strongly than older women do," she replies. Finally she is given permission to sleep on the balcony amid the cool breezes and the songs of the nightingales. Seeing the signal, the boy climbs a wall and a pillar to reach the balcony. Unfortunately, they both fall asleep and are discovered by the father, with the girl cradling the boy's thing in her hand. (Euphemism in the original). "Wife, come and see what kind of nightingale our daughter has caught", calls the father. When the mother sees what has happened she begins to wail, but the father hushes her. "Good may come of this yet", he explains. Sword in hand, he tells the boy (who is a very good match) that all problems will be solved if he agrees to marry on the spot. Since that is the very thing that the boy most wanted to do, a priest is called and the wedding is performed. And then, "since they had only gone six miles that night and still had two more to go, the girls' parents left the couple to themselves for the rest of the morning". Cervantes: Don Quixote Don Quixote and Sancho and Sancho Panza (and Quixote's horse and Sancho's donkey as well) are the most guileless and affectionate characters in the history of literature. During this brief period of Christian history, "The Natural Man" (Sancho) is shown as really not all that bad. Like many of the authors in my series here, Cervantes had tried his hand at the more flowery and high-toned genres -- i.e., romances, which by this time had lost their pulp status and become official. One of the fathers of the novel, Cervantes was criticized by critics (who appeared within about a year or two of the novel's birth) for little mistakes like making men and donkeys impossibly disappear and reappear, or for having spring come a month after the beginning of autumn, but he just didn't care. In the second volume of the novel he laughed at the critics of the first volume. Spain at this time was not backward at all, but one of the most powerful and wealthiest countries in the world. The famous windmill is only one of several mills to appear in the work, and whenever one of the protagonists is given a good thumping the Spanish word used is "molinar" -- to grind, to mill. Spelling out the symbolism would be stupid, but reality does grind Don Quixote down. Probably all buddy fiction and road stories can be traced back to this book. (Mark Twain made his debt explicit in Huckleberry Finn). Don Quixote is clearly trying to escape from a boring and unsatisfactory life, and in the course of the book he helps many others do the same: crazy as he is (as he himself even realizes in the end), he has a transformative influence on everyone he meets. Don Quixotes's madness consists of always trying to do the right thing. Those who see the book as a "warning against fanaticism" are missing the point. Those who think that Don Quixote's main problem is that his romance novels were obsolete in the world of his day are missing the point too. It was by trying to do the right thing that he screwed himself up. NOTE: "Dream the impossible dream" is not the message here -- that sounds like it comes from an entrepreneurial self-help handbook. Other such debased slogans include "They said it couldn't be done, but we did it!" -- Schick razor blades -- and "Think outside the box". (To say nothing of "If it feels good, do it" and "Dance your brains out"). In contemporary life, without a degree of stodginess you are entirely at the mercy of The Man. Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel A mixture of deliberately absurd (but technically sound) pedantry, toilet jokes, social criticism, attacks on the scholastics, slapstick, hyperbole, urbane Christianity (Rabelais was a friend of bishops), and serious thinking. Rabelaisan humor is more scatalogical than lewd (go to Sterne for lewdness) and his taste in food is for large quantities of hearty peasant fare, especially hams, sausages, and tripes. Bakhtin's book is great, but whoever came up with the term "material lower body stratum" has got a lot to answer for. Montaigne: Essays Not at all obscure, but he belongs with the other guys here. The forms of funny, relaxed, hopeful Christian humanism they developed were swamped by the Reformation and Counterreformation. Robert Burton: Anatomy of Melancholy Pedantic like Montaigne, but he wanders all over the place without necessarily having a main point. With most of these authors, but above all Burton, you have to enjoy the practice of reading per se. You can't be trying to get anywhere. Burton's book is partly a 1300-page personal reflection, full of tidbits of now-obsolete scholarship, by one of the most scholarly men of his time (the head librarian at Oxford). And partly it's a study of what we now call neurosis and psychosis, but which was then always mixed in with purely physical medicine. I haven't read much of it yet, but the story about the man who was convinced that frogs were breeding in his stomach was definitely worth it. Alert correspondent Language Hat points out that "Anatomy of a Murder" was the title of the novel and film, but that the title of Burton's book lacks the indefinite article. Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy A shaggy dog story made up of shaggy dog stories. A novel consisting entirely of digressions, foreshadowing, and flashbacks. It takes hundreds of pages for the author to get born. Anathemas in Latin; scholastic arguments in French (can a fetus be baptized within the mother's womb?). Abundant information on military fortifications. Dirty jokes and double-entendres on every single page. Like several of the other authors here, if you're looking for a quick payoff and want the author to get the point, this is the worst book in the world.
POETRY My own favorite poets are usually regarded as minor, as below. (What I mean: Shakespeare is major, good, and interesting. Dryden and Spenser are good, and major too, but much less interesting. Most poets today are good but neither major nor interesting. I tend to like interesting minor poets, preferably but not exclusively the good ones.)
Tristan
Corbiere: Les Amours Jaunes
Aloysius
Bertrand: Gaspard de la Nuit
Henri Michaux:
Epreuves, Exorcismes
and
L'Espace du Dedans.
For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry. An Anglo-Saxon poem written sometime between 700 A.D. and 1025 A.D., probably in an area under Norse rule. The Christian elements are weak and the pagan elements intense, no matter what Tolkein tries to tell you. Plenty of blood and guts, descriptions of the carrion crows feasting on the bodies of the defeated, but there's sensitivity too. The following describes the grief of a king, one of whose sons has accidentally killed the other:
"Always, each morning, he remembers well Adapted from the Chickering translation (recommended) , which includes the original. WOMEN'S STUDIES
Leopold Stein:
Loathsome Women
Steven
Goldberg: Why Men Rule One of his arguments is sort of cute in a nutty, provincial sort of way. From the fact that women have not made great contributions in chess, mathematics, or music composition, he concludes that they are not bright enough to exercise power. But these three groups are well known to be made up of impractical eccentrics who can barely take care of themselves. Alert correspondent Language Hat suggests adding King Tamara of Georgia, who was not called a Queen because she was just too darn tough. And while Queen Zenobia of Palmyra was ultimately defeated by the Romans, so was almost everyone.
Ivan Illych:
Gender A self-reported "nice Irish Catholic girl" comments: "Ivan Illich's Gender is interesting. I would file it under the heading, 'Thoughtful and Thought-provoking, though Basically Nutty, Wholesale Critiques of the Modern World'". TRAVELLERS' TALES
Canard,
Marius, Miscellanea Orientalia, Variorum, 1973. (XI: "La relation
de la voyage d'Ibn Fadlan chez les Bulgares de la Volga." Includes a description of an week-long orgy at a Viking funeral culminating in a human sacrifice. Descriptions of the Vikings show them to be very similiar to the ideal outlaw bikers of our time: tall, blonde, muscular, hairy, filthy, lewd, violent, and drunken. I actually believe that these customs have been passed down for over a thousand years in an unbroken line of military non-coms, since the most useful members of defeated armies were often simply absorbed into the victorious units. I dreamed once of making a Jodorowski theatre-of-cruelty film based on Ibn Fadlan, but Michael Crichton got ahead of me and ruined everything with a crappy rewrite.
Benjamin,
Sandra, The World of Benjamin of Tudela, 1995, Associated
University Presses
Twelfth-century Jewish traveller in the Middle East and Central Asia
(considerably earlier than Marco Polo.)
Tons of background information about Venetian ships, the Mongol use of music in coordinating their armies, etc., etc. Pelliot's translation is more accurate but impossible to find for less than $1500. Paul Pelliot: Notes on Marco Polo Fifty pages on the words for "cotton" in various languages. Porcelain = purslane = pig butt (porc l'ane?) Pelliot did his research in more than fifteen languages. Unanimous choice for the Pedantry Hall of Fame. Friedrich Hirth and W.W. Rockhill, trs., Chau Ju-Kua, Cheng-wen, Taipei, 1970 (St. Petersburg, 1911). Chinese trade report from the Sung dynasty. Lots of tidbits. Whose aloes are superior, Cambodia's or Viet Nam's? J. Reinaud, J., Relation des Voyages faits par les Arabes et les Persans, dans l’Inde et la Chine dans le IXe siecle de l’ere chretienne, Paris, 1845. Primarily one man's report of his travels on the Indian Ocean. Lots of good stuff but I forget the details. Sinbad in the Arabian Nights is probably partly derived from this. Gabriel Ferrand (tr.), Relations de Voyages et Textes Geographiques Arabes, Persans, et Turcs Relatifs a l’extreme-orient du VIIIe au XVIIIe siecles, Paris, 1914. A collection of reports on the Islamic Indian Ocean trade. Who were the Waq-waq? Is Tibet an earthly paradise? More controversy about aloes. Morris Rossabi: Voyager from Xanadu In the service of the Mongol Khan, two Nestorian Christians from present day China, of Onggut Turkish descent, visit the major crowned heads of Europe. RELIGION Euclides da Cunha: Rebellion in the Backlands For a period during the nineteenth century a significant part of the Brazilian interior was controlled by fanatical backwoodsmen, followers of a bizarre cult leader, who defeated a series of armies sent to crush them. This and the next several titles reflect my vicarious interest in violent, fanatical heretics. If I knew of a good book about Jan Zizka it would be here too. And then there's Europe's last pagan, Jagiello (Jogaila) of imperial Lithuania: Lithuania Ascending. Anthony Arthur: The Tailor King: The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster The mild-mannered, pacifist, sensible Mennonites of our time have close but long-past relatives who were wilder and crazier than you could possibly imagine. Sex, violence, torture, communism.
Henri Maspero:
Taoism and Chinese Religion Includes one of the few available descriptions in a Western language of the Taoist state (absorbed by Ts'ao Ts'ao) which existed in north central China during the second century A.D. A pioneering study of the Taoist religion of that time. Le Roy Ladurie: Montaillou
The
eradication of the Manichees (Albigensians) in the South of France. The
heretics are affectionately portrayed.
Denis de
Rougement: Love and Western Man Interesting argument claiming that the cult of courtly love and the troubadors were spinoffs of the Manichees. The Arabs have also been suggested (Briffault), and from the romances I have read it seems that the Franks were always pretty lewd. Overdetermination again. Medieval Europe was much less orthodox and more chaotic than the English-department followers of C.S. Lewis have told us. De Rougemont seems never to have been given much respect. He was an amateur and perhaps also a fascist or something like that. David Gordon White: Myths of the Dog-Man All the civilized cultures of Eurasia had stories about dog-men (Cynocephalae) who always lived far off somewhere. White collects these legends in their diverse forms and speculates that perhaps there is some real connection with the dog-loving nomad peoples of the steppe. This is an inadequate summary of a book which was a lot of fun when I read it quite awhile ago. Julian Baldick: Imaginary Muslims A Central Asian Sufi cult taught its novices using an elaborate history of the order which can be shown to have been deliberately fictitious. I'm still working on this one.
Mar John
Gregory Bar Hebreus Abu Faraj (tr. Budge): The
Laughable Stories Jokes and stories from a Jacobite Christian bishop from the Mongol period (ca. 1300). Written in Syriac (related to Aramaic); he also wrote in Arabic, and wrote a history og the Mongols that is still useful. The Jacobites still exist in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon and are theologically similiar to the Ethiopian, Coptic, Armenian, and Malabar Christians (in Kerala, India). About 5-10% of the jokes are translated into Latin because they're lewd. (For centuries, bishops have been going downhill.)
Sample: A
man went to the dentist for an extraction. He told the dentist that the
price he was asking was too high. The dentist said "I can't charge you
less than that. But tell you what -- I'll charge you the same price, and
pull an extra tooth.) Seth, often called the God of Evil, is comparable to Coyote, Loki, Reynard, and other tricksters. Te Velde untangles the various forms Seth took through Egyptian history. Egypt really does seem to have been different from everywhere else.
Te Velde
cites one of his teachers, who pointed out that the fact that Egypt stands
at the beginning of civilized history does not mean that it is simpler
than what came afterwards. This point can be generalized: in any
presentation, the beginning or foundation must be described in a sketchy
way if you hope to be able to get to the conclusion at all, but often
enough when we check back and look closely at the beginning we have
chosen, we find that it is really quite different and much more
complicated than we had thought.
Cosmas was a
sailor of the sixth century A.D., probably a Greek, who became a churchman
in later life. This book is mainly of interest as one of the first Western
descriptions of India and the Indian Ocean, but the author's purpose was
to prove, with the help of copious Bible quotations, that the earth is
flat. I found it unreadable even as a joke. CHINA Lieh Tzu, tr. A.C. Graham Like Chuang Tzu, but less well-known. Sample: A elderly man was making a pilgrimage to visit his father's grave. He had been born in exile and knew nothing about his father's ancestral home, so a fellow traveller offered to help him out. At a certain point the fellow traveller said "Now we have entered your father's native province". The pilgrim put on a grave demeanor. A little later the fellow-traveller said, "We have just entered your father's native district." The pilgrim made an obeisance and chanted an ode. Not too long afterwards the friend pointed to a village and said "That is your father's native village". The pilgrim prostrated himself many times, chanting all the while. Finally the man pointed to a burial mound and said "That's your father's grave". The man went into paroxysms of grief, prostrating himself time after time and wailing piteously, After about ten minutes the man said "Ha, ha! Fooled you! We still have another fifty miles to go".
A New Account of Tales of the World, tr. Richard Mather. Chinese unlike any you've ever heard of before. From the Three Kingdoms period and afterwards (ca. 200--400 A.D.) Dilletantish avant-garde Zen, gambling on oxcart races, naked drunken poets, snarky mysticism. The most prized Chinese poetic style was developed during this period, but the founder, Ts'ao Ts'ao, is still hated and is always a villain in operas.
Odds and ends of XIXc Chinese culture, mostly from the villages -- puns, jokes, word games, superstitions, local customs, etc. Lots of fun stuff. In English with Chinese characters.
奇詩Strange Poems In Chinese only, but I had to list it. The Chinese language lends itself to word games. This book includes poems made up entirely of repetitions of the same syllable, poems that can be read backward or forward, anagram poems, poems on peculiar topics, and so on. This book and the one above gives a glimpse of aspects of "the Chinese mind" which are not shown in formal occasions, making the Chinese way of life seem much more interesting and appealing. PHILOSOPHY None of these books are really odd, but they aren't taught in philosophy classes. They should be, though. This list could be much longer. Stephen Toulmin: Cosmopolis Michel Meyer: Rhetoric, Language, and Reason Justus Buchler: Metaphysics of Natural Complexes John William Miller: The Midworld HISTORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE Movses Dasxuranci: History of the Caucasian Albanians Never read it. The Caucasian Albanians were unrelated to today's Albanians, just as the Galicians of Poland, the Galicians of Spain, and the Galateans of Turkey are all unrelated. The Romans weren't fussy about shit like that. Translated from the Armenian by one of the most eccentric Oxonians ever, C.J.F. Dowsett. Marshall Sahlins: Islands of History A Hawai'ian queen with eighty husbands. Because they thought he was a god, they killed Captain Cook. Traditional Hawai'ian society was vivid. Eli Sagan At the Dawn of Tyranny Sees the murder of the father at the origins of the state. Lots of data from early state systems in SE Africa and Polynesia. Psychoanalytic point of view. Despite its strangeness, I think that Sagan's theory is basically valid. To get from a kinship society to a state society, you have to kill your brothers and cousins, and if need be, your father. Genghis Khan did. So did Attila, Mo Tun, Shaka Zulu, Aeneas and Romulus in Plutarch, Charlemagne, the second Chinese T'ang Emperor, one of the Czars, and probably Moses. Macbeth failed because he was chicken, not because he was evil. Lady Macbeth couldn't do it all by herself. David W. Maurer: Whiz Mob
Non-fiction
about New York pickpockets. Pickpocket family suffers a crisis when son
asks to join the Boy Scouts.
T. Wertime, and JD Muhly: The Coming of the Age of Iron Production and use of iron is almost completely unrelated to level of civilization. Harold Barclay: The Role of the Horse in Man's Culture Everything you need to know about the history of horses. Mongolia and Iceland have more horses per capita than any other modern nation, and the two breeds are related. In the XIXc, the most modernized nations had the most horses per capita. Xinru Liu: Silk and Religion Religious practices involving the veneration of the tombs of saints and the use of silk winding sheets in their funerals spread through China, India, the Middle East, and Europe, despite having no justification at all in any of the religions of those areas. Richard Bulliett, Camel and the Wheel During the great age of Islam, freight was carried almost entirely by sea and by donkey and camel caravans, with minimal use of wheeled transport. Includes a complete history of the camel. (According to Steensgard, caravan trade was economically competitive up until 1600 or even later). Wixman, Ronald, Language Aspects of Ethnic Patterns and Processes in the North Caucusus, Chicago, 1980. The Caucasus area has more linguistic complexity than the rest of Europe put together: European, Turkish, Armenian and Iranian languages, plus three distinct families of Caucasian languages.
Political stuff:
www.seetheforest.blogspot.com jjmrsnx
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