Hiatus Update

Great news everyone, I am posting again. I am sorry for the delay, and sorrier to announce that I don't even have anything to say about new selection Grendel, beyond the fact that I just read a different book by John Gardner (the manifestoey The Art of Fiction) and another book directly pertinent to Our Selection (the Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney). Also, I went to the scene of the crime itself, England, only to find out, while reading on the airplane, that though Beowulf was written in English, it takes place in Denmark and in Geatland. Who knew! But a few things about Beowulf before starting in on Grendel. One of the things I noticed about it, was that, like Aeschylus and Sophocles, I thought it was kind of boring. I think this is because it is so old that no one had to do anything even remotely interesting to make it worth writing down. Just like how everyone cares about your first word and not your millionth, the fact that the first story like Beowulf even was made it noteworthy. Now, I ask you -- does that make it worth reading still? Everyone says you should like the blues and bands like Orange Juice, because without them there wouldn't be bands like the Kinks or the National. I do not say this. I think it is silly. But it seems as if for things like Beowulf and ancient Greek plays (I'm excluding Homer, because his epics seem to me to have enough plot to be interesting, rather than just being examinations of emotions -- rage, pride, woe -- that are broad enough to now be stock) are, through a function maybe of literature's being totally obsessed with itself, important to at least sort of understand. For future reference purposes, at least -- to appreciate, for example, Grendel by John Gardner, or Les Mouches (which I really liked) by Sartre. I don't know if that's good or bad -- that so many books gain resonance through reminding us of old things -- but it does seem worth pointing out, at least when I have been totally slacking on saying anything on here. Also, one last note on the above comparison between pop music and literature -- pop music seems to be, for the most part, unliterarily unconcerned with its own past (there are vaguely deconstructionist bands like Art Brut and Pavement, but leave that kind of influence-spotting to critics, who love to do it). It is unlike, in this respect, classical music (as I understand it from Alex Ross's the Rest is Noise, which is very informative about the tendency of composers at least since the fin-de-siecle to quote from each other liberally) and especially rap music, which is constantly about rap music. Again, I don't know quite what to make of this -- the observation that fiction is more like classical or rap music than pop music -- but, on an off month, there it is. Soon in the week -- a post on Grendel, more on why I found Beowulf boring, and, if we pray hard to the bloggods, maybe a post from Brian Blood on what he thought of his handsome edition of Atonement.