Homer's Odyssey

Check this out - a fragment from a papyrus manuscript of the Odyssey dating from the third to the second century BCE. The Odyssey is the second of Homer's major Greek epics and follows on from the Iliad, both of which were written around the ninth or eight century BCE, telling the story of the ten year siege of Ilium by a coalition of Greek states and the long journey home of Odysseus following the fall of Troy.
It may look like nothing but a scrap of reed to the uninitiated but this is literary gold - Homer's work is fundamental to modern literature, art and music. He was a pretty awesome dude.
This piece has been identified as part of Book 12.384 - 390.
It's one of a collection of treasures held by the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University. 
Apparently existing fragments from The Odyssey are far rarer than those still around from The Iliad, being outnumbered four to one.

Touchy-feely...

Everyone knows a thing of beauty is a joy forever...and these beauties are made for keeps. Found these exquisite cloth-bound book covers by Penguin designer Coralie Bickford-Smith on-line here. 

Classic cover

How beautiful is this! The original cover art for E.B White's 1952 classic Charlotte's Web sold at auction to a New York collector for US$155,000. The graphite and ink illustration by Garth Williams features farmgirl Fern Arable holding the saved-from-slaughter pig Wilbur, with Charlotte spinning her web above them. If you look closely you can still see the production notes around the edges. The same cover art has been used for over 58 years and in 2000, Publisher's Weekly named Charlotte's Web the best selling children's book ever. 
Williams first teamed with White for the cover of the mousecapade Stuart Little.

Bookaholics Anonymous

My name is RubyfireWrites and I'm a bookoholic.
Just when I think I am fortified against temptation.... I come across a bookstore and all resolve crumbles. Sigh.
Books + shop = ka-ching goes the till. 
This was Saturday's haul from Andy's Book Shop on the northern beaches (19 bucks for the lot). I went out shopping for figs, spinach leaves and raspberries, so of course it was natural that I came home with a pile of books.
Cervantes' Don Quixote, Plutarch's Fall of the Roman Republic, Aboriginal Myths and Legends by AW Reed and - haha! - for a little light relief The Love Queen of the Amazon by Cecile Pineda. The Rousseau artwork on the cover caught my attention and the blurb on the back won me over for the $4 spend: 
"Expelled from her demure convent school in the small town of Malyerba, Peru, to be led kicking and screaming to the altar, Ana Magdalena was kidnapped on the night of her wedding only to escape and find refuge with the man of her dreams. But marriage to the penniless deluded writer Federico Orgaz was to herald even more extraordinary adventures. From her colourful initiation into the life of the flourishing bordello La Nymphaea to her exalted role as Madam of the legendary pleasure-dome La Confiteria, Ana Magdalena's sensuous journey would lead her into realms hitherto unknown..."
They say when trying to write, one should also read read read. That's my excuse and I'm sticking with it.

Top 10 Classic Literature Video Games

Did you know that somebody, somewhere, has turned The Great Gatsby into a video game?! 
'Spend a summer on a jazz-fueled adventure based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s legendary novel. Experience the Roaring Twenties first-hand as you uncover secrets behind the richly decadent facade. Explore one of the most tragic tales in literary history,' says the spiel.
'...Recreate Fitzgerald’s famous prose, assemble your own library and earn trophies to share with friends on Facebook.'
I have zero interest in gaming but perhaps it's a welcome relief from the bizzare role-play world of Halo: Combat Evolved, Metroid Prime et al.
Discovering the evolution of Gatsby from Penguin Classic to video game console inspired Flavorwire to dream up a list of: 10 Unlikely Classics That Would Make Great Games. 

Best Dressed Literary Figures

Reading an article in the SMH by novelist John Marsden, whose Tomorrow series is apparently epic among teenagers (?) and is on its way to the big screen, I was curious when he said: 'I'm not a visual person. I see words not pictures. I don't notice faces, clothing, hairstyles. There are few descriptions of such things in my books. I can have an hour's conversation with someone I've just met, run into them an hour later and not recognise them.' 
Maybe that's why I haven't read any of his books? The idea that a person can look at something and not perceive some dual impression of form as well as function is incomprehensible to me.
Especially when it comes to characters and their clothes! Today's list comes courtesy of Flavorwire, whose writer Judy Berman had the brilliant idea to nominate Literature's 10 Best Dressed Characters. Bravo! I do admire most of the inclusions and am particularly pleased that Madame Bovary got a guernsey - however it must be said - there are a couple of glaring omissions. 
Where is Anna Karenina? 

And Marguerite Duras' nameless girl in The Lover, the girl with an imagination that surpasses her grim reality and who goes to school wearing evening shoes?:
"I'm wearing a dress of real silk, but it's threadbare, almost transparent. It used to belong to my mother...It's a sleeveless dress with a very low neck. It's the sepia color real silk takes on with wear. It's a dress I remember. I think it suits me. I'm wearing a leather belt with it, perhaps a belt belonging to one of my brothers...This particular day I must be wearing the famous pair of gold lamé high heels. I can't see any others I could have been wearing, so I'm wearing them...Going to school in evening shoes decorated with diamanté flowers... These high heels are the first in my life, they're beautiful, they've eclipsed all the shoes that went before...

Here's a couple from Flavorwire's list:

In Breakfast at Tiffany's Truman Capote writes of Holly Golightly: “She was still on the stairs, now she reached the landing, and the ragbag colors of her boy’s hair, tawny streaks, strands of albino blond and yellow caught the hall light. It was a warm evening, nearly summer, and she wore a slim, cool black dress, black sandals, a pearl choker. For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheeks. Her mouth was large, her nose upturned. A pair of dark glasses blotted out her eyes. It was a face beyond childhood, yet this side of belonging to a woman. I thought her anywhere between sixteen and thirty; as it turned out, she was shy two months of her nineteenth birthday.”

Gustave Flaubert describes Emma in Madame Bovary: “She would come directly, charming, agitated, looking back at the glances that followed her, wearing her flounced gown with gold eyeglass, her dainty shoes, all sorts of elegant trifles that he had never enjoyed, and exhaling the ineffable seduction of yielding virtue.”


Who do you think should have made the cut?

Man caves

On the subject of Hemingway yesterday...I came across this picture of his writing room. This is the spot in Key West, Florida, where Hemingway penned For Whom the Bell Tolls and Death in the Afternoon, probably while drinking a Scotch, smoking a cigar and contemplating the mementos he collected from his adventures in Africa and Cuba. Hemingway converted an old carriage house on his property into this writing studio. Note his famous Royal typewriter on the desk.

Also found two photos of Mark Twain's man cave high atop a hill on his sister's property in Elmira, New York. In this sanctuary Twain wrote Life on the Mississippi, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In 1874 he described his writing hut in a letter to William Dean Howells:

“It is the loveliest study you ever saw…octagonal with a peaked roof, each face filled with a spacious window…perched in complete isolation on the top of an elevation that commands leagues of valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills. It is a cozy nest and just room in it for a sofa, table, and three or four chairs, and when the storms sweep down the remote valley and the lightning flashes behind the hills beyond and the rain beats upon the roof over my head—imagine the luxury of it.”

I love my writing room too. It just needs thousands more words to spill out of it...

Five meet the 21st century

Once a treasure always a treasure… even if means changing the lingo. They've done it to the Ancients - Homer, Socrates, Ovid - and the Classics - Shakespeare, Goethe, Milton - too many to mention, so that we modern plebs can access, appreciate and perpetuate the creative greats. Now they're giving the marvellous Enid Blyton a turn.

The Guardian reports that, approaching 70 years since they were written, publishers have ‘updated’ Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series because they feared her 1940s vernacular was putting off 21^st century kids.

Commenting on Hodder’s decision to release ten updated versions of Blyton’s Famous Five novels, journalist Alison Flood bade “farewell’ to “awful swotters,” “dirty tinkers” and “jolly japes,” explaining:

“Hodder is ‘sensitively and carefully’ revising Blyton’s text after research with children and parents showed that the author’s old-fashioned language and dated expressions were preventing young readers from enjoying the stories. The narrative of the novels will remain the same, but expressions such as ‘mercy me!’ have been changed to ‘oh no!,’ ‘fellow’ to ‘old man’ and ‘it’s all very peculiar’ to ‘it’s all very strange.’ …

“Other changes include ‘housemistress’ becoming ‘teacher,’ ‘awful swotter’ becoming ‘bookworm,’ ‘mother and father’ becoming ‘mum and dad,’ ‘school tunic’ becoming ‘uniform’ and Dick’s comment that ‘she must be jolly lonely all by herself’ being changed to ‘she must get lonely all by herself.’”

Mercy me! The old lady might be rolling in her grave, but hopefully happily, as it signifies her perpetuity.

How Archimedes scuppered a Roman fleet

With so much history and legend behind it, Sicily is high on my list of 'must go' places. Some seriously cool stuff happened there. It even manages to make maths palatable.
You know Archimedes? He was a Greek mathematician who hung out in Syracuse just before the dawn of Christendom.
The UK's Sunday Times reported last week that a scientist claims to have solved the mystery of how Archimedes used solar power to help destroy a dastardly Roman fleet that ambushed his home city in the 3rd century BC.
Legend has it that during Sicily's Siege of Syracuse, Archimedes used mirrors to create a 'death ray' that burned through the enemy fleet's sails, rendering each vessel limp and lifeless. 
However, Cesare Rossi, professor of mechanical engineering at Naples Federico II University in Italy reckons that, in fact, Archie invented a steam-powered cannon to annihilate the invaders.
So, instead of reflecting sunlight straight onto moving ships, he might have used mirrors to heat huge kettles of water to power his prototype artillery. Rossi says curved mirrors could have concentrated the sun's rays on a tank filled with water. The water would have boiled and the trapped steam fired the gun, shooting flaming cannonballs at the Romans. And all this 1500 years before gunpowder was known in Europe. 
The paper says: 'Rossi calculated that a heated cannon barrel would need to have converted little more than an ounce of water into enough steam to hurl a 13lb projectile, with a firing range of 500ft. In the 15th century Leonardo sketched a steam cannon which he credited to Archimedes.'
I am no scientist, but the creative in me loves this story, whichever version of events - legend or logic - happens to be true.

Today's musical inspiration...

Because it's one of my absolute favourite books of all time. Because Kate Bush achieves a rare feat (that no movie version ever could) in actually doing justice to the story and its two main characters. And because I've just stepped off a jet plane in England - land of the blustering moors and the legend of the Brontë sisters...

Flaubert encore

During nightly bouts of insomnia this week I have:
1. Finished reading Madame Bovary by lamplight; and
2. Discovered that my upstairs neighbour takes a 12 minute shower and a bowel movement daily at 3am (thin walls).
Flaubert is a treasure. Which reminds me of the the third thing I did whilst others slumbered: downloaded Freebooks for iPhone and acquired a copy of his 1869 work, Sentimental Education: The Story of a Young Man. Doubt I can bring myself to read it on a 3"x2" screen though. The soft felt of aged pages that whisper as they're turned is a textural accompaniment essential to the pure pleasure of reading.
So, to firmly fix Flaubert's adulterous bourgeois romp in my imagination, before Madame Bovary is returned to rest in my bookshelf, a few more pieces de resistance...
Emma convincing Charles to conduct an experimental operation on a villager's club foot:
"Bovary might, indeed, be successful; might be an able surgeon, for all Emma knew. And how satisfying for her to have urged him to a step that would bring him fame and fortune! Her one wish was for something more solid than love to lean upon."
Rodolphe wearying of Emma's frequent impassioned declarations of adoration for him:
"Because wanton or mercenary lips had whispered like phrases in his ear, he had but scant belief in the sincerity of these. High-flown language concealing tepid affection must be discounted, thought he: as though the full heart may not sometimes overflow in the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, his thoughts, his sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we strum out tunes to make a bear dance, when we would move the stars to pity."
Rodolphe contemplating a tin full of old love letters written to him by his past conquests:
"What a lot of humbug! Which summed up his opinion. For his pleasures had so trampled over his heart, like schoolboys in a playground, that no green things grew there, and whatever passed that way, being more frivolous than children, left not so much as its name carved on the wall."
And finally, Rodolphe crying poor after the Madame has reignited his desire for her, then archly stubbed it out by asking for cash:
"'I haven't got it, my dear lady'. He was not lying. If he had it he would doubtless have given it to her, distasteful though it usually is to perform such noble deeds: a request for money being of all the icy blasts that blow upon love the coldest and most uprooting."
Poor Emma. Her downfall was tragic and complete. But at least the lady lived and loved - what else was she to do? - whiling away hour upon hour in the endless mire of a marriage to the puny cipher that was her husband, in the dormant village that was her captor?

Team Whitman

Forget the soccer, this is my kinda game.

Whitman vs Sawyer...ooh tough call.

Which literary giant would you back? There's a range of classics to choose from. Get your Novel-T League team shirt here.

Loving Flaubert

Dipping into Flaubert in preparation for a sojourn to France ooh la la. Madame Bovary was the novel that scandalised a nation on publication in 1857 and ultimately resulted in Flaubert's prosecution for immorality. Quelle horreur.
I am loving every word, every phrase, every paragraph. One quarter of the way in and here are some passages that sing...
On the sudden death of Charles Bovary's first wife:
"...But the damage had been done. A week later, as she was hanging out the washing in the yard, she had a spasm, and spat blood; and on the following day, as Charles was drawing the curtains, his back to her, she exclaimed: 'Oh God!' heaved a sigh and fell unconscious. She was dead! It was incredible!"
On entering the Les Bertaux farmhouse where he at first failed to notice Emma's presence:
"...the shutters were closed. Through the chinks in the wood the sunshine came streaking across the floor in long slender lines that broke on the corners of the furniture and flickered on the ceiling."
On a green silk cigar case found along the road from La Vaubyessard to Rouen:
"Love had breathed through the meshes of the canvas; every stitch has fastened there a yearning or a memory; and all those interwoven threads of silk were but a projection of that same silent passion."
I'm up to the part where Charles and Emma have just moved to Yonville and Madame Bovary has taken a walk with young Leon, and Leon "didn't know how to proceed, being torn between fear of making a false move, and desire for an intimacy which he accounted well nigh impossible."...
Poor old Flaubert only made a measly 500 francs for the first five years' sales of Madame Bovary. I wonder how many millions of copies have sold since...?

A prince among books

How beautiful is this copy of Machiavelli's The Prince! 
Can't wait to start reading it. The perfect gift from a faraway friend.

Laureate of the larrikan

Long after the clock struck 12 while tripping the Sydney Harbour night fantastic last week, my friend Angelina and I hopscotched our way along the Writers Walk at Circular Quay.
It's a personal ritual whenever I walk the Walk, that I never walk on any of the writers. I make sure I step carefully around them, out of respect. You know?
Anyway, there we were, just past A.D. Hope and James A. Michener, and a stone's throw from Mark Twain when, in my haste to get to Banjo Paterson I almost missed C.J. Dennis altogether. 
One of my childhood heroes, his Book for Kids, with its distinctly blue-ish spine and musty, dog-eared pages, still gets an airing by me a few times a year. The poems and vivid pictures in it are nothing less than awesome. (The Triantiwontigongolope - for example - a triumph of the imagination!) Dennis wrote poems for grown ups as well - Songs of a Sentimental Bloke is probably his most popular collection - but it's the rollicking kids rhymes I like best.
C.J. Dennis' plaque on the Writers Walk spruiks a quote from the man they called the Laureate of the larrikan:
It 'appened one day, I 'ad jist come down,
After long years, to look at Sydney town.
'An 'struth! Was I knocked endways? Fair su'prised?
I never dreamed! That arch that touched the skies!
The Bridge!...
       - I Dips Me Lid (1936)
Now if only some clever soul could translate C.J.Dennis' ingenious tales into a 3D animated film, a DS game or an iPhone app, perhaps the next generation of kids would come to know and love his genius too.

Having his cake...

Synchronicity is a recurring theme in my life. Yesterday I was flipping through an old favourite, EM Forster's A Room With A View - reminding myself what a cool story it is. Today, I came across a cool story about EM Forster himself.
Short sight was a problem for Mr Forster, the English author and essayist who had five novels published in his lifetime. On attending the wedding of his friend Lord Harewood, who also happened to be the Queen's cousin, Forster is said to have bowed gravely to the wedding cake, under the mistaken impression it was Her Royal Highness, Queen Mary.
Natural mistake really.