Amery, Dryden, Atkins, Rand

Since my last post I've read an issue of The Economist and The New Scientist, three issues of Eclectic Reading.

I've also read three collections of Jean Amery's essays, completing a reading of his works. I have concluded the poor soul suffered from depression, on top of having survived Gestapo torture and two concentration camps. I found his essay on suicide profoundly shocking, in the sense of a baring of a suicidal person's soul.

I have also read Atkin's four volumes on Sex and Literature. Two observations stand out. The first is that shame did not enter the description of sex until the reign of Elizabeth the First. The second (and talk about words I'd never thought I'd write) is that any sort of anal sex has been considered shocking or unusual since Antiquity. My vocabulary is expanded, of course, and you'd think it would be impossible for this topic to get boring, but after over 1400 pages, yes, it did lose my interest. At times, I got bored with the catalog of less common practices -- if I wanted kink, I'd read Krafft-Ebbing, and I deliberately don't. However, Atkins is without peer for wit and lack of stuffiness among academics, and it was refreshing and amusing to read his innumerable asides. I was interested to find that Lesbia was actually a older married woman who seduced Catullus, the only good love poet among the Romans. That is not what one associates with her name.

I then decided to read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, since it was mentioned by Eva Mendes in OK Magazine, my bible. It was as I expected: a long defence of artistic integrity vindicated in the end, but badly written, misogynist, and utilitarian towards the environment. That being said, I'm going to read Atlas Shrugged next.

Finally I read Dryden and His World, and it did go on forever.