Just like the others you've been reading, I got the call
(email really) to guest blog for Cloudy.
My true love, Eli was invited too, but he's really busy with spring break right now. Also, there's March Madness, the NBA, and non-academic reading at the rate of 1.5 books per day. I could never read at that rate. Even on vacation, I'm like .75 books per day so long as they are written for popular audiences like me and don't exceed 300 pages.
I interviewed Elias extensively about his readings and learned the following. I think you'll find his reading far more interesting that the labor grievance files that I have been reviewing for work lately.
Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman was a quick read for Elias because it is textual analysis for the layperson (Elias is ordained in this shit!). Ehrman describes many of the textual discrepancies that occurred in copying the New Testament by hand for all those years before they had movable type. Some were due to clerics wishing to make various apostles' accounts agree. Other things slipped in to our current Biblical versions that were merely marginal notations. Elias says he enjoyed this one, but he should since I gave it to him for Christmas last year.
Elias also read The Diagnosis by Alan Lightman. Eli's dad thought he would like it because the main protagonist undergoes a pathology that mirrors Socrates's last days. Sort of.
Today, Elias finished Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Elias read me some passages, but I couldn't follow. My brother Ed loved it, and I love Elias for reading something upon recommendation from someone in my family.
On top of the reading, he has been doing Hesiod translations for some text book in the works on Greek mythology, and he finished reading the longest Cattulus poem there is.
I'm familiar with Cattulus because when Elias and I were first dating, he would recite, in English, the most nasty of the poems to me. From an on the spot, live translation imparted to me by Elias, I bring you Cattulus 16 (in which the author disses on some guys he doesn't like):
I will fuck you in the ass and I will fuck you in the face,
you [gay epithet for 'bottom'], Aurelius, and Furius, you bugger,
you who think, from my little verses,
because they are a bit soft, that I am indecent.
For the pious poet himself should be decent,
his little verses need not be;
they only have wit and charm
if they are a little soft and indecent,
and are able to incite that which lusts,
I don't mean boys, but these hairy men
who are unable to move their hard groins.
You, because you have read "many thousands of kisses,"
think I am unmanly?
I will fuck you in the ass and I will fuck you in the face.