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February 29, 2004

Coming Soon: Lanx Satura

For some months now I have been thinking about weblogs with comments as a delivery vehicle for literature. Some works demand to be pondered carefully and discussed with others, and some of those most worth pondering are written in smallish parts suitable for daily reading and discussion. Other works may demand to be read in bits because they are too light rather than too heavy. These would include epigrams, aphorisms, and jokes such as those collected in the Philogelos.

I haven't been posting much lately because I've been working on a series of such blogs, each of which will present a work of literature in daily or weekly slices, with the comment section open.

Which authors will be included? Watch this space. The first two or three blogs will debut tomorrow, March 1st. I was hoping to have them up 1 minute after midnight for the start of the archaic Roman year, but it looks like it will be later tomorrow, since I have a very bad cold.

In the mean time, here are hints on the identities of some of the authors to be included:

  1. Which Roman author would most appropriately debut on March 1st? That should be easy.
  2. Which (relatively) modern author would most appopriately be paired with him, as a native of the same town and great admirer of his fellow townsman?
  3. Which (relatively) modern poet wrote not one but two five-act tragedies on Nero, so irretrievably out-of-print that even xeroxes are hard to come by, but admired by Yvor Winters and the one or two other critics that have ever read them?
  4. If A. E. Housman is the classicist who has been most successful as an author of English literature, who is the mediaevalist?
Posted by Michael Hendry at February 29, 2004 11:33 PM
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