Category: Literature

First, let’s talk about a sonnet


⬆︎ The newly discovered version of Sonnet 116. I asked Open AI’s 4o engine to modify it for modern spellings. I have typed the text with an IBM Wheelwriter typewriter. Click here for high-resolution version.

The most thrilling news I came across today is that a somewhat different version of Shakepeare’s Sonnet 116 has been discovered in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. The New York Times wrote about it here, and an academic paper about the discovery is here.

This is one of Shakespeare’s best-known sonnets. As the New York Times points out, the new version has an almost scolding tone aimed at those who deceive. The words “heretic” and “mountebank” are used, words that do not appear in the version with which we are familiar.

Sonnets were meant to be read aloud. Note that the word “fixèd” is two syllables.

Contempt for lying mountebanks! Now there’s a thought for the day.


⬆︎ The newly discovered version of Sonnet 116, with the text from the copy in the Bodleian Library.


⬆︎ Sonnet 116 as we have long known it. This page was scanned from the A.L. Rowse edition of the sonnets published in 1964.


⬆︎ I made a trip to Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s this morning. I wasn’t in the market for eggs, because a neighbor has given me some nice big double-yolk eggs. At Whole Foods the egg shelves were pretty much empty.


⬆︎ Even Whole Foods’ most expensive eggs — $13.99 a dozen — were sold out.


⬆︎ I’m guessing that this truck probably cost at least $60,000. It’s also very likely that parts of it were made in Canada and Mexico. When these fools get what they deserve there will be a great feast of gourmet Schadenfreude. But what’s sad is that things will be much worse for people who don’t drive around rolling coal in $60,000 trucks.

Writers who tried to warn us

The zone is completely flooded with you know what. From liberal sources and liberal friends I am hearing two categories of responses. The first boils down to red alert, Defcon 1, all hands on deck. The second is more restrained, and cautions us against wasting our efforts and our mental health on feints, distractions, and smokescreens. This second group points out that many of the outrages of the past two weeks have quickly fallen flat, and that Trump is not as powerful as he wants us to think he is. As someone wrote on Facebook, “Be careful, folks…. Is the constant freak-out to wear us down? … Keep your powder dry till you see the whites of their eyes.”

We don’t know — can’t know at this point — what they actually will be able to do.

But we do know what they want to do, and we do know what they are trying to do. What they are trying to do is to make a reality out of everything that science fiction and fantasy writers have been warning us about for many years.

I have zero patience for centrist chumps who keep telling us that we must “reach out” to them and “try to understand them.” We do understand them. We have understood them for a very long time. There is a huge body of literature, some of it fiction, some of it history and social science, telling us what they are.

Things that have happened before obviously are not impossible and can happen again. We already had a civil war in this country, and historians such as Heather Cox Richardson have made it quite clear that what is happening now comes from the same roots as what happened then. We already had a war on this planet against fascism. No one today is talking about ovens and genocide, but they are talking about ethnic cleansing with forced displacement, offshore prisons, and what would amount to concentration camps. They are cutting off food and medicine to millions of the planet’s poor. People will die. Even if Trump floats an idea and subsequently has to walk it back, they’re telling us what they want, and they will do as much of it as they can get away with.

What they are trying to do is a petrifying mix of pretty much everything that writers of dystopian fiction have tried for many years to warn us about. I’ll try to list some of them.

The Hunger Games: This is where oligarchy leads. It’s about the ugliness and ridiculousness of those who want to rule us. It’s what happens when there is no democracy, when oligarchs have all the power and the little people have none. It exposes the sadism that we can see quite clearly in MAGA, in Trump, and in Trump operatives like Stephen Miller. Hunger Games actually was very popular with the deplorables, who seem to lack the imagination to apprehend who they themselves are in the story.

The Handmaid’s Tale: This is where Christian Nationalism and Project 2025 want to take us. And let’s remember that it’s not just women who pay the price. In this story, African-Americans are forcibly relocated, and it’s implied that there was a total genocide against Native Americans. There are always scapegoats. The rest of us are just natural resources to exploit.

Fahrenheit 451: This is about the importance of ignorance. It’s about censorship and what happens to those who resist the lies that totalitarianism always requires. It’s about not forgetting the things that we once learned at great cost.

Nineteen Eighty-Four: This is about the tools that totalitarian regimes use to install and preserve themselves — surveillance, the suppression of dissent, and, as in Fahrenheit 415, the lie-enforcing systems that totalitarianism always requires. It’s about what happens to us when they flood the zone.

Star Wars: This is about the close connections between autocracy and empire. It’s about how rebellion is inevitable. It’s also about the difficulty of rebellion, when autocracy and empire are entrenched and vastly rich. It’s about the corruptibility of formerly democratic governing bodies. It’s about our need for heroes, for hope, for bravery, for perseverance. It’s about how oligarchs and empires hate diversity, equity, and inclusion; and it’s about how rebellions depend on it.

The Children of Men, The Road, Lucifer’s Hammer: In a dystopia, survival is Priority 1. Oligarchy and totalitarianism have an inherent tendency to lead to uncontrolled pandemic, environmental disaster, famine, and violence. They don’t care about us. To resist, first you must survive.

Wool: This is about mass deception, its consequences, and the difficult process of slowly figuring things out.

The Lord of the Rings: This is about the power of evil, the ugliness of evil, the strange sameness of evils wherever they appear, and the importance of alliances in resisting evils. It’s about how having kings and armies in the resistance is a great help, but also about how the little people can, and must, stand up for themselves.

The Lord of the Flies: This is about how people who are not fully developed human beings — that is, the deplorables — can so easily regress into primitive and inhuman behavior, if someone or something winds them up in a certain way. It’s about the Stanford Prison Experiment. It’s about how power and authority can lead people who are cognitively and morally stunted not just to illiberal ideology but all the way to cruelty and violence.

Fugue in Ursa Major: Here I must apologize for promoting not my own self-published books, but rather my ideas. The number of sales of my novels is next to nothing compared with the above. But I believe that, ten years ago in 2014, I correctly called a great deal of the chaos of today. It’s that it’s the billionaires who finance the engines that overpower the arc of justice. It’s that, ultimately, the billionaires and oligarchs want all the power. Being that rich is deeply corrupting and corrosive, and wealth at that level provides the ability to buy the power to do what they want to do. They finance the so-called think tanks that develop the propaganda, they own the machinery that retails the propaganda, they corrupt our elections and our governing bodies with money, and they have led us to a situation in which the richest man on the planet actually has his hands on the infrastructure of our government. Just months ago, that would have seemed too crazy even for fiction. But here we are. My novel also is about the importance of knowledge and the intelligentsia. JD Vance was entirely right when he said that (from his dark perspective) the universities are the enemy. If corruption and autocracy depend on lies, then the enemy of corruption and autocracy is knowledge and truth. A Frodo may lack the knowledge of a Gandalf, but a Frodo can know enough to do what needs to be done, as long as he can distinguish between who is lying to him and who is not.

We know what we’re up against. We know who they are. We know what they want. We know what they’ll use against us. We know what we have to do to try to stop them. I never guessed that they would get this far this time around. I thought the institutions would hold. I thought we’d learned our lessons about these people. We all got the memo. But 77,284,118 of us were too foolish to read it.

Pathos vs. tragedy


Source: Gutenberg.org

I have long remembered an English professor, Emily Sullivan, elaborating on the distinction between pathos and tragedy. Pathos, she said, is merely sad. Pathos has no meaning. Pathos has none of the edifying characteristics of tragedy, such as a character’s downfall because of a fatal flaw.

If at that time I had read The Old Curiosity Shop, I think I would have asked her if the novel’s pathos made it a bad novel. I think she would have had to say yes, and I think I would have agreed.

Clearly Oscar Wilde would have agreed, too. He famously said that one would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the ending. I’m paraphrasing Wilde so as not to have a spoiler, in case you don’t know how The Old Curiosity Shop ends.

I love Charles Dickens, and thus it is hard to find that I hated The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) in much the same way I hated Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and for the same reason — endings that combine cruelty and pathos with no redeeming meaning. That sets up an interesting discussion about whether the ending of Wuthering Heights (1847) is mere pathos. I would argue that for some mysterious reason Wuthering Heights rises above mere pathos, as though Catherine and Heathcliff were ghosts all along. But that’s a discussion that could go on for an hour or two, over a bottle or two of ale.

Still, I admire 19th Century readers, even though they loved The Old Curiosity Shop. They were patient, and they were smart. But their lives were harder than ours, so maybe it was easier for them to go along with stories in which bad things happen to good people. Here I should add that the villains in The Old Curiosity Shop all got their just deserts.

One sometimes hears people defending bad stories by saying, “But that’s the way life is.”

I detest that argument. Stories are stories precisely because they don’t have to be — shouldn’t be — like life. And any writer who gives heros and heroines anything other than their heart’s desire, and villains anything other than their just deserts, needs a good hard talking to. Therein is the key to tragedy. Tragic heroes fail to get their heart’s desire, because of a fatal flaw. That we understand and accept. But Nell Trent and Tess Durbeyfield did not have fatal flaws.

The New Testament in Scots

If you are a native speaker of English, then Scots is a language that you already 65 percent (more or less) understand. Totally aside from my interest in Scotland and Sir Walter Scott, I find that fact, from linguistics, fascinating. At first I conceived of Scots as just a dialect of English. But scholars see it otherwise, and now I’m convinced: Scots is its own language.

There is a second reason why the Scots language warms my heart (other than the fact that it is beautiful to listen to). It’s that speaking Scots has long been stigmatized in Scotland. To feel properly respected outside the places they grew up, people who grew up speaking Scots learn to “code switch” to standard Scottish English. This is very much like what happens with people, like me, who grew up where the Southern Appalachian English dialect is spoken. We learn to code switch to avoid stigmatization of the way we talk. Some of us can learn to mask our Southern Appalachian accents almost completely. Others retain traces that, to a careful ear, give them away. (More on that below.)

During my recent trip to Scotland, I made a pilgrimage to McNaughtan’s Bookshop in Edinburgh. It is a fascinating place, and, I think, the only seller of rare and antique books in Edinburgh. The owner is very knowledgeable and very helpful. I bought two books while I was there. I had them shipped home so that I didn’t have to deal with them as luggage. One of the books is The History of the Book in Scotland, Volume 4, from the Edinburgh University Press. I will write about that book later. The other is a translation of the New Testament into Scots, published in 1983.

To convince you that you already 65 percent understand the Scots language, I’ve included below an image from page 101. It’s Luke, chapter 2, verses 1 – 14, a section of the New Testament familiar to us all — the Christmas story. For comparison, I’ve also included the same verses from New International translation.

I suggest reading the Scots aloud, paying attention to the sound and phonetics. Most of it will be perfectly understandable, though there are some words you won’t recognize (though many are decipherable from context). I will list those words below.


⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.

Siccan a thing: Such a thing

Ilkane: Those of that ilk; that family

Haundfastit: Betrothed

Boukin gin: Very pregnant

Brocht: Brought

Barrie: A baby’s flannel coat

Heck: A slatted wood frame or rack

Hirsel: A flock of sheep

Uncolie frichtit: Extremely frightened

Liggin: Lying

Syne in a gliff: Then all of a sudden

Kythed: Appeared

Yird: Earth


⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.

The translator of this work was William Laughton Lorimer, a language scholar who taught Greek at St. Andrews University and who died in 1967. The translation was, of course, from the Greek.

Many people in Scotland are working to reverse the stigmatization of Scots. Sadly, Southern Appalachian English remains just as stigmatized.

I mentioned above that some traces of Southern Appalachian are detectable even in professional actors. For example, there is the tendency not to distinguish between “ken” and “kin,” and “pen” and “pin.” The actor Samuel L. Jackson, who grew up in Chattanooga, provides some good examples of this, especially in Star Wars.

Cats and Sir Walter Scott


Walter Scott in his study, with a cat

Sir Walter Scott’s home, Abbotsford, is an enchanting place. I was not surprised on my visit to Abbotsford to see that he had cats, including a favorite cat, Hinse, whose portrait is among the many portraits in Abbotsford’s armoury room. I said to Ken that any writer who has cats is going to write about cats. I had no particular memory of cats appearing in any of the eleven Waverley novels I’ve read, so I had to do some research.

What I wanted was for Scott to be as much a cat person as Robert A. Heinlein, whose novel The Door Into Summer starts ands ends with a cat. Scott, it seems, was not as much a cat person as was Heinlein. But Scott’s The Antiquary has several mentions of cats.

If there is a character in Scott’s novels who is most like Scott himself, that would be Jonathan Oldbuck in The Antiquary. Oldbuck has a cat. The cat is not given a name and mostly serves as atmosphere, sitting on a table in Oldbuck’s study the same way Hinse sat on Scott’s writing desk at Abbotsford, and sitting in a chair in Oldbuck’s dining room.

Washington Irving visited Scott at Abbotsford and wrote this about Scott:

While Scott was reading, the sage grimalkin, already mentioned, had taken his seat in a chair beside the fire, and remained with fixed eye and grave demeanor, as if listening to the reader. I observed to Scott that his cat seemed to have a black-letter taste in literature.

“Ah,” said he, “these cats are a very mysterious kind of folk. There is always more passing in their minds than we are aware of. It comes no doubt from their being so familiar with witches and warlocks.”

He went on to tell a little story about a gude man who was returning to his cottage one night, when, in a lonely out-of-the-way place, he met with a funeral procession of cats all in mourning, bearing one of their race to the grave in a coffin covered with a black velvet pall. The worthy man, astonished and half-frightened at so strange a pageant, hastened home and told what he had seen to his wife and children. Scarce had he finished, when a great black cat that sat beside the fire raised himself up, exclaimed “Then I am king of the cats!” and vanished up the chimney. The funeral seen by the gude man, was one of the cat dynasty.

“Our grimalkin here,” added Scott, “sometimes reminds me of the story, by the airs of sovereignty which he assumes; and I am apt to treat him with respect from the idea that he may be a great prince incog., and may some time or other come to the throne.”


⬆︎ Hinse


⬆︎ Oldbuck in his study


⬆︎ Oldbuck at breakfast


⬆︎ Abbotsford


⬆︎ And for the record, here’s a photo of Ken and me in a pub in Edinburgh, after we’d been to a lecture at the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club.

The Iliad: At least I tried

The Iliad. Translated by Emily Wilson. Norton, 2023. 848 pages.

Sixty pages of the Iliad was all I could handle. Reading Homer is thought to be edifying. I did not find it edifying. I found it boring. The mortals (at least in the first sixty pages) all are idiots, all behaving badly — vain, blind, belligerent, conniving, and mean. The gods are even worse. The mortals are hyperactive and volatile. The gods are lazy. I often have said that dysfunction and foible do not make good stories. If there is a quest in the Iliad, it’s crushing and looting Troy, just for the heck of it. What an edifying goal!

Stories require villains, but there’d better be at least one character per story whom we actually can like. No such character appears in the first sixty pages of the Iliad.

Of course I understand why reading the Iliad is thought to be edifying. To be able to read the ancient Greek would be very edifying. But translations not so much.

I tried to remind myself that the Iliad was 300 or 400 years old in Plato’s time. It’s not surprising that it is so primitive.

I do think, though, that this new translation of the Iliad is a good book to have on the shelf as a reference. There is a long list of characters at the back of the book that would serve as an excellent reference on Greek mythology. There are extensive notes nicely keyed to the verse. The notes explain many of the symbols and allusions, things that only Greek scholars would know. To me, the notes are more edifying and illuminating than the text itself.

There is a fascinating clash between Greek philosophy, with its wisdom, and Greek mythology, with its foolishness. From what little I know about Greek history, it was inspired more by foolishness than by wisdom. Reading about the Peloponnesian War, which was complete folly, will break your heart. Foolish gods, perhaps, drive foolish projects.

Having flung the Iliad, I’ve started on a guaranteed good read — Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop. I may have read it many years ago, but if I did I don’t remember anything about it. Many of Dickens’ novels were serialized — The Old Curiosity Shop, Bleak House, Oliver Twist, Barnaby Rudge, Nicholas Nickleby. These are my favorite Dickenses, though I love David Copperfield and have read it several times.

It’s a shame that nobody serializes novels anymore, because serialization requires that the writer make each installment compelling in itself, so that the reader is eager for more and desperate to know what happens next. A serialized novel probably will be a hot read, and we all love hot reads. The only modern serialized novels that I can’t think of are Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City novels, which were serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle (and briefly in the San Francisco Examiner after Maupin had a spat with the Chronicle’s editors).

The Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club

As an amateur scholar of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, I’m very interested in non-amateur Sir Walter Scott scholarship. As far as I can tell, though, not all that many people pursue an academic interest in Sir Walter Scott. Scott has fallen out of fashion. As I’ve argued before, we’re overdue for a Walter Scott revival.

From Googling, many months ago I discovered the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club. They are very serious. I’ve watched some of their YouTube lectures. They know who today’s Sir Walter Scott scholars are, and they bring ’em in for lectures. The median age of the group seems to be pretty high. That doesn’t surprise me. I don’t expect younger people to take an interest in Scott until somebody — somebody please! — makes a beautiful movie from, say, The Heart of Mid-Lothian.

The club is 130 years old. Princess Anne attended their dinner on their 100th anniversary.

It happens that, when I’m in Scotland next month, there will be a lecture based on a novel about Scott. Ken has secured tickets for us.

The lecture is at the New Club, Edinburgh, Edinburgh’s oldest social club, which I suppose is why there is a dress code for the lecture. Fine. That will be a reason (if I even needed another one) for me to take a couple of my Harris tweed jackets back to their homeland for a wee visit.

The Night Manager


Tom Hiddleston as Jonathan Pine and Elizabeth Debicki as Jed Marshall

It’s shocking how much time I spend (and waste) scrolling through the streaming apps on my Apple TV looking for something fit to watch. How does so much junk get made? Who watches it? One of the most useful categories, actually, are the “trending” categories, or “Top 10 This Week.” If something is “trending,” I move on. It’s pretty much guaranteed that I won’t like anything that’s “trending.” Please pardon my snobbery, but I’m a refugee from popular culture, not a consumer of it.

And then a few days ago I came across a rare jewel on Amazon Prime Video. It’s the six-part BBC series “The Night Manager.” It’s a spy thriller, based on a novel by John le Carré, that was first shown on BBC One in 2016. I have no idea when it came to Amazon Prime Video.

The screenplay is flawless. The cast is superb, especially Olivia Colman as a not-so-posh Foreign Office manager with a north-of-England accent who just won’t quit, no matter what those above her (with accents much more posh, a kind of class struggle) do to try to stop her. Tom Hiddleston’s effortless sophistication (is that a requirement in a British spy thriller?) is fascinating to a provincial American like me. He came by his sophistication and his accent naturally, though. He was born in the Westminster district of London and has Eton and Cambridge on his résumé.

There are six one-hour episodes in the series. A season two is now being filmed (I was not able to find a release date), and I believe that a third season has been approved as well. The second and third seasons will go beyond the book by Le Carré, but the screenwriters of “The Night Manager” are so good that I’m confident that they’ll pull it off.


Olivia Colman as Angela Burr

C.J. Sansom’s Shardrake novels

Novels don’t have to be masterpieces to be worthwhile, especially if, like me, you read for escape and thus prefer novels that are set in another time and another place rather than the here and now. C.J. Sansom (who died in April), was very popular, as he deserves to be.

Sansom’s Shardrake character is a solicitor in London during the time of Henry VIII. Shardrake is a hunchback, accustomed to being stared at and made fun of, though he is a gentleman. Sansom’s plots are mysteries, and they tend to be a little wooly and complicated, as they need to be if a novel goes on for more than 600 pages. But what I like best about the Shardrake novels (I have read five of them and will read the other two) is Sansom’s evocation of Tudor England. We travel all over London on foot, on horseback, and in boats on the Thames. Sovereign takes us to Yorkshire, by horse on the way up from London and by ship on the way back. Heartstone takes us to Portsmouth in July of 1545, a date you’ll be familiar with if you know what happened to Henry’s beloved ship the Mary Rose.

Sansom reminds me a bit of Winston Graham, though Sansom is not nearly as good a writer as Graham. Like Graham’s Poldark character, Shardrake is a man ahead of his time who loves justice rather than power. That is a danger. Sansom makes it quite clear how dangerous the Tudor period was, not only for those close to the court who lost their heads, but also for the ordinary people who got crossways with a divided church that was just as cruel and dangerous as Henry. Historians give estimates that vary widely, but it seems that 57,000 to 72,000 people were executed while Henry VIII was king. Sansom’s Henry VIII is a repulsive character. Other characters such as Thomas Cromwell are more complex.

At the risk of making everything political, Sansom reminds us (as does Winston Graham) how hard it can be to be ahead of the times one lives in. We are joined to such people in the past by a kind of invisible thread. We identify with them. There can be no real compensation for those who lived through the many horrors of history. Historical novels serve an important purpose by helping us to never forget.

Ken is now on Substack

Video of an oldie — Ken on The Tonight Show in 2013, after his first book was published

Ken Ilgunas is now on Substack. He’s also in the process of deciding whether to also start a podcast, but I suspect he will do that.

You can sign up for his Substack articles here. Some articles will be free, and others will require a subscription.

In his first Substack post, “My bizarre relationship with money,” he explains why he has taken a new approach to managing his career as a writer.

Longtime readers of this blog know Ken well. He lived here on and off for a number of years, starting in 2010. In 2013, he published his first book, Walden on Wheels. His second book, Trespassing Across America, was in 2017, and This Land is Our Land was in 2018. Though he wandered in those years, Acorn Abbey was his home base for seven years. Ken now lives in Scotland with his wife and young daughter. Ken is one of those lucky people with a dual citizenship. His dad was born in Scotland.

For the record, Ken and I email each other regularly and visit when we can. We continue to be literary confederates.

In many ways, Ken is like a time traveler from the future — a better future, from which he comes back to point the way. Whatever Ken is thinking — and his thoughts roam wide over many subjects — always points the way forward. I am 35 years older than Ken. I won’t live in as much of that future as younger people will. But through Ken we older folks can glimpse what that future will look like, as long as good ideas can prevail over all the bad ones.


Ken and me in Edinburgh, September 2019. The dog is Greyfriars Bobby.