A real hodgepodge, and that's leaving out Passionate Marriage, which Jenna has me reading.
For whatever reason, I've started reading The Books of Great Alta to Moshe. I'd forgotten how amazing they are, a real showpiece for Jane Yolen's talents. She switches tones so effortlessly in these books that it's a joy to read them. Each section starts with a "myth" section, which tends to be grand and sweeping, then a "legend" that's somehow related to the story to come. Then she jumps in and out of the actual story to intersperse it with lullabies, histories, ballads, and so forth. It's a tour de force in the same way that Possession is. (Although Possession is the better book)
I picked up a book of Leigh Brackett's short stories from the 40s and 50s, and I'm into the fourth one. She was writing, of course, in the heyday of the pulps, and so it's odd to see how non-pulpy the stories are. Not the plots, which are very space operatic, but the writing itself is very sensual and adult, which is not something I tend to ascribe to the writers of the day (Van Vogt, Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, et al). Then again, the fourth story is a collaboration with Rab Bradbury, which reminds me that he was also writing SF back then, and his writing is also beautiful, and not what we think of as pulpish writing (though Bradbury clearly had more literary goals than Brackett, which is why he managed to migrate to slicks like the Atlantic Monthly).
Oddly enough, all four of the stories I've read so far involve some sort of hypnosis or mind control--I've never thought of that as a particular trait of Brackett's style. But I haven't read as much of her work as I'd like, which I why I picked up this collection in the first place. I do see that most of her work was not sold to Campbell, who was the editor of the big SF magazine at the time, and whom Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke all credit with refining their styles. That may be why her stories stick out as so different from theirs (although it's interesting to speculate whether they're similar because of Campbell's interest, or whether Campbell just happened to work well with that sort of writer).
This shabbat I also read another chapter in Kugel's Jacob's Ladder, this one about the rape of Dinah. This one really feels like it was very little altered from an original paper that it's based on (not that I'm going to check...) He focuses very much on the Testament of Levi, an account from the second Temple period purporting to be Levi's recounting of his story to his sons. Apparently, there's a set of 12 of these, one for each brother, and Kugel talks a bit about the Testament of Simeon as well, since he was the other brother he slew the Shechemites. The issue of the Dinah story for early commentators is that Simeon and Levi seem to act pretty reprehensibly--they slay every man in Shechem after tricking them to undergo circumcision. Jacob disapproves, but it doesn't seem to go any farther--they're never actually punished for this.
Kugel traces a couple of different stories which aim to show that, in fact, Simeon and Levi acted according to God's will, where some versions even have them taking up special angelic swords for the occasion. He also shows how the commentaries can give an indirect view of the period; in this case, we can deduce something about different attitudes to intermarriage. (We can read Jacob's assent to the circumcision proposal as saying that he would've supported an intermarriage with Shechem, and then Levi becomes the (righteous?) avenger who says that this cannot happen).
I also read a bit more of book 13 of the Iliad, where Meriones meets Idomeneus in the back lines, and each tries to explain why he's there instead of in the front lines. It's kind of funny in it's own way, and Homer unquestionably ends it on a joke, so I wonder if it was thrown in as a bit of a break from all the fighting going on, before the aristeia Idomeneus which is coming up.
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