Ah yes, it helps to have a fishing buddy with the patience of Job. Job, the biblical character, not as in that other J-O-B word, the employment thing. Typing that word made me think of one of my all-time favorite books, too: Job: a comedy of justice.
Good book, too. Anyway, I’m grabbing a fishing pole and tacklebox, plus a digital camera and heading to the lake.
The two books I’m reading right now? Tales of the Big Bend by Elton Miles (Texas A&M Press) and Bloom’s Shakespeare: the invention of the human.
What worked for me, in the Tales of the Big Bend, there’s mention of story, part myth, part historical, about character who “hunted Indian scalps.” What caught my attention, the copyright on the book is 1976. That myth, doing this backwards, was the source, at least in part, for Cormac MacCarthy’s Blood Meridian.
But is it odd to have obscure Texas mythology (or history), back to back with literary criticism?
I’ll ask the fishing buddies. I can imagine how this goes, too.
“What about the historical reference, vis-a-vis, Shakespeare’s Henry V, and the problems with the British Kingdom in 1604, or with the timing of Shakespeare’s satire of politics in Troilus and Cressida, which was always a problem play?”
“What are you babbling about?”