Read some new fiction of mine in The Collagist, an excellent new online mag from Dzanc Books.
I couldn't let today end without wishing John Milton a happy quatercentenary. The Guardian has a nice birthday roundup, including a Miltoniana quiz , some musings on Milton v. Shakespeare in the greatest-poet contest (do we really have to choose?), and Philip Pulllman reading a bit o' Paradise Lost.
Scenes from a marathon: My story about St. Olaf College's all-day reading of Paradise Lost is now up:
In between his reading stints, Chad Goodroad, a senior majoring in English and political science, hawked black "Milton Marathon" T-shirts at a card table. Someone asked him how sales were. "Crazy," he said. "Actually, kinda slow." A student in one of the shirts knitted her way through Book III. A professor's toddlers played nearby on a harvest display of pumpkins and sheaves.
...Participants fortified themselves with coffee and Subway sandwiches. Another English professor contributed a devil's-food cake and a pair of devil's horns. Somebody drew a picture of the archangel Michael on the chalkboard.
"It's cool," Mr. Goodroad observed midafternoon, when the group had made it to Book VI. "It's kind of like a purging."
Miraculously, nobody's energy flagged. It wasn't just the coffee and sandwiches; read out loud, Milton's blank verse can be propulsive, and the readers had caught the rhythm.
In case it's not already on your calendar, Dec. 9 is Milton's 400th birthday. A couple of weeks ago I flew out to St. Olaf College, Minn. to take part in a marathon reading of "Paradise Lost" that some folks there staged in honor of the quatercentenary. I write about it in next week's Chronicle.
If you ever have a chance to read Paradise Lost out loud, I urge you to take it. It's more fun than you think. Among the joys? When you check back in with a classic like PL, you stumble on phrases that have taken on lives of their own outside the source material. Take this bit from Book II, which Philip Pullman mined for the trilogy "His Dark Materials":
...Into this wild abyss,
The womb of nature and perhaps her grave,
Of neither sea, nor air, nor fire,
But all these in their pregnant causes mixed
Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless the almighty maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more worlds,
Into this abyss the wary fiend
Stood on the brink of hell and looked a while,
Pondering his voyage...
Early this year, the Oxford University Press blog ran some of Pullman's thoughts on "Milton in 2008." (Pullman also wrote an introduction for a recent Oxford edition of PL.)
The quartercentenary fun is just beginning. The University of Cambridge, Milton's alma mater, has all kinds of festivities planned, and my sources at St. Olaf's tell me that there are dozens of PL marathons taking place this fall. Find one near you--or stage your own and make yourself popular with all your friends.
