Why would anybody read me…

…when they could be reading Simcha Fisher?  Jeepers, she’s fun!

I’ll see her Goethe and raise her a George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, later George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron, commonly known as Lord Byron. His Adventures of Don Juan (pronounced “Joo-en”) was one of the great trials I had to endured in my Romantic Lit class at the UW. Byron goes somewhere, stands before a great monument like a Pyramid or the Parthenon, strikes a pose, and then gasses on endlessly about how it reminds him of himself. It. Never. Ends.

C.S. Lewis scrawled on the back flyleaf of his copy the immortal words. “NEVER AGAIN.”

I like a lot of the English Romantics (Germans, not so much). I retain a fondness for Wordsworth and Coleridge. And I think George MacDonald stands solidly in the English Romantic tradition, as does C.S. Lewis and Chesterton, in their own ways. It was a literary tradition trying to re-connect with the Catholic sacramental vision so brutally denied it by the police state erected by the Tudors and what followed. At its best, it still has the power to move. But man, when it get self-absorbed and egoistic it can really sour.

On the bright side, I love what Tim Powers does with Byron in The Anubis Gates.