Topping the charts

Check out the top 1000 books owned by OCLC libraries in 2005. The complete list is very interesting to peruse. Like a sports fan, I search through the rankings for my favorites, noting that the Divine Comedy (#4), Odyssey (#5), Iliad (#6), and Hamlet (#9) made it in the top ten. Some other interesting rankings:*

Emily Brontë beat out her sister Charlotte with Wuthering Heights (#28) topping Jane Eyre (#30). The Aeneid was fairly low--#40. I was just saying to someone the other day that reading Vergil in translation is very different from the Homeric epics, which retain much of their vim and vigor. Lucretius (#48) managed to overcome Plato's Republic (#55). Too bad Lucretius didn't believe in the life of the soul after death, and as such can't appreciate the win. Though it is interesting that Plato's picture of an ideal society beat the US Constitution (#237) by so great a number. In the changing identities field, Ovid's Metamorphoses (#56) scraped past Twelfth Night (#58). Machiavelli's Prince topped Paradise Lost; it gets me thinking: maybe Milton's protagonist could have learned from the Italian, overthrown God from the inside rather than try to take his kingdom by force outright. The lasagna-loving cat Garfield (#15) trounced the anecdotes of the Peanuts gang (#69), who in turn beat out another boy-and-his-pet duo, Calvin and Hobbes (#77) . For a reason I cannot understand, there are twenty-four more holdings of Richard the II (#106) than Richard III (#107), which is a personal favorite. Thucydides (#123) falls in behind Herodotus (#119) in the Greek historians field, and in the talking animals department, Orwell's Animal Farm (#137) cuts ahead of Milne's Winnie the Pooh (#142). Boccaccio's Decameron (#143) was far ahead of his teacher Petrarch's entry, Rime, coming in at #484.

Surprisingly, some Shakespeare plays did not to make the top 1000: Two Noble Kinsmen (though admittedly not in 1st Folio, is considered to be half written by W.S., half by John Fletcher. See its Wikipedia article.) Only Henry IV part I (#226) , without its second part, made it. What happens if you want to know how his story turns out? I guess you'd have to turn to Henry V, which comes in at #105. What of Henry VI? None of his three-part story makes the list, but Henry VIII does.

Oh, and number 1? The Bible, of course. It's owned by nearly double the libraries as the number two holding, the US Census. There are nearly 12 times as many Bibles held as the number three entry, Mother Goose.

Check out the Banned Books list, too, as well as the other categorized lists, like the Drama list, which shows us where greats like Cyrano de Bergerac and Oedipus Rex (yes, the Latin title), line up against the works of Shakespeare and others. Dennis, you'll like the Reference List, which includes greats like Elements of Style and Fowler's Dictionary of English Usage. No OED or OLD, however, two of our favorite lexica (or lexicons, your choice).

After nearly an hour amusing myself by browsing these fun lists, I suppose it's time to get back to work-- labor vincet omnia.

*Definition from site: "This list, updated for 2005, contains the 'Top 1000' titles owned by OCLC member libraries--—the intellectual works that have been judged to be worth owning by the 'purchase vote' of libraries around the globe."

Sulu boldly goes

I'd like to start with one of my favorite quotations from actor Ian McKellen: "I've had enough of being a gay icon! I've had enough of all this hard work, because, since I came out, I keep getting all these parts, and my career's taken off. I want a quiet life. I'm going back into the closet. But I can't get back into the closet, because it's absolutely jam-packed full of other actors."

A good friend of mine sent me a link, the only clue to its content being the line, "of all the pictures they could have chosen..."

National Coming Out day was October 11, and even if you're a little behind, my props to you, George.

Why does sports writing seem to necessitate corniness?

No. 1 USC beat UW yesterday, which was not a surprise. I was disappointed, however, in the choice the Seattle Times made on how to report this. The title of their article: "Trojans don't horse around against UW." Get it? The Trojan Horse? Hilarious.

I find, though, that this is a common enough technique in sports writing, this tendency towards corny puns on the team's mascot. Another example from the Times' Sports page, the preview for the Seahawks/Cowboys matchup: "Bledsoe riding high again as a Cowboy." This tendency extends to player's names, too, as in "Hill has mountain of a night," referring to WSU receiver Jason Hill.

To prove this phenomenon isn't limited to the Seattle Times, note the LA Times' Sports page, which includes such titles as "Perfect 'Penmanship" and "Man on a Mission Beats His Man From a Mission." Or Sports in the Chicago Tribune, with "Assessing a penalty to golf's dumb rules" and "Superman too hot for Tech to handle."

I imagine the Sports writers tossing potential headlines for their articles around the lunch table:
"hey guys, whaddya think: the White Sox had terrific pitching last night, right? So how about "Perfect Bullpenmanship" as a headline?"
"Hey man, cut the 'bull,' [laughs around the table] and let the subtlety of the pun speak for itself!"

Though I must admit, I've been known to include a pun in the occasional term paper title. Perhaps it comes down to the psychology of the writer, whether they're reporting a baseball game or doing a close reading of a classical text. Perhaps at some point, after focusing on something for a while, we get a little goofy about it. That this goofiness occasionally manifests itself as a pun I guess isn't terribly surprising. It's the level of corniness, I guess, that gets me with respect to these sports headlines, though. I like to think of my own use of puns as somewhat ironic, like the title of this "blog."

Maybe sports writers think of them that way, too.

Horace and falafel

This afternoon I made the journey with five of my peers to the Philadelphia Free Library for a lecture by my professor Julia Gaisser on the reception of Horace. It was interesting and entertaining, particularly at the culmination when she discussed the line from the second Roman ode, "dulce et decorum est...," and its reception by men of Victorian England and the reaction to that tradition by Wilfred Owen in his poem of that name. An interesting aside: upon googling the Latin to verify it, I found that every reference was to the Owen poem and not the Horace. How could one not find reception interesting?

Following the lecture we went for an early dinner to a Persian restaurant to which our friends who are big fans have been trying to get us for a long time. I had the falafel platter, a big plate of falafel, rice, and a tasty onion and tomato salad. The turkish coffee and baklava was a treat, too.

A more exciting Saturday I have not had in quite some time, considering I'm usually loitering at home or the libes. And it's not over yet-- tonight is the first game of the World Series.

Hoping to ride my book sale high through the week

It's the last day of Fall Break. At the Media Library book sale this morning, I found a sealed copy of the Sims (the original, classic version) for a dolla fitty. Sweet. Now how am I going to be able to get school work done when I have that to destract me? I also picked up a collection of critical essays on Hamlet (incl. essays by T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis), some Latin texts with commentary (Martial, Tacitus' Agricola), and the second edition of the Oxford Companion to the Theatre. Oh, and a $.50 Law and Order board game. That should be interesting. I spent four bucks total -- I love book sales!

test

here is the test for my first post on my first "blog"