"Blog posts that either come to naught, or several pages of scribbled lines..."
I've pretty much made my peace with my hard drive becoming infected and needing to be wiped before being resurrected a few years ago, save only for two things: one, a mild regret over the loss of my final post on David Copperfield (in which I was arguing that the book's subtitle should've been "I Get Hard for Retards," given the titular hero's unseemly affection for an infantile, possibly mentally handicapped, woman, who had a perhaps too keen, even for the Victorian era, attachment to her father; then too, DC's attraction to Dora was a bit of misplaced Oedipal attraction, given how infantile and mentally deficient his mother seems to have been); and two, a stronger regret over the loss of my review / essay on the Oxford World's Classics edition of the first five books of Livy's Ab Urbe Condita, or "From the Founding of the City" (The Rise of Rome, Books I - V; 1998).
Given that I read it during the last half of 2008 through January 2009, and due to the fact that I've only in the past week picked up the next installment (a second-hand copy of the Penguin Classics edition of Books VI - X, titled Rome and Italy [1982]; books XI - XX are lost, and the remaining books, out of a reported 140, are XXI - XLV; Rome's life-and-death struggles with Carthage are covered in Books XXI - XXX), I'm really struggling to recall exactly what I read or what I tried to single out in my post. I annotated my copy of The Rise of Rome, I highlighted it profusely, but still....flipping back through it, skimming the introductory material (provided by the same guy who did the new translation, T.J. Luce; Luce was also the author of Livy: The Composition of his History [1977], which was cited by R.M. Ogilvie in the Penguin edition of Rome and Italy), reading Ogilvie's introduction to the Penguin translation by Betty Radice, I got nothin'. Hell, I can't honestly say that I fully remember exactly what Livy wrote about Coriolanus (in Book II, chiefly in Chapters 33-5), who was the anti-hero of one of Shakespeare's plays (and yes, I saw Ralph Fiennes' movie tweak of Coriolanus last year; it was decent, even if I thought that it softened the role of his mother and wife a bit; Shakespeare's play was okay: it was one of his lesser plays, but at least I liked it better than Troilus and Cressida).
I read an English translation of Tacitus' Annals a few years before I tackled Livy, and I remember demmed little of it; of course, that was before I took the highlighting and annotating plunge. (I previously wanted to keep my books as pristine as possible, even those I'd purchased second-hand and that already had spots of mildew on them, as in my edition of Tacitus.) The reason that I started writing a post about Livy was to leave myself a trail of virtual bread crumbs, in the hopes of being able to recall more of Livy than I can of Tacitus.
As it is, I would probably have to pretty much re-read the Oxford World's Classics edition of The Rise of Rome -- or at least, heavily skim it -- to recall what I wanted to file in my long-term memory.
Bah.
Given that I read it during the last half of 2008 through January 2009, and due to the fact that I've only in the past week picked up the next installment (a second-hand copy of the Penguin Classics edition of Books VI - X, titled Rome and Italy [1982]; books XI - XX are lost, and the remaining books, out of a reported 140, are XXI - XLV; Rome's life-and-death struggles with Carthage are covered in Books XXI - XXX), I'm really struggling to recall exactly what I read or what I tried to single out in my post. I annotated my copy of The Rise of Rome, I highlighted it profusely, but still....flipping back through it, skimming the introductory material (provided by the same guy who did the new translation, T.J. Luce; Luce was also the author of Livy: The Composition of his History [1977], which was cited by R.M. Ogilvie in the Penguin edition of Rome and Italy), reading Ogilvie's introduction to the Penguin translation by Betty Radice, I got nothin'. Hell, I can't honestly say that I fully remember exactly what Livy wrote about Coriolanus (in Book II, chiefly in Chapters 33-5), who was the anti-hero of one of Shakespeare's plays (and yes, I saw Ralph Fiennes' movie tweak of Coriolanus last year; it was decent, even if I thought that it softened the role of his mother and wife a bit; Shakespeare's play was okay: it was one of his lesser plays, but at least I liked it better than Troilus and Cressida).
I read an English translation of Tacitus' Annals a few years before I tackled Livy, and I remember demmed little of it; of course, that was before I took the highlighting and annotating plunge. (I previously wanted to keep my books as pristine as possible, even those I'd purchased second-hand and that already had spots of mildew on them, as in my edition of Tacitus.) The reason that I started writing a post about Livy was to leave myself a trail of virtual bread crumbs, in the hopes of being able to recall more of Livy than I can of Tacitus.
As it is, I would probably have to pretty much re-read the Oxford World's Classics edition of The Rise of Rome -- or at least, heavily skim it -- to recall what I wanted to file in my long-term memory.
Bah.