Book Launch and Presentation: Road Pricing and Provision: Changed Traffic Conditions Ahead: Tuesday 4th September 2018

Road Pricing and Provision [ANU Press] CC By-NC-ND 4.0 

The launch of our book, Road Pricing and Provision: Changed traffic conditions ahead, will be in Canberra on Tuesday 4th September, followed by my presentation: https://t.co/UWDpOBN81m

— Michael de Percy (@madepercy) August 17, 2018

On Tuesday 4th September 2018, our book will be launched and I will be giving a presentation entitled: Road Pricing and provision: Where are we now and how did we get here?

To register for the event, please visit the registration page.

The electronic version of the book is available for free download at ANU Press.

The Aeneid: Quasi-plagiarism or slow and deliberate Homerisms?

Fuga di Enea da Troia e San Girolamo by Federico Barocci (1598) [Public domain] via Wikimedia

The Aeneid by Virgil

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Last year I managed to do cover-to-cover readings of Homer's Iliad and The Odyssey, but it has taken me some time to get around to Virgil's "sequel", The Aeneid. In The Iliad, Aeneas is whisked away from the battle at Troy (to heal) and effectively disappears from the story. 

Virgil, in his epic poem written during 30-19 BCE, picks up Aeneas' story (much like Homer does with Odysseus in The Odyssey) and puts him on a quest to become the founder of Rome. (This occurred before the time of Romulus and Remus. Virgil had to reconcile the myth of the wolf-suckled brothers with the earlier Greek myth.) 

This translation puts the epic poem into prose. It is nothing short of gripping. I enjoyed Virgil's Georgics and Eclogues, but this work was brilliant. I can see how Virgil has adapted much of Homer's approach to story-telling, but with several differences. Homer brings in the scenery, such as sunsets reflecting on battlefield bronze, as well as stories about who killed whom. Virgil does similar, but without so much of the scenery. Of course, this is a translation from the hexameter form, and was originally written in Latin rather than Greek, so how this translation compares with the original, I am at a loss. 

What we do know is that Virgil was honouring Augustus Caesar with this tale, and tracing Augustus back to Aeneas. (I recall a family history on the UK's Who do you think you are? where one person's lineage was traced right back to Jesus, so such myths for the aristocracy have been common for centuries.) 

Rather than recount the story, and what I find most fascinating, is the story of the Trojan Horse. Homer barely mentions it, and Virgil fills in some of the gaps. But the larger story that has been passed down doesn't really come from Homer or Virgil. This is not new, but I was expecting that the three books together would give a more complete story of the legend that we have come to know. 

As for the "quasi-plagiarism" of Homer, I tend to agree with La Trobe University's Chris Mackie that:

In this sense the criticism of Virgil of plagiarising Homer, or quasi-plagiarism, seems rather unreasonable.

I am surprised to learn that the poem was never completely finished, and that Virgil wrote at the same speed I write up my research. For the record, that is "about three lines a day".

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The Humble Sentence

Photo by Holly Chaffin [CC0 Public Domain] via publicdomainpictures.net

How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One by Stanley Fish

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My reading year began with Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book. Adler mentions (p. xi) that after the book became a best-seller, it was parodied by How to Read Two Books and, more seriously, How to Read a Page. So when I saw How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, I was intrigued. 

With my usual marginalia noticeably absent, I must say the book was worth reading, but it is relatively easy enough to take in in one go. The book provides numerous examples of great sentences, including great beginning and ending sentences. (Dickens doesn't get a mention other than a suggestion that his were over-rated.) There are a number of exercises using various sentence types that are useful. 

Hemingway thought that if he could write just one good sentence, then the day was well-spent (A Moveable Feast, p. 22):

I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.

Fish doesn't go so far, but sees the sentence as a building block for all great writing. I particularly liked the idea that to be a writer, one has to like sentences, much like the painter who paints because she likes the smell of paint (p. 1). And the poem by Kenneth Koch really sums up this delightful little book:

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.

An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty

The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.

The next day the Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.

I would say that the major benefit of reading this work is that it brings the sentence back as the unit of work. I tend to focus more on paragraphs as corralled ideas, but overlook the importance of the humble sentence. Having read this work, I hope I can implement some of the clever suggestions and see the role of the humble sentence in framing not just stories, but also my academic work.

I found this book on Maria Popova's Brain Pickings.

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