NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31

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Path: sparky!uunet!olivea!spool.mu.edu!torn!watserv2.uwaterloo.ca!watsci.UWaterloo.ca!msmorris From: msmorris@watsci.UWaterloo.ca (Mike Morris) Newsgroups: rec.arts.books Subject: Retrospection of My 1992 Reading Message-ID: <C07439.E3q@watserv2.uwaterloo.ca> Date: 1 Jan 93 22:06:45 GMT Sender: news@watserv2.uwaterloo.ca Organization: University of Waterloo Lines: 487 Friday, the 1st of January, 1993 In keeping with my shortstanding tradition here of reckoning up reading for the previous year, here's my list for 1992. As before, I count only whole volumes that I have completed in the year, and, as before, the total list (of 157 books this year) is made up of three sub-lists, each sub-list listing its books in chronological order of completion. The first sub-list is my classics ``structured reading program'' (means that I read in it a fixed number of pages every night), the second consists of reading in (well, roughly) American lit and history (it is also structured), and the third sub-list contains books I've finished freestyle. After the list, I'll try to summarize a little what I especially liked from this year. *** 1. Polybius, _The Histories_, v. III 2. Polybius, _The Histories_, v. IV 3. Polybius, _The Histories_, v. V 4. Polybius, _The Histories_, v. VI 5. Babrius and Phaedrus 6. Menander, v. I 7. Appian, _Roman History_, v. I 8. Appian, _Roman History_, v. II 9. Appian, _Roman History_, v. III 10. Appian, _Roman History_, v. IV 11. _The Ancient Near East: Volume I An Anthology of Texts and Pictures_, edited by James B. Pritchard 12. _The Ancient Near East: Volume II A New Anthology of Texts and Pictures_, edited by James B. Pritchard 13. Aristotle, v. XI (_Historia Animalium_ VII--X) 14. Hippocrates, v. V 15. Hippocrates, v. VI 16. _Greek Lyric_, v. III 17. Epictetus, v. I 18. Epictetus, v. II 19. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus 20. Livy, _Ab Urbe Condita_, v. I 21. Livy, _Ab Urbe Condita_, v. II 22. Livy, _Ab Urbe Condita_, v. III 23. Livy, _Ab Urbe Condita_, v. IV 24. Livy, _Ab Urbe Condita_, v. V 25. Livy, _Ab Urbe Condita_, v. VI 26. Livy, _Ab Urbe Condita_, v. VII 27. Livy, _Ab Urbe Condita_, v. VIII 28. Livy, _Ab Urbe Condita_, v. IX 29. Livy, _Ab Urbe Condita_, v. X 30. Livy, _Ab Urbe Condita_, v. XI 31. Livy, _Ab Urbe Condita_, v. XII 32. Livy, _Ab Urbe Condita_, v. XIII 33. Livy, _Ab Urbe Condita_, v. XIV 34. Lysias 35. Plutarch, _Lives_, v. I *** 36. _Letters from Mexico_, by Hernan Cortes, tr. and ed. by Anthony Pagden 37. _The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, A.D. 500--1600_, by Samuel Eliot Morison 38. _The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages, A.D. 1492--1616_, by Samuel Eliot Morison 39. _Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus_, by Samuel Eliot Morison 40. _Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of Jade: The Americas Before Columbus_, by Brian M. Fagan 41. _Popol Vuh: The Great Mythological Book of the Ancient Maya_, Newly Translated and with an Introduction by Ralph Nelson 42. _The Ancient American Civilisations_, by Friedrich Katz 43. _The Cities of Ancient Mexico: Reconstructing a Lost World_, by Jeremy A. Sabloff 44. _Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Quiche Maya_, English version by Delia Goetz and Sylvanus G. Morley from the Translation of Adrian Recinos 45. _The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico 1517-1521_, by Bernal Diaz del Castillo, tr. by A.P. Maudslay 46. _Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings_, translated by Dennis Tedlock 47. _A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of The Ancient Maya_, by Linda Schele and David Freidel 48. _The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy_, by Kirkpatrick Sale 49. _The Incas: The Royal Commentaries of the Inca_, by El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539--1616), trans. by Maria Jolas 50. _The Epic of Latin America_, by John Armstrong Crow 51. _A Short History of the American Revolution_, by James L. Stokesbury *** 52. _The Wood Beyond the World_, by William Morris 53. _The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty_, by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice) 54. _Self-Contradictions of the Bible_, by William Henry Burr 55. _Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One_, by Friedrich Nietzsche, tr. by R.J. Hollingdale 56. _Mr. Midshipman Hornblower_, by C.S. Forester 57. _Lieutenant Hornblower_, by C.S. Forester 58. _Hornblower and the Hotspur_, by C.S. Forester 59. _A Palaeozoic Geology of London, Ontario_, by Christopher Dewdney 60. _The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto_, by Mortimer J. Adler 61. _Hornblower and the Atropos_, by C.S. Forester 62. _Beat to Quarters_, by C.S. Forester 63. _On Socialism_, by J.S. Mill 64. _Ship of the Line_, by C.S. Forester 65. _Flying Colours_, by C.S. Forester 66. _Commodore Hornblower_, by C.S. Forester 67. _One World: The Interaction of Science and Theology_, by John Polkinghorne 68. _The Unmade Bed: Sensual Writing on Married Love_, edited by Laura Chester 69. _Lord Hornblower_, by C.S. Forester 70. _Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies_, by C.S. Forester 71. _Hornblower During the Crisis and Two Stories, Hornblower's Temptation and The Last Encounter_, by C.S. Forester 72. _In Praise of the Stepmother_, by Mario Vargas Lllosa 73. _At Swim-Two-Birds_, by Flann O'Brien 74. _Greek Lyrics_, translated by Richmond Lattimore 75. _Beauty's Punishment_, by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice) 76. _Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country_, by Mordecai Richler (1931--) 77. _The Mythology of North America_, by John Bierhorst 78. _The Mythology of South America_, by John Bierhorst 79. _The Mythology of Mexico and Central America_, by John Bierhorst 80. _The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends & Their Meanings_, by Jan Harold Brunvand 81. _Yellow Silk: Erotic Arts and Letters_, edited by Lily Pond and Richard Russo 82. _The Choking Doberman and Other ``New'' Urban Legends_, by Jan Harold Brunvand 83. _Greek Homosexuality_, by K.J. Dover 84. _The Robber Bridegroom_, by Eudora Welty 85. _Paideia Problems and Possibilities: A Consideration of Questions Raised by The Paideia Proposal_, by Mortimer J. Adler 86. _Duino Elegies_, by Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. by J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender 87. _Sonnets to Orpheus_, by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by M.D. Herter Norton 88. _Letters to a Young Poet_, by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell 89. _The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge_, by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by M.D. Herter Norton 90. _Selected Poems_, by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by J.B. Leishman 91. _reason and reality: the relationship between science and theology_, by John Polkinghorne 92. _The Third Policeman_, by Flann O'Brien 93. _Time's Arrow, or the Nature of the Offence_, by Martin Amis 94. _A Shropshire Lad_, by A.E. Housman 95. _A Journal of the Plague Year_, by Daniel Defoe 96. _Touching Fire: Erotic Writings by Women_, edited by Louise Thornton, Jan Sturtevant, & Amber Coverdale Sumrall 97. _Largo Desolato_, by Vaclav Havel, English version by Tom Stoppard 98. _The Memorandum_, by Vaclav Havel, tr. by Vera Blackwell 99. _Temptation_, by Vaclav Havel, tr. by Marie Winn 100. _The Rustle of Language_, by Roland Barthes, tr. by Richard Howard 101. _The Book of J_, translated from the Hebrew by David Rosenberg, interpreted by Harold Bloom 102. _Beauty's Release_, by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice) 103. _Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences_, by John Allen Paulos 104. _Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion, & Morality_, by Steve Allen 105. _The Complete Poems of Francois Villon_, translated by John Heron Lepper, including the Texts of John Payne and Others 106. _Tell Me a Story: Creating Bedtime Tales Your Children Will Dream On_, by Chase Collins 107. _One Hundred Poems from the Japanese_, by Kenneth Rexroth 108. _The Arkansas Testament_, by Derek Walcott 109. _A Natural History of the Senses_, by Diane Ackerman 110. _The Day of the Locust_, by Nathanael West 111. _Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke_, a Translation from the German and Commentary by Robert Bly 112. _Death and the Maiden_, by Ariel Dorfman 113. _The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy, by Evelyn Waugh 114. _The Age of Reason_, by Thomas Paine 115. _The Book of Might_, by Rick Ollman 116. _Poems from the Book of Hours_, by Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. by Babette Deutsch 117. _Who Wrote the Bible?_, by Richard Elliott Friedman 118. _Selected Poems_, by Robert Bly 119. _Lord of the Flies_, by William Golding 120. _Wordstruck_, by Robert MacNeil 121. _Their Eyes Were Watching God_, by Zora Neale Hurston 122. _Brave New World_, by Aldous Huxley 123. _Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future_, by Friedrich Nietzsche, tr. by Walter Kaufmann 124. _The Road to Serfdom_, by Friedrich A. Hayek 125. _The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion_, by Ford Madox Ford 126. _Staring at the Sun_, by Julian Barnes 127. _A Pale View of Hills_, by Kazuo Ishiguro 128. _An Artist of the Floating World_, by Kazuo Ishiguro 129. _A Room of One's Own_, by Virginia Woolf 130. _The Handmaid's Tale_, by Margaret Atwood 131. _Duino Elegies_, by Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. by David Young 132. _New Poems [1907]_, by Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. by Edward Snow 133. _New Poems [1908]: The Other Part_, by Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. by Edward Snow 134. _humanist manifestoes I and II_, edited by Paul Kurtz 135. _Thasos and Ohio: Poems & Translations 1950--1980_, by Guy Davenport 136. _Thinking about Magritte_, by Kate Sterns 137. _The Travels of Sir John Mandeville_, tr. by C.W.R.D. Moseley 138. _Thompson's ``The Hound of Heaven'': An Interpretation_, by Francis P. LeBuffe, S.J. 139. _Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz Poems: A Bilingual Anthology_, Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden 140. _Sor Juana's Dream_, by Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, tr. by Luis Harss 141. _The Mysterium_, by Eric McCormack 142. _Stories of God_, by Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. by M.D. Herter Norton 143. _Two Treatises of Government_, by John Locke 144. _The Sumerians_, by C. Leonard Woolley 145. _A Universal History of Infamy_, by Jorge Luis Borges, tr. by Norman Thomas di Giovanni 146. _The Art of War_, by Sun Tzu, tr. by Samuel B. Griffith 147. _Yeats's Poems_, by William Butler Yeats 148. _The Analects of Confucius_, tr. by Arthur Waley 149. _Confucius: The Unwobbling Pivot, The Great Digest, The Analects_, tr. by Ezra Pound 150. _The Collected Poems of A.E. Housman_, A.E. Housman 151. _An Autobiographical Study_, by Sigmund Freud, tr. by James Strachey 152. _Beyond the Pleasure Principle_, by Sigmund Freud, tr. by James Strachey 153. _Civilization and Its Discontents_, by Sigmund Freud, tr. by James Strachey 154. _The Ego and the Id_, by Sigmund Freud, tr. by Joan Riviere, revised by James Strachey 155. _Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis_, by Sigmund Freud, tr. by James Strachey 156. _The Future of an Illusion_, by Sigmund Freud, tr. by James Strachey 157. _Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego_, by Sigmund Freud, tr. by James Strachey There are a number of these volumes from the third, freestyle, list where somebody's recommendation here had something to do with inducing me to read them. Some of these recommendations spun out of arguments, to be sure, but I appreciate them just the same (in fact, it's one of the reasons I like picking arguments with intelligent people). Anyway, the following book readings can be dedicated to the influence of people here: 95 Miriam Nadel 92 Vance Maverick and George Scott 55,123 Roger Lustig 109 Mike Godwin 129 Susan Gere 135 Jeff Davis 81,139,140 Francis Muir 83 John Donald Collier 121 Terrance Heath 125,150 Mark Taranto 143 Mikhail Zeleny 146 John Wojdylo 86-90,111,116,131-133,142,151--157 Fiona Webster Most of my classics reading was done in the English translations of the Loeb editions at 50 pages a night (=25 small English pages). There were some lovely miscellaneous reads this year, most notably the volume of Babrius and Phaedrus (verse collections of Aesop's fables). Marcus Aurelius is always a joy to revisit. If you haven't read him yet, go and do it. But Epictetus was a new and welcome companion. I think that Stoicism goes too far in proscribing emotional display, but I do think it is dead on in insisting that reason must be in charge (at least of when and where the emotions are to be given free rein). I also think the separation of the happenstances of human life into those we can exercise moral choice over and those we cannot, counselling us to pay no heed to what is beyond our moral control, but pay all attention to what is in our control, to be a lesson contemporary society could benefit by. Many passages would be worth committing to memory. A couple examples: Why, what is the matter of being reviled? Take your stand by a stone and revile it; and what effect will you produce? If, then, a man listens like a stone, what profit is there to the reviler? But if the reviler has the weakness of the reviled as a point of vantage, then he does accomplish something. [volume I, p. 165] But God has brought man into the world to be a spectator of Himself and of His works, and not merely a spectator, but also an interpreter [exegete]. [volume I, p. 45] Again, if a man comes forward and says, ``I would have you know that nothing is knowable, but that everything is uncertain''; or if someone else says, ``Believe me, and it will be to your advantage, when I say: One ought not to believe a man at all''; or again, someone else, ``Learn from me, man, that it is impossible to learn anything; it is I who tell you this and I will prove it to you, if you wish,'' what difference is there between these persons and---whom shall I say?---those who call themselves Academics? ``O men,'' say the Academics, ``give your assent to the statement that no man assents to any statement; believe us when we say that no man can believe anybody.'' [volume I, pages 371-373] Next train yourself to use wine with discretion, not with a view to heavy drinking (for there are some clumsy fools who practise with this in mind), but first for the purpose of achieving abstention from wine, and keeping your hands off a wench, or a sweet-cake. And then some day, if the occasion for a test really comes, you will enter the lists at a proper time for the sake of discovering whether your sense impressions still overcome you as they did before. But first of all flee away from the things that are too strong for you. It is not a fair match that, between a pretty wench and a young beginner in philosophy. [volume II, p. 85] But, the core of my classics reading was the history of republican Rome, with Polybius carried on from last year, Appian's _Roman Wars_, and Livy's _From the Founding of the City_. Polybius I think displays the profounder historical mind, but all three authors are simply a goldmine of story. I've commented before about some of my American reading this year. In '91 I began with Prescott and then Columbus' diary which ended up devoting most of this year's reading to Columbus and conquistadores and precolumbian civs and Latin America. All more or less in honour of the quincentennial. Prescott is still my favorite account of the conquests, but I must say that I enjoyed the whole thread. It is another goldmine of story. And it sketched in this gaping chasm in my education. I have been meaning all year to draw up some sort of review especially of the books by Samuel Eliot Morison on voyages of discovery, but I'm afraid I just haven't gotten around to it, so I'll content myself with a word or two here. Morison I think is one of the great narrative American historians, this century's worthy companion of Parkman and Prescott. His style is always personal, and, above all, he makes it a story. Unfortunately for him, his style is also authoritative, dismissive of all he considers fools, and it gets him in no end of trouble with whippersnappers who go gunning for him. For one thing, he simply makes his own (usually reasonable, I think) judgment calls about all the Columbus ``questions'' (precolumbian discoveries, birth and training and travel, why he sailed, what he expected to find, where he landed, etc., etc.), and Morison has little sufferance for those who like to wallow in these things, those who prefer to emphasize our ignorance and the mystery of it all. Morison's _Admiral of the Ocean Sea_ is probably *the* modern Columbus, giving the canonical interpretation (that is, if you're going to choose one from out of hundreds). Morison lauds Columbus' achievement as a mariner, and traces his colonial disasters to the very singleness of purpose that made Columbus into the Discoverer in the first place. I got mine from the Book-of-the-Month Club, and and it is indeed a pretty thing, but, unfortunately, it is an abridgement of the original two-volume 1942 work (I haven't seen the full thing, but I gather the difference is that all the footnoting has been cut). A perfect foil to it is Kirkpatrick Sale's _Conquest of Paradise_. Sale is rabidly environmentalist, and doesn't like Morison from the word go. He sees the Conquest as an untold environmental disaster, the product of a sickness in the very soul of European civilization. I mean, not only does he excoriate Judeo-Christianity for introducing a patriarchal deity who gives man dominion over the earth, but he traces this all the way up to Enlightenment liberalism and individualism and says that they have to go. Columbus, for Sale, becomes the epitome of the rootlessness, exploitiveness, and all-round sickness of Western civ. And always Sale plays off of Morison, contradicting him at every step that he can. OK, I'm not sympathetic to Sale's politics, but he writes very, very well. Let me summarize both Morison and Sale with two striking quotes. First, Sale, in a footnote regarding a dig of what might be La Navidad in Haiti: The bones of a European rat have been found through these excavations; though it is not quite certain when it arrived, it would be perfectly in keeping that the first European animal to land in the New World was a rodent ``pest,'' introduced accidentally. [Sale, p. 117] Then, listen to Morison on the destruction of the aboriginal inhabitants of Hispaniola: Those who fled to the mountains were hunted with hounds, and of those who escaped, starvation and disease took toil, whilst thousands of the poor creatures in desperation took cassava poison to end their miseries. So the policy and acts of Columbus for which he alone was responsible began the depopulation of the terrestrial paradise that was Hispaniola in 1492. Of the original natives, estimated by a modern ethnologist at 300,000 in number, one third were killed off between 1494 and 1496. By 1508 an enumeration showed only 60,000 alive. Four years later that number was reduced by two thirds; and in 1548 Oviedo doubted whether 500 Indians remained. Today the blood of the Tainos only exists mingled with that of the more docile and laborious African Negroes who were imported to do the work that they could not and would not perform. The fate of this gentle and almost defenceless people offers a terrible example to Americans who fancy they will be allowed to live in peace by people overseas who covet what they have. [Morison, p. 492,493] I would suggest there's a world of difference here exhibited of the world-views of these two historians. The one with a cynicism, that, however much I don't happen to agree with his politics, comes so naturally to me: How typical, a rat! And the other with what would be unthinkable to any modern writer---identifying Americans with the underdogs---the Indian victims of Europeans. Let's see---with my freestyle reading, I'll pick out some individual works. You see above that Fiona got the most dedications, which is because I credit her with spurring me to read both Rilke and Freud. For Rilke I seem to remember an ancient post back when Fiona was still Oceanstar and took Rilke with her backpacking in the mountains. My foray into Rilke this year has been only a taste---in particular, I've had only a glance at the German---, but I've been amazed to find that much of it stays with me. My first love is given to the Elegies, but I also particualarly like the first part of the _New Poems_. _Malte Laurids Brigge_ is an episodically and lyrically beautiful novel, but I must say that I couldn't shake the moral criticisms of it that Kundera made in _Immortality_. Rilke is very inwardly directed, yes, but I must say I almost can't imagine reading him backpacking in the mountains. Ideally, I think he should be read in the city, very late at night, everyone else asleep. Yeats and Housman and Villon were also wonderful acquisitions for the year. But, I didn't read nearly as much poetry as I would have liked. Nor as much Nietzsche as I set out to read, though what I did read (_Zarathustra_ and _Beyond Good and Evil_) didn't exactly change my previously held notions about him. The Hornblower novels were a lovely read and I'd recommend Anne Rice's erotic trilogy, ``Chronicles of Sleeping Beauty''. Not only erotic, but intriguing I think. I also thought _The Third Policeman_, _The Robber Bridegroom_, _A Journal of the Plague Year_, _The Loved One_, _Wordstruck_, _Brave New World_, _The Good Soldier_, _A Pale View of Hills_, and _The Mysterium_ all fictional jewels. The two Ishiguro I finished this year complement _Remains of the Day_, which I'd read before. I almost can't decide, but I'll say now that I think _Pale View of Hills_ is the best of the three. For non-fiction, I'd strongly recommend all of _Who Wrote the Bible?_, _The Road to Serfdom_, _A Room of One's Own_, _The Age of Reason_, and _Two Treatises of Government_. _Who Wrote the Bible?_ I'd single out for a particularly clear and convincing argument from first principles in favor of the Documentary Hypothesis (you know---J, E, P, D and all that). Also, I am particularly glad of reading Sun Tzu and Confucius for the first time, and I look forward to more exploration of Chinese literature in the future. Which brings me to the string of Freud I finished the year with. I was going to start Dorothy L. Sayers and Arthur Ransome on Christmas Day, but I'm afraid I got stuck with the Freud instead (so anyway I'm starting reading Sayers and Ransome today). I credit Fiona because of her mystery post of items from the index of one of Freud's works. (Was it the _Introductory Lectures_? I forget.) It seemed to promise God's plenty was to be found in Freud, and so it caught my interest. So far, I'm impressed both by how little Freud claims (in that he'll say that psychoanalysis is merely a method of bringing the unconscious to the attention of the conscious, so that conscious moral choice may be made) and by how much he claims (he'll psychoanalyze the whole of Western civ, arguing Judeo-Christianity is an illusional, perhaps even delusional, neurosis, and prescribe atheism as the cure). I'm also amazed at how much of Freud I've simply internalized from out of the culture, without having been quite consciously aware of its provenance. Fascinating stuff. Finally, a note about the number of books. I remain impressed by 220 or 400 books read in a year. In 1991, my list totaled 92 books. The greater number this year can be explained mostly by the fact that among the books on my freestyle list, a lot of them were pretty thin. Dropping usenet altogether, or doing absolutely zero physics and ignoring my family, or ignoring household chores (hey, there's an idea!), I might be able to read more. And I can see where sticking to short fiction would up my my total somewhat. But mostly I'm convinced I don't read anywheres near as fast as many of you do. Let me leave you with this beautiful hymn I learned from Morison (and which has become the song I've sung most frequently to my daughter, Helen, born this last February): Sal-ve re-gi-na C E G A GG Ma-ter Mi-se-ri-cor-di-ae, A C' B A G A G GG Vi-ta, Dul-ce-do, et spes no-stra sa-l-vae. C' GG A F DD E F G E E D CC Ad Te cla-ma-mus ex-su-les Fi-li-i E-vae, G A B C' GG A B C' B A G A GG. Ad Te su-spi-ra-mus Ge-men-tes et flen-tes C' G A F D E E G A C' A GG In hac la-cri-ma-rum val-le. A G F E D E D CC E-ia er-go-- Ad-vo-ca-ta no-stra, G A B C'C' G A C' B A GG il-los tu-os, mi-se-ri-cor-des o-cu-los, C' GG A FF D E F G F A G GG ad nos con-ve-r-te. F E D E D CC Et Je---sum- Be-ne-dic-tum fruc-tum ven-tris tu-i, G A B C'C' B G A G G A C' B A G No-bis post hoc ex-si-li-um os-te-n-de. C GG A C' B A G EE F E D CC O---- cle-mens, E F G E CC O-------- Pi--a, G A B C'B A G GG O---------- Du-l-cis C' GG A F D E F GG Vir-go Ma-ri--a-. C F E D C CC where C=do, D=re, etc., C'=C 8va, and all notes are eighth notes, except where doubled they are quarter notes Morison says it is one of the oldest extent Benedictine chants, and would have been sung by Columbus' sailors at evening prayers somewhere in the second dogwatch (then between 5 and 7 PM), just after sunset. Have a Happy New Year, and may God bless. Mike Morris (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)