In between marking essays, and having my hair cut, and listening to some podcasts from the BBC's In Our Time series, I've been getting a bit of reading done. The big book I've got on the go is Niall Ferguson's The War of the World and it's highly readable in the way one comes to expect of Ferguson. I'm still in its early stages and found the material on the economic background to WW1 fascinating - Ferguson reckons it doesn't make sense to accept that the Great War was felt to be inevitable in the key months of 1914 given that the markets showed no sign of responding in any such manner., and I reckon he's right. (Which makes the ensuing slaughter even more ghastly and idiotic. Surprise, surprise.)
Other than such ruminations on the nightmare of history it's been poetry all the way, basically to escape the nightmare, I suppose. I finished A.R. Ammons's Bosh and Flapdoodle yesterday and my reactions confirmed my fanboy status regarding anything from the greatest American poet that hardly anyone else I know seems to have heard of. What is it about some writers that makes you fall in love with anything they write? I mean there are stretches of Bosh I don't really get, but I just don't care. Being in Ammons's company is enough.
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