Search This Blog


Planetary Motions, published by Giant Steps Press, is now available on Amazon for $14.95.



Spoor of Desire: Selected Poems is available for $16.00 from FootHills Publishing, P.O. Box 68, Kanona NY 14856 or see www.foothillspublishing.com.

Tourist Snapshots was available from Randy Fingland's CC Marimbo, P.O. Box 933, Berkeley CA. CC Marimbo has, unfortunately ceased publishing, though I still have a few copies to spare.

Dada Poetry: An Introduction was published by Nirala Publications. It may be ordered on Amazon.com for $29.99 plus shipping. American buyers may order a copy from me for $23 including shipping.

Each book is available from the author William Seaton.


A categorized index of all work that has appeared on this site is available by looking under the current month in the Blog Archive section and selecting Index.


This site is listed in BlogCatalog and

Literature Blogs
Literature blog








Saturday, March 1, 2025

Index

The index has grown to the point of becoming unwieldy, leading me to offer first a brief sketch of its contents.

For the most part the site contains literary criticism with topics ranging around the globe and through the centuries. There are also other essays, translations, travel stories, a few memoirs, a few political comments. With rare exceptions (mostly early) I do not post my poetry here.

In the literary essays I am willing to discuss virtually anything. This site is strong on literary theory, the idea of the avant-garde, ancient Greek, medieval European, and Asian literatures, and includes a series of treatments of blues songs as poetry.

Some of the essays are technical and include academic jargon, probably indigestible to a lay reader. Others are directed toward a general audience. Perhaps the most accessible are those in the Every Reader’s Poets series (section 5G below) which assume no background knowledge. 


The index now features hypertext connections. Simply click on any title below to read it.

Though this listing serves, I think, a clear purpose, not every posting falls easily into the categories. One essay might equally be placed under literary theory or medieval texts while another might fit under memoir, politics, or travel. Translations with comment might be either criticism or translation. Poke around a bit.

The categories are:

1. speculative, familiar, performance pieces, and other essays

2. literary theory

3. Greek texts (and a few Latin)

4. medieval European texts

5. other criticism
A. 16th-19th century
B. 20th century to the present 
C. Asian texts
D. songs
E. Notes on Recent Reading
F. Rereading the Classics
G. Every Reader's Poets

6. translation

7. poetry

8. politics

9. memoirs

10. travel


1. Speculative, familiar, performance pieces, and other essays
Agnostic Credo and Vita (October 2015)
Confidence Games (August 2022)
Contronyms (March 2019)
Cookbooks (April 2014)
Dead Reckoning (February 2011)
Deer (December 2012)
Documents of the first Surreal Cabaret (March 2012)
Documents of the second Surreal Cabaret (June 2012)
Documents of the third Surreal Cabaret (October 2013)
Documents of the fourth Surreal Cabaret (July 2014)
Documents of the fifth Surreal Cabaret (February 2015)
Notes on Pan (June 2014)
Oedipus and the Meaning of Polysemy (July 2011)
The Subversive Wit of Jerry Leiber (December 2022)
"The Three Ravens" (August 2013)
Trinidadian Smut (April 2016)
Truckin' (November 2014)
The Verbal Dance of the Blues (September 2020) 
“Walkin’ Blues” [Son House] (December 2011)

E. Notes on Recent Reading
Notes on Recent Reading [Melville, Greene, and Whalen] (September 2011)
Notes on Recent Reading 2 [Crane, The Crowning of Louis, Thornlyre] (October 2011)
Notes on Recent Reading 3 [Kipling, San Francisco Mime Troupe, Lynn’s Tao-te-ching] (November 2011)
Notes on Recent Reading 4 [Sarah Scott, de La Fayette, Wharton] (January 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 5 [The Deeds of God in Rddhipur, Burney, Cooper] (January 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 6 [Jewett, Addison, Crabbe] (February 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 7 [Nabokov, Austen, Grettis Saga] (April 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 8 [Bakhtin, Lewis, Brown] (May 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 9 [Plutarch, Tacitus, Williams](June 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 10 [Voltaire, France, Dryden](July 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 11 [Wright, Kerouac & Burroughs, Gilbert] (August 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 12 [Huxley, Norris, Dōgen](September 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 13 [Mirabai, Wood, Trocchi] (November 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 14 [Algren, Hauptmann, Rolle] (January 2013)
Notes on Recent Reading 15 [Hemingway, Orwell, Gaskell]{February 2013}
Notes on Recent Reading 16 [Howells, Ford, Mann] (April 2013)
Notes on Recent Reading 17 [McCarthy, Chang, Snorri](July 2013)
Notes on Recent Reading 18 [Radcliffe, Stendhal, Erasmus](October 2013)
Notes on Recent Reading 19 [Powers, Zhang Ji, Vietnamese folk song] (February 2014)
Notes on Recent Reading 20 [Rowe, Stevenson, Issa] (May 2014)
Notes on Recent Reading 21 [Fussell, Mahfouz, Watts] (August 2014)
Notes on Recent Reading 22 [Waugh, Belloc, Okakura] (October 2014)
Notes on Recent Reading 23 [Naipaul, Dinesen, Spillane] (January 2015)
Notes on Recent Reading 24 [Fielding; Izumo , Shōraku, and Senryū; Plath] (June 2015)
Notes on Recent Reading 25 [Baskervill, Gissing, Capote] (July 2015)
Notes on Recent Reading 26 [Tuchman, Premchand, Cocteau] (November 2015)
Notes on Recent Reading 27 [Forster, Sackville-West, Capote] (January 2016)
Notes on Recent Reading 28 [Verne, Waley, Hurston] (March 2016)
Notes on Recent Reading 29 [Achebe, Jewett, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam] (October 2016)
Notes on Recent Reading 30 [Bradford, Scott, Marquand] (April 2017)
Notes on Recent Reading 31 [Marlowe, Trollope, p'Bitek] (August 2017)
Notes on Recent Reading 32 [Morrison, Cary, Kawabata] (October 2017)
Notes on Recent Reading 33 [Tourneur, Peacock, Greene] (December 2017)
Notes on Recent Reading 34 [Hawthorne, Huncke, Bentley] (January 2018)
Notes on Recent Reading 35 [Scott, Norris, Jacobs] (August 2018)
Notes on Recent Reading 36 [Norris, Rexroth and Laughlin, Sand] (November 2018)
Notes on Recent Reading 37 [Waley, Wharton, London] (January 2019)
Notes on Recent Reading 38 [London, Vonnegut, Cather] (June 2019)
Notes on Recent Reading 39 [Aristophanes, Machiavelli, Braddon] (September 2019)
Notes on Recent Reading 40 [Saunders, Adichie, Radhakrishnan] (January 2020)
Notes on Recent Reading 41 [McCarthy, Priestley, Ehirim] (July 2020)
Notes on Recent Reading 42 [Bulgakov, Tedlock, Wlliams] (October 2020) 
Notes on Recent Reading 59 [Balzac, Hauptmann, Updike] (March 2025)

Menus (August 2021)
My Most Politically Active Year (February 2011)
Nova Academy (March 2011)
Pestering Allen [Ginsberg] (March 2012)
Poetry on the Loose (September 2011)
A Scholar's Debut (October 2012)
Sherman Paul (August 2016)
Suburbanite in the City (November 2010)
Tim West (March 2013)
Vignettes of the Sixties (October 2019)
VISTA Trains Me (June 2011)

10. Travel 
Arrival in Nigeria (August 2015)
Acadiana [Lafayette, Louisiana] (May 2010)
An Armenian Family in Bordeaux (December 2014)
Carnival [Portugal] (May 2012)
Cookie Man [Morocco] (October 2011)
Creel (October 2010)
Dame Fortuna in Portugal (May 2012)
Dinner with Mrs. Pea [Thailand] (April 2013)
Election Day in Chichicastenango (January 2012)
An Evening in Urubamba (July 2011)
Favored Places (July 2019)
Festival in Ogwa [Nigeria](January 2011)
Fictional Destinations (April 2020)
On the Ganges' Shore (August 2013)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Given Names

 

     My older brother and I enjoyed during elementary school a fraternal rivalry. We would compete in shooting baskets, in wrestling, in Monopoly and cribbage, and in verbal games as well.  In disputations about who possessed the more prestigious given name, I would argue that James was, as everyone knew, the most typical butler’s name after Jeeves, whereas William was the name of the much-praised Shakespeare.  He would respond that Billy was notoriously most appropriate for goats, but his trump card was the fact that the Bible was named after King James.  What reply was possible? 

     We operated on the archaic assumption that, as Origen said, names are not arbitrary or meaningless, but rather are significant (nomina sunt omina).  Some of my students in Nigeria had English given names chosen to increase their chances of prosperity either in a very general way (such as Moneymaker, Famous, and Goodluck) or more narrowly (College, Engineer, and Editor).  Yet once all our names were sprechende Namen. 

     My own first name has typically martial Germanic roots, deriving from the words for “will” or “willing” and helmet, hence meaning “resolute protector.”  The representation of strength, even ferocity, in personal names often made use of animals like those on heraldic coats of arms, reminiscent of totemic beasts, such as in Eberhard (”strong boar,” paralleled in Old English Wilbur, “wild boar”), Bernard (“strong bear”), and Leonard (“strong lion,” the Norse Bjorn simply means “bear”). 

     On the other hand Hebrew names are primarily religious such as Michael ) ”resembling God”), Raphael (“God has healed”), and Jonathan (“Yahweh has given”).  Muslim names tend similarly toward piety: Mohammed, of course, (now, I read, the most common male name for babies born in the U. K.), while Hassan, Omar, and Ali, are all names of associates or followers of the Prophet, though each, of course, has an etymological meaning as well. 

     Hindu names, often selected with the advice of astrologer, conform to the same patterns.  Some are simply desirable qualities such as Sunita (“good” or “virtuous”) or Vijay (“victory” or “success”), while others may be names of deities (Ram, Lakshmi, Krishna), and others yet might be figures from history or legend, such Sita from the Ramayana or Ashok, the last Maurya emperor

     In most of Western Europe [1] the given name precedes the surname or family name.  Traditionally called a Christian name and conferred only at baptism or christening, in Europe it was almost always chosen from names on the calendar of saints, thus indicating not only identity but spiritual aspiration as well.  For this reason many priests insisted that a child’s name be chosen either from the Bible or the calendar of saints, but in fact it was not until 1983 that the proliferation of unconventional names caused a revision of canon law specifically forbidding names “foreign to a Christian morality.”  Yet I know of an earlier case in which priest refused to christen a girl Sybil, calling her Teresa instead, though she used Sybil all her life.

     Though the given name was to be religious in Christian Europe, the name Jesus itself was avoided everywhere except on the Iberian Peninsula (whence it traveled to Latin America).  Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain the popularity of the name in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries while it was little-used elsewhere: the celebration of the Feast of the Holy Name encouraged by the mendicant orders, or the use of the name for abandoned orphans and by newly converted men who had been named Mohammed.  As recently as 1998 a legal decision was necessary for Jesus to be entered on official records as an individual’s given name in Germany. 

     Traditionally in Europe people have celebrated their saint’s day in a way similar to American birthday parties, though, though, for the pious European, a mass or an offering might be included in the day’s activities.  This practice, often combined with observance of the actual birthday, emphasizes the significance of the saint whose name one bears as well as doubling one’s occasions for self-celebration.. 

     Puritans, determined to display their faith as prominently as possible, sometimes chose novel given names; the most well-known is the seventeenth century preacher Praise-God Barebone (whose brother was Fear-God). [2]  Others included Die-Well, Sorry-for-sin, Repentance, Kill-sin, Joy-againe, From-above, Hope-full, and Faith-my-joy.  It was as though they had stepped out of the pages of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. 

     The willingness to confer such improbable names enjoyed a bit of a renaissance among the less puritanical during the counter-culture youth movement of the late sixties.  One of the era’s icons, the inimitable Way Gravy and his wife, named their son Howdy Do-Good Gravy Tomahawk Truckstop Romney after he was born in the Tomahawk Truckstop in Boulder.  (He later decided he would prefer to go by Jordan.)  I recall, among people of my own acquaintance in the Haight-Ashbury, little ones named Wheatberry, Midnight, Ecstasy, and Winterlude.  Some well-known figures participated in the trend with Abbie Hofmann and his wife Anita naming their child america (lower case), but doubtless the celebrity with the most freewheeling and innovative children’s names was Frank Zappa (whose own name, though it looks like it might be invented, perhaps as a play on Zap comix, is his parents’) whose children were Dweezil, Moon Unit, Diva, Ahmet Emuukha Rodan, and Thin Muffin Pigeen.

    Our own identification with our names must be, though, a pale reflection of the feeling of our species through most of its history.  Quite commonly people have kept a personal name secret to prevent attacks by magicians.  According to Frazer [3] this practice is not only common across the globe from Australian and American aborigines, but also among what he calls “Esquimaux,” people from Chile, Indonesia, Hindus, and ancient Egyptians.  The anxiety surrounding personal names may take many forms: sometimes the name’s bearer cannot mention it, but anyone else can, sometimes the prohibition is limited in time.  Some people have veritable layers of names, each concealing a more intimate and powerful one.

     The ethnic connotations of names can be subtle.  Does Laurence carry some faint French perfume as opposed to Lawrence?  Geoffrey surely sounds just a bit British next to Jeffrey.  Such hints are of course, arbitrary and misleading, utterly without logical justification, yet they linger in our minds.  Otto must surely, it might seem, be more portly than Étienne, and Fabio more fun-loving than Olaf. 

     Ethnic cues may lead to altogether mistaken assumptions.  One might think that someone named Percy is either a British aristocrat or a Jamaican, but in fact the name is most popular today in Peru.  One expects Brunhild to be a Valkyrie, yet Brunilda’s Cuchifritos is a small café near me owned by a Puerto Rican woman.  In Guatemala I encountered a tour guide named Ivan, and I know a child with four Orthodox Jewish grandparents named Bronwen.  

     The fact that people wish sometimes to change their given names is further testimony to the power they retain even for moderns.  European converts to a Hindu or Buddhist guru or to Islam may wish to change their names, while immigrants from Thailand or China may adopt an English name if they live in the United States.  Actors, writers, and telephone salespeople often choose professional names, while prison inmates, hobos, and hikers on the Appalachian Trail devise sobriquets.  

     Adam is said in Genesis to have named the animals and mothers and fathers are able to exercise a similar power in giving names to their offspring.  Feeling the responsibility of this choice, parents often deliberate at length and consider many possibilities before settling on one.  Though we no longer consciously accept the principle of magic that claims that words can influence reality, we remain wary of their power.  No name can satisfactorily express an individual personality, but we seek to provide each infant with the best odds, unimpeded, if not aided, by an auspicious given name.  My own has served satisfactorily, though, after a thousand years of popularity, “plain old Bill” has become a set phrase, to me an acceptable one, expressing familiar comfort like worn old slippers.

 

 

1.  In Hungary the family name comes first. 

2.  The most elaborate Puritan name of all, “Unless-Jesus-Christ-Had-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned” is variously said to be Praise-God's baptismal name, his brother's name, or the name of his son, commonly called Nicholas. 

3.  The Golden Bough, 284-289 and elsewhere.

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)