In May, the wife and I drove around the Carolinas, visiting members of her family who have fled the winters of the upper Middle West, taking in art galleries, and shopping at used bookstores.  At one such store, Mr. K's, I purchased Eight Against Utopia, a 1970 paperback edition of Douglas R. Mason's 1966 science fiction novel, which appeared in hardcover as From Carthage Then I Came.  I bought it largely because of its gorgeous blue cover, but also because it presents itself as steeped in sophisticated literature and Christian thought--the paperback title is no doubt a reference to the war between Polynices and Eteocles, the sons of Oedipus and rival claimants to the throne of Thebes, and I'm guessing the hardcover title is a reference to St. Augustine and/or T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and on the publication page we see acknowledgment that Eliot's The Waste Land and Four Quartets are quoted within the text.

I have been reading Eliot lately and so am familiar with The Waste Land and Four Quartets (if you want a taste of the MPorcius "genteel poverty" lifestyle, listen to Eliot read his poems here and here while you hand wash the dishes and fold your own laundry), but it has been years since I have read about Oedipus's unruly children, so I decided to reacquaint myself with their shenanigans by reading some of the classics in translation on my bookshelves.  (During the early to mid-1990s, while I was working at a bookstore, I was considering a career as an academic focusing on late 18th-century Britain and its culture, and so purchased and read a bunch of Greek and Roman literature in translation, thinking it would help me get into the mindset of people like Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, whose education and entertainment consisted in large part of these ancient texts.)

If you dare, share my journey through a world of people who seem to spend all their time mixed up in incest, murder, and suicide, or fighting bloody battles against gods, monsters and each other, by clicking below.