I have started reading Milton's Paradise Lost on the tram to school. It pays to read aloud on trams, displaying your dramatic talent for poetic recital. How does it pay? people give up their seats nearest you so as to allow one the luxury of stretching ones leggs.
The first book introduces Satan and his army, his generalissimo Beelzebub and a whole band of other cool demons; theres Astarte one hot babe with crescent horns, plus all the archaic Egyptian gods, they've been booted out also: Isis, Osiris, Orus and that good old semitic cow Moloch. Their all there plus much more. Mammon has to be my favorite, he's always looking down into the ground and digging holes and pulling out strange metals. He's cool, a kind of primordial Boral steel.
So what happens in the first book? Satan has tried to do a junta on old god, Its all very political, but almighty and tyrannical god has won the battle and cast Satan and his cronies down into a newly built yon lake of fire. Satan wakes up with a hang over and begins his woeful soliloquy. They create a new castle and city called Pandemonium, and are just about to think about what to do next, how to take revenge on god, when the book ends. The suspense, even Milton new how to keep you hanging on for the next book.
I'm loving this work, you feel righteous and want to curse people. It would go well with a good flagellation. It is a more conceptual, psychological Hell compared to Dante's. Milton struck on the very modern idea of ambiguity, whereas Dante couldn't think outside the good and evil box, to which his text must suffer the eternal dread of being severely dated medieval.
A LITTLE Q;NOTE ON THE POEMS RELEVANCE TODAY
'And when Night Darkens the Streets, then wonder forth the sons of Balial, flown with insolence and wine.'
Yeah thats what the city is like on a Saturday night.Drunken thugs wondering around meaninglessly starting fights and bashing people.
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