. . . please e-mail me. My address is gro.oilucruc@oilucruc turned backwards (don’t want to encourage spambots by making it harvestable).
If you are not Michael Gilleland, but happen to know his e-mail, that would be good, too. (I can’t find it anywhere on his site, and have some not-ready-for-publication thoughts on Palladas and Martial I’d like to share with him.)
Update: Thanks, I’ve gotten hold of him.
Yesterday I saw for the first time Rossini’s first opera, the one-act farce La Cambiale di Matrimonio (The Bill of Marriage). It is set in England, and the most amusing character is the Canadian Slook, who has crossed the Atlantic to pick up his mail-order bride. The DVD version I saw, directed by Michael Hampe and conducted by Gianluigi Gelmetti, puts Slook (Alberto Rinaldi) in a delightfully primitive Canadian costume. He arrives on a cold day dressed in furs and carrying a gun in one hand and a pair of peacepipes in the other:
Once inside he takes off his fur coat and hat to reveal a buckskin jacket with fringes, plaid shirt, and something that looks like a more elaborate version of a bolo tie:
How much of the costume is implied in Rossini’s score (1810) and how much is the director’s idea (1989) I do not know. I can heartily recommend the recording, which is well-sung, well-acted, and pleasingly free of Eurotrash pretensions. It is included in a very reasonably-priced box set of four early one-act operas. I bought it for $20.99 a few days ago, though the current low price on Amazon Marketplace is $24.25 new. Not bad for four delightful works in one package. On the other hand, the picture of the composer on the box may deter some buyers.
I drove to Charlottesville today to see an HD broadcast of Racine’s Phèdre by the UK National Theatre, with Helen Mirren in the title role. Some desultory thoughts:
“Children need religion. They can always give it up later.”
(Le Plaisir, 1952)
Driving through Berryville, Virginia a couple of hours later I had to slow down for a police car on the shoulder with all its lights flashing. There was no other car on the shoulder, and the policeman was having an intense conversation with a shirtless bald guy on a ride-on lawnmower 20 or 30 feet off the road. I wonder if he’d been driving it recklessly in traffic. If he’d been keeping it off the road, it’s hard to think what he could have done to attract the attention of a policeman — assuming the grass he was cutting was his own. Or would drunk driving on your own property be illegal if it was sufficiently blatant? There were some very curly fresh-cut tracks in the grass.
Driving through Waynesboro, Virginia yesterday, I passed the entrance to The Eastside Speedway, a venue for drag-racing, Motocross, and demolition derbies. The one-block-long road leading to it is Al Gore Lane.
In a recent post at Chicago Boyz, David Foster asks “what the proper Greek would be for ‘government by clowns'”. There are several possibilities:
I’m sure there are other possibilities, but I can’t seem to find my English-Greek Dictionary at the moment.
I think it was Patterico’s Pontifications where I recently ran across a weblog called Verum Serum. An interesting name, since it has three or four meanings in Latin:
So which of these interesting possibilities is the right one? None, as it turns out: it’s only half Latin. As the proprietors say on their ‘About’ page, “Verum is Latin for truth, as in truth serum. Why Latin? Because we’re tired of the Catholic blogs hogging all the cool names.”
In its article on Leibniz, Wikipedia reports: “No philosopher has ever had as much experience with practical affairs of state as Leibniz, except possibly Marcus Aurelius.” Possibly? Privy Counselor of Justice to the House of Brunswick, trusted adviser to the Electress of Hanover and the Queen of Prussia, and Imperial Court Counselor to the Habsburgs are important positions, beyond the reach of most philosophers, but they hardly compare to being Emperor of Rome.
The Perseus Collection of Greek and Roman Materials provides a convenient list of Word Counts by Language. As of half an hour ago, the totals were:
English
(42,956,587 words)
French
(2,001 words)
German
(426,929 words)
Greek
(8,263,757 words)
Italian
(178 words)
Latin
(9,244,457 words)
Old English
(1 word)
Other
(3,318 words)
I want to know how a single word of Old English slipped in among the tens of millions in other languages, why it isn’t listed among the ‘Other’ languages, and — most important — what word is it?
Glycon (A.P. 10.124):
Πάντα γέλως, καὶ πάντα κόνις, καὶ πάντα τὸ μηδέν·
πάντα γὰρ ἐξ ἀλόγων ἐστὶ τὰ γινόμενα.All is laughter, all is dust, all is nothing, for all that is cometh from unreason.
Is this Greek legible? I’m just wondering how the Greek characters included in the Windows extended Times New Roman font look in HTML. That would certainly simplify blogging Greek quotations. Should I feel stupid for not thinking of it before, or for thinking it will work now? Feedback appreciated, with information on what browser and operating system you are using.
Auto-Feedback: On my screen, the acute accents are much too short and too vertical: insufficiently different from the graves.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell twice quotes a song popular among the proles of his imagined future, “composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator”. He calls it “dreadful rubbish” and a “driveling song”, but it seems to me that it would fit right in to the Great American Songbook. Of course, we cannot judge the music, but I have certainly heard worse words. Here are the lyrics, with the proletarian (Cockney) mispronunciations edited out:
It was only a hopeless fancy,
It passed like an April day,
But a look and a word and the dreams they stirred
They have stolen my heart away!They say that time heals all things,
They say you can always forget;
But the smiles and the tears across the years
They twist my heartstrings yet!
(George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, II.iv and II.x)
It is not deep, but other than the awkward rhythm of the fifth line, I don’t see anything embarrassingly wrong with it. Do I need a taste-bud transplant?
An English English professor — I mean an Englishman who is also a professor of English — mocks the hard sciences to a mathematician:
A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need. There’s no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle’s cosmos. Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God’s crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can’t think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Quarks, quasars — big bangs, black holes — who gives a shit? How did you people con us out of all that status? All that money? And why are you so pleased with yourselves?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I’d push the lot of you over a cliff myself. Except the one in the wheelchair, I think I’d lose the sympathy vote before people had time to think it through.
(Tom Stoppard, Arcadia, Scene 5)
The Gramophone has put much (all?) of their archives on-line, but the texts have been OCR’d, and the results are as one would expect: often erroneous and sometimes unintelligible. My favorite typo so far is from the review of one of my favorite CDs, the recording of Arriaga’s three string quartets by the Sine Nomine Quartet, or, as the Gramophone puts it in the title of the review, the “Sine Numine Quartet”.
Absinthe, of course, which recently appeared at the state liquor store down the hill. They have four different brands, all priced from $42.95 to $59.95, so I need to do a bit of research before trying one out. Not to mention stocking up on sugar cubes.
I know very little about meteorology, but tomorrow’s National Weather Service forecast for my town includes what must be a quite unusual combination: “Patchy frost / Hi: 70o F”.
InstaPundit writes that if Obama takes Nick Gillespie’s advice to legalize and tax drugs, gambling, and prostitution, “it’ll be your patriotic duty to smoke dope and sleep with hookers”. My knowledge of hookers is purely theoretical, but surely if you’re actually sleeping with them you’re wasting your money?
Emily Dickinson at her coldest and clearest:
The heart asks pleasure first,
And then, excuse from pain;
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering;And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor,
The liberty to die.
It should be known that Akaky Akakievich expressed himself mostly with prepositions, adverbs, and finally, such particles as have decidedly no meaning. If the matter was very difficult, he even had the habit of not finishing the phrase at all, so that very often he would begin his speech with the words “That, really, is altogether sort of . . .” after which would come nothing, and he himself would forget it, thinking everything had been said.
A few pages later:
“So it’s that, that’s what it is,” he said to himself, “I really didn’t think it would come out sort of . . .” and then, after some silence, he added, “So that’s how it is! that’s what finally comes out! and I really never would have supposed it would be so.” Following that, a long silence again ensued, after which he said, “So that’s it! Such an, indeed, altogether unexpected, sort of . . . it’s altogether . . . such a circumstance!”
(Nikolai Gogol, “The Overcoat”, 1842)
I bought the very handsome Everyman Collected Tales, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, last Sunday at Daedalus Books in Maryland, and haven’t had time to read more than the one story. (Grades were due Tuesday, and I have an indexing job to finish by Monday, so I haven’t had much time for anything else.) Here are a few desultory notes, so my April archives won’t be quite so bare:
Most depressing things I’ve seen or heard in the last two weeks:
1. The policeman who pulled me over for speeding last Tuesday asked me about my driving record and I told him, quite truthfully, that I’ve had four moving violations in nearly forty years of driving, the most recent a speeding ticket in another county last August. He said that not having had a ticket for eight whole months made me an excellent driver, and let me go with a warning. Apparently a significant percentage of local drivers get several tickets a year, which explains a lot about my insurance rates. I’ve had one ticket each in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s, so I suppose I should be worried that the ’10s will arrive fairly soon.
2. The next evening, one of the actors at the play I was seeing (Comedy of Errors here) asked if that was me he’d seen pulled over by a police car. Thanks for noticing, funny man.
3. A week or so before, a fellow theater-goer asked me about the Loeb Classical Text I was reading at intermission and whether I teach Latin (yes) or Greek (if there’s any demand). We talked about teaching and learning for a good five minutes before realizing that if we were in the same grad department at the same time, we really should know each other. We knew each other’s names, but less than twenty years had changed both our faces beyond recognition.
4. My students sometimes offer unsolicited dating advice, which I can generally squelch by saying that I don’t really think dating advice from teenagers is very helpful to someone my age. Before I could do so last week, one of my 11th-graders offered to set me up on a date . . . with her grandmother. To make it worse, she seems to have been serious, and well-intentioned.
