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poisoninjest

the_red_shoes

Foeda est in coitu et brevis voluptas
et taedet Veneris statim peractae.
non ergo ut pecudes libidinosae
caeci protinus irruamus illuc
(nam languescit amor peritque flamma);
sed sic sic sine fine feriati
et tecum iaceamus osculantes.
hic nullus labor est ruborque nullus:
hoc iuvit, iuvat et diu iuvabit;
hoc non deficit incipitque semper.
-- attr. Petronius Arbiter

Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short;
And done, we straight repent us of the sport:
Let us not rush blindly on unto it,
Like lustful beasts, that only know to do it:
For lust will languish, and that heat decay,
But thus, thus, keeping endless Holy-day,
Let us together closely lie, and kiss,
There is no labour, nor no shame in this;
This hath pleased, doth please and long will please; never
Can this decay, but is beginning ever.
-- Ben Jonson

Delight of lust is gross and brief
And weariness treads on desire.
Not beasts are we, to rush on it,
Love sickens there, and dies the fire.
But in eternal holiday,
Thus, thus, lie still and kiss the hours away.
No weariness is here, no shamefastness,
Here is, was, shall be, all delightsomeness.
And here no end shall be,
But a beginning everlastingly.
-- Helen Waddell

No clever turn for the sestet: I just wanted to see the three of them together. This may be why I tend to stay off LJ for long periods of time: it's too easy to get lost in all the interesting stuff in here.

Current Mood:

worried about time passing

poisoninjest

So I guess I'm inconsistent. Oh well. But vastly entertained.

Current Mood:

entertained

"...He's writing a paper that contradicts all of Lambard's conclusions, and I'm helping by toning down his adjectives and putting in deprecatory footnotes. I mean. Lambard may be a perverse old idiot, but it's more dignified not to say so in so many words. A bland and deadly courtesy is more devastating, don't you think?"

"Infinitely."

I'm reading Douglas Hofstadter's Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language and having trouble getting into it, which puzzles me because both the subject matter and the conceit (88 translations of a French poem from 1537, wound round with Hofstadterian essays, and yes, the echo of iumonna gold galdre bewunden was deliberate) sound absolutely my kind of thing.

Still trying to understand that, though the book has already paid for itself by prompting me to get hold of Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, which is quite probably the best book I've read this year.

But Hofstadter is currently lambasting an article by John Searle, and yes, it looks like Searle's article is intellectually dishonest, but the hyperbolic invective creeping into Hofstadter's tone is off-putting. You can hear the tone of incredulous disbelief in his words, and it distracts -- and suddenly I understand that quip in Gaudy Night about a bland and deadly courtesy being more devastating. Hofstadter isn't weakening the truth of his argument, but he is weakening the impact of his argument by descending into the lists and taking a swing. He may have felt goaded into it, but it's a danger. Like some parts of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion: I may agree absolutely with the point that he's making, but his tone makes me feel awkwardly that there must have been a way of expressing it which wouldn't alienate part of the audience.

Current Mood:

curious

But of course we did; and it was in the gardens there that I did Theseus from Midsummer Night's Dream at the end of my first undergraduate year -- they had said they wanted a dead-serious Theseus, who might sound as though he was reading the FT while doing the "More strange than true" speech, and I thought "Sure, I can do that". And where the fireworks from a neighbouring May Ball seriously disrupted our stroll and dialogue in IV.i and then completely failed to come in on cue when I wanted them for the throwaway line "Go, bid the huntsmen wake them with their horns".

You know, for all the complaining I may do from time to time, it has been an interesting old life, and no mistake.

And, because after that I was curious to see what a Darwin scarf looked like, here's the list.

Well, it's an interesting idea, that there weren't actually widescale Anglo-Saxon invasions, that it was mostly acculturation.  And one I would once have been professionally very interested in.  And the idea may be valid even if his expression of it is off.  But I wish I could find a better and more scholarly expression of it, because when he comes out with something like "Being human, we like to personify such things, so we conjure up Arthur on one side and the likes of Alfred, Hengist and Horsa on the other." my blood pressure does something unfortunate.  And maybe he only means only that there were characters like Alfred on the Saxon side, and isn't borrowing Alfred from his place in real history (king of the West Saxons from 871-99, and of the "Anglo-Saxons" from perhaps 886, and incidentally the English defender of Britain against the invading Vikings) and thrusting him back into a different and mythical conflict four centuries earlier on the opposite side, but it leaves me greatly vexed.  And rather unwilling to take his word for anything else, which would be unfortunate if there are bits of the book that are scholarly and accurate.

I was re-reading Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing the other day, and Henry has the wonderful speech when he's comparing real writing with a cricket bat, which -- even if it may look like a club -- is actually several pieces of wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that it's sprung, like a dance floor.  Real writing is like that.  Then you can hit a ball with barely any effort and it will go sailing out of the grounds.  If you had used a club instead, the ball would only have travelled a few feet and you'd end up dropping the club and jumping around with your hands in your armpits.  This book is a club in its recording of facts, even if its prose style is rather good.  ("Consult any list of Roman emperors and it makes the English medieval monarchy, even during the Wars of the Roses, look remarkably stable." It's a very good line.  It may even be true, but there's no way I'm prepared to take his word for it at this point: he has completely blotted his copybook.)

(Okay, it's not as bad as the book I read years ago in which Merlin arranged for Beowulf to be killed by a flamethrower.  But that was at least supposed to be fiction.)

ETA: So if this man, writing in 2004, shows up how easy it is to disprove Myres again, given that Myres was already quite discredited when I went up to Cambridge in 1989, I shall graduate from being vexed to being filled with rage. I am absolutely prepared to believe the basic case -- that archaeological evidence doesn't support the idea of largescale Anglo-Saxon invasions -- but this particular exposition of it is doing its cause more harm than good. Open question (mainly directed as sollersuk): is there a more scholarly exposition of this theory published somewhere else?

I wonder where one could vote to have the Beowulf manuscript made available next, or if the CD facsimile that Kiernan did a while back means that's off the cards?

ETA: And the audiobook is read by Richard Dawkins and Lalla Ward. All fourteen hours of it. Hmm. My intended participation in novel_in_90 just wavered, badly...

Current Mood:

grateful

A wonderful take on an old story, followed by a meditation on war, on the seductive beauty of war, which a people hungry for peace cannot simply deny or ignore if they hope to defeat it: the trick, not yet achieved, is to provide a more compelling beauty as an alternative.

Thought-provoking, and very highly recommended.

I think I first saw this on the old academic ANSAX-L discussion list. (What it was doing there, I've no idea, but it was incredibly funny and still is.)

And Java programmers would probably also enjoy (with a side dish of mild horror) the bit of this entry starting with "For the lack of a nail".

male voice (low, terrible) Let go... let go of me...
m.v. How could you do it?
female voice (spirited) So? I bet you did it too!
m.v. (broken) I know I did.

f.v. So what was I supposed to do – wait for you? I could've had anyone I wanted. You're the one that kept coming back...
m.v. How can this work, when we don't love each other?

either: I thought we were different.

The thing that made me write that down, under the ironic heading Anger is Sacred, was the fact that some other people walked by while this was going on and one of them said, half-amused, "They're at it again"...

Oh, the actual play, back in the present? Well worth seeing.

In memory of
TOM SANCHA
1947-1992
Courageous gifted and loved

And the second, larger and more elaborate:

These trees, in memory of
Isabella Hamson
the beautiful Miss Drummond
were planted in 1978
by her husband

I know no more of Tom or Isabella, but as I read their stones probably many dozens of times when I lived and walked there I wanted to remember them again here.

Reminds me though that one of the things I had wanted to do before I left Cambridge was fund a memorial plaque on a bench in the Botanic Gardens.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933) (more poems)

Odysseus Elytis (1911-1996)

A whole civilization away from A. E. Housman, which is odd because Housman was a classicist as well as a poet and perhaps knew the ancient world that Cavafy deals with so well as well as he did.

But it was as I was reading Waiting for the Barbarians with a modern-day Greek looking on that I realized I have almost always read poems from the point of view of the barbarians. This chimed off my old thoughts about Old English exile poetry contrasted with the words that Dante puts into the mouth of his ancestor Cacciaguida:

The Wanderer, 49-57:

Dante, Paradiso, XVII, 55-60:

Tu lascerai ogni cosa diletta
più caramente; e questo è quello strale
che l’arco dello essilio pria saetta.

Tu proverai sì come sa di sale
lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle
lo scendere e ’l salir per l'altrui scale.

Thou shalt leave everything loved most dearly, and this is the shaft which the bow of exile shoots first. Thou shalt prove how salt is the taste of another man's bread and how hard is the way up and down another man's stairs.

And while the sound of the Old English has something that made me fall in love with it long ago and I love it still, it is hard to deny from these two extracts that the Italian says more, in a more compact way, and in a way which hits a modern audience much more directly with its salt bread and stairs than the wanderer's spirits of seafarers.

(Not that I'm necessarily wondering about how to pitch a Very Short Introduction about Old English verse, or anything like that...)

Current Mood:

teems with quiet fun

Othinn, I think, has sworn
an oath on the sacred ring --
who shall trust in his troth?
he had Suttungr cheated
of his mead,
and made Gunnloth grieve.

- Hávamál, v. 110.

More on the opera later. In a nutshell, don't leave after the prologue and act one, even if you are a bit disappointed. It gets much better.