One of three rivals in love, from a Brazilian novel set in the 1850s:
(Note: the aunt and the baroness are one and the same.)

He was a young man of about twenty-five or twenty-six. His name was Jorge. He wasn’t ugly, but artifice had ruined a little the work of nature on him. Too much attention sickens the plant, said the poet, and this maxim is not only applicable to poetry but to man as well. Jorge had a fine brown mustache, groomed and cared for with excessive dedication. His clear and lively eyes would have been more attractive if he hadn’t moved them with an affectation which was sometimes feminine. The same can be said of his manners, which would have been easy and natural if they hadn’t been so studied and measured. His words came out slow and calculated, as if to make felt all their author’s liberality. He didn’t say them like most people; each syllable was, so to speak, caressed, making it possible to see after a few minutes that he was making the entire beauty of the expression consist in this elongation of the word. His ideas could be evaluated by his manner of expressing them; they were empty, in reality, but they carried a ring of gravity which made one want to go out and amuse his ear with light and trivial things.

These were Jorge’s visible defects. There were others, and of these, the worst was a mortal sin, the seventh. The good name his father had left him and his aunt’s influence could have served him well in some good civil profession; but he preferred to vegetate uselessly, living off the wealth he had inherited from his parents, and off the hopes he had of the baroness. He had no other occupation.

Despite the defects in him, he had good qualities; he knew how to be loyal, he was generous and incapable of low deed, and he had a sincere love for his old aunt.

(Machado de Assis, The Hand & the Glove, tr. Albert I. Bagby, Jr., chapter 7)

In the second paragraph, “deadly sin” would be a better translation than “mortal sin”. I wonder who the poet of the fourth sentence is. Horace is a more likely source than most, but the words don’t ring a bell. Then again, an English translation of a Portuguese sentence translating or alluding to a Latin poet wouldn’t, necessarily.

When I see the subject-line “How to handle wild babies?”, I can’t help thinking of feral infants: an interesting concept for a horror movie, if it hasn’t already been done. (I’m not much interested in horror movies, so I wouldn’t know.) Presumably the spammers mean ‘wild babes’ and are just too incompetent to get even so simple a phrase as that right. The inappropriate question mark is another sign of generalized ineptitude.

He sido para mí, discípulo y maestro. Y he sido un buen discípulo, pero un mal maestro.

I have been my own disciple and my own master. And I have been a good disciple but a bad master.

(Antonio Porchia, Voices, tr. W. S. Merwin, 2003, pp. 86-7)

Oddly, though he provides the Spanish text on the left-hand pages and mentions the Buenos Aires editions of 1943 and 1966, Merwin never gives the Spanish title of the book. Was it perhaps Voces? Thanks to the web, that’s now an easy question to answer, and the answer is yes. There is a whole website devoted to Porchia’s work, with pictures of various editions and numerous quotations, apparently English only. Is the 3rd edition of Voces missing because a copy could not be located?

Seen on a new or nearly new Saab 9-3 convertible:

SNAAB

Too bad the car was an unattractive shade of green, because the pun is excellent.

Notes from my reading of Book II:

1. Again the passage that most struck me was a classicizing bit, a simile describing Satan’s journey through Chaos (943-50):

As when a Gryfon through the Wilderness
With winged course ore Hill or moarie Dale,
Persues the Arimaspian, who by stelth
Had from his wakeful custody purloind
The guarded Gold: So eagerly the Fiend
Ore bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare,
With head, hands, wings, or feet persues his way,
And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flyes:

This has some resemblance rhetorically to 7.501-3, though the latter is more neatly laid out in threes:

                    Earth in her rich attire
Consummat lovly smil’d; Aire, Water, Earth,
By Fowl, Fish, Beast, was flown, was swum, was walkt
Frequent;

Milton does not mention that the Arimaspians were traditionally one-eyed: did he not think it important, or assume that his readers already knew? ‘Moarie’ is not in the Shorter O.E.D. or www.dictionary.com, and must be a form of ‘moory’, meaning ‘marshy, fenny’.

2. The account of the origins of Sin and Death, featuring rape, incest, head-birth, and bestial transmogrification, manages to outdo Hesiod in gruesomeness.

3. It’s interesting that the music of the fallen angels (546-51) is epic or panegyric, sung “With notes Angelical to many a harp” about themselves and their deeds. The effect is rather Homeric.

I started a new job two months ago, and now teach part-time at two different high schools. Oddly, I seem to have more spare time for reading now, partly because I have to get to work at the new school at 7:00 to avoid rush-hour traffic, but don’t meet any of my students until 8:15. In the last month, I’ve read half a dozen novels and the first seven books of Paradise Lost, a work I had not read since college. (That would have been 1972 or 1973.) It seems appropriate to blog some desultory thoughts on the work, perhaps three per book. I’ll write about the novels tomorrow.

1. The passage in Book I that most struck me as particularly worth quoting was the description of Mammon, principal architect in Heaven and now in Hell (738-51):

Nor was his name unheard or unador’d
In ancient Greece; and in Ausonian land
Men calld him Mulciber; and how he fell
From Heav’n, they fabl’d, thrown by angry Jove
Sheer ore the Crystal Battlements: from Morn
To Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve,
A Summers day; and with the setting Sun
Dropd from the Zenith like a falling Starr,
On Lemnos th’ Aegaean Ile: thus they relate,
Erring; for hee with this rebellious rout
Fell long before; nor aught availd him now
To have built in Heav’n high Towrs; nor did he scape
By all his Engins, but was headlong sent
With his industrious crew to build in Hell.

2. The only non-famous line that was particularly familiar after all these years was 307:

Busiris and his Memphian Chivalrie

3. Right from the start, I’ve found the poem entertaining, sometimes even hypnotic, but also insubstantial: far more words than matter. So far from being a peer of Homer, Vergil, and Dante, Milton seems a poet in roughly the same class as Statius or Claudian. Is this unfair? He seems to do a mediocre job of justifying the ways of God to men.

Topsius, a fictional German professor of Biblical archaeology who drinks beer with his breakfast:

Socrates é a semente; Platão a flôr; Aristoteles o fructo . . . E d’esta arvore, assim completa, se tem nutrido o espirito humano!

(Eça de Queiroz, A Relíquia, III)

Socrates is the seed, Plato the flower, Aristotle the fruit; and on this tree, thus complete, the human spirit has been nourished!

(Eça de Queiroz, The Relic, Chapter III)

Les seules bonnes copies sont celles qui nous font voir le ridicule des méchants originaux.

The only good copies are those which show up the absurdity of bad originals.

(La Rochefoucauld, Maximes 133, translated by Leonard Tancock)

La plupart des jeunes gens croient être naturels, lorsqu’ils ne sont que mal polis et grossiers.

Most young people think they are being natural when really they are just ill-mannered and crude.

(La Rochefoucauld, Maximes 372, translated by Leonard Tancock)

When you see a review of a book entitled Ius Latinum and think “Mmmmm . . . gravy”.

Publius Ovidius Naso is 2050 today. The vernal equinox seems a suitably Ovidian date.

Though the specific date is (so far as I know) unknown, this year is also the 2000th anniversary of his banishment to Tomis: I wonder if there are any scholarly conferences scheduled to commemorate the fact. The Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto and even the Ibis have gotten far more scholarly attention in the last decade or two than in the previous century, so it would be a propitious time. I suppose a Younger Julia conference would also be in order, if enough can be said about her and her banishment to justify one.

I don’t believe I’ve ever seen this in manuals of rhetoric or lists of figures of speech, but these three sentences all use the same rhetorical trick:

1. Nice we’re having weather, isn’t it?
2. What’s a girl like you doing in a nice place like this?
3. I’ve got high friends in places all over time.

The last is the title of one of the three good songs on what is apparently the only album by Scott McQuaig. Can anyone quote more examples? I have a feeling I’ve forgotten one or two.

Randall Jarrell describes a student art exhibit at a fictional women’s college (”Benson”):

The students had learned all the new ways to paint something (an old way, to them, was a way not to paint something) but thye had not had anything to paint. The paintings were paintings of nothing at all. It did not seem possible to you that so many things could have happened to a piece of canvas in vain. You looked at a painting and thought, “It’s an imitation Arshile Gorky; it’s casein and aluminum paint on canvasboard, has been scratched all over with a razor blade, and then was glazed–or scumbled, perhaps–with several transparent oil washes.” And when you had said this there was no more for you to say. If you had given a Benton student a pencil and a piece of paper, and asked her to draw something, she would have looked at you in helpless astonishment: it would have been plain to her that you knew nothing about art. By the time a Benton artist got through exploiting the possibilities of her medium, it was too dark to do anything else that day; and most of the students never learned that there was anything else to do.

(Pictures from an Institution, Chapter 6, “Art Night”, section 2)

I was reminded of this by A. C. Douglas’ comments (here and here) on a contemporary composer’s desciption of how he composes his works. He may be a bit unfair to the composer, who does imply that he has to have an idea before he can tinker with it.

I have been experimenting with making pamphlets for Latin and Greek texts that are too short to fill a whole book. The first one finished is a teaching text of Androclus and the Lion, which I used with my Latin 3 class last semester and have now revised, mostly by adding notes that classroom use showed would be useful. I was pleasantly surprised how well it came out, and wish I’d done it years ago. All it took was a six-year-old DeskJet printer, 28-pound semi-glossy paper, 67-pound cover stock, a long-reach stapler, and quite a few hours getting the formatting just right.

It is only twelve pages. Four contain the text of Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 5.14, with macrons, and with some general interpretative questions below the text. Four more, facing those, contain vocabulary (very full) and grammatical notes (brief). Before the eight pages of text and notes, there is a title page, a copyright page with illustration and dedication, and a preface, and after them a page with further interpretative questions on the whole text.

Not very competent pictures of the cover and part of the text can be seen here and here (the pamphlet itself is much clearer). A Word 97 file containing the facing copyright page and preface, plus one pair of facing pages of text and notes, can be seen here. I should note that students found the format very convenient, and particularly appreciated the individualized dedications: since I print out each copy separately, it’s easy enough to change a few words in each copy. I got into the habit of printing individualized full-color tests, quizzes, and handouts two years ago, when I was teaching classes with 2-4 students at a school where the xerox machine rarely worked. Printer ink is expensive, but not all that expensive, and the aesthetic advantages seemed to outweigh the pecuniary disadvantages. This is another step in the same direction.

If anyone would like a copy, either to read the story, or to see if it is suitable for use in your own classroom, or just to see what can be done with a color printer, some paper, and a stapler, the cost is $3.00 each within the U.S., with 1st-class postage included in the price. Just let me know how the dedication should read. Of course, if anyone would like multiple copies for classroom use, I can provide them.

Watch this space for announcements of further pamphlets in various formats.

A month ago I posted about Liver Pudding, a Carolina delicacy whose very name makes me shudder. Last week, Ann Althouse reminded us that her readers once paid her $200 to eat something she has always despised, an egg salad sandwich. Putting these two facts together, it occurred to me that I might be able to raise some much-needed funds, find something to write about, and gratify my more sadistic readers, all at the same time. I therefore undertake the following promises:

1. For a PayPal contribution of only $20, I will buy and eat an entire one-pound package of Neese’s Liver Pudding, finishing it off in no more than a week, will post pictures of the stuff in the package, in the frying pan, and on the plate, and will write about its taste, texture, and any other characteristics worth noting on both of my weblogs.
2. For another $20 each, I will do the same for Neese’s C Loaf (main ingredient: pork stomachs) and Scrapple. (I haven’t seen Liver Mush or any of the other more exotic Neese’s products in the grocery stores I frequent, but am willing to look for them, if anyone wants me to try them.) For no further charge — because I’m sure I’ll like it — I will also buy a package of Neese’s Country Sausage, to see how it compares, if readers answer the first two challenges.
3. For $100, I will make and review a haggis. My local Asian grocery store had two of the three main ingredients last time I was there (lamb stomach and liver) and I should be able to get a lamb heart there or somewhere in town — perhaps at a Halal butcher. (The recipes call for sheep, not lamb, but surely either will do?)
4. Finally, for $200 I will purchase a package of ‘pork uteri’ at the Asian grocery, cook them using an authentic ancient Roman recipe from Apicius, eat them, no matter how revolting they turn out, and provide pictures and a review, as before. Sows’ wombs were a Roman delicacy, as admired as lobster or Porterhouse steak today, but I’ve never tried them and am torn between intellectual curiosity and visceral disgust.

Now I need to look through Apicius and see if there are any more Roman delicacies to add to my fund-raising challenge. The Asian grocery carries goat penises and ‘intestinal bung’, among other things, but I don’t recall anything like either of those in Apicius. And I doubt that I can get hold of flamingo or dormouse in Raleigh.

Although I haven’t posted much lately, I have been hard at work ‘behind the scenes’ on several projects. Here are the first two:

I. I continue to add to my collection of critical texts on the web, and have just uploaded Ovid, Heroides 1 (Penelope Vlixi), with a brief apparatus and two of my own conjectures, one of them rather dubious. The rest of the letters will follow, not necessarily in numerical order, though I do plan to finish the single Heroides, and Martial’s epigrams, before turning to the doubles.

II. More important, I have begun the process of transforming my web-texts, including many more not yet ready for publication, from hard-coded HTML files into a MySQL database with a PHP interface. Overall, they will look exactly the same: here is the HTML text of Propertius 2.29, and here is the MySQL version. However, the new format offers several advantages:

1. When the user interface is ready, readers will be allowed to select whichever section of the text they wish to read, instead of being given a whole book and then scrolling down. Here is the MySQL version of lines 11-20 of the same poem. Until the interface is ready, and I add more poems, readers can alter the line numbers in the URL and see what happens. The only other poem available now is Propertius 4.10 (here), which illustrates how I handle transpositions (not that I’m entirely convinced by that one).
2. Once the user interface is written, readers will be able to compare two or more passages from the same or different authors, with or without apparatus.
3. At the moment, the apparatus criticus for a given line consists of a single character string. These will be broken up into their constituent parts and stored as variants, conjectures, lacunae, transpositions, repunctuations, and so on. Once that is done, and once the database contains a sufficient number of works, interesting searches will be possible. Readers will be able to locate all of Bentley’s conjectures on the Heroides, or see how often iam has been confused with nam in manuscripts of various authors, or (if they’re feeling malicious) see who is most futile emender of a given author, i.e. the one with the most conjectures published without any of them making it into the text.
4. A more sophisticated interface will allow interested readers to modify their own electronic copies of my Latin texts, promoting variants and conjectures from apparatus to text, adding or subtracting variants and conjectures, transposing lines to see how they look and then transposing them back, and so on: like penciled marginalia, but far neater. If I were doing this just for Propertius, I’d call it ‘Quot Lectores, Tot Propertii’, but I suppose I need a more general name for the project.
5. When the editorial interface is ready, it should speed up the process of editing and publishing texts. That will allow me to finish up the various texts I have under construction more quickly, though making up my mind what to print is already the greater part of the labor.
6. In the long run, I plan to license my texts and the editorial interface, which will allow others to edit and publish their own versions of my texts and of any others they care to upload. Of course, anyone who takes a text (mine or another’s), edits it, and publishes it on another website will need to be careful to avoid copyright infringement, making sure that the new text is not too similar to the source text or to any other text still under copyright. Comparing two web-texts will be easy enough: software can easily be written to calculate the number of significant differences between any two of them. (Determining how different is different enough to avoid copyright infringement may be tricky, though. In fact, the necessary degree of difference would differ from author to author: independently-edited texts of the Aeneid might well have whole pages identical in text and apparatus, while independently-edited texts of Propertius might well differ in every couplet.)
7. In the even longer run, text and apparatus need to be plugged into a larger system that interlinks repertories of conjectures, bibliographies with (when possible) links to the full texts of the articles listed, lexicons, commentaries, metrical analyzers, and so on. Combining multiple texts and apparatus critici into a single database is just the first step.

To sum up, this is the obvious next step in the computerization of classical texts: bare web texts, and even web-texts with apparatus criticus (not that anyone else seems to be particularly eager to edit those) are not very different from printed texts. Making the text and (even more important) the apparatus into a searchable database will provide enormous advantages to teachers, students, researchers, and even ordinary readers.

Though I’ve been thinking of something like this for years, I began putting together the PHP and MySQL the day after Christmas, and have put 45 hours into it so far. A great deal of work remains, but it is already clear that the job is doable, and worth doing. The SQL is turning out to be easier than I expected, considering it’s been nine years since I’ve done any, and twenty since I did SQL for more than a few months. On the other hand, the PHP is trickier than I thought it would be. However, I’ll be at the public library when it opens at 9a.m. tomorrow, and they have several books with both PHP and MySQL in the title, and they should help.

Update: (1/28/08, 8:45pm)

Apologies to anyone who tried the links and found that they didn’t work. I saved a copy of the program in a different directory for public use, but forgot to make a copy of the database. Once I started adding and deleting columns in the tables to fit modifications in the (non-public) editing version of the program, the public version naturally stopped working. I’ll try to fix that problem in the next day or two, but it should work until I modify the database again.

One more point: If the results of the comparison between HTML and SQL texts are unimpressive, that’s the point: SQL can reproduce the HTML texts — not that I’ve tried to make the formats precisely the same — though it can also do much more.

Over the last month or so, I have added quite a few Classics titles to the list of Books for Sale (link in left-hand column), including several that are, so far as I can determine, not available elsewhere either new or used. The most notable addition is a complete set of Momigliano’s Contributi alla Storia degli Studi Classici e del Mondo Antico I-IX, complete in six single and three double volumes. Please buy the books I don’t need, so I can buy the ones I do need.

If we’re going to give our students texts in which v is used for consonantal u, shouldn’t the enclitic conjunction be -qve, not -que? The latter confuses some students in their scansion exercises, since they try to take the u as a vowel. For that matter, shouldn’t desueta in Aeneid 2.509 be desveta? It’s scanned as a trisyllable, and ue is not a diphthong, so the u must be a consonant here. For the opposite problem, I assume that Horace’s trisyllabic forests in Epode 13.2 should be spelled siluae, not silvae, even in elementary texts, to show that the word is an anapest, not a spondee. The Latin Library does precisely that. I should check my other Horaces.

If anyone reading this will be attending the A.P.A. meeting in Chicago this week, I would dearly love to get copies of the 20%-off sales catalogues from Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Walter de Gruyter and would be glad to reimburse the costs of mailing one copy of each to Raleigh. Please e-mail if you would like my eternal gratitude.

While looking for lard at Food Lion for my Christmas baking (in the oven right now), I ran across a shelf (just above the bacon) with a row of products from Neese’s Sausage: country sausage, liver pudding, souse, and “c. loaf”. The first sounds tasty, but the second made me think that there are few words in the English language that sound worse together than ‘liver’ and ‘pudding’. I’ve had souse — once — and found it disgusting, and the name of c. loaf made no impression on me one way or the other, though the first ingredient is pork stomachs, so it’s not very high on my list of things to try. A look at the Neese’s Sausage website told me that they have other products, including liver mush. A fan site describes it as follows:

A southern American food composed of pig liver, head parts, and cornmeal. It is commonly spiced with pepper and sage. Considered a more tolerable version of scrapple, livermush was most likely brought south through the Appalachian mountains by German settlers from Philadelphia. Livermush is colloquially known as poor man’s or poor boy’s pâté.

It is a regional variation on Liver Pudding. It has a different recipe, including varied spices and seasonings. For some folks there is no substitute - only livermush in the morning will do.

Livermush is commonly prepared by cutting a slice off of a pre-prepared loaf and frying it with grease in a skillet until golden brown, much like you would SPAM. At breakfast liver mush would be served alongside grits and eggs. For lunch liver mush can be made into a sandwich with mayonnaise, either fried as above, or left cold. As liver mush’s popularity rises, it is appearing as a primary ingredient in dishes such as omelets and pizza.

As for the liver pudding, the official Neese’s site assures us that “it doesn’t taste like pudding and it doesn’t look like liver”. Perhaps I’ll try it some time. I’ve tried duck tongues and curried goat and sea cucumbers, so how bad can liver pudding be?

By the way, when I found the lard, it was only available in 8-pound buckets with handles. No problem: I bake a lot, and lard lasts for months in the refrigerator.