I owe to Instapundit the following link to the book, All Known Metal Bands. Check out the product description:

Product Description

This volume contains the names of over 50,000 metal bands. Presuming that each of these bands had an average of four members, and multipling that by the number of bands, one might figure that at least a quarter of a million humans have pledged allegiance to one of them at some point is his or her lifetime. Never has a genre of music relegated to the underground of a civilization had so many devotees; no radio needs to transmit the power of this music, for it is sought out fiercely and freely by the doomed and the dispossessed, whose ears are never soiled by songs of love and weakness.

These names are invisible tokens to be spoken aloud, each representing a human quest for superhuman spectacle: shaking floorboards and quivering walls, split ears leaking blood, with faces painted and ornaments pointy, voices uttering eternal truths shunned by woman and man alike.

Is it redundant that this book is hardcover?

…and why does that passage remind me of the following:

Theognis is the only writer represented in this volume whose poetry has come down to us by a regular manuscript tradition.  His works are to be found, in whole or in part, in more than forty manuscripts, the oldest and best of which belongs to the early 10th century.  We have almost 1400 lines of elegiacs, which are variously divided to form between 300 and 400 poems, most of them single couples, the longest two poems of 30 lines.  At last, the novice might think, the critic’s task is straightforward: he is dealing with compete poems instead of stray fragments and he can ply his trade in peace.  But alas!  the field of Theognidean studies is battle-scarred, strewn with theories dead or dying, the scene of bitter passions and blind partisanship. Welcker in1826 divided the poems into a small corpus of ‘genuine Theognis’ and a large mass of poetry by other writers, earlier and later.  Separatists of various shades of opinion held the field till 1902, when Harrison published a vigorous defence of the unity of the  corpus, and since then combat has been continuous, except for interruptions due to real wars. (emph. mine)

-D. A. Campbell, Greek Lyric Poetry. 343-344.

Jive Iliad

Courtesy of Gizoogle, this ought to be worth a weekend of fun.  Check out “bootylicious Achilles“, which I’m sure is what Patroclus thought…

Brotherly love

For some reason I’ve been dinking around lately with some Coptic Gnostic Christianity texts and, in  particular, giving a cursory run-over to the contents of the Tchacos Codex (i.e., the one with the Gospel of Judas), and I found the following bit from the opening of 1st Apocalypse of James rather intriguing:

It is the Lord who spoke with me: “See now the completion of my redemption. I have given you a sign of these things, James, my brother. For not without reason have I called you my brother, although you are not my brother materially.”

The text goes on to outline all sorts of cool quasi-SF Gnostic hierarchies and gnomic utterances about the male and female elements and about where, when, and why whoever can be released from materiality will be etc.  Typical stuff– all this spirit-body/good-evil sort of dualism.

But…if one of the points of this text is to reinforce the belief that Jesus is actually some kind of primary spiritual emanation of God (”But it did not exist when I came forth, since I am an image of Him-who-is. But I have brought forth the image of him so that the sons of Him-who-is might know what things are theirs and what things are alien [to them].”), and if the ultimate goal for James is to leave behind his body in order to become spirit (”If you want to give them a number now, you will not be able to do so until you cast away from your blind thought, this bond of flesh which encircles you. And then you will reach Him-who-is. And you will no longer be James; rather you are the One-who-is.”), then what purpose does it serve for Jesus to specify that he is “not [his] brother materially”?

No, I don’t want to have the whole “no word for ‘cousin’ in Aramaic” debate, especially if it’s going to be compounded by issues of translation into/from Coptic and Greek.  I just thought it was an interesting point that appears to reflect an early belief (earlier, at least, than Eusebius) in Jesus’ and James’ different parentage.

There’s also the curious point that the Protoevangelium of James from around the same time appears to claim that James is Jesus’ stepbrother.   [Blunt spectulation!] But perhaps this otherwise meaningless initial aside about not being brothers “materially” is meant as a means to authorial authenticity by piggybacking off of the Jesus-James relationship of the other work, e.g. “although you are not my brother materially (Hint, Hint: I’m the real James writing this,  since I’m not making any crazy claims about Jesus being my actual brother.  So if you liked my protoevangelium, then you certainly shouldn’t find anything objectionable about what I say here)”.

November?

Archilochos:

Οὐ φιλέω μέγαν στρατηγὸν οὐδὲ διαπεπλιγμένον
οὐδὲ βοστρύχοισι γαῦρον οὐδ᾽ ὑπεξυρημένον·
ἀλλά μοι σμικρός τις εἴη καὶ περὶ κνήμας ἰδεῖν
ῥοικός, ἀσφαλεώς βεβηκὼς ποσσί, καρδίης πλέως.

It’s not what you say…

…it’s how you say it that counts. Apt advice from the Mediterranean ancients, who left us many examples of the consequences of not speaking correctly…or at least in the manner in which one’s audience would want one to speak.

I’m currently engaged in an intermittent discussion with Orwhalyus over at Works and Days on the origins of the medieval spellings michi and nichil for the classical mihi and nihil, (I’ve remarked on more than one occasion that all the evidence has probably already been compiled and the correct conclusions reached by some some late 19th Century German PhD candidate whose dusty thesis is currently rotting away under the stacks at Tübingen or Heidelberg. But that won’t stop us!) and the most recent exchange brought up Catullus 84 as an example of how you could be hammered in Ancient Rome for incorrect speech. That put me in the mind of one of the more entertaining episodes of early Roman history, namely, the origins of the Pyrrhic War. The following is from the Loeb translation of the Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus:

Postumius was sent as ambassador to the Tarentines. As he was making an address to them, the Tarentines, far from paying heed to him or thinking seriously, as men should do who are sensible and are taking counsel for a state which is in peril, watched rather to see if he would make any slip in the finer points of the Greek language, and then laughed, became exasperated at his truculence, which they called barbarous, and finally were ready to drive him out of the theatre. As the Romans were departing, one of the Tarentines standing beside the exit was a man named Philonides, a frivolous fellow who because of his besotted condition in which he passed his whole life was called Demijohn; and this man, being still full of yesterday’s wine, as soon as the ambassadors drew near, pulled up his garment, and assuming a posture most shameful to behold, bespattered the sacred robe of the ambassador with the filth that is indecent even to be uttered.

When laughter burst out from the whole theatre and the most insolent clapped their hands, Postumius, looking at Philonides, said: “We shall accept the omen, you frivolous fellow, in the sense that you Tarentines give us what we do not ask for.” Then he turned to the crowd and showed his defiled robe; but when he found that the laughter of everybody became even greater and heard the cries of some who were exulting over and praising the insult, he said: “Laugh while you may, Tarentines! Laugh! For long will be the time that you will weep hereafter.” When some became embittered at this threat, he added: “And that you may become yet more angry, we say this also to you, that you will wash out this robe with much blood.” The Roman ambassadors, having been insulted in this fashion by the Tarentines both privately and publicly and having uttered the prophetic words which I have reported, sailed away from their city.

As soon as Aemilius, with the cognomen Barbula, had assumed the consulship, Postumius and those who had been sent with him as ambassadors to Tarentum arrived in the city, bringing no answer, to be sure, but relating the insults that had been offered them and exhibiting the robe of Postumius as proof of their story. When great indignation was shown by all, Aemilius and his fellow consul assembled the senate and considered what course they ought to take, remaining in session from early morning until sunset; and this they did for many days. The question was not whether the terms of peace had been violated by the Tarentines, since all were agreed upon that point, but when an army should be sent against them. For there were some who advised against undertaking this war as yet, while the Lucanians, the Bruttians, and the large and warlike race of Samnites were in rebellion and Tyrrhenia, lying at their very doors, was still unconquered, but only after these nations had been subdued, preferably all of them, but if that should not be possible, at least those lying eastward and close to Tarentum. But others thought the opposite course advisable, namely, not to wait for a moment, but to vote for war at once. When it was time for counting the votes, those in the latter group were found to be more numerous than those who advised postponing the war to another time. And the populace ratified the decision of the senate.

(XIX, 5-6)

A Further Point on Modernism

Earlier in this post, I posited a definition for Modernism based on an artist’s relative consciousness of how things in a given culture can be considered “new” or “old”. I was to partially retract that on the grounds that the consciousness and manipulation of such categories was manifestly in full operation in previous eras, particularly in Roman civilization. There’s an excellent article by Hines, I think, and I’ll get the reference here once I dig it out. The gist of the matter is that by the time the Romans came along literarily, Greek poetry had already been established as something of a gold standard for centuries. Once you’ve had a few generations of Latin poets come along and develop their language for poetry, you then get your Golden Age Latin literature (e.g., Horace’s Odes, Virgil’s Aeneid, etc.). Well…what happens to the guys who come next, the so-called Silver Age writers, when Virgil’s already gone and written the Aeneid? In other words, we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that any given generation of artists is somehow especially conscious of the fact that it has the weight and authority of previous artistic generations bearing down upon itself. Hines’ article does an excellent job of demonstrating conscious poetic innovation in successive epochs of Latin literature.

But I did say “partially retract”. I’m now thinking that instead of a “new vs. old” consciousness, perhaps Modernism might be best explained by a “part vs. whole” consciousness concurrent with the late 19th and early 20th century upheavals ultimately resulting in the more or less peaceful settlement we now look back upon as “Western Civilization”. In other words, whereas prior to Modernism the prevalent mindset might have been to draw sharp cultural distinctions among, say, French, German, and English art and literature, the Modernist movement marked the beginning of what we now more normally see as closely-linked subgroups of a more general “Western” phenomenon.

As for previous parallels, I repeat a point raised in a lecture on Late Roman Antiquity (ca. 200AD-400AD) that the art and literature of this period owed much to the idea of the Cento or literary patchwork (e.g., consider the Cento Nuptialis of Ausonius, a poem fashioned entirely from lines and half-lines of Virgil. Also, take a look at the Vergilian Cento of Faltonia Betitia Proba, which retells the life of Christ through Virgilian verse [I couldn't find the full text, but here's a helpful page]). If you try to interpret this kind of artistic movement in light of several other Late Antique cultural developments towards a far more inclusive definition of what it meant to be a Roman than had existed under the Republic and the Early Empire, then I think you come up with something that looks a lot like the Modernist movement in early 20th century Europe. Then take into account the fact that what is often considered the first Modern novel, Don Quixote, came from an area of the world that had already been struggling for a long time with the problem of juggling in one coherent work the artistic “vocabularies” from multiple cultural traditions, each in some sense “foreign” to the other–well, take that into account, and it throws the similarities in higher relief.

Either that, or it all becomes an incomprehensible pastiche…which thought, curiously enough, brings to mind the epigraph to “The Wasteland”, quoting the vacuously bombastic Trimalchio, who was so thoroughly (un)cultured that he had 3 libraries(Cf. XLVIII). Either you bring this all together in order to mean something larger and more profound (e.g., Roman Identity, Spanish Identity, Western Identity), or it all ends up consumed by a horrific banality. And thus the Sybil perishes.

ἥκω γὰρ ἐς γῆν τήνδε καὶ κατέρχομαι.

The other day I arrived and returned to my high school to acquire a transcript. I also took the opportunity to reconnect with a number of my former teachers, some of whom I encountered serendipitously in hallways and classrooms. The whole experience impressed up me the major differences between my time in high school and in college.

In high school I felt whole, as it were, and I only returned to that cognizance of being after two arduously satisfying (or satisfyingly arduous) years out of the country. College, on the other hand, was a time of significant personal fragmentation for me. As look back, I realize that in my attempts to adapt myself to the social circumstances and cultural milieu of a northeastern liberal arts college, I ended up shattering my own personality by setting up multiple different relationships and personas that were collectively doomed to failure. In the lofty hopes of being able to experience all sides of the world, I tried to be everyone, but ended up being no one and destroyed (or almost destroyed) a number of friendships in the process.

At college I learned to think in polarities, as it were. This wasn’t a completely bad thing, mind you. After all, the ideology of opposed distinctions is one valid academic tool among many and has its uses. Unfortunately, I doubt it’s a very useful life philosophy for someone who likes to span various social categories.

In any event, revisiting my high school gave me a bit of an opportunity to wander around in the idea space of self-definition, specifically the question of how far one can push the limits of one’s identity in society without violating sensibilities, and whether or not this leads merely to a bland lowest common denominator. In other words, to what degree are we constrained to self-define always and only “against”, and if we attempt to reject this constraint, must that inevitably result in social dislocation?

Two further points: First, I’ve filed this under linguistics since it is at some level a matter of definitions and meanings. I suppose there’s some kind of fancy word for this type of psycho-sociological application…probably has the lexeme “-semi-” in it somewhere.

Second, the title quote is the 3rd line of Aeschylus’ Choephoroi; I’ve chosen Orestes as something of an avatar to this discussion for one main reason and two ancillary ones. The main reason is that I remembered the line as quoted in Aristophanes’ Batrachoi (1128), wherein Aeschylus defends himself against Euripides’ accusation of redundancy by claiming that by both “arriving” and “returning” Orestes alludes to two different aspects of his identity in coming to Thebes. Upon reflection, I felt something similar the other day at my high school.

As for the other two reasons, well…in considering options for a decent model for the discussion of the coherence of multiple aspects of one personality, the traditional “everyman” in Greek myth is Odysseus (cf. Joyce: “No-age Faust isn’t a man. But you mentioned Hamlet. Hamlet is a human being, but he is a son only. Ulysses is son to Laertes, but he is father to Telemachus, husband to Penelope, lover of Calypso, companion in arms of the Greek warriors around Troy and King of Ithaca. He was subjected to many trials, but with wisdom and courage came through them all. Don’t forget that he was a war dodger who tried to evade military service by simulating madness. He might never have taken up arms and gone to Troy, but the Greek recruiting sergeant was too clever for him and, while he was ploughing the sands, placed young Telemachus in front of his plough. But once at the war the conscientious objector became a Jusqu’auboutist [bitter-ender]. When the others wanted to abandon the siege he insisted on staying till Troy should fall”.) . But he’s a little *too* traditional for my purposes. Besides, he’s got Athena on his side, and that’s just not fair.

Moving on from Odysseus, one might consider Oedipus, especially given how all of us men are supposed to derive our problems from his…or at least we were at some point in the recent past. But again, he’s still too much of a ready-made archetype in that much of the action that set in motion the tragic sequence of events centered on him, by and large happened without his conscious knowledge. In other words, Oedipus is in some sense more the name of a social process than of an individual human being.

So instead, I thought I’d move on to Orestes. He doesn’t really get put up on the pedestal too often, even in spite of the fact that he’s such an important figure in the (drum roll) Oresteia. Moreover, Euripides’ play about him gets a lot of bad press. But when you get down to it, he doesn’t seem to have been anyone all too special. Just some guy trying to do the right thing in a tough situation. Maybe it wasn’t the best of ideas, avenging his father by killing his mother and all, but BAM…next thing he knows, the Furies are after him. Eventually, the story (as Aeschylus puts it) ends well with the establishment of a venerable social institution. Keep your fingers crossed for me, will you?

My Ántonia

I love the introduction to Willa Cather’s masterpiece so much that it’s actually hindered my completion of the book, so often do I return to read it. It’s a little long to type out here in full, but here’s the first paragraph:

“Last summer I happened to be crossing the plains of Iowa in a season of intense heat, and it was my good fortune to have for a traveling companion James Quayle Burden–Jim Burden , as we still call him in the West. He and I are old friends–we grew up together in the same Nebraska town–and we had much to say to each other. While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we say in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to touch and red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it was like to spend one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.”

I suppose the first thing to say is just how remarkably Cather strikes precisely the appropriate tone for her Virgilian epgraph: “Optima dies…prima fugit”, from Georgics 3. Life springs seamlessly from descriptions passionately evocative of death; the mere repetition of “burning” is so well employed as to avoid all sense of redundancy and instead to imply the insurmountable rift between language and experience, the unbridgeable memorial gap between the past and the present. Death as well as life lie in those hidden interstices and yield to one another: Nature,by virtue of its bounty “stifles”, yet remains as stimulating as the otherwise sterile ground “stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron”. This burning unknown desire, this animating principle seeking for something, searching for some kind of expression, dying to live and living to die, ultimately finds its answer in attempted reconstruction of another human being, an act of artistic creation, of memorial parturition. The best days have fled; the Golden Age has past. How can we keep alive within us its burning splendor?

UPDATE: Here is the extended quote from Georgics 3.  I think it more or less supports my interpretation:

Optuma quaeque dies miseris mortalibus aevi
prima fugit; subeunt morbi tristisque senectus
et labor, et durae rapit inclementia mortis.

“Ah! life’s best hours are ever first to fly
From hapless mortals; in their place succeed
Disease and dolorous eld; till travail sore
And death unpitying sweep them from the scene.”

(J. B. Greenough, trans.)

Silly

Back when the early church decided to celebrate Christmas in the dead of winter, might it have been the case that the following phrase was uttered somewhere by someone:

Christus hibernatus est.

The Suda and Wikipedia

If you’d like to be impressed with a rather faint idea of just how much of the enormous edifice of Classical Greco-Roman culture has perished in oblivion, you probably couldn’t do much better than to peruse one of the few ancient encyclopedias that have come down to us in one form or another. One of the best preserved is the Suda, which is now undergoing something of a corollary to project Gutenberg: http://www.stoa.org/sol/.

Apropos that, this might be mere contrarianism (or “agrarianism”, according to the spell-check program that knows my most intimate thoughts and secret desires), but I’m starting to dislike Wikipedia ever so slightly. Don’t get me wrong–I think it’s a frequently useful and overall worthwhile project stemming from a noble intent; in fact, to demonstrate my magnanimity I’ll even link to its entry on the Suda and comment that it’s much better than the last time I saw it (about 5 months ago): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suda.

But the issue of incomplete sourcing and unsubstantiated claims that still leaves a dull ache…yes, I’m aware of where that kind of reasoning leads the purportedly scientific historian, and yes, I will likely blog again and more thoroughly about my epistemological discontent with the academic establishment.

But until then, if you can’t beat’em, join’em. Here’s an interesting article the introduction of which serves as a nice supplement to the Wikipedia Suda page in that it cites the early 20th C. Doelger article that touched off the whole debate about the title (it is aptly named, “Der Titel”): http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ElAnt/V9N1/TyrrellSuda.pdf. It’s a sobering thought for the information age to ponder that so often we know not even the very names of things.