Erling, Lynne, and I went to see Pasolini’s Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma last Friday night, but when we go to the San Francisco Cinematheque in Yerba Buena Center for the Arts a goodly 30 minutes before the showing, it was sold out. We sulked for about five minutes, waiting for scalpers to appear and offer us tickets, but luckless we trudged over to Restaurant Lulu instead for a bit of a nosh. We overdid the victuals and walking back to the car, noticed that The Matrix Revolutions was showing in Imax at the Sony Metreon. None of us having seen it yet, we decided to go in and recover from our dinner. It was fun looking at the thick makeup on Keanu’s mug and being able to see a spec of lint on the Merovingian the size of a Buick, but the movie overall was a disappointment. At the end, as we looked at the credits, Erling leaned over and informed me that Don Davis the composer of the score had come to Sub Pontio Pilato last April and enjoyed it. Also, three people who had sung in our opera had sung in the choir towards the end of the movie. Well, that was nice, but the movie was still bad. It was as though the brothers W. had taken all the iffy and boring parts of the first film and expanded them beyond all comprehension and endurance. Listening to Keanu parrot frosh existential philosophy while others stand around immobilized as if trapped in amber is not much fun. The special effects for the battle for Zion were fun in abstract way. And it was fun to see Phil Tippett reuse the feet off of his Enforcement Droid from RoboCop for the dockloader cloned fighter suits. All that was missing was Peter Weller or Sigourney Weaver. At one point, I found msyelf waxing nostalgiac for Walter Pidgeon and Leslie Nielsen discussing Krell graphemics in a director’s cut of Forbidden Planet. Of course, we could have gone to see Gibson’s snuff flick, but not on a full stomach.
Books that we’ve either received recently, are reading, or want to buy:
“Nushu is a beautiful script which was created hundreds of years ago by unschooled, rural, peasant women in Jiang Yong Prefecture, Hunan Province, China.” [The World of Nushu via Margaret Ronkin at Georgetown University via the Language Policy List at the University of Pennsylvania]
I was looking for an audio example of glottalized consonants when I ran across Professor Richard Applegate’s Inezeño Chumash language site.
A week’s worth of non-blogging. No excuses. Watched some movies: Fog of War (with Ian and Kari), Lucía, Lucía (known in Mexico as La Hija del Canibal), and In the Cut. Errol Morris’ interview with Robert McNamara explicates eleven lessons about war. Hija is a surreal little neo-new-wavish mystery. Jane Campion’s movie is a taut erotic murder mystery thriller. At about the same time as I was asking rhetorically whether Harvey Keitel’s manhood would be on display, we were treated to an erect membrum virile being fellated.
Most know that it was Horace who wrote about verba sesquipedalia ‘half-yard words’ in his Ars poetica, giving us a great synonym for polysyllabic, but a while back, a peek at Lewis & Short sent me to one of Martial’s epigrams [vii.14.]:
lux mea non capitur nugis neque moribus istis
nec dominæ pectus talia damna movent:
bis senos puerum numerantem perdidit annos,
mentula cum nondum sesquipealis erat.
Later on, as I was sifting through a Hebrew-English dictionary that V. had given me, I came across ’amah ‘cubit; penis; forearm, middle finger’. The cubit—a handy measurement because the ruler is always with you—is the distance between the tip of the middle finger (the digitus infamis or impudicus) to the elbow (or ulna from which root also comes the English ell), or about a foot and a half. Was it Pan-Mediterranean, cross-linguistic braggadocio or something else? Getting from forearm to middle finger to penis seems an understandable semantic shift in this day and age, but just how did the bird get its present day obscene meaning? Sure, the Romans had called it the lewd or unchaste finger, but was our gesture just some schoolboy’s pedantic recreation of an ancient method of indicating scorn, or something more primeval? There was also that old Beatles’ lyric about “fish and finger pie” going through my head. It was from Penny Lane, and its meaning had been gleaned years before from a John Lennon interview, and the Germans call the digit under discussion, the Stinkefinger. In the end, I supposed the fingers of the hand can be mapped to a man’s body with the thumb and pinkie as arms and the index and ring fingers as legs, which does leave the finger itself to stand in for the male member. Finally, and maybe not so coincidentally, I was left to ponder the gematrial significance of Hebrew gid ‘sinew; penis’ and dayig ‘fish’ (both being equal to 17, or one inch short of a cubit). After all, it’s a short paronomastic leap from ichthus to ithyphallic.
Translation of Martial by Walter C A Ker, MA:
My love is not taken by such triffles, nor by such passions as that; Nor do such losses move my mistress’ heart: She has lost a boy just counting twice six years, Whose prick was not yet a foot and a half long.
[Addendum 02/20/04: Thanks to Mischa (see commentary) for a couple of threads over on the Classics-L. I now know the Greek for ‘flip the bird’, id est, skimalizo. Follow the links for more philologist foo.]
All in a day’s brooding.
Meanwhile, the unsolicited email is outta control. Worms keep coming COD and anti-virus software keeps me busy and informed. All the while thinking upon:
Nullo ergo tempore non feceras aliquid, quia ipsum tempus tu feceras. et nulla tempora tibi coæterna sunt, quia tu permanes; at illa si permanerent, non essent tempora. quid est enim tempus? quis hoc facile breviterque explicaverit? quis hoc ad verbum de illo proferendum vel cogitatione comprehenderit? quid autem familiarius et notius in loquendo conmemoramus quam tempus? et intellegimus utique, cum id loquimur, intellegimus etiam, cum alio loquente id audimus. quid est ergo tempus? si nemo ex me quærat, scio; si quærenti explicare velim, nescio: fidenter tamen dico scire me, quod, si nihil praeteriret, non esset præteritum tempus, et si nihil adveniret, non esset futurum tempus, et si nihil esset, non esset præsens tempus. duo ergo illa tempora, praeteritum et futurum, quomodo sunt, quando et præteritum iam non est et futurum nondum est? præsens autem si semper esset praesens nec in præteritum transiret, non iam esset tempus, sed æternitas. si ergo præsens, ut tempus sit, ideo fit, quia in præteritum transit, quomodo et hoc esse dicimus, cui causa, ut sit, illa est, quia non erit, ut scilicet non vere dicamus tempus esse, nisi quia tendit non esse.
[Augustinus, Confessiones]
All that and lusting after his mother, too.
Today is the birthday of Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890-1960) and Bertold Brecht (1898-1956).
Show me the way to the next whisky bar
Oh, don’t ask why, oh, don’t ask why
Show me the way to the next whisky bar
Oh, don’t ask why, oh, don’t ask why
For if we don’t find the next whisky bar
I tell you we must die
I tell you we must die
I tell you
I tell you
I tell you we must die.Oh, moon of Alabama
We now must say say good-bye
We’ve lost our good old mama
And must have whisky
Oh, you know why.[Brecht und Weill Alabama Song]
“I don’t like people who have never fallen or stumbled.
Their virtue is lifeless and it isn’t of much value.
Life hasn’t revealed its beauty to them.”
[B L Pasternak]
While cleaning blog, I managed to delete the number one entry. I’ve been able to reconstruct it partially, having preserved the comments but lost the trackbacks.
Couple of quick updates:
Well, today’s James Joyce’s and James Stephen’s birthday: Crock of Gold and Finnegans Wake.
A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
[via Finnegans Web]
“Your stirabout is on the hob,” said the Thin Woman. “You can get it for yourself. I would not move the breadth of my nail if you were dying of hunger. I hope there’s lumps in it. A Leprecaun from Gort na Cloca Mora was here to-day. They’ll give it to you for robbing their pot of gold. You old thief, you! you lob-eared, crock-kneed fat-eye!”
The Thin Woman whizzed suddenly from where she stood and leaped into bed. From beneath the blanket she turned a vivid, furious eye on her husband. She was trying to give him rheumatism and toothache and lockjaw all at once. If she had been satisfied to concentrate her attention on one only of these torments she might have succeeded in afflicting her husband according to her wish, but she was not able to do that.
“Finality is death. Perfection is finality. Nothing is perfect. There are lumps in it,” said the Philosopher.
[via the Litrix Reading Room]