May 8, 2008
In which I look at photographs
In looking over photographs on the internet, the short attention span in me enjoys many of the amusingly-captioned contributed-photography sites. LOLCats, of course; and also Man Babies, photobombing (not photobombing). Of course, plenty of stuff on flickr: sticker art, smashed cars, bicycle parking: something for everyone, especially for me.... Read more
April 18, 2008
A few words on the aroma of death
There ain't nothin' more powerful than the odor of mendacity...You can smell it. It smells like death. — Tennessee Williams, Cat on A Hot Tin Roof CASSANDRA This house . . . It’s horrific! CHORUS Why call out in horror? Is there some vision in your mind? CASSANDRA It's this house— it stinks of murder, blood slaughter . . . CHORUS LEADER No, no—that's the smell of sacrifice, victims at the hearth. CASSANDRA That smell . . . it's like an open grave . . . CHORUS Do you mean the splendid Syrian incense? It's all through the house. CASSANDRA [turning back to the palace doors] No. But I must go. I'll lament my death, and Agamemnon's, too, inside the house. Enough of living! — Aeschylus, Agamemnon The powerful refrain of Mendacity! rings through the film adaptation Tennessee Williams's intense play, but for years I have conflated mendacity and complacency; only after breaking down the words did I better separate their usage. I think I have even gotten a few odd looks when using mendacity during conversation. The section of Agamemnon has some stunning imagery in the original, with the vocabulary of sacrifice suddenly presented in the context of drama. I wanted to write a paper around this, but my knowledge of Greek vocabulary was never strong enough; I have been reading the Agamemnon from a copy available online, but without my annotated copy of Liddell and Scott (available online, but .... not quite the same) and lacking the unequalled references of Smythe's Greek Grammar and Denniston's Greek Particles, I am adrift. That Denniston edited the Oxford University Press text of the Agamemnon is not coincidence: the work is notorious for its complexity and sophisticated use of Attic Greek.... Read more
April 16, 2008
A few maps
While tidying up my desk, I found the following maps: Manhattan & Welsh Guide to New York City (a search on Google for this term does not yield promising results!), which I picked up at the Mid-Manhattan Library a few days ago before a multi-lingual poetry hoe-down; NYC Cycling Map, 2007 edition. The 2008 map is now available online: http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/bikemapfront2008.pdf http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/bikemapback2008.pdf, which really should be in my cycling bag; Andorra (Andorra? Andorra!), which an eager Andorran pressed on me in Brussels; and Biblical Sites in Turkey (at atlas with gazetteer, actually) recently sent me by my parents. Some appealing photographs complementing this book appear in the Biblical sites in Turkey flickr pool.... Read more
