The · Athletes · Of · God

Invitas nullum nisi cum quo, Cotta, lavaris
et dant convivam balnea sola tibi.
mirabar quare numquam me, Cotta, vocasses:
iam scio me nudum displicuisse tibi.

* * *

Your party invitation
only goes to guys you bathe with.
But not to me? A revelation:
You hate to see me naked.

On my jar of peach jam:

INGREDIENTS:

sugar, peaches, pectin, concentrated lemon juice

INGRÉDIENTS:

sucre, pêche, jus de citron concentré

When I was a teenager I went through a period where I read a lot of Kurt Vonnegut novels. This is not terribly surprising. It wasn't until the very end of my Vonnegut phase, or just after it, that I found out that most people seem to think he is a "funny" author. This was a surprise, because I found him to be a "suicidally depressing" author, the sort of author you'd read to wallow in your "better to have never been born" feelings.

Tonight I read Samuel Beckett's Murphy, which I had tried to read a while back, but only got a few pages into. It is a funny book, his first published novel, before he caught on to his more familiar style, back when he still labored under the shadow of Joyce. There are all these great set scenes -- a terrific moment when all the characters come up with a different way to avert their eyes, for instance. The plot seems to largely exist to give Beckett a chance to think up clever writerly things to do. We like novels like this, although we often wish they'd get rid of the novel part and just do the clever writerly things. But the novel is a good excuse to be inspired to do such things, I suppose.

But of course it's also Beckett, and while it's hard to really care about any of these characters or their intricate machinations (it's almost a Wodehouse novel, if Wodehouse had been a depressive ex-pat who killed someone off every few chapters to keep the plot chugging along), nevertheless Beckett's bleak outlook and his characters' drives to escape themselves and their "human condition" are, well, depressing. But then again, I was never very good at separating comedy from tragedy, whether it's finding comedy painfully tragic, or finding comedic gallows humor in painful situations. I am either broken or agile that way.

(Also, yay for the term being basically over and having enough energy to read a short novel in one night!)

In the book, one of the characters keeps a copy of Bishop Jean-Baptiste Bouvier's "Supplementum ad Tractatum de Matrimonio" under his pillow for naughty reading. It appears to be a 19th c. treatise on sex, or something like that, and it's quoted in some histories of contraception. But my school's library doesn't have it, and Google Books only has it in snippet view. Grr!

'They [ = “men of rare sensibility”] do not fear boredom as much as work without pleasure; they actually require a lot of boredom if their work is to succeed. For thinkers and all sensitive spirits, boredom is that disagreeable “windless calm” of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds. They have to bear it an dmust wait for its effect on them. Precisely this is what lesser natures cannot achieve by any means.'

[Nietzsche, The Gay Science.]

I don't like his rhetoric of "rare sensibility" but this is basically how I use boredom.

This is probably the wrong blog for this post.

So, I caught a performance of Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610 tonight. Fellow student K. was singing in it, and zomg she has a magnificent voice, supple and friendly and all that. But yes: It's a very, very strange piece. Or maybe it isn't, maybe I'm just unfamiliar with music from that period. It's hard not to listen to it teleologically: It sounds like it is knee-deep in late Renaissance music, but it's striving to become Bach. There are the melismas of baroque music, but they overlap each other in these odd Renaissance polyphonic ways, rather than the more typically baroque intermeshed gearworks.

But then! So this made me think about paleography. Because the prof really likes showing us all the various stages between what we might call one script and the next. He is trying to make a point, that the scrips don't spring out fully formed from the head of Zeus, but rather develop over time. But this slow morphing actually makes it kind of impossible to distinguish the A script from the B script -- even though, if you took away all the intermediary steps, they'd look utterly distinct. It's a little frustrating, pedagogically.

But then again! Is it not sort of arbitrary that we pick A and B to be the defining positions, and think of the in-between stuff as being in-between? Couldn't we also think of Bach as this awkward stage between Monteverdi and Beethoven, rather than thinking of Monteverdi as this awkward stage between Desprez and Bach? Well, ok, that's not quite a fair comparison. But it was very difficult for me to stop thinking of the piece as being a curious mashup of two more familiar styles.

Anyway I work on the middle ages, which I assure you is not a mashup of Classical and Renaissance modes, nor is Monteverdi just a weird mashup. There was some pretty excellent music even within the frameworks established by the piece, as far as I could make it out. Or, I liked it, anyways. Plus there was a whole section that involved echo puns. Who doesn't like echo puns? ("...solamen (Amen!)" or "...vita (Ita!)").

I had a weird frustration today that discombobulated me much more that it should have (for it is nothing that requires your concern, so no worries), and I got a bit sad, so I purchased some books from Amazon, because it was too late to go to a proper bookstore. They are mostly comics, though one is a book I've wanted for a skajillion years, the Annotated Flatland. These seem like books I might actually be able to read before term is over, maybe. But I don't have the books now! And I can't tell if my satisfaction is being delayed or not!

In this article I'm reading, "What is an author?", Foucault uses (in translation) the term "family resemblances" and the term "game" to describe writing... but then he goes and whines about "the problematic nature of the word 'work' and the unity it designates." Apparently he hasn't read Wittgenstein after all! Well, it's 1969... No, surely he'd have heard about it by then, even if PI somehow hadn't been translated yet. Amazing that he still thinks that a word implies a unity.

This has been yet another in a series of posts which you probably don't give a flop about.

EDIT: And later in the article, "mode of existence", which is surely a rewrite of "form of life". What the hells, Michels?

Here beginneth a series on Latin words which, for whatever reason, don't seem to stick well to my brain, in hopes that by ratting them out, they will finally choose to linger.

QUIN. Quin is just from "qui ne", which are both common enough words, except that it is apparently from some weird ablative form of "quī". So it's a question word followed by "lest". Anyway it is basically something you stick in the beginning of a phrase to show that you're asking a rhetorical question, along the lines of "why not". "Quin conscendimus equos?" Why not mount our horses? Why not indeed. It's just that the meaning apparently expanded from there, so it takes in senses like "without [doing something]": "Curiosus nemo est quin sit malevolus" -- No one is inquisitive without being eeeeeeevil. Or it can mean something like "but that not", or perhaps just "verily". Or "nay!" Though Latin already has a perfectly fine word for that kind of "nay!" -- "immo".

So, yes, a rhetorical gesture that kind of gets translated into a dozen different and obscure things in English. Meh.

Human nature is such that when we are suddenly taken up by someone whom we consider superior and admirable, we accept his attentions calmly, whereas when we are dropped we cannot rest until we feel we have got to the bottom of the person's profound irrationality. Nor can we easily accept the verdict sent down to us through the mortifying silence of someone who has found us wanting and has packed up and moved on. We protest it, each in our way -- our futile way, since the more effective is our protest the more surely do we drive away the person whose love we have lost not because of anything we did, but because of who we are.

[Janet Malcolm, In The Freud Archives, p. 120]

I was reading this book on Dante, on his "De Vulgari Eloquentia", which I'm presenting on in an upcoming class. And it mentioned his "La Vita Nuova". And I've read "La Vita Nuova", shortly after I first read "La Commedia", a few years ago. And yet, and yet I remember so little about it. There's a lady he likes, and there are some poems among some prose bits. He really likes the lady, but I don't think they get it on. That's about all I remember.

And that's about all I remember! What kind of nonsense is this. I READ THE BOOK. Why can't I remember anything about it? I remember more about certain books that I HAVEN'T read, that I have only flipped through at bookstores, or heard friends talk about. READING IS A LIE. And I have built my life on a lie. Reading had better get its act together, or we're splitsville.

* * *

Also I was reading another book on Dante, which was written in Spanish (which I don't read) and occasionally quoted authors in Italian (which I really don't read), without translating, and when it would make that leap from the one language to the other, it was linguistically gut-wrenching and nauseating. That was pretty awesome. It is the sort of thing that other people describe enjoying in roller coasters. I do not enjoy roller coasters. But I enjoyed this. Oh reading, I can't stay mad at you.

You know you've chosen a classy wine when the copy feels comfortable telling you that it goes great with pizza.

Also when it comes in a "1L terra pak" with screw top. Though that's supposed to be better for the environment!

Though, also, when you manage to find something trashier than pizza to pair it with. PB&Js for dinner? Again?!

This is a game for two people two play who live far apart but who chat via AIM or MSN or GTalk or somesuch, and who have sufficiently large music collections. The game is called "Maxisingle". It will probably take 40 to 60 minutes to play. You can imagine any number of variations, which I encourage you to implement.

Here are the rules to the game:

1. The first player picks out a song to start with. That will be the "hit single". The first few times you play, you might want to start with a song that you love, but a song that you despise or a song that you don't care much about but which was very popular might also work.

2. The first player sends the hit single to the second player, and they listen to it. They talk about it for a while -- either the first player explains why they love it, or the second player says what they notice about it. Discussion happens.

3. The second player responds with another song, which in some way relates or contrasts with the first song. This is a "b-side"; it probably should be by a different musician. Both players listen to this song, and talk about how it compares and contrasts with the "hit single".

4. The first player then responds with another song, which relates both to the hit single and to the first b-side; both players listen and comment.

5. The second player then responds with another song, which relates to the hit single and to the previous b-side; it does not need to relate to any of the other b-sides, but it also shouldn't fall entirely out of the sway of the hit single. These follow-up b-sides, perhaps they react to the same aspect of the hit single, but in a different way.

6. How long this back and forth goes on is up to the players, but we recommend six songs, or five if the game is going to immediately be played again with the second player coming up with the first "hit single".

7. The winner of the game is the person who has the most delightful time playing it, but they score points only for the amount of delight the other player has. Afterwards, all the songs might be placed into an iTunes playlist or the like, for future reference.

We hope you enjoy playing Maxisingle!

A sigh is an innate passion of the soul arising out of a suspension of the mind. Or: a sigh is a remarkable inspiration accompanied by a vehement suspension of the mind. Or: a sigh is a vehement passion of the mind arising out of extreme meditation. Or: a sigh is a sudden and unexpected utterance of the mind resulting from the plight of the soul. But a sigh derives its name from the suspension of the mind (suspiritus < suspensio spirituum), since, when the soul relates to memory the happiness it once had or the immensity of its grief, or the immeasurably joy, or the contrary, or troubles to come, the mind is suspended, because the heart is fettered by the fact that the soul forgets its operative capacity. Thus, when the heart gradually begins to dilate again, the mind returns to its original state, and from this very return a certain sound arises, which is called a sigh. But, in fact, there are very many who sigh out of bad manners or illness. Women, however, sometimes sigh in order to deceive lovers; for they, too, are frequently deluded by sighs.

Sighs, then, in a larger sense, can be understood as a nod, an indication, and a signal. Moreover, a great number of things are indicated by a sigh. Indeed, when a certain knight was sitting not far from a certain virgin, he sighed vehemently. Finally, asked by her wherefore he was sighing, he responded: "For I dare not reveal to you the desire of my heart." She, however, made a rather remarkable statement to him, saying: "He who hesitates to lay open his desire to a woman when the opportunity to speak is present seems not to have a manly soul."

[from Boncompagno da Signa, The Wheel of Venus, early 13th c., ed & tr. Josef Purkart.]

So I had this thought the other day. I was listening to the Brahms Clarinet Quintet on my way to school, and thinking about how it was premiered at the Wittgenstein's house. (Like, what?! I know!) And I thought, you know, that would be an excellent thing to have been at, the meeting of this great piece of chamber music and a brilliant philosopher...

Except, then I thought, wait, when did that quintet get written? Sometime in the late 19th c., right? And Wittgenstein was born, what, 1888? (Answer: 1889.) So was he even there when the quintet premiered?

Answer: The quintet was written in 1891. Ludwig was two-and-a-half years old. And while I'm sure he was adorable and precocious, it's just not quite the same as if he had been a little older.

I spent three days watching Roman Holiday, in little bits and pieces, while eating sandwiches or whatnot. Perhaps that is how I can watch Hollywood movies. It didn't seem to lose momentum or anything. The movie is not so great, although it does make Rome look like a fun place to visit, with lots of great backdrops. Mostly, though, Gregory Peck comes off as someone with excellent comedic timing -- far funnier than the actual "funny guy" in the movie, Eddie Albert, who hams it up awkwardly -- and certainly more interesting than Audrey Hepburn, whose blank face is upstaged by her haircut. (She won an Oscar for that? What? Whatever, Hollywood.)

Paul, last night, claimed to both have a penis and know the words to the Chanukah song. And he sang them quickly. But, and this is key, since I don't know the words, I was unable to verify that he had them correct. I think my hypothesis might still hold.