So, why is speed needed to say poetry? It is the sound of sense waking up the latent agility of the tongue: “speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue.” It is attention to sharper contrasts, to multiplying facets, to a superabundant collation of angular things all [...]
Archive for the ‘latin’ Category
The Speed of Verse, II
Posted in Charles Williams, Dante, God, Herbert, John Crowe Ransom, Pound, Vergil, Yeats, art, beginnings, birds, books, crannies, dialogue, dreaming, eccentric, history, idiosyncrasy, labor, language, latin, love?, rule, speed, stars, sun, the body, time, translation, verse on October 10, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Another Reflection on Lucretius
Posted in Lucretius, anyone, beginnings, books, cosmos, dialogue, fate, language, latin, letters, necessity, rain, rule, spring, the grave, the impossible, translation, water on April 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The Poetry of Lucretius’ Invitation to Accept “Mater Rebus Certa”
In lines 188-198 of the first book of De Rerum Natura, Lucretius describes the implications of there being a “semine certo”, a definite seed for every kind of thing, that each thing has “sua … materia.” His particular concerns in this passage are: that the developement [...]
try and understand me …
Posted in H.W. Fowler, anyone, beginnings, books, conjunctions, dialogue, eccentric, indirect discourse, language, latin, letters, wit on April 9, 2009 | 4 Comments »
I want to praise a book—A Dictionary of Modern English Usage by H.W. Fowler—but I cannot at this moment find the right words to do justice to the object of my admiration.
Instead, I’ll give an example of what I admire (which incidentally confirms and elucidates one of my long and vehemently held beliefs):
try. The idiom [...]
for my novel class
Posted in Dostoevsky, Goethe, Indian Summer, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Kant, Werther, books, crannies, dialogue, eccentric, exceptions, fate, idiosyncrasy, language, latin, letters, logic, love?, mania, necessity, nooks, novel, speed, spring, stars, summer, sun, the grave, time, wind, wisdom, wit on March 3, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Jean Paul Richter’s Maria Wuz: Inversions of Time, Nooks, Exceptions to the Rule, Interpolations and a Room for Man Cut out of, or Built into, the Universe
Proceeding according to no a priori principle, but seeking rather to treat of Jean Paul’s “Life of Maria Wuz, Merry Dominie of Auenthal” without wronging its delightfully angled discourse [...]
something I wrote for my Lucretius class
Posted in Aphrodite, God, Homer, Lucretius, Venus, anyone, beginnings, conjunctions, fate, greek, history, ladies, language, latin, love?, sailing, sun, traffic, voluptas, water, wind on February 9, 2009 | 1 Comment »
y calling Venus “Aeneadae genetrix” Lucretius both accepts a mythic inheritance and returns it to his reader strangely transformed. The phrase focuses our attention on the overwhelming nearness of Aphrodite to Anchises that produced Aeneas, and seeks to extend the brilliance and force of that strange and momentary relationship of the human and divine – “hominum divumque voluptas” – over the begetting of each of the Aeneadae. But, by an odd sort of logic, the poet’s extending her particular role in the birth of Aeneas over the births of men in general, Venus herself, the brilliant, dissembling, shame-faced goddess who shines in the Homeric hymn is allowed to recede farther from our sphere. The intimacy of Aphrodite’s union with Anchises is evoked mutedly here only to release her from it into the more general and metaphorical motherhood that befits the respectful distance Lucretius grants the gods. By “pluralizing” this union, this highest pleasure of men and gods – “hominum divumque,” Lucretius prepares us to let that “and” assume a more disjunctive and subdued force, in contrast to the conjoining violence at the meeting-point of gods and men which is the center of the Homeric cosmos.
the odour of the lamp
Posted in Abraham, Achilles, God, Moby Dick, albatross, art, greek, history, language, latin, mosaic, polis, sailing, savage, skrim-shander, the impossible, water, whale, whiteness, wind, winter on November 2, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Through the rambling body of any grand or would-be-grand endeavour, poetry, life, and all their bewildered exchanges, it is always in a back-alley, a digression, an out of the way place that unity, kosmos insinuates itself.
Moby Dick, a book not inaptly compared for fantastic uncontainability to a labyrinth through a thundercloud, harbors any number of such out of the way places that promise a truer scope of its impossible whole than passages [...]
an appendix to “the disappearing alphabet”
Posted in digamma, greek, language, latin, letters, lymmerick, wisdom, wit on October 14, 2008 | 3 Comments »
this character, mr. digamma,
can be found in a musty old grammar.
how woida came oida,
left video, wit,
and ask why we lost our digamma.
