Tricks with Cow Parts

Raise a glass today for Horace de Vere Cole, Neville Chamberlain’s brother-in-law, and a prankster of rare dedication.

Here was a man who once stood in the street handing out free theatre tickets to a series of extremely bald passers-by with the result that, when viewed from the dress circle, the assembly of shiny bald heads in the carefully chosen seats clearly spelt out an expletive – complete with a dot over the ‘i’.

He had a Corkman’s flair for obscenity. His Who’s Who entry was rejected when he described his chief recreation as “fucking”, and the things he did with a cow’s udder must have given nightmares to many.

Find out more about Cole and his ilk in Norman Moss’s 1977 work The Pleasures of Deception, or in the unusually good Daily Mail article from which I have quoted above.

Pop on Gibbon

In 1995 the Classics Ireland editor Theresa Urbainczyk had the gumption to ask Iggy Pop for a contribution. His album American Caesar was still in the racks, and he was happy to reveal the source of its inspiration.

In 1982, horrified by the meanness, tedium and depravity of my existence as I toured the American South playing rock and roll music and going crazy in public, I purchased an abridged copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Dero Saunders, Penguin).

He goes on to list the ways in which he benefits from a deep acquaintance with Gibbon’s work.

There are also enough drugs, motels, and glimpses of the songwriting process to remind us who we’re talking to. Iggy doesn’t patronise his audience. My favourite part, however, is that opening sentence. Is it modelled on Gibbon’s beautiful description of his own inspiration?

It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted fryars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.

I think it is.

Find more on that sentence here. Watch Iggy proclaim himself a nerd here. Then get back to work, for God’s sake.

Poppe on Aeneas

Classics Ireland have done a wonderful thing. They have made the first twelve volumes of their annual journal freely available online, without subscription, to everyone. I suspect that is how all journals will operate before long. No doubt there are economic obstacles, but they will surely be overcome by the ingenuity, philanthropy and vanity of scholars.

There are some gems in the Classics Ireland collection. I’ve settled on two explorations of the extraordinary reach of Roman culture.

The earliest surviving vernacular translation of the Aeneid was undertaken in 11th or 12th century Ireland, and the translator in question was charmingly unburdened by the modern instinct for fidelity.  He added a prologue and pruned the guff. Twelve-branched Virgilian similes were lopped to stumps. Seven lines of poetry:

And the hero of Laomedon’s line, seeing it all, tosses on a mighty sea of troubles; and now hither, now thither he swiftly throws his mind, casting it in diverse ways, and turning it to every shift; as when in brazen bowls a flickering light from water, flung back by the sun or the moon’s glittering form, flits far and wide o’er all things, and now mounts high and smites the fretted ceiling of the roof aloft.

Become three lines of prose:

When Aeneas then heard of that gathering of the Italians approaching him, he was worried, very fearsome, and full of many thoughts, and he did not know what counsel he should follow.

In my long-contemplated Aeneid For The Busy Modern, of course, this will simmer for another few hours:

Italians? Aeneas freaked!

Erich Poppe’s article is exactly what I look for in journals. It is well researched, cleanly written, and animated by a larger purpose: Poppe wants us to study “translation literature” more seriously. It’s also a half hour of your life which might yield that bright shining fact you return to twenty years later around a poker table, or in a footnote to your monumental reassessment of Gerhart Hauptmann. The Trivial Pursuit Mediaeval Epic Edition should be rolling off the factory belts any day now.

Next, Iggy Pop puts a shirt on and gets inky.

Petrarch’s Lute

How well do you have to know the subject of your dissertation? I am at the early stages of my research on Petrarch. Will I ever be able to speak as magisterially as Ernest H. Wilkins does here?

“Petrarch certainly did not take a lute with him to Naples in 1343; it is highly improbable that he did any singing there; and it is unlikely that he found occasion to express his delight in bird song.”

I have never been as certain about anything as Wilkins is about everything. He has earned his certainty. The rest of the piece, and his other work on Petrarch, is blindingly meticulous. But he makes me feel bad for the birds of Naples. Is their song so pallid?

It’s also hard to imagine Petrarch not finding the time to express his feelings about anything, but again I defer to Wilkins.

He knows his lutes

So Petrarch sits in a Neapolitan mulestop tavern. How to beguile his grief at the death of Robert of Naples, his discomfort at Pope Clement’s latest bull? With music, obviously. He curses himself again: Why didn’t I pack that damned lute? Well, I’m certainly not singing without it. That would be the height of improbability.

Boccaccio notices that his companion has fallen silent. He knows better than to ask for a song. He casts about in mute desperation for a topic. Songs. Lutes. Music. A chaffinch alights on a strut of the tavern’s awning. Yes!

“So, Francis. What do you think of these city birds? Pretty tuneful, aren’t they?”

Petrarch’s face (already colore non candidus) clouds further. Silently, he drains his cup.

Boccaccio’s heart sinks. It’s going to be a long winter.

Movie Breaks

When you’ve been driving your brain too hard, it can take a while for the wheels to stop spinning. You can’t go straight from twelve hours of footnote tweaks to chopping wood in the fields of Concord. Anxiety sets in.

What you need is a gateway activity.

One solution is to chop small amounts of wood in the library, and build up gradually to lumberjack mode. Another is to apply the academic paradigm to increasingly leisured activity. You can start by becoming an expert in your favourite film.

Your university library probably has scads of movies you can borrow. If you’re not a film student, you may not know where they are. You can easily befriend a film student. Sit in the canteen for a while reassessing Douglas Sirk. Otherwise, ask a librarian.

You will also find several browse-worthy film journals. I like to watch the movie again, and read the articles in descending order of intellectual engagement. By the time you come to the capsule reviews in Empire, you’re ready to stand yourself down.

Somewhere in that descent you will find Film Quarterly.

The current issue has a lot about The Wire, but I direct you instead to Volume 44, No. 2, and Nikki Stiller’s review of Chocolat. Why? Because the unintentionally yuksome sentence about the cleric’s organ (it is bulky but, you will be relieved to hear, “relatively harmless”) may not be so unintentional after all: it is followed swiftly by a consideration of a phallicising landscape sketch. And because it is the only article in the entire Jstor warehouse which contains the phrase “ant sandwich.”

Should we call this a journalwhack? Whatever it is, I’m inclined to send a prize to the next scholar who can shoehorn “ant sandwich” into a published article. There must be an entomologist somewhere working on insect troilism.