Morning Read
¶ In the Decameron, a tale from the (Florentine) proletariat. Two young and comely workers in the wool trade meet in a garden that, for a change, belongs to neither of their families nor to the convent in which one of them is immured. The boy, Pasquino — already, the commedia dell’arte nomenclature — interrupts his love-making to brush his teeth with a sage-leaf. Unfortunately, it has been breathed upon by a great venomous toad, and Pasquino dies. Does Simona, the girlfriend, worry that she’ll be caught in flagrante? Not a bit of it. It’s for murder that she’s hauled in! As she is not a lady, she has no cause to worry about her honor. But she does prize her good name as a solid citizen, so she demonstrates to the podestà how Pasquino came to grief. This kills her, too.
This tale (IV, vii) is not only short but starkly denuded of the superlatives that garland all the earlier love-stories. Neither Simona nor Pasquino is the most handsome, the most beautiful, &c. McWilliam’s notes tell sus that the lovers “have special significance as the first working-class hero and heroine in the history of European tragic literature.” Well, they both die. I wouldn’t call the story tragic.
¶ In the Aeneid, the Sibyl persuades a reluctant Charon, who has gotten in trouble on previous occasions for ferrying (famous) mortals across the Styx and who is disinclined to allow Aeneas to embark, by brandishing the golden bough. In contrast to the dead souls, apparently, Aeneas is suddenly “a giant,” and his weight is almost more than the boat can bear. We’ve all been in something like it at one icky time or another:
                           gemuit sub pondere cumba
sutilis et multam accepit rimosa paludem.
¶ C K Williams: a poem from August 2005, “Rats.”
and the president
and his energy-company
cronies still insist
global warming
isn’t real. The ratsrove where they will
now, shiny and fat,
they’ve appropriated
the whole lawn.
Not the most poetic lines in the history of verse, but “rove” is worthy of the great Augustans.
¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Deborah Petersen, of Life in the Fast Lane. I’m probably not going to get this right, but Ms Petersen appears to be the dispatcher of her husband’s Canadian trucking company, Fast Lane. I guess it’s not a full-time job. Why is her blog so popular (and it is popular, apparently)? Because Ms Petersen has studied SEO — search engine optimization, the technique or set of techniques that floats through these pages like a miasma. Most of the bloggers so far seem disdainful of SEO, in much the same way that doctors are disdainful of vitamin supplements. If you’re doing a good job, you don’t need the boost. (One’s Inner Publicist: Are you CRAZY?) Editor Michael Banks treats SEO as a Masonic secret, too precious to be discussed in any detail. I guess I won’t be learning about that from Blogging Heroes.
¶ In Le rouge et le noir, our cynical hero, Julien, is out-cynicized by his fellow seminarians, who, mostly drawn from peasant backgrounds, believe in good meals, warm cassocks, and the power of not thinking. Again, I flip to the English translation and learn precisely nothing. Well, most of the time. Every now and then there’s an idiom the sense of which I’d never extract from a dictionary. The really tough ones all seem to involve en and être.
Les gens adroits parmi les séminaristes virent qu’ils avaient affair à un homme qui n’en était pas aux éléments du métier.
translates as
The sharper ones among the seminarians saw that they were dealing with someone who was not without some elements of their calling.
¶ Writing about Jean-François Revel, Clive James becomes almost intemperate. I think that I share James’s dislike and contempt for ideology, but it has been much less salient in my life than it doubtless was in his. One of the good things about the countercultural Sixties was that everyone was really too stoned for ideological rigor. How else could boomers have become the sterling investment bankers who mastered the universe in the Eighties?
Although I feel slightly left out of James’s side of the conversation, I get it in the end.
After the verbal battle of a lifetime, he had come to accept that the reason for the readiness of the intellectuals to connive at mass extermination was that their language was itself a totalitarian instrument. Hence the hollowness of what he called the eternal dream of the bien pensant left: un totalitarisme végétarien. The reluctance of ex-ideologists like Bernard-Henri Lévy to acknowledge their debt to Revel is quite understandable. He isn’t telling them that they were bad writers because they thought that way. He is telling them that they though that way because they were bad writers.
Zing!