Gods and Mortals in Classical Mythology

Posted on by

I’ve turned the “reply” function here back on — or at least no logon to WordPress should be required to leave a comment — to see what happens. So far, unwanted replies are coming in. We’ll see whether that becomes a torrent.

Gods and Mortals in Classical MythologyAnother specialized dictionary that’s a prized book on my shelves: the hardback edition of Gods and Mortals in Classical Mythology by the tireless Michael Grant and John Hazel, first published in the UK in 1973. The Dorset Press put out my edition in 1985.

In the front cover I wrote my name, and “New York City, Aug 29, 1986.” I found it on a remainder table at the Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue back when that place was a destination, rather than just a large store in a large nationwide chain (and which closed last year anyway). I bought it as an upgrade to a paperback version of the book I acquired ca. 1984 in Nashville.

Acquiring the hardback allowed me to give the paperback to my college friend Rich, who’d expressed an admiration for it during a visit, and wanted it to look up Classical references in the Continental philosophy and the writings of other Germanic thinkers he’s interested in.

Me, I just enjoy reading about Antiquity. Gods and Mortals in Classical Mythology is an exceptional reference for that purpose.

Some excerpts, picked at random, show its richness. Such as wonderful detail about well-known characters:

Traditions vary about the appearance of the Gorgons. One the one hand, they are sometimes described as beautiful, and it was said that Athena gave Perseus the power to kill Medusa because she had boasted of excelling the goddess in beauty. Ancient art, on the other hand, depicts them with hideous round faces, serpentine hair, boar’s tusks, terrible grins, snub noses, beards, lolling tongues, staring eyes, brazen hands, a striding gait, and sometimes the hindquarters of a mare.

Or giving more obscure characters a mention:

Halirrhothius: Son of Poseidon and a nymph, Euryte. Near the Acropolis in Athens, he raped Alcippe, a daughter of Ares and Aglaurus, and for this Ares killed him. The god was arraigned by Poseidon at a court which met on the spot. This was the legendary origin of the court named Areopagus (Hill of Ares), which tried cases of homicide at Athens: it acquitted Ares of guilt.

And offering variations on the stories, which shows that that’s the way storytelling usually works. The book has this to say on the death of the hunter Orion, who hunts even now in the winter sky with his faithful Canus Major and Minor following him.

Orion next went to Crete, where he hunted in Artemis’ company, but Eos, goddess of the dawn, fell in love with him and carried him off. The gods, and particularly Artemis, were jealous that a goddess should take a mortal lover, and on the island of Delos… Artemis killed Orion with her arrows.

She is likewise associated with other variant accounts of Orion’s death. According to one of them, he died because he rashly challenged the goddess at discus-throwing; and another story recounted that she shot him for trying to rape Opis. Again he was said, while clearing Chios of wild animals, to have tried to rape Artemis herself, but she brought from the ground an enormous scorpion which stung him to death.

Or else she did this because she was afraid that he would kill all the animals on earth; or, alternatively, she actually contemplated marriage with Orion, whereupon her brother Apollo tricked her into killing him by pointing to an object far out at sea and betting that she could not hit it. She tried and succeeded, but the target she had hit turned out to be Orion’s head, for he was swimming or wading far from shore. In her grief she place her beloved in the sky as a constellation.

Lost Beauties of the English Language

Posted on by

Lost Beauties of the English LanguageMy edition of Lost Beauties of the English Language, a book originally published in 1874, is a reprint published in 1987 by Bibliophile Books in the UK. How it came to be in the Chicago bookstore where I bought it toward the end of the ’80s — maybe the incomparable Stuart Brent Books on Michigan Ave. — I don’t know.

But I’m glad I have it. All dictionaries are good for browsing, but Lost Beauties is especially charming. You find things like:

Barrel fever: the headache caused by intemperance in ale or beer.
Crambles: boughs and branches of trees, broken off by wind.
Farthel: the fourth part of anything (related to farthing, which I figure is pretty much lost as well).
Glunch: to frown.
Keech: a fat, round lump, whence also a keg (of butter).
Pingle: to eat with very little appetite.
Well-will: the opposite of ill-will.
Wordridden: to be a slave to words without understanding their meaning; to be overawed by a word rather than by an argument.

Two of my favorite lost beauties are actually prefixes, namely alder- and um-.

Alder: a prefix formerly used to intensify the meaning of an adjective in the superlative degree — as if to better the best, and heighten the highest… In Wicliff’s Bible, the Almighty is called the Alder-Father and also the Alder-Creator.

Other examples: alderbest, alderfirst, alderforemost, alderhighest, adlerlast, adlertruest, alderworst, and I guess it does survive in fossilized form in “alderman.” A little bit better than the best seems to defy the internal logic of superlatives, but language isn’t entirely subject to logic. There’s clearly a place for the alder- formation in English, or there could be.

Um: round or around.

Umgang: circuit, circumference
Umlap: to enfold
Umset: to surround

The author, Charles Mackay (1814-89), was a Scotsman better known for writing Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), which covered a lot of ground, including the South Sea Company Bubble, tulip mania, witch hunts, alchemy, crusades, fortune-telling and more. “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one,” Mackay wrote. Sounds about right to me.

One of the more interesting aspects of Lost Beauties, as least for an American reader in our time, are the words he includes that aren’t lost to American English. Perhaps Mackay didn’t know that they were still used on this side of the Atlantic, or maybe some of them were revived in the 20th century in American English. But I think it’s more likely that he knew that some of the words were spoken here, but also felt that that didn’t count.

Such as: egg on (verb), gruesome, laze (verb), pinchpenny, rung (as in the step of a ladder), swelter (in the heat), watershed.

USS Arizona 1979

Posted on by

It won’t be too many years before the living memory of the attack on Pearl Harbor is as gone as the assassination of Franz Ferdinand or the shelling of Fort Sumter or the Shot Heard Round the World. Does it matter whether such events make it into a collective awareness beyond actual memory? I think it does.

PearlHarbor79According to the Park Service, about 2 million people visit each year, so it’s unlikely that the awareness will fade too soon. This image dates to July 1979, which I took on the approach to the memorial. That was almost closer in time to the attack than to the present (not quite: 38 years vs. 36 years), which itself is a sobering thought.

Inside are a list of the Arizona’s dead. The inscription also says: To the Memory of the Gallant Men Here Entombed and their shipmates who gave their lives in action on 7 December 1941, on the U.S.S. Arizona.

How the Whos Really Dealt With the Grinch

Posted on by

Ann and I decided to watch one of this year’s airings of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! last night, which, except for the commercials interrupting in places not originally intended for that purpose, was worth a watch, as always. I may or may not have seen the show on December 18, 1966, when it first aired, but I did watch it most years during the early ’70s, and occasionally since then.

This time it occurred to me just how forgiving the Whos really were. Not only did they welcome Christmas with song despite having no presents or toys (and no food), when the Grinch returned all of that, they didn’t toss him in the Whoville jail for burglary.

Or worse. Naturally, I had to come up with an alternate ending.

The Whos organized a posse with care
And tracked the Grinch down near his lair.
You’ve stolen our presents, from largest to least,
You’ve grabbed our Who pudding, and glommed our roast beast.
They hit him hard in the name of their town,
They kicked his shins and knocked him down.
And without a word or even a sniff
The Who posse tossed the Grinch over the cliff.

Recent Bumper Sticker Sightings

Posted on by

Next year’s election is all still talk, though more strangely entertaining than most year-before politicking. Hints of it are appearing outside the chattering classes, though.

Spotted a 2016 political bumper sticker the other day, one advocating the candidacy of the junior Senator from Texas. I’d guess his supporters are a little thin on the ground here in Illinois, but there have to be some. I’ve seen more stickers around here late this year supporting the Senate’s token socialist.

Another sticker on the same car said Marriage = Man Outline + Woman Outline, which might have been there awhile, growing ever more quixotic. Also, a sticker indicated that the owner used to be a Marine. And finally, one urged GO VEGAN. Make what you will of all that.

An El Niño Winter?

Posted on by

Some years, December comes in with the kind of snow we had before Thanksgiving. This year, rain as November ended and December began. El Niño?

I can’t pretend to understand exactly how that works, but I do defer to NOAA on the matter of the impact of El Niño on North America: “Seasonal outlooks generally favor below-average temperatures and above-median precipitation across the southern tier of the United States, and above-average temperatures and below-median precipitation over the northern tier of the United States.”

As a northern-tier location, so far we haven’t had below-median precipitation, but it has been warmer than usual. Suits me.

Other marks of the season, recently spotted in the neighborhood, include creeping Christmas lights. They started appearing just before Thanksgiving and have accelerated since. I expect a rush to put them up next weekend. The neighbors across the street have them up already. A few blocks away, someone did the full Griswold on their house, as a few people do: hundreds of lights everywhere, inflatables, glowing Santas, reindeer, elves, “Nutcracker Suite” characters, and a Nativity setup that might be visible from space.

It’s enough so far that I brought the lights in from the garage, for testing. That makes me ask all over again, how can simple strings become so tangled? Also, three of the four strings lit again after 11 months or so. One did not wake up, like the woman astronaut in the original Planet of the Apes.

Thanksgiving & The Days After ’15

Posted on by

On the whole, Thanksgiving outside was gray and rainy, but pleasantly warm for this time of the year. The days afterward were drier but much chillier, though not quite freezing.

Pictured: an all-too-common meal snapshot, in this case most of my Thanksgiving dinner. Note the artless presentation. I did that myself. I don’t remember what the plastic fork was doing there, but I will assert that we used metal utensils.
Thanksgiving chow '15The ham came from a warehouse store, while Lilly prepared the various starches, with Ann’s assistance. She combined four or five different cheeses for the macaroni and cheese. It isn’t Thanksgiving without that, she said, and it was the star attraction of the plate. For those who fret about such things, there was a green item on the menu, too: green beans, which didn’t make into the picture, but did make it into my stomach.

Once again, Martinelli’s sparkling cider was the main drink — original and cranberry/apple — though we also opened a bottle of wine we bought at a winery near Traverse City in 2007. I’d post the name of the wine, but that would involve going out to the refrigerator in the garage, where it’s now stored, and reading the label. It was a pretty good Riesling.

Some people shop on the Friday after Thanksgiving. That’s never been my ambition. My ambition is to do as close to nothing that day as possible. Days like that are very rare. This year I almost achieved it. Almost, but not quite.

Which reminds me of this exchange in Office Space.

Michael Bolton: You were supposed to come in on Saturday. What were you doing?

Peter Gibbons: Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing, and it was everything that I thought it could be.

On Saturday, we watched Vancouver Asahi, a Japanese movie on TV about the baseball team of that name, composed of Japanese-Canadian players during its heyday in the 1930s, when there used to be a Japantown in Vancouver. Not bad on the whole, though about 30 minutes too long. It also had the virtue of being about something I’d never heard of before.

After the movie ended, at about 11:30 in the evening, I went out on the deck and could see Orion to the south, parading across a nice clear sky. Never mind the solstice. Winter’s here.

Greater Tuna at Ford’s Theatre

Posted on by

Will Reagan-era Washington DC ever evoke the kind of nostalgia New York of various decades does, or London of the ’60s, or the once-removed nostalgia for Paris or Berlin of the ’20s? The Americans doesn’t really trade on nostalgia for the time, even though it’s set then. Who knows?

All I know is that I visited DC a number of times during the mid-1980s. During a late ’86 visit, I went to Ford’s Theatre for a performance of Greater Tuna.

FordsTheatreI don’t remember a lot about Greater Tuna, except that it was a somewhat dark, two-man farce about a fictional small town in Texas. According to Samuel French, which licenses the play, Greater Tuna was originally produced in 1981 in Austin by its authors, Jaston Williams, Joe Sears and Ed Howard. The play’s stars, Williams and Sears, played all 20 characters, and Howard directed.

Greater Tuna was first presented Off Broadway at Circle in the Square in New York City on October 21, 1982. It ran for over a year Off Broadway, and “went on to tour major theatres all over America and spots overseas for the next 30 some years, and became one of the most produced plays in American theatre history,” notes Samuel French.

I think Joe Sears and Jaston Williams were still the two men doing all the parts in 1986, but I wouldn’t swear to it. All I have left is a ticket stub and a recollection of it being entertaining.

Ford’s Theatre, of course, has a doleful history of its own. The president’s box is still draped with flags, though it’s actually a 1960s reconstruction of the original, as is the entire theater space, with more changes made in a 2008 renovation. During the most recent renovation, the Washington Post ran an article containing a brief history of the place:

“Ford’s Theatre was a Baptist church until it was taken over in 1861 by entrepreneur John T. Ford. The venue was destroyed by fire the night of Dec. 30, 1862, but was rebuilt and reopened in 1863.

“After the assassination… when Ford sought to reopen for business, there was a public outcry. The government bought the theater from Ford and used it over the years as a museum and as an office and storage building.

“On the morning of June 9, 1893, the building was packed with 500 government clerks, occupying several floors of jury-rigged office space, when the interior collapsed, according to a Washington Post account the next day. Scores were killed and injured, and the theater’s already altered interior was destroyed.

The government rebuilt it again — and again used the building for storage. In the 1950s, the government decided to restore the building as a historic site and theater venue, and Ford’s reopened in 1968.”

It just occurred to me that I’ve visited three of the four sites of presidential assassinations: Ford’s Theatre, the National Gallery of Art’s West Building (built on the site of Baltimore & Potomac Railroad station where President Garfield was shot, though unmarked), and the Texas School Book Depository building. Guess that means I need to visit Buffalo.

More Moo Goo Gai Pan

Posted on by

Back again on November 29. A good Thanksgiving to all. The snow, which has been melting all day, ought to be gone by then, leaving cold mud. But snow will be back before long. Never mind the snows of yesteryear. There’s always plenty more this year.

Sand, as I’ve noted before, is good for adding traction to icy driveways and sidewalks. Something I’ve learned this year: playground sand isn’t what you want. At freezing temps it tents to stick together, which makes for lousy spreading. Tube sand, which I’ve long used, is the thing.

It’s been 40 years since the original broadcast of “Over the River and Through the Woods,” the episode of The Bob Newhart Show in which Emily’s out of town for Thanksgiving, so Bob spends the holiday with Howard and Jerry and Mr. Carlin watching a football game. They get blotto and order an excess of Moo Goo Gai Pan from a Chinese restaurant.

How much pretend-drunk comedy is there now? Not much, I think, though I don’t spend a lot of time watching sitcoms any more. I’ll leave it to others to tease out the social implications of that. It’s enough for me to note that there’s no equivalent of Foster Brooks on prime time that I know of. Then again, there’s not really any such thing as prime time any more.

Lilly at 18

Posted on by

It’s that time of year again.

Cake!Why the green flower? she asked. I’d had a green, yellow and red flower put into the design. I made up a metaphor on the spot: the traffic light metaphor of life. Some things you should absolutely do: green. Some things absolutely not: red. Some things you need to use your judgment and take into account circumstance and so on: yellow.

We added candles to the cake. The string of candles Lilly’s holding.

Ann & Lilly 11.19.15The string was made of some kind of flash paper. When you lit one end, the paper would be consumed quickly, leaving all of the candles burning. Nice effect.