the Greater Nomadic Council

Justified Paranoia

You know, I always felt that even if Iraq's oil supply were a motivation for invading, it was nevertheless a minor and secondary or tertiary one. Now, however:

Bush says that we've got to keep fighting in Iraq to keep the nation's oil supplies from falling into the wrong hands. "If Zarqawi and bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create a new training ground for future terrorist attacks; they'd seize oil fields to fund their ambitions; they could recruit more terrorists by claiming an historic victory over the United States and our coalition," the president said.

Did he unwittingly justify the criticisms of some of his most ardent opposition? I suspect that he's simply scatter-shooting now, saying anything he can to justify the unjustifiable and, now, playing on people's fears of raising gas prices. Nevertheless, many will no doubt interpret this statement as proof that it was all about the oil.

Scientific Illiteracy

Yet another entry in the chronicle of American ignorance:

American adults in general do not understand what molecules are (other than that they are really small). Fewer than a third can identify DNA as a key to heredity. Only about 10 percent know what radiation is. One adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth, an idea science had abandoned by the 17th century.

Twenty percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth?! How soon before we revert to drowning witches?

Japan: Island of Ten Thousand Deviants

As a bit of an elaboration on snw's recent excursions in Japan and as a post related to sso's love-cantaloupe, read this about vagina cans and sex vending machines. Funny stuff.

The Zebra Skirt

I had my first note-worthy observation of the semester the other day. I was standing in the rotunda before class, resolidifying in the artificial cool after walking a mere two or three hundred yards from the parking garage to the building. The heat had me hunched over my steering wheel on the way to campus to prevent my back and shirt from melding like melted plastic. Even the breeze became an enemy, so hot it only made me sweat more. So, I was resting against the marble walls, pretending I stood in a meat locker when I noticed an unfortunate girl walking across the rotunda and turning down the eastern wing. She was a meek, glasses-wearing brunette carrying a few extra pounds along with her books. She wore a black and white knee-length skirt and a pale pink halter top. While dressed smartly enough, she no doubt would not be immediately accepted by the blonde, malnourished fashionistas who comprise the more visible portion of the university's girls. Apparently, she had just come from the restroom—the back of her zebra skirt was tucked into the top of her pink panties. While I suppose she could be grateful that she didn't go thong that day, I'm sure the unexpected feel when she sat down of cold plastic against the backs of her bare thighs brought her an instant blush and sickening stomach. From what I saw, no one rushed to inform her, though there was no wake of giggles either. I would have, perhaps, warned her myself, but my heat-induced torpor made the twenty or so feet between us into an impassable marble desert. I could only think, "poor girl" and restrain from chuckling.

Adventures in Teaching

Well, I taught my first class today, a freshman composition course. Unfortunately, I don't have any good anecdotes to relate yet. They all seem pretty bright (even if most of them can't write well) and responsive. I even almost managed to fill the entire 80 minutes, but had to stretch things out a bit. I was planning on more awkward silences when I asked questions, but I seem to have at least three who always want to answer and a handful of other students who are willing to speak up regularly. It's funny sitting in class now that I'm teaching as well; I find myself analyzing the professor's pedagogical techniques and quirks for pointers. They all seem so polished and bursting with information while I have little to say and even less grace when saying it. I hope to have some juicy observational nuggets to relate later in the semester. For now, however, I just need to learn how to teach.

Translations of Horace

Michael Gilleland, laudator temporis acti, provides us with several different translations of the Horatian ode I discussed recently. Some of them are quite funny, too.

Fight the Demon

Another Grow game, this new one actually makes sense. You play a knight out to destroy a demon threatening the globe.

Colorado River, 9:53 PM, 6-29-05, Austin, TX

Below the fold...

Another Bad Headline

I think this one may be even worse than the Johnny Depp headline linked earlier.

Horace, Odes, 1.5

Given the favorable responses to my recent posts on Latin poetry, I thought I'd discuss one of Horace's odes that I recently read. 1.5 appears to be a particularly popular ode from the amount of commentary I was able to find online and from some implied remarks in those commentaries. Of course, Horace's odes in general are highly treasured works. Nietzsche eloquently makes the point I fumbled in an earlier post:

To this day I have got from no poet the same artistic delight as from the very first a Horatian ode gave me. In certain languages what is here achieved is not even to be thought of. This mosaic of words, in which every word by sound, by position, and by meaning, spreads it influence to right and left and over the whole; the minimum in compass and number of symbols, the maximum achieved in the effectiveness of these symbols, all that is Roman, and believe me, of excellence unsurpassed.

1.5 is a particularly enjoyable ode because it combines many of these subtle word-order effects with the enduring theme of foolish, youthful love; Horace's vantage point is one of detached wisdom:

quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa
perfusus liquidis urget odoribus
    grato, Pyrrha, sub antro?
      cui flavam religas comam,

simplex munditiis? heu quotiens fidem
mutatosque deos flebit et aspera
    nigris aequora ventis
      emirabitur insolens,

qui nunc te fruitur credulus aurea,
qui semper vacuam, semper amabilem
    sperat, nescius aurae
      fallacis! miseri, quibus

intemptata nites. me tabula sacer
votiva paries indicat uvida
    suspendisse potenti
      vestimenta maris deo.

Milton's translation, a heroic, though inevitably doomed, attempt to recreate the poem's effects runs:

What slender youth bedew'd with liquid odours
Courts thee on roses in some pleasant cave,
   Pyrrha, for whom bind'st thou
   in wreaths thy golden hair,

Plain in thy neatness? O how oft shall he
On faith and changed Gods complain: and seas
   Rough with black winds and storms
   unwonted shall admire:

Who now enjoys thee, credulous, all-gold,
Who alwayes vacant, alwayes amiable
   Hopes thee; of flattering gales
   unmindfull. Hapless they

To whom thou untry'd seem'st fair. Me in my vow'd
Picture the sacred wall declares t'have hung
   My dank and dripping weeds
   To the stern God of Sea.

As David West writes, "This is as close a translation could come without becoming a crib, and the price is high." As any decent commentary on this poem notes (commentaries on Horace are necessary if you want to study these on your own), the poem's first line recreates through word order the lover's embrace of Pyrrha: "quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa" is literally "who [in] many slender you boy in roses". The next line echoes this effect by placing the verb "urget" in the middle of "liquidis odoribus," a common technique known as hyperbaton. The verb, however, demands comment. It means "to press, press hard on, press onward, push on"; it can also mean "to press close, crowd". "Urget" is quite a bit more salacious than the "court" that Milton uses. While it certainly has that sense (as in "to urge" or "press a case") the context—a bed of roses, a heady perfume, a cave (which needs little symbolic interpretation)—lends the word a far greater physical import than Milton's translation allows. While Horace is not leering, the innuendo is clear. The first question's syntax also mimics the luxuriousness of the setting; the second, far shorter and more straight-forward question pleasingly contrasts this with a glimpse of Pyrrha's preparations. "For whom do you tie your flaxen hair, simple in elegance?" West points out that "simplex munditiis" is "untranslatable" and "not so demure and Puritan as 'plain in thy neatness.'" The sense here is, instead, of deceptive, studied simplicity that results from the highest art. Munditia has several connotations: "cleanness, cleanliness; neatness, elegance, spruceness." Likewise, "simplex" means not just "simple," but "uncompounded, unmixed; plain, ordinary, natural, without elaboration; artless, ingenuous." Without the possibility of translating "munditia" as "elegance," the phrase might be far easier to translate, but that connotation throws what would otherwise be a fairly straight-forward construction into doubt. Translation also misses the word-play of the third stanza between "aurea" [golden] and "aurae" [breezes/winds]. Not only does "aurea" recall Pyrrha's "flavam coman" [yellow/golden hair] and not only does it transmute her physical characteristics into a mistaken moral judgment by her naive lover, but it further replicates the inevitable, heart-wrenching knowledge the "puer" will discover once he becomes one of the "miseri" who have known and lost Pyrrha's affections. The final sentence of the poem is the most tortured, what one commentator calls "the despair of students reading the text with dictionary in hand." I know it took me at least half an hour to figure out those last four lines. Part of that was lack of context; often, upon retiring, Greeks would dedicate their tools to the appropriate deity or hang a votive plaque on the walls of the temple. But even knowing this, we don't know what the sacred walls indicate with the poet's votive tablet until we reach the last line. The water imagery that has been present from the very beginning—the boy drenched in odors, the "aspera aequora" [rough seas]—now implicates the poet himself. Pyrrha is the "niger ventus" [dark wind; in the poem "nigris ventis"] that dangerously rouses young men's passions. Although we don't think Horace himeself once loved Pyrrha, he may have loved her type, but has since reached dry land. West states, "Saved from shipwreck, they [Greeks or Italians] might offer up the clothes they had been washed ashore in." The difficult word-order could suggest a certain reticence on Horace's part to admit this; it could also represent the turmoil he once experienced but has since put by. The "tabula votiva" [votive tablet] further suggests the act of writing itself. Horace has put aside naive, youthful love for the sacred work of poetry.

Juan Cole's Joke of the Day

From the bitter humor files:

They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq. Why don't we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it's worked for over 200 years and we're not using it anymore.

Unfortunately, this is, for me, too close to the sad truth to be funny.

Bad Beginnings

The Little Professor directs our attention to the Lyttle Lytton Contest, a contest that seeks to find the worst invented opening sentences under 25 words for a novel. The winner for 2005:

John, surfing, said to his mother, surfing beside him, "How do you like surfing?"

I like some of the honorable mentions better, but that one is pretty atrocious. In line, waiting, waiting, waiting for his hamburger, Steve, a man with hairy nostrils, felt something.

Horace is Hard

In case anyone is interested, I finished my Latin textbook, Reading Latin, (yes, the review is mine) a week or so ago. Now, rather than let my newly and tenuously acquired skills rust away, I'm reading a little on my own each day. For now, I'm working on Horace and I must say, he's really difficult, far more so than the bits of Ovid and Virgil I've read so far. I'm operating under the theory that if I can read this very difficult poet, then other authors will be easy in comparison. Horace does things like put the subject four lines away from the verb. I just got used to seeing adjectives and nouns split up by only a few words, not a few stanzas. Crazy poets. Here's an example with literal and then idiomatic (not mine) translation:

namque me silva lupus in Sabina,
dum meam canto Lalagen et ultra
terminum curis vagor expeditis,
fugit inermem

truly with me woods a wolf in Sabine,
while my I was singing of Lalagen and beyond
boundary with cares I was wandering unimpeded,
fled unarmed

A wolf, while roaming trouble-free
In Sabine wood, as fancy led me,
Unarm'd I sang my Lalage,
Beheld, and fled me.

Sheesh. While it's true that poetry is what's lost in translation, at least the translation between, say, French and English is easier due to their structural similarities. Latin poetry is ultimately untranslatable into English. Of course, all of this is either old news or uninteresting (or both) to you, dear Reader, but really, I'm just trying to drive you away with these sorts of posts. Now shoo!

Bush and Intelligent Design

Wow. Even Instapundit and Daniel Drezner are taking Bush to task for his apparent support of Intelligent Design theories. I wonder if things like this are part of the reason Bush's support is at an all-time low. Naturally, PZ Myers, champion of science, has his own reply.