Fred Jenkins > Recent Status Updates

"Just down the road from Racine, where Danish pastries were invented."

Indeed, time for a Racine kringle and coffee!

σοφία γάρ ἐστι καὶ μαθεῖν ἃ μὴ νοεῖς.
Menander

"A Statue of Liberty made of Jell-O. Where do you start eating it? The head? The torch?"

How appropriate for this present moment of shame in the history of the Republic.

"in practice, 'real' means dead-anything else, there's always room for some conversation."

"There is no crueler hells than committee work, she decides..."

"This is as it should be, he thinks. The cold, the dark, and the waiting death.
He waits."

"All Divinities were very clear about such things, but none of them agreed with one another."

I am always struck by the slightly weird juxtaposition of the two epithalamia (61-62) with the Attis poem (63). But then we don't really know how Catullus arranged his poems or how that is or isn't reflected in the manuscript tradition.

The perfect and pluperfect are far less common in Greek than in English; Greek uses the aorist in many instances that English would use the perfect.

The forms are pretty distinct and easy to recognize in most cases.

o quid solutis est beatius curis,
cum mens onus reponit, ac peregrino
labore fessi venimus larem ad nostrum
desideratoque acquiescimus lecto?

Nobody has a keener affection for home than a Roman poet!

inger mi calices amariores

I am reading this in a somewhat nonlinear fashion. Currently reading Luke and Timothy, which are the lectionary readings in this season.

"We'll burn that bridge when we come to it."

"He wondered now how many people there were, including those not under threat of execution in a dark cellar, who were living their back-up plan; who were office drones or office cleaners, teachers, plumbers, shop assistants, IT mavens, priests and accountants only because rock and roll, football, movies and authordom had not panned out. And decided the answer was everyone."

"Lamb had sighed, grieving over his role as answerer of stupid questions."

"Spiderwebs attached themselves, like long trails of agglutinative suffixes, onto our arms and faces."

A heaping helping of participles (present, future, and aorist). Luschnig has added a lot of additional readings since the preliminary edition I used in college. In this chapter, stories of Deucalion and Perseus from Apollodoros.

"In Versailles we shuffled through room after room filled with gold and mirrors. After a while, the number of gold-encrusted rooms began to seem not just extravagant but actually insane."

"Walking through security was like dying--the way you became just your name on a piece of paper and gave up your money and your watch and your shoes."

soles occidere et redire possunt:
nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda.

" Angela and Hannah got into an argument about which was more formal, Thanksgiving dinner or the Last Supper. They debated the difference between supper and a snack. Hannah said it depended on whether the food was hot or cold."