Fred Jenkins > Recent Status Updates

Seven chapters in; just getting past the intro/background material and into the main part of the book.

Happy to see mention of Ladislav Zgusta, whom I remember from grad school at Illinois. Several friends studied Hittite with him.

Anthony made at least one howler: he claims that the Mycenaeans were unaware of the empire of the Hittites. Has he never heard of the Ahhiyawa documents? Not exactly a recent discovery.

Finished New Poems, starting Duino Elegies.

I have read bits and pieces of this before, now working through the whole. The first chapter is a nice overview of IE studies, not much new.

I don't know what I am writing about. I am obscure to myself.

"They can feel it," Sasha said with a sigh. "It's like a shadow in your peripheral vision, something you can't look at directly, yet it is always there. It must be quite unpleasant. But people get used to everything."


He mused at how deftly the routine had constructed itself. Like a salt crystal or a snow flake. How easily ordinary rationalizations draped themselves over insane facts.

"Never fuck with a librarian."

"It had been a busy few weeks for Alex. She had been declared heir to the throne of Troy, met the Pope, been attacked by pig-men and a burning sorceress, watched a mob calmed by a speech about dumplings, and seen a severed head talk. You'd have thought she would've been past surprises."

"An ineffectual priest, an enervated knight, a misanthropic elf, and an antique vampire. It sounded like the start of a bad joke to which the tragic punchlinewas yet to be revealed."

His approach to the orthodox historians of the English language is to take a sledgehammer to a gnat. While McWhorter is quite convincing, the repeated hammer blows get a bit tedious.

Und dann und wenn ein weißer Elefant.

And later she sat in the little room she rented over a tea shop whose proprietor was all for chaos and division so long as we could also sit and have a properly civilized cup of tea.

Into part 4 on Roman culture.

"like a word ripening in silence"

"yet again the sword of fate severs the head from the hydra of chance."

Now more than halfway through the very long Part about the Crimes. A depressing chronicle of brutality and corruption. I can see why it is the fourth of five. If it were the first, I would had Dnf'd this after a few pages.

The biggest collection of phobias outside of the DSM: sacraphobia, gephyrophobia, claustrophobia, agoraphobia, necrophobia, hemophobia, peccatophobia, clinophobia, tricophobia, verbophobia, vestiphobia, iatrophobia, gynophobia, ombrophobia, thalassophobia, anthopobia, dendrophobia, optophobia, pedophobia, ballistophobia, tropophobia, agyrophobia, chromophobia, nyctophobia, ergophobia, decicophobia, anthrophobia, etc.

"From the collection of prehistoric rocks there arose a kind of quicksilver, the American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis."