Laudator Temporis Acti

The Internet is now awash with statements like this:

Dionysius was a Greek God
The first Olympics were in Greece. Makes sense to me.
But of course if you always feel aggrieved and it makes you feel better think what you like.

and this:

Dionysius, the god of wine and chaos, as Eucharist.

and this:

De (heidense) Goden hebben zich verzameld op de Olympus voor een feestmaal. Apollo is herkenbaar door de stralenkrans van de zon, Bacchus (Dionysius) door de druiven, Neptunus (Poseidon) door zijn drietand, Diana (Artemis) door het maantje, Venus (Aphrodite) door Cupido.

Dionysius is not Dionysus.

This isn't just an error made by Internet pundits. Thrice in The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971) Hugh Kenner mentioned Dionysius when he meant to say Dionysus (pp. 150, 250, 408).

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I would provide screenshots, but I can no longer add images to blog posts from the hard drive of my own computer. When I try, I get this nonsensical message:

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My friend Eric Thomson just sent me the following, from "Spanish novelist and commentator, Juan Manuel de Prada (translated from ABC newspaper yesterday)":

Goya warned us that "the dream of reason produces monsters"; and the dream of enlightened reason, more specifically, produces the most emetic aberrations. France was a chosen nation, perhaps the most blessed by artistic genius; but it rejected the gift it had received, to end up being what it is today (as we will soon be too), a multicultural dunghill, a vomitorium where nihilism and ugliness, frivolity and vileness, inanity and sordidness sing a proud epithalamium. Even their most agonizingly lucid minds — I am thinking, for example, of Houellebecq — can do nothing but kick rabidly among the detritus, because — as the poet said — clarity always comes from the sky. And, where heaven has been denied, one can only light up with the flames of hell. The secular grandeur of French culture first entered a phase of pompous and decadent tumescence, then filled with worms and putrefaction, and finally poured fetidly over the world, like a bursting sack of pus.

The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris could be presented before the court of History (pardon the capital letter) as the closing ceremony of "Western civilization" (which was never a true civilization, but a parasitism of apostates on the ruins of the extinct Christian civilization). Their pretended transgression was nothing but gaudy buffoonery ... Their proud exhibition of "queerness" was like a living painting by Bosch, swarming with monsters and chimeras that grope from the chasms of eternal damnation. A punishment that the rain anticipated, tarnishing the whole grisly coven.

Among the egregious lumps of vomit, none as striking as a burlesque representation of Leonardo's "Last Supper", a sort of catwalk of the grotesque that, in the end, blasphemed against the Eucharist, with the exaltation of a bluish and nauseating Dionysus. Why, among all religions, does this mob only feel hatred towards the Catholic religion? For the simple reason that intimately, there in the pestilent chasms where they writhe, they recognize it as true. I confess that this bleak fact has saved me on many occasions, when my faith was on the verge of being snuffed out.

Labels: typographical and other errors