Laudator Temporis Acti

Tom Volk's Fungus of the Month for July 2007, Crepidotus crocophyllus, the orange crep:

Crepidotus usually grows on very old, very rotten logs that dry out easily. Yet it is in these dry conditions that you can often find Crepidotus fruiting bodies. The mycelium must be able to survive these harsh times while it is decaying the wood. Thus, despite its persistent mycelium, the fruiting bodies are pretty delicate and seem to be falling apart. In fact the genus name Crepidotus means "cracked ear." You may recognize the similarity to the word "decrepit," which literally means "thoroughly cracked up."

Ian Gibson, Crepidotus in the Pacific Northwest:

The name "Crepidotus" may come from crepido = base or pedestal (Latin), ous, otos = ear (Greek). According to Schalkwijk-Barendsen it means "with a base like an ear".

Schalkwijk-Barendsen is Helene M.E. Schalkwijk-Barendsen, Mushrooms of Western Canada (Edmonton: Lone Pine, 1991), unavailable to me.

I suspect that the second etymology is correct, but despite Latin crepido both roots of Crepidotus are probably Greek:

• κρηπίς (krēpis), genitive κρηπῖδος (krēpidos) = boot, foundation
  
• οὖς (ous), genitive ὠτός (ōtos) = ear

Latin crepido is derived from Greek κρηπίς, κρηπῖδος.

Thomas Mann, Goethe's Career as a Man of Letters (Goethes Laufbahn als Schriftsteller, tr. H.T. Lowe-Porter):

"Every morning," sighs Émile Zola, "each of us has to swallow his toad."

Mann is probably quoting from memory. I think (although I cannot be sure from Google Book Search's snippet view) that Zola's sentence comes from an article first published in the newspaper Le Figaro and reprinted in his Nouvelle campagne (1896), p. 69:

Moi, voici trente ans que, tous les matins, avant de me mettre au travail, j'avale mon crapaud, en ouvrant les sept ou huit journaux qui m'attendent, sur ma table.

In my rough translation:

As for me, for the past thirty years, every morning, before getting to work, I swallow my toad, by opening the seven or eight newspapers that await me on my table.

Zola sounds like he's referring to a well-known expression, and in fact he is. See Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort, Products of the Perfected Civilization. Selected Writings, tr. W.S. Merwin (New York: Macmillan, 1969), p. 231:

M. de Lassay, a very gentle man but with a great knowledge of society, said that one must swallow a toad every morning, when one had to go out into the world, so as not to find anything more disgusting during the day.

M. de Lassay, homme très doux, mais qui avait une grande connaissance de la société, disait qu'il faudrait avaler un crapaud tous les matins, pour ne trouver plus rien de dégoûtant le reste de la journée, quand on devait la passer dans le monde.

On a related note, Reuters recently reported:

A man in southeast China says 40 years of swallowing tree frogs and rats live has helped him avoid intestinal complaints and made him strong.

Jiang Musheng, a 66-year-old resident of Jiangxi province, suffered from frequent abdominal pains and coughing from the age of 26, until an old man called Yang Dingcai suggested tree frogs as a remedy, the Beijing News said on Tuesday.

"At first, Jiang Musheng did not dare to eat a live, wriggling frog, but after seeing Yang Dingcai swallow one, he ate ... two without a thought," the paper said.

"After a month of eating live frogs, his stomach pains and coughing were completely gone."

Over the years Jiang had added live mice, baby rats and green frogs to his diet, and had once eaten 20 mice in a single day, the paper said.

Edwin Way Teale, A Walk Through the Year (July 20):

On this evening walk of ours, at the end of another torrid day, we come upon the deep red of wood lilies along the skirts of Juniper Hill; we find a firefly asleep, its lamp still unlit, clinging to the furry underside of a mullein leaf; we smell the honeyed fragrance of the sweetest flower of our north meadow, the purple bloom of a pasture thistle; we watch a small butterfly in the sunset weaving in and out, up and down among the forests of the mowing grass. With such small and pleasant things we round out our day. Small they are. Pleasant they are. But unimportant they are not. They are the enduring things. They are part of all that steadfast, unconquered, timeless, simple progression in nature that Thomas Hardy pointed out will "go onward the same though dynasties pass."

The quotation comes from Thomas Hardy's poem In Time of "The Breaking of Nations":

Only a man harrowing clods
  In a slow silent walk,
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
  Half asleep as they stalk.

Only thin smoke without flame
  From the heaps of couch grass:
Yet this will go onward the same
  Though dynasties pass.

Yonder a maid and her wight
  Come whispering by;
War's annals will fade into night
  Ere their story die.

The last stanza of Hardy's poem reminds me of the great love story hidden in the pages of Teale's A Walk Through the Year. "We" in the paragraph above are Nellie and Edwin Teale, an old woman and man when the book was written, but once "a maid and her wight." In an episode from "war's annals," their only son David died in World War II.

Dear Mr. Gilleland,

Many years ago, Russell Baker wrote a very funny and memorable article about the annual zucchini plague for his Sunday Observer column in the New York Times Magazine. I was unable to locate the article, but this archived letter to the Times suggests that the joke attributed to Garrison Keillor may not have originated with him.

Yours,

David Doster

August 5, 1984
CELEBRATING ZUCCHINI

Although Russell Baker refers many times to "planting" squash, he overlooks the truism that "zucchini grows whether you plant it or not" ("Squash," Sunday Observer, June 24).

In these parts - and only in the summer - we are urged to lock our cars when we park; otherwise, when we return, we may find someone has dumped some zucchini in it.

But, joking aside, we really love the stuff. Why else would thousands of us go to celebrate the annual Zucchini Festival, in late August, in the nearby town of Harrisville, N.H.? DEECE LAMBERT Hancock, N.H.

Patrick Kurp at Anecdotal Evidence examines the poetry of Sean Rafferty and quotes this couplet from one of his poems:

Let the chorus sing
Not to be born is best.

When Rafferty says "the chorus", he probably means the chorus from Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, which sings (1224-1238, tr. R.C. Jebb):

Not to be born is, past all prizing, best; but, when a man hath seen the light, this is next best by far, that with all speed he should go thither, whence he hath come.

For when he hath seen youth go by, with its light follies, what troublous affliction is strange to his lot, what suffering is not therein? - envy, factions, strife, battles and slaughters; and, last of all, age claims him for her own, - age, dispraised, infirm, unsociable, unfriended, with whom all woe of woe abides.

μὴ φῦναι τὸν ἅπαντα νι-
κᾷ λόγον· τὸ δ᾽, ἐπεὶ φανῇ,
βῆναι κεῖθεν ὅθεν περ ἥ-
κει πολὺ δεύτερον, ὡς τάχιστα.
ὡς εὖτ᾽ ἂν τὸ νέον παρῇ
κούφας ἀφροσύνας φέρον,
τίς πλαγὰ πολύμοχθος ἔ-
ξω; τίς οὐ καμάτων ἔνι;
φθόνος, στάσεις, ἔρις, μάχαι
καὶ φόνοι· τό τε κατάμεμπτον ἐπιλέλογχε
πύματον ἀκρατὲς ἀπροσόμιλον
γῆρας ἄφιλον, ἵνα πρόπαντα
κακὰ κακῶν ξυνοικεῖ.

Sophocles in turn echoes Theognis 425-428 (tr. J.M. Edmonds):

The best lot of all for man is never to have been born nor seen the beams of the burning Sun; this failing, to pass the gates of Hades as soon as one may, and lie under a goodly heap of earth.

Πάντων μὲν μὴ φῦναι ἐπιχθονίοισιν ἄριστον
μηδ᾽ ἐσιδεῖν αὐγὰς ὀξέος ἠελίου·
φύντα δ᾽ ὅπως ὤκιστα πύλας Ἀίδαο περῆσαι
καὶ κεῖσθαι πολλὴν γῆν ἐπαμησάμενον.

I've never studied Italian in school or been to Italy, so take what follows with a grain of salt.

In my garden this summer I planted a type of zucchini called on the seed packet Costata Romanesco. Costata is an adjective meaning "ribbed", and Romanesco is an adjective meaning "Roman". The few I've harvested so far definitely have ribs, and I assume that the cultivar originated in Rome.

But Costata looks to me like a feminine adjective, Romanesco like a masculine one. Why don't the adjectives agree in gender? Why isn't the name Costata Romanesca, or Costato Romanesco? Google has 1080 hits for "Costata Romanesco", 339 for "Costata Romanesca", 4 for "Costato Romanesco", and even 1 for "Costato Romanesca". But Google hits indicate usage, not correctness (899,000 hits for the correct "ad nauseam" versus 1,040,000 for the incorrect "ad nauseum").

I also wonder what implied noun the adjectives modify. In American English we say zucchini, which is masculine and plural in form, even when we mean a single vegetable. Garzanti's online Italian dictionary has an entry for feminine zucchina (plural zucchine), but none for masculine zucchino (plural zucchini). However, under zucchina the dictionary does recognize zucchino as an alternative. The word is a diminutive of feminine zucca, so I would expect zucchina.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, New College Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1979) defines zucchini as "A variety of squash having an elongated shape and a smooth, thin dark-green rind." That definition fits the typical zucchini I see in the grocery store, but the samples of Costata Romanesco [sic] in my garden have a rough, grayish green rind. They are very tasty.

Someone told me a joke about zucchini, supposedly first told by Garrison Keillor. Why do the inhabitants of Lake Wobegon lock their cars in the month of August? So their neighbors won't leave bags of zucchini on the back seat. The point is that zucchini are prolific. I looked for this joke in the online Prairie Home Companion archives but couldn't find it.

Giacomo Leopardi, Pensieri (1845), XCIX (tr. W.S. Di Piero):

People are ridiculous only when they try to seem or to be that which they are not. The poor, the ignorant, the rustic, the sick, and the old are never ridiculous so long as they are content to appear such and to stay within the limits imposed by these conditions; it is absurd, however, when the old wish to seem young, the sick healthy, the poor rich, or when an ignorant man tries to appear educated, or the rustic cosmopolitan. Even physical deformities, no matter how serious, draw nothing more than momentary laughter so long as one does not try to hide them; that is, so long as he does not try to pretend he does not have them, which is like saying that he's different than he really is. Any keen observer can see that it's not our disadvantages or shortcomings that are ridiculous, but rather the studious way we try to hide them and our desire to act as if they did not exist.

Those who try to seem more likable by affecting a moral nature not their own are making a terrible mistake. The incredible effort required to sustain this illusion is bound to become obvious, the contradiction between the true and the false more transparent, and as a result one becomes more unlikable and unpleasant than if he were to act honestly and consistently like himself. Everyone, even the most unfortunate, possesses a few pleasant natural traits; when displayed at the right time, these are surely more attractive, because more true, than any finer false quality.

Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Counsels and Maxims, chap. 3 (Our Relations to Others), § 30 (tr. T. Bailey Saunders):

And in this connection let me utter a word of protest against any and every form of affectation. It always arouses contempt; in the first place, because it argues deception, and the deception is cowardly, for it is based on fear; and, secondly, it argues self-condemnation, because it means that a man is trying to appear what he is not, and therefore something which he thinks better than he actually is.

To affect a quality, and to plume yourself upon it, is just to confess that you have not got it. Whether it is courage, or learning, or intellect, or wit, or success with women, or riches, or social position, or whatever else it may be that a man boasts of, you may conclude by his boasting about it that that is precisely the direction in which he is rather weak; for if a man really possesses any faculty to the full, it will not occur to him to make a great show of affecting it; he is quite content to know that he has it. That is the application of the Spanish proverb: herradura que chacolotea clavo le falta—a clattering hoof means a nail gone.

To be sure, as I said at first, no man ought to let the reins go quite loose, and show himself just as he is; for there are many evil and bestial sides to our nature which require to be hidden away out of sight; and this justifies the negative attitude of dissimulation, but it does not justify a positive feigning of qualities which are not there.

It should also be remembered that affectation is recognized at once, even before it is clear what it is that is being affected. And, finally, affectation cannot last very long, and one day the mask will fall off. Nemo potest personam diu ferre fictam, says Seneca; ficta cito in naturam suam recidunt—no one can persevere long in a fictitious character; for nature will soon reassert itself.

A common form that affectation takes in our day is the inflated job résumé. One apparently serious web site gives advice on how to fake your college education, how to lie at the interview and get away with it, etc.

Code of Virginia § 54.1-3926 (Preliminary proof of education required of applicant):

Before an applicant will be permitted to take any examination under this article the applicant shall furnish to the Board satisfactory evidence that he has:

1. Completed all degree requirements from a law school approved by the American Bar Association or the Board; or

2. Received a bachelor's degree from a four-year accredited college or university and studied law for three years, consisting of not less than eighteen hours per week for at least forty weeks per year in the office of an attorney practicing in this Commonwealth, whose full time is devoted to the practice of law; or

3. Studied law for at least three years partly in a law school approved by the American Bar Association or the Board and partly, for not less than eighteen hours per week for at least forty weeks per year, in the office of an attorney practicing in this Commonwealth whose full time is devoted to the practice of law; or

4. Received a bachelor's degree from a four-year accredited college or university and studied law for three years, consisting of not less than eighteen hours per week for at least forty weeks per year, with a retired circuit court judge who served the Commonwealth as a circuit court judge for a minimum of ten years and who at the time of commencement of the three-year study period was retired for not more than five years.

The attorney in whose office or the judge with whom the applicant intends to study shall be approved by the Board, which shall prescribe reasonable conditions as to the course of study.

Related posts:

• Practicing Law Without a Degree: Maine
  
• Practicing Law Without a Degree: Washington

Thomas Hardy, Liddell and Scott On the Completion of their Lexicon:

'Well, though it seems
Beyond our dreams,'
Said Liddell to Scott,
'We've really got
To the very end,
All inked and penned
Blotless and fair
Without turning a hair,
This sultry summer day, A.D.
Eighteen hundred and forty-three.

'I've often, I own,
Belched many a moan
At undertaking it,
And dreamt of forsaking it.
-- Yes, on to Pi,
When the end loomed nigh,
And friends said: "You've as good as done,"
I almost wished we'd not begun.
Even now, if people only knew
My sinkings, as we slowly drew
Along through Kappa, Lambda, Mu,
They'd be concerned at my misgiving,
And how I mused on a College living
    Right down to Sigma,
    But feared a stigma
If I succumbed, and left old Donnegan
For weary freshmen's eyes to con again:
And how I often, often wondered
What could have led me to have blundered
So far away from sound theology
To dialects and etymology;
Words, accents not to be breathed by men
Of any country ever again!'

    'My heart most failed,
    Indeed, quite quailed,'
    Said Scott to Liddell,
    'Long ere the middle!...
    'Twas one wet dawn
    When, slippers on,
    And a cold in the head anew,
    Gazing at Delta
    I turned and felt a
    Wish for bed anew.
    And to let supersedings
    Of Passow's readings
    In dialects go.
    "That German has read
    More than we!" I said;
Yea, several times did I feel so!...

'O that first morning, smiling bland,
With sheets of foolscap, quills in hand,
To write ἀάατος and ἀαγής,
Followed by fifteen hundred pages,
What nerve was ours
So back to our powers,
Assured that we should reach ᾠώδης
While there was breath left in our bodies!'

Liddell replied: 'Well, that's past now'
The job's done, thank God anyhow.'

    'And yet it's not,'
    Considered Scott,
    'For we've to get
    Subscribers yet
    We must remember;
    Yes; by September.'

'O Lord; dismiss that. We'll succeed.
Dinner is my immediate need.
I feel as hollow as a fiddle,
Working so many hours,' said Liddell.

At the beginning of J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I saw the following motto from Aeschylus' Libation Bearers:

Oh, the torment bred in the race, the grinding scream of death and the stroke that hits the vein, the haemorrhage none can staunch, the grief, the curse no man can bear.

But there is a cure in the house and not outside it, no, not from others but from them, their bloody strife. We sing to you, dark gods beneath the earth.

Now hear, you blissful powers underground - answer the call, send help. Bless the children, give them Triumph now.

Libation Bearers, or Choephori, is the second play in Aeschylus' dramatic trilogy Oresteia, and gets its name from the chorus of women who carry drink offerings to be poured on the grave of Agamemnon. Agamemnon was murdered by his wife Clytemnestra in the first play of the trilogy. The "children" in the quotation are Orestes and Electra, son and daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, who are plotting to kill their mother in revenge for her murder of their father.

Rowling quotes Robert Fagle's translation of the end of the kommos, sung by the chorus. In A.F. Garvie's edition of the Choephori (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), this passage is found at lines 466-478. Here is the original Greek:

ὦ πόνος ἐγγενής,
καὶ παράμουσος ἄτας
αἱματόεσσα πλαγά,
ἰὼ δύστον᾽ ἄφερτα κήδη,
ἰὼ δυσκατάπαυστον ἄλγος.

δώμασιν ἔμμοτον
τῶνδ᾽ ἄκος, οὐδ᾽ ἀπ᾽ ἄλλων
ἔκτοθεν, ἀλλ᾽ ἀπ᾽ αὐτῶν,
δι᾽ ὠμὰν ἔριν αἱματηράν·
θεῶν <τῶν> κατὰ γᾶς ὅδ᾽ ὕμνος.

ἀλλὰ κλύοντες, μάκαρες χθόνιοι,
τῆσδε κατευχῆς πέμπετ᾽ ἀρωγὴν
παισὶν προφρόνως ἐπὶ νίκῃ.

Here is a more literal translation:

O trouble bred in the family, and discordant bloody stroke of doom, alas woeful cares not to be borne, alas pain hard to stop!

It is for the house [to apply the] absorbent remedy for these [wounds], not from others outside, but from themselves, through savage bloodstained strife. This is a hymn to the gods beneath the earth.

But paying heed, o blessed ones under ground, to this prayer, send aid to the children, graciously, for victory.

Garvie has a good note on the adjective ἔμμοτον, which I translated as "absorbent":

μοτοί are plugs of lint for dressing festering wounds, or, more precisely, for keeping them open until they suppurate and can heal from within .... This is one of the most certain cases of a borrowing by Aeschylus from medical terminology...

The English word for such a plug is tent, defined by Webster's Dictionary (1913) as

A roll of lint or linen, or a conical or cylindrical piece of sponge or other absorbent, used chiefly to dilate a natural canal, to keep open the orifice of a wound, or to absorb discharges.

A synonym for tent in this sense is pledget.

J.K. Rowling studied classics for two years at the University of Exeter, before switching to French. Some think that the Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore was modelled on one of her classics professors, Peter Wiseman.

Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania, Part XV (The Origin of a Species), V (Men Who Become Books: Biblianthropus Defined):

On that note I close this volume and affirm that bookmen, men of letters, students, and all manner of passionate readers are a species apart finding their sustenance in the printed word as plants imbibe air and fishes animalculae; they do not look upon life with their own eyes, but through the eyes of books as through an optical glass, magnifying, intensifying, distorting or glorifying, according as they fancy it; or sometimes they eschew all common affairs and use books as kaleidoscopes to make for their own delight fantastic patterns which they use as substitutes for life. They become natives of a world of books, creatures of the printed word, and in the end cease to be men, as, by a gradual metastasis, they are resolved into bookmen: twice-born, first of woman (as every man) and then of books, and, by reason of this, unique and distinct from the rest.

William Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, gives us glimpses of the books on the shelves of his study. On the second photograph from the top on the right I see some volumes of the Loeb Classical Library, including Aristotle, Diogenes Laertius, and Marcus Aurelius.

Thoreau, Journal (March 5, 1838):

But what does all this scribbling amount to? What is now scribbled in the heat of the moment one can contemplate with somewhat of satisfaction, but alas! tomorrow—aye, tonight—it is stale, flat and unprofitable,—in fine, is not; only its shell remains, like some red parboiled lobster-shell which, kicked aside never so often, still stares at you in the path.

I noticed an example of asyndetic privative adjectives in a poem by Paulus Silentarius (Greek Anthology 5.268.5): "He sits unmoved, unshaken" (ἀστεμφής, ἀδόνητος ἐνέζεται).

---

A prayer from Plato, Phaedrus 279 b-c (tr. Benjamin Jowett):

SOCRATES: Should we not offer up a prayer first of all to the local deities?

PHAEDRUS: By all means.

SOCRATES: Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as a temperate man and he only can bear and carry. -- Anything more? The prayer, I think, is enough for me.

Σωκράτης
οὐκοῦν εὐξαμένῳ πρέπει τοῖσδε πορεύεσθαι;
Φαῖδρος
τί μήν;
Σωκράτης
ὦ φίλε Πάν τε καὶ ἄλλοι ὅσοι τῇδε θεοί, δοίητέ μοι καλῷ γενέσθαι τἄνδοθεν: ἔξωθεν δὲ ὅσα ἔχω, τοῖς ἐντὸς εἶναί μοι φίλια. πλούσιον δὲ νομίζοιμι τὸν σοφόν: τὸ δὲ χρυσοῦ πλῆθος εἴη μοι ὅσον μήτε φέρειν μήτε ἄγειν δύναιτο ἄλλος ἢ ὁ σώφρων.

ἔτ' ἄλλου του δεόμεθα, ὦ Φαῖδρε; ἐμοὶ μὲν γὰρ μετρίως ηὖκται.

---

I learned a couple of new words lately. The first is fipple, defined by The Oxford English Dictionary as "the plug at the mouth of a wind-instrument, by which its volume was contracted" and the subject of a learned essay by Patrick Kurp at Anecdotal Evidence.

The second is perry, defined by Webster's Dictionary (1913) as "A fermented liquor made from pears; pear cider."

---

Commenting on The Importance of Gold, E.J. Moncada notes that in Petronius, Satyricon 27,

a eunuch slave holds forth a silver jordan (matellam argenteam...OK, not auream) for the use of the wine sodden Trimalchio. Pliny (HN 33. 48-50), discussing the misuse of gold, relates the orator Messala's accusation that the triumvir Anthony used vessels of gold in satisfying all sorts of indecent necessities (aureis usum vasis in omnibus obscenis desideriis).... Long before More, Herodotus (III.23) relates scouting Ethiopians and learning that their prisoners were all bound with fetters of gold. Tertullian (On Apparel of Women, c.7) states that "there are some barbarians with whom, because gold is indigenous and plentiful, it is customary to keep (the criminals) in their convict establishments chained with gold." And, as a curious link, Strato, known as a dedicated pederast, finds in AG XI. 6, that the numerical value of the letters in πρωκτός (anus) and χρυσός (gold) is the same (1570). Ubi thesaurus ibi cor?

He also recalls Dr. Johnson's definition of goldfinder as "one who finds gold. A term ludicrously applied to those who empty jakes." Some have found gold, or at least yen, in Japanese jakes recently, according to an Associated Press story:

Envelopes containing 10,000 yen -- about $82 -- and notes wishing the finder well have been discovered in municipal toilets across Japan, media reports said, baffling civil servants and triggering a nationwide hunt.

Local media have estimated that more than $16,400 worth of bills were found at men's rooms in city halls in at least 15 prefectures in recent weeks.

Each package of 10,000-yen bills, some wrapped in traditional Japanese washi paper, was accompanied by handwritten letters that read "Please make use of this money for your self-enrichment,'' and "One per person,'' according to reports.

Officials are baffled over the identity of the benefactor or any motives, the reports said. Packages turned over to police were to be kept for a time in case someone claimed them.

---

Also from the Far East, Bounty on flies sets central China city buzzing (China Daily, July 10, 2007):

The authorities in a central China city have set a bounty on dead flies in a bid to clean up their image and promote public hygiene.

But critics have swatted down the move, questioning the benefits of paying 0.5 yuan (seven US cents) per insect turned in at the Xigong district office of Luoyang city, Henan Province.

Xigong District paid more than 1,000 yuan (US$125) for about 2,000 dead flies on July 1, the day it launched the bounty, with the aim to encourage cleanliness in residential areas.

"I and colleagues believe it's the best way to push residents to do more for their living environment," said Hu Guisheng, the office chief, adding it had proved effective with the district's 390,000 residents.

The payment scheme is the first of its kind in Luoyang, a medium-sized city of 1.55 million people, which is striving to earn the title of "state-level hygienic city".

The "State Hygienic City Standard", issued in 2005, has ten criteria for the award, including the prevention and treatment of disease-transmitting lifeforms, which requires hygienic cities to effectively control pests like rats, mosquitoes, flies and blackbeetles.

The Xigong District office has set up cash desks with signs urging everyone to "participate in the campaign against mosquitoes and flies" at the entrances to six residential compounds. The office staff have been busy in counting dead flies and giving out cash.

A passerby surnamed Ge was attracted by the red board at a compound. "I couldn't believe anyone was willing to buy such disgusting things," said Ge, who admitted his compound seemed to have fewer flies since the campaign was launched.

"I support the move," said Ge.

The Roman emperor Domitian also took a personal interest in the eradication of flies, according to Suetonius, Life of Domitian 3.1 (tr. J.C. Rolfe):

At the beginning of his reign he used to spend hours in seclusion every day, doing nothing but catch flies and stab them with a keenly-sharpened stylus. Consequently when someone once asked whether anyone was in there with Caesar, Vibius Crispus made the witty reply: "Not even a fly."

Inter initia principatus cotidie secretum sibi horarum sumere solebat nec quicquam amplius quam muscas captare ac stilo praeacuto configere, ut cuidam interroganti, essetne quis intus cum Caesare, non absurde responsum sit a Vibio Crispo, ne muscam quidem.

From E.J. Moncada, on Sappho, fragment 168b Voigt:

The poem is often labeled Fragmentum Adespotum as being of unknown authorship, but traditionally it has been ascribed to Sappho and its "secretive" mood serves only to enhance its connection with her. I am unable to read that early English lyric

Western wind, when wilt thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
  Christ that my love were in my arms
  And I in my bed again.

with its appeal to sense impression and emotion without recalling Sappho's four-line poem, especially her "climactic" last line, ἔγω δὲ μόνα κατεύδω.
I can remember only once having read a line similar to that, Idyll XX, 45 where Theocritus writes

μώνη δ᾽ ἀνὰ νύκτα καθεύδοι
but let her sleep the night alone

but the context is quite different from the emotion expressed in Sappho.

At a far remove from the poets mentioned, there is another poem which always brings me back to Sappho and that is A.E. Housman's

The weeping Pleiads wester,
And the moon is under seas,
From bourn to bourn of midnight
Far sighs the rainy breeze.

It sighs for a lost country
To a land I have not known,
The weeping Pleiads wester,
And I lie down alone.

(More Poems. X.)

It has been mentioned that AEH's poem is more of a free translation of Sappho's than it is an original poem. It's certainly difficult to imagine AEH having written the last line without having Sappho in mind....

Those more impatient than others with poetic mountains being made out of romantic four-line molehills might very well suggest that Sappho actually had another and more practical reason for bemoaning her solitary state. We must posit some pre-existing conditions such as the time of year, winter, and her familiarity with the writings of the Hebrew Preacher (Time lines!) who with his practical acumen reminds us that it is folly to sleep alone for "si dormierunt duo, fovebuntur mutuo; unus [or una] quomodo calefiet?" (If two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone? Eccles. 4:11)

Edward Cook asks:

Given that there is such a thing as "comfort food," why shouldn't there also be "comfort books"? Comfort books, as I imagine them, are personal, much-read favorites, to be resorted to when other reading (or life in general) seems flat, stale, and unprofitable.

My list of comfort books includes:

• Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy
  
• Arthur Conan Doyle, novels and stories about Sherlock Holmes
  
• Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania
  
• Montaigne, Essays
  
• Christopher Morley, Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop
  
• Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena

Maine Bar Admission Rules, Rule 10 (The Bar Examination), c (Education Qualifications):

Before taking the bar examination, each applicant shall produce to the Board satisfactory evidence that the applicant

(1) graduated with a bachelor's degree from an accredited college or university or successfully completed at least 2 years' work as a candidate for that degree at an accredited college or university; and

(2) graduated with a juris doctor or a bachelor of laws from a law school which had received its provisional or final accreditation from the American Bar Association by the time of the graduation of the applicant; or

(3) graduated from a law school accredited by the United States jurisdiction in which it is located and has been admitted to practice by examination in one or more jurisdictions within the United States and has been in active practice there for at least 3 years; or

(4) graduated from a foreign law school with a legal education which, in the Board's opinion pursuant to regulations adopted by the Board, is equivalent to that provided in those law schools accredited by the American Bar Association and has been admitted to practice in that country or by examination in one or more jurisdictions within the United States and has been in active practice in a jurisdiction in which the applicant is licensed for at least 3 years; or

(5) successfully completed two thirds of the requirements for graduation from a law school that had received its provisional or final accreditation from the American Bar Association by the time of the applicant's completion of those requirements and then within 12 months following such successful completion pursued the study of law in the law office of an attorney in the active practice of law in the State of Maine continuously on a full-time basis for at least one year; provided that the attorney must, in advance, present the proposed course of study to the Board for its approval and, at its conclusion, certify that the course, as approved, was completed.

Items 1 and 5 show how it is possible to complete the process without a degree. Thanks to Katie Gray for providing this information.

Related post: Practicing Law Without a Degree: Washington.

Valerie Conners, World's Best Bathrooms, 1. Lam Sai Wing's Golden Bathroom:

No expense was spared when jeweler Lam Sai Wing created a golden bathroom in his Hong Kong jewelry store. Spending over $4 million on 24K gold amenities, Lam has created a wash closet with over-the-top opulence.

After his jeweler's business achieved extraordinary financial success and having been inspired by Vladimir Lenin's aspirations to give golden toilets to the masses, Lam decided to take the plunge and build the bathroom.

Not a single bathroom nook or cranny lacks the shiny ore. Golden sinks, toilet paper dispensers, tissue boxes, tiles, a chandelier and mirror frames fill the room, but aren't for just any average visitor to see … customers are granted access only after spending at least $200 in the store.

Such an extravagant washroom isn't without its rules: Shoes are not allowed inside, for fear of tracking out gold on their soles. Before leaving the sumptuous loo, take a look toward the heavens; Lam had the golden ceiling encrusted with rubies, emeralds, pearls and sapphires.

The quotation from Lenin comes from his essay on The Importance Of Gold Now And After The Complete Victory Of Socialism, Pravda 251 (Nov. 6-7, 1921), tr. David Skvirsky and George Hanna:

When we are victorious on a world scale I think we shall use gold for the purpose of building public lavatories in the streets of some of the largest cities of the world. This would be the most "just" and most educational way of utilising gold for the benefit of these generations which have not forgotten how, for the sake of gold, ten million men were killed and thirty million maimed in the "great war for freedom", the war of 1914-18, the war that was waged to decide the great question of which peace was the worst, that of Brest or that of Versailles; and how, for the sake of this same gold, they certainly intend to kill twenty million men and to maim sixty million in a war, say, in 1925, or 1928, between, say, Japan and the U.S.A., or between Britain and the U.S.A., or something like that.

But I wonder if Lam Sai Wing might have been inspired not by the words of Lenin but by the example of Bassus (Martial 1.37):

You capture your bowels' load in unfortunate gold, Bassus, nor does it shame you. You drink from glass. Therefore it costs you more to defecate.

Ventris onus misero, nec te pudet, excipis auro,
  Basse, bibis vitro: carius ergo cacas.

See also Thomas More, Utopia II (tr. G.C. Richards, rev. Edward Surtz):

While they eat and drink from earthenware and glassware of fine workmanship but of little value, from gold and silver they make chamber pots and all the humblest vessels for use everywhere, not only in the common halls but in private homes also. Moreover, they employ the same metals to make the chains and solid fetters which they put on their slaves. Finally, as for those who bear the stigma of disgrace on account of some crime, they have gold ornaments hanging from their ears, gold rings encircling their fingers, gold chains thrown around their necks, and, as a last touch, a gold crown binding their temples. Thus by every means in their power they make gold and silver a mark of ill fame. In this way, too, it happens that, while all other nations bear the loss of these metals with as great grief as if they were losing their very vitals, if circumstances in Utopia ever required the removal of all gold and silver, no one would feel that he were losing as much as a penny.

nam cum in fictilibus e terra vitroque elegantissimis quidem illis, sed vilibus tamen edant bibantque. ex auro, atque argento non in communibus aulis modo, sed in privatis etiam domibus, matellas passim, ac sordidissima quaeque vasa conficiunt. ad haec catenas et crassas compedes, quibus cohercent servos; iisdem ex metallis operantur. postremo quoscumque aliquod crimen infames facit, ab horum auribus anuli dependent aurei, digitos aurum cingit, aurea torques ambit collum, et caput denique auro vincitur. ita omnibus curant modis, uti apud se aurum argentumque in ignominia sint, atque hoc pacto fit, ut haec metalla, quae ceterae gentes non minus fere dolenter ac viscera sua distrahi patiuntur, apud Utopienses, si semel omnia res postularet efferri, nemo sibi iacturam unius fecisse assis videretur.

Sappho, fragment 168b Voigt (tr. Kenneth Rexroth):

The moon has set,
And the Pleiades. It is
Midnight. Time passes.
I sleep alone.

δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα
καὶ Πληΐαδες, μέσαι δέ
νύκτες, πάρα δ' ἔρχετ' ὤρα,
ἔγω δὲ μόνα κατεύδω.

E.J. Moncada comments on some recent posts:

The Secret Life of Books
I recalled a passage from Steiner's "No Passion Spent" wherein he broaches this topic of books continuing on long after author and readers are long gone. "Marble crumbles, bronze decays, but written words - seemingly the most fragile of media - survive. They survive their begetters - Flaubert cried out against the paradox whereby he lay dying like a dog whereas that whore, Emma Bovary, his creature, sprung of lifeless letters scratched on a piece of paper, continued alive."

Laws and Lawyers
"Erasmus, a sensitive and authoritative judge of Latinity, held that if allowances were made for the fact (a rather unfortunate fact, he seems to think) that More was a lawyer, and that from the standpoint of letters nothing is more barbarous than English law, his literary talents were remarkable. Writing in 1528, he regrets that More's immersion in public life does not allow him more literary activity." Ciceronianus, I, 1012-1013. Footnote in The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, Vol.3, Pt.1, xxxvi. Ed. Craig R. Thompson.

Door-Shutting in Antiquity
Copley's "Exclusus Amator" is the text most often referred to anent this topic (the title is from Lucretius, 4. 1177). Nisbet and Hubbard in their discussion of Horace's Parcius Iunctas (Car. I. 25) offer a generous number of references on this topic (e.g. Alcaeus, Plautus, Asclepiades, Catullus, Propertius, Ovid, Horace). A Commentary on Horace's Odes. Bk I.

There are variations on the theme. Propertius, for example, represents the door as speaker, quoting the lover's song (I.16). Rufinus (P.A. 5.103) and Ovid (Ars, 3.69 ff.) take umbrage at the locked door but concentrate on scolding the woman hiding behind it and foretelling a cold, wrinkled, loveless future for her. Moses Hadas, discussing Theocritus (3), properly identifies the poem as being of the paraklausithyron type and goes on to show "how absurd convention can become for the lady lives in a doorless cave and the lover has only to stride in." A History of Greek Literature, p. 206.

Phaedromos in Plautus' Curculio sings the praises of the door of the pimp's house where he'll find his beloved. He speaks of "otiumst oculissimum" (15) - most adorable - and Palinurus answers mockingly "ostium occlussissumum" (16) - most shut.

Squeaky hinges could be problematic in erotic contexts, v. Nisbet, loc. cit., pp. 294-5 for references. Hor., Car. 3. 5. speaks of the lover stretched out before the heartless door and queries the unresponding woman, do you hear the noise the door makes? (Audis quo strepitu janua?) As one might expect, a lover would be very grateful for a door that made no sound opening or closing (Curculio). And so on...

In case you haven't noticed, this blog is my private file cabinet, and Google is its index. I welcome the occasional reader, but I would continue to blog for myself even with no readers.

My brother recently told me that it was possible to be admitted to the bar in certain states without a law degree. Over the next week or two, I will file in this blog information I find on this topic. If it doesn't interest you, skip it.

For the State of Washington, see the Admission to Practice Rules (APR).

From APR Rule 3 (Applicants To Take the Bar Examination), b (Qualification for Bar Examination):

To qualify to sit for the bar examination, a person must present satisfactory proof of either (i) graduation from a law school approved by the Board of Governors, or (ii) completion of the law clerk program prescribed by these rules, or (iii) admission to the practice of law by examination, together with current good standing, in any state or territory of the United States or the District of Columbia or any jurisdiction where the common law of England is the basis of its jurisprudence, and active legal experience for at least 3 of the 5 years immediately preceding the filing of the application.

Emphasis added.

APR Rule 6 (Law Clerk Program) is too long to quote, and this is a summary of some points. Applicants must (1) be of good moral character; (2) have a 4-year college degree; (3) be the full-time employee of a judge or lawyer in the State of Washington who will act as a tutor for only one clerk at a time; (4) make application for the clerk program to the state bar; (5) appear for an interview; and (6) pay fees. Tutors must (1) be members in good standing of the bar; (2) have at least 10 years of experience; and (3) certify the clerk's employment, the tutor's eligibility, etc. The length of study is 4 years, with 12 months of study per year, and 120 hours of study per month, including 3 hours of tutorial supervision per week. The course of study is prescribed by the bar's Law Clerk Committee. There must be monthly written examinations of the clerk by the tutor and an annual oral examination by the Law Clerk Committee. Tutors must submit monthly certificates of progress, and a final certificate of completion.