When I first met the late Albert Jamme, the renowned epigrapher of Old South Arabian, this Belgian Jesuit startled me by exclaiming at the top of his voice, "I hate my bed!" When I politely suggested that he get a new mattress, he shot back with "No, no! I hate my bed because it keeps me from my texts!"
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Friday, March 06, 2015
I Hate My Bed!
Eric Ormsby, "A Kingdom in Splinters," New Criterion (March, 2015), a review of James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014):