Dale Gieringer

   Another notable colloquial neologism is the use of "like" to introduce a thought. For example:  As soon as the bikers entered the bar, we were like, "Let's get out of here pronto."   I'm not even sure how to classify this as a part of speech.    
    A useful expression that has come into currency is "whatever" as a one-word indicator of indifference.  We hear it all the time from our daughter.  I've come to use it often myself, though I have to admit it can be rude.
     One new development irks me above all others: the gross overusage of  f***,  f***ing, f***er, etc.  as (take your pick)  adjective, adverb, expletive, or noun.  It's a poor excuse for not finding a more colorful mot juste.  Whatever happened to d*mn, darn, dang, drat, doggone,  gosh-darn, accursed, infernal,  blasted, blankety-blank?  I never heard the word "f***" until the sixth grade, and never in family settings.  As I recall, we rarely used it at WHHS except in dirty jokes and certainly never in classroom.  I remember being admonished by Wilma Hutchinson for using "damned" in an essay.   Now f***ng  is everywhere with the ascendancy of cable TV.   Some years ago there was a TV western called Deadwood, which was critically praised for its authentic, gritty portrayal of the Old West.   Every other line in the show had an f-word in it.   I turned it off in disgust.   No way is that how folks spoke in the 19th century.  More likely they used the n-word, which is now verboten.   Of course, we don't really know how they spoke in the 19th century, since there were no recordings, and Victorian editors were notoriously prudish in censoring foul language.  But they censored words far less offensive than what we use today.  F*** was the number one most unprintable four-letter word during our youth,  even up to the end of the 20th century.  I can't remember ever hearing it spoken by anyone in my grandparents' generation.  And I don't care to hear it again, except in historical portrayals of how witless people spoke in the early 21st century.   Godd*mn it all!

Paul Simons

Philip Spiess

Cataloguing my library, as I am currently doing (as a hedge against my wife insisting that I start culling the collection by throwing books away, in order to increase the sitting area available in our modest house), I am running through books of humorous sketches by the late Robert Benchley, of "Algonquin Round Table" and New Yorker fame, who was my first and primary mentor (besides WHHS's Jeff Rosen, Dale Gieringer, Johnny Marks, and Jerry Ochs) in the field of humorous writing (if such mine is).  In a sketch, "Ding-Dong School Bells:  or What the Boy Will Need" [1930], collected in Chips Off the Old Benchley (1949), I came across a list, required "in clear English translation," of the presumed necessity of acquiring a copy of each of the following books:  "The Aeneid, Odyssey, Immensee, La Fontaine's Fables . . . , Nathan the Wise, and Don Quixote."

Leaving off all levity for the moment, as a cultural historian I'm intrigued by this list, which Benchley wrote in 1930 (I'm guessing what might have been pretty close to the truth in those days), and I'm wondering how many of my fellow WHHS classmates have read and are familiar with any or all of these books.  [Just to save you having a "senior moment," I'll divulge the authors and their genres and languages:  Aeneid -- epic poem by Virgil (Latin); Odyssey -- epic poem by Homer (Greek); Immensee -- novella by Theodor Storm (19th-Century German); Fables (contes) of La Fontaine (17th-Century French); Nathan the Wise -- poetic drama by Gotthold Lessing (18th-Century German); Don Quixote -- novel by Miguel de Cervantes (17th-Century Spanish).]

To give you the chronology of my own study of these works (vide WHHS), yes, every one of them is housed in my living room, with the exception of La Fontaine, whose works are housed in our study with fairy tales and children's books.  I read Immensee and Nathan der Weise (in German) with Frau Kitzmann at Walnut Hills in German class, and later re-read Nathan der Weise in graduate German; various La Fontaine fables I had read on my own from various sources.  I did not read The Aeneid (but perhaps some of you did, in WHHS Latin classes) nor The Odyssey until college, and Don Quixote we read in a junior-year college course in "World Literature."

So I'm wondering, what were your experiences (if any) with these particular works of world literature, or other major works (especially at WHHS)?  [N.B.:  Homer's Iliad and Odyssey (whether they were actually by someone named Homer or not) have been used almost continuously (!) since their inception (circa 8th Century B.C.) as textbooks for schoolboys -- and later schoolgirls.  When I taught Middle School History, I used The Iliad (in a modified prose version), while my teaching partner, in English class, taught The Odyssey; they were both part of the curriculum.]

Chuck Cole

I had read The Odyssey (and The Illiad) decades ago in college in a Classical Literaature in Translation class, and returned to it about 10-15 years ago because of what I'd read about it's place in the history of conciousness.  I was totally surprised at how beautiful it was, and easy it was to understand.  I think at that point I was reading the translation by Fitzgerald.  Newer translations have been published which I've read as they've come out.  Each one is different and a work of literature in its own right.  I've just started to read Emily Wilson's translation--the first one, it is said, by a woman.  She's on the faculty at Yale and, interestingly enough, is talking here at Dartmouth on Thursday.  

Daniel Mendelsohn, who wrote a fascinating book called The Lost: A Search for Six Million, about trying to discover his relatives' history and fate in Poland during the war and what he discovered.  Mendelsohn is a classicist and taught one course each year about The Odysseyt at Bard.  In his relatively recent book, An Odyssey:  A Father, A Son, and an Epic, he let's his aging father sit on his class (I think it was the final time he taught it) and then they went together on a cruise that retraced Odysseus's travels.  I recommend it, especially if you are fan of The Odyssey.  

Dale Gieringer

Phillip - Honestly,  I've never heard of Immensee nor read Nathan the Wise.  You'd think Benchely might have mentioned Goethe's Faust or Tolstoy's War and Peace or Shakespeare's Hamlet or Proust's Rememberance of Things Past (a daunting read: "Longtemps, je me suis couché en lisant Proust....").  As for the Aeneid, we read it in Miss Hope's 11th grade Latin class - or at least selected portions, namely Books 1,2,4 and 6.  It goes on all the way to book 12, but the last half isn't worth reading, being Vergil's fabricated account of Aeneas' wars in Italy, which has no connection to anything in real history or classical literature.  I've never read the entire Aeneid, in translation or otherwise.   As for the Odyssey, a fascinating tale indeed, we read it in prose condensation, not verse translation, in 8th grade as I recall.  We also read a simplified, abbreviated version of Odysseus' travels in Latin class (translated from Greek to Latin, of course).  Not until college did I read Lattimore's complete verse translation, later discovering that Fitzgerald's and Fagles' were even better.   As for the Iliad - a more tedious story,  like a play-by-play account of two football teams shoving each other back and forth on the field - at one point I skimmed it in a prose condensation for young readers.  Not until much later in grad school did I audit a course in Homeric Greek, and discover the pristine beauty of Homer's verse in the original, aptly described by Matthew Arnold as eminently rapid,  eminently plain and direct in syntax and wording, eminently plain and direct in substance of thought, and eminently noble.   Homer's Greek is actually much easier to read than Vergil's Latin; the syntax is straightforward, with a vocabulary hauntingly archaic and rich,  full of  mellifluous vowels and subtle diphthongs,  enunciated in a pitch accent that the Romans described as musical.  For all of that, the Iliad's storyline does get pretty tedious - Book 2's Catalog of Ships is an infamous challenge for memory experts -  so our instructor stuck to the dramatic highlights in class, namely books 1, 9, and 24.  Maybe someday I'll finish it.  Or maybe instead I'll dive into Joyce's Ulysses, the relation of which to Homer is obscure and esoteric, but an interesting exercise for idle hours.   

David Buchholz

Two Days in Death Valley, A Wolf Moon, A Blood Moon, and a Lunar Eclipse

Most National Parks are either closed during the shutdown or severely impacted.  The Death Valley National Historcal Association, however, through its donations. has enabled the park to stay open, including emptying trash, cleaning restrooms, and paying staff.  It was there that Jadyne and I spent the past weekend, two days in one of my favorite places in America.  For those not familiar with the majestic beauty of Death Valley, I am doing what I do best—posting images of what we saw in just two days.  We chose this past weekend because of the first full moon of the year (the wolf moon), the Supermoon (when the moon's path is closer to the earth than usual), and the full lunar eclipse, when the color of the moon is blood red.  In my photographs I did not alter or enhance the colors in any way.

The full eclipse.

Mesquite Dunes, near Stovepipe Wells

One of the locals

A sign in the Stovepipe Wells General Store

Another local.  Joe in front of the Borax Museum

I have about twenty-five more images on my website.  I traced the path of the eclipse from start to finish and spent a magical morning in the Mesquite Dunes at sunrise.  It was such a pleasant relief to be away from...

http://www.davidkbuchholz.com/death-valley-the-blood-moon-and-the-lunar-eclipse/

Philip Spiess

Chuck:  Tell us about the connection between The Odyssey and "its place in the history of consciousness" (a new one on me).  Although I did not actually read The Iliad, The Odyssey , or The Aeneid until college (the first two in Lattimore's translations, the last in Rolfe Humphries' translation -- all of which, I'll admit, I skimmed), I had known their stories from 6th Grade at Clifton School, when we had studied the Ancient World and I had acquired (through circumspectual "borrowing") -- and thoroughly immersed myself in -- my grandmother's copy of Guerber's Myths of Greece and Rome:  Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art (1893).  It has served me well over the years in matters of myth, and literature, and classical art, and I was stunned several years ago to discover that it had been recently re-issued in paperback.  I mention this only because, of course, without having actually read The Odyssey, I was one of the writers and actors in our little 8th-Grade parody, The Oddity of Useless, in which many of you acted -- or acted out (cf. Dave Schneider).

Dale:  Not only was Benchley writing satire, he was also writing about Middle School (or perhaps High School) boys, so the higher literature would not have applied -- though it does beg the question of what was expected of somewhat accomplished boys in the 1920s and 1930s (which was really the start of my inquiry into our own classmates' required reading).  I myself really got into The Iliad with Edith Hamilton's prose narrative of the story, which is what we used with the 5th Graders when I was teaching Ancient Greek history in a private Middle School (we read it out loud in class, discussing it as we went along, and when we got to the descriptions of the destruction of Troy, I jumped up and started overturning student desks in the front row -- surprising the hell out of the kids and really irritating the art teacher in the room below).  However, as to my own tastes (not being adept in reading either Greek or Latin), I'll take Matthew Arnold to read on almost any subject any day; I took one of my four doctoral exams on him and his work -- I love his writing and his attitudes.  As to Joyce's Ulysses, the man was doubtlessly drunk when he wrote it (most say he was practically blind -- "blind drunk," I'd say), just like William Faulkner must have been when writing his books.  I much prefer Joyce's Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  (But I did see the great Irish actress Siobhan McKenna in a one-woman performance of Joyce and some other Irish authors, and the highlight of the evening was "Penelope's Soliloquy" from the end of Ulysses -- McKenna's monologue rendition of it made sense of Joyce for me for the first time.)

David:  Have you ever seen "the rabbit in the moon," which is older than "the man in the moon"?  When I was teaching Middle School, the kids wanted to know where the notion of the Easter Bunny came from (I had cautioned them not to eat the "little chocolate eggs" the Easter Bunny leaves on the front lawn), and I had no idea, so I researched it -- and found that it came from the ancient Eastern goddess Estra (after whom Easter is named), whose pet was a rabbit which she kept in the moon (she was a fertility goddess, after all).  That night, coming home from the school, I was driving toward a giant rising full moon -- and, sure enough, there was "the rabbit in the moon" facing left, long ears streaming over its head at the top of the moon!  Who knew?  On another matter, how is that "Borax Museum" in Death Valley?

Bruce Fette

Philip,

While you didnt address your question to me, regarding the borax museum, I jump to answer. I took my son to see Edwards Air Force Base, where X15 and other significant events took place (stuff you can see in the movie "Right Stuff".. The Borax museum is a few miles further east. And guess what, its where they used to (maybe still do) mine borax. I barely remember what was to be seen there, except for the guy and a mule train, and a place with shade and cooling for a while. It was also quite near the first rocket engine test stands. I now wish I had ventured even further east, many more interesting things a few miles further east. And a few miles west, you can also find the company "Scaled Composites" where Burt Rutan makes really cool rocket planes, and you can find the experimental aircraft boneyard out there in the Mojave desert too. When last seen, the surrounding mountains now have many many windmills.

Chuck Cole

I'm sure all of us remember fondly Frank Robinson.  Here's a link to his obituary in the NY Times.  His passing brings back many memories of baseball and Crosley Field while we were at WHHS.  How many high schools allowed early dismissal on opening day if you had tickets for the game?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/obituaries/frank-robinson-dead.html?emc=edit_th_190208&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=16615500208

(you'll need to copy the link since I wasn't able to paste a hyperlink here.)

Stephen Collett

I missed when and how we got a flutter going here on Homer - I also missed seeing the hymn to Hermes mentioned, my favorite. But I would put in a reccomendation for the Caribbean rendition (a nasty word I want to stop using) Omeros, by Derek Walcott. As epic in length and scope, and in its beautiful, generous writing; so many tales he tells. 

Jerry Ochs

TIL A KEYPUNCH word is one that can be spelled out using each key on a lettered telephone keypad only once—like FOXTAILS (36982457), PLAYTIME (75298463), or KEYPUNCH itself (53978624).

Jerry Ochs

How difficult was it to read Gothic text?

Philip Spiess

"It's very Gothic!" Tom said archly.  [A "Tom Swiftie" for you all.]

Jerry Ochs

"Homosexuality should be legal everywhere!" said Tom, half in earnest.

Philip Spiess

"Let's take the fork in the road," said Tom flatly, tired as he was.

Jerry Ochs

Dad's sex change operation went well," Tom said transparently.

Philip Spiess

"You're singing way off key!" said Tom sharply, which was natural for him.

Jerry Ochs

"The sea is extremely calm today," Tom said unwaveringly.

Barbara Kahn (Tepper)

Thanks Paul

Jerry Ochs

"I didn't need to do it," Tom said unwittingly.

Philip Spiess

"I used to visit him at Arlington House," said Tom speaking generally.

Jerry Ochs

"Nepotism is not a crime," Tom said avuncularly.

Philip Spiess

"Let's stop this nonsense right now!" said Tom Swiftly. 

Jerry Ochs

"The name's Bond, Fasten, Stick, Bind, Fuse or Glue. James Bond, Fasten, Stick, Bind, Fuse or Glue." - Roget Moore

Philip Spiess

Jerry, I'm shaken by your statement, but certainly not stirred.