I’m leaving the title off of this until the end–read it first. Doctor, you say there are no haloes around the streetlights in Paris and what I see is an aberration caused by old age, an affliction I tell you it has taken me all my life to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels, to soften and… Read more →
Tag: poetry
One Thousand (and one)
I am shocked to discover that the previous post was number one thousand. Damn, that’s a lot of my blather. To celebrate my millenipost, I present some of my favourite Latin poetry. This piece is commonly referred to by the highly creative and poetic name “Catallus 5”, since it’s the fifth of surviving works of Catallus. Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque… Read more →
Punting
Since my blogging time today got subsumed into a lengthy debate about the gender-neutral pronoun in English, the use of “man” to mean homo sapiens and not “a single male human”, and related matters, I have to punt on blogging tonight. (Although the discussion should be the seed of a good post later.) So, for your entertainment tonight, I turn… Read more →
Proud and Unrepentant: Part 3
So, our discussions of the proud and unrepentant brings us to my personal favourite: the Lucifer of George Santayana. Santayana‘s book-length poem/five-act play, Lucifer: A Theological Tragedy, was one of his early works, and I think it’s fair to say is it’s pretty obscure. Santayana is well-known for his contributions to philosophy, perhaps most notably in the field of aesthetics,… Read more →
Proud and Unrepentant: Part 2
Well, while my first thought is of Brust, when the urge hit me to seek out some Lucifer literature this weekend, I knew I wouldn’t be buying yet another copy of his novel. It would be tricky to justify given I alread own two copies. Instead, I turned to Milton himself. While it is certainly true that a little bit… Read more →
