[lit-ideas] Re: Sunday Wotsit
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2008 11:35:42 -0700
A chaplain's dusty term--see notes for ref--leads me to this week's
brief, which is to suggest a new discipline, naseology. Based on
sudden insight had, ironically, while brushing my teeth, I re-wrote
in my head the answer to an exam question some thirty or more years
old. In both Pascal's day and that of Cleopatra, I reasoned, there
must have been people who admired huge map hooters. How else does
the famous person's pensee make sense, "if Cleopatra's nose had been
a half an inch shorter, the face of human history would have been
different"? Note the "shorter." Anthony liked her big beak; so did
Pascal.
In class I have sometimes mentioned possibly studying the nose in
art, confirming or challenging the hypothesis that in paintings
noses, like breasts and other parts on which we fix, are mixes of the
real and the imaginary, in size and shape influenced by fashion.
Try, as a dip test, to call to mind a nose broken in brawl or war, a
European one clearly inherited from Genghis Khan, a poxed proboscis?
They exist, but they're hard to recall. I imagine many painters, on
introduction to the sitter's chamber, being taken quietly aside by
the chamberlain or lady's maid, "About that nose..."
Students might pursue the "hemline" thread, consider whether fashion
for big conks was linked to the stock market's rise. Then there's
the biographical aspect and the study of command: what is the link
between being able to look down a long schnozz at people and success
on or off the battlefield? Caesar started this, but Lord Wellington
deserves a chapter to himself. And then there's Abe, the nose in
poetry, caverns measureless to man.
Carry on.
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/miscellanea/
cleopatra/bust.html
http://books.google.com/books?
id=5s8IAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA47&lpg=PA47&dq=naseology&source=web&ots=-
iGhbeDvnJ&sig=iUnjckeG7p5NE3IlEZRNOZNXu60&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resn
um=2&ct=result
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
