[lit-ideas] "Something's Rotten in Sardonia"
- From: jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2008 09:57:54 -0500
Hi Mike. This below is the post I sent half an hour ago to the list. Since it
will now have to make it to Finland and back, it may be sometime before it's
online. So thought I'd post it to you offlist. It will also be a valid
experiment to see that if you respond to it, even with a thankyou, and onlist,
how long does it take a plane from Memphis to Finland. Do you do the correct
adhesive cases?
Cheers,
JL
-----
"SOMETHING'S ROTTEN IN SARDONIA"
??????????????? by J. L. Speranza
Country Home and Beauty
John McCreery, a Japan-based anthropologist writes about me:
>This [excellent post by Speranza which has elicited among other things, a
>reply by our Memphis resident]
>on top of [la vita e bella] have made my day.
John.
Well, much obliged.
Geary takes his time to play with me.
>*Ah, there's the rub. JL thinks I understand him. He
forgets I'm a refrigeration repairman. As Virgil Dewey said in his
opinion piece in the
> Onion:
>
>http://www.theonion.com/content/opinion/im_just_a_simple_country
This confuses me, I'm _also_ *just* a country. What has that to do with
love and life? I hate when people call Buenos Aerean city slickers.
Just hate it. Buenos Aires comprises the vast pampa around it, where I
was born, partially bred (not on bread, precisely) and come back for
the Loeb of my week.
So the opposition is between 'town and country'. Memphis is a town, so
how could you identify with 'just a simple country'. Mind, Tennessee is
not even a country, it's a state. It may have countryside.
One of the disgraces of the English language that the Anglo-Argentines
(yes, Anglicans) inflicted on the smooth colonial patois is
???????????????? "the camp"
--- this is thought to be a strict transliteration of "el campo". So,
"I'm going for a long weekend to the camp" would translate "al campo",
which is metonymic for the more pretentious non-U 'estancia'. Farmers
do not go on mentioning the name of their farms or estancias. They just
say 'camp'. The equivalent non-colonial English would be, "I'm going to
the country" (I'm reading Atonement), not a mention of the name of the
house, The Tallis House, or the Home County, Surrey, where it is
located.
>That is to say, I understand my stuff as you do yours. OK?
No Old Kinderhook. I do not understand my stuff. Otherwise I would not
even be sharing it with you! Each post where I mention your name it's a
cri de coeur for reflection, cooperation, time of sharing, intimacy of
thought, reconsideration of views. I don't care about your
refrigeration stuff and wouldn't like to be controversial there, since
lives depend on your decompressing the shortage to ground, etc. But
with philosophy, life does NOT depend on our correct understanding of
Aristotle's enthelecheias. If I instill some humour, be grateful. Kant
didn't and he made it to the history of philosophy -- while I'm
building a Mudd name in lit-ideas (Our new Finnish moderator said, "I
agree with Andreas Ramos. Nobody can engage in a conversation with
someone who has four contributions a day". He should meet my neighbour!
I guess they are more laconic in Finland.
I suppose Geary is right that I should be more sardonic. But he should
provide a map. Sardinia? I never liked the smell of it. As Malvolio
used to say, "Something's rotten in Sardonia".
>Now that
> that's settled, let's get on to what I do understand in your posts. I
> understand that you have a fine tuned sense of humour (please note
> the Anglican (heretical) "u" inserted in your honour -- and yet again!).
Thanks. With honour, you can stick it up the thesaurus, because when I
use honor, I'm using the italic (i.e. Roman, italianate, 'honor' -- as
in 'honoris causa'. I think Chaucer went to far when instilling the
'u'. Same with theatre versus theater. The correct Latinate is theater.
And if you think of it, humor. Webster was one of the main causes of
Loeb. Love him with all my heart. He was a native of Hertford,
Connecticut, and I never fail to visit his bust (he had only one) in
Central Park, New York City.
> Now then, humor is one thing, accuracy another. Just how acrid are you?
> Not very. Why not? Accuracy is a virtue according to WalterO and Plato.
> Get more caustic, I say. Thomas Aquinas says: "Matrimony rhymes
> with Acrimony -- a coincidence? I don't think so." Surely you wouldn't try
> to contradict Aquinas.
This confuses, as it uses technical vocabulary. I thought 'acrid' was
Southern drawl for 'accurate', but apparently it's not. It's not acid
either. Caustic is something Geary will promote since he is into acids,
for the more serious compressors. I'm surprised Aquinas found that the
Latin for matrimony and acrimony rhyme, for they don't in Latin, and it
sheds a doubt as to whether you are reading the right translation. Try
the 103 volumes of Patrologia Latina, ed. by the Bibliotheque Nationale
de Paris.
"You have impregnated your audience with your
> implicatures, time now to marry them."
Marry an implicature? He cannot mean marry them audience, because
audience is singular, and refers to audio, i.e. ear, and though I have
heard your sweet Irish voice, (and you mine, and with piano background,
too), not everyone here can recognise people as _audience_ only. For
instance. I have a feeling I would recognise Palma if in an
international airport, he goes,
?????????? "Hey, Speranza, it's palma here!"
For I only know one Palma.
And of course, L. K. ("I'm L. K. and I think we've met"). I'm not sure
I could recognise the dialect of McEvoy if he tries his mother dialect.
And Ritchie's Cockney will probably do. There's this story of an
American businessman planning a meeting with a Cockney. A time was
looked for for a forthcoming meeting on the phone.
???????????????? "I'll fight"
said the Cockney. It took some desimplicaturation (a la S. Chapman --
she wrote a book on the 'non-intended implicatures of accent) on the
part of the American to get that right into
??????????????? "Half eight"
i.e. 7:30, or 8:30, as the case may be.
------
"No more sweet words. Tell these
> folks exactly how you feel. Use phrases like "asshole motherfucker" -- you
> must learn to speak the local lingo. Your humor is too refined, too clever,
> too funny. Where are the mud pies, I want to know.
>
>
I like a sweet word. If I had a child I would say that to the child
every night, "Sweet dreams". Words have to be sweet _and_ winged
('pteroenta'). When one British sculptor shot two woodcock with one
shot, 'Epea pteroenta' were compiled by the Earl of Leicester on his
honour. Not to mention Horne Tuke's book, "The diversions of Purley".
"Motherfucker I understand. But what about fatherfucker. I always
thought motherfucker was what J. D. Atlas, the Gricean at Passadena, in
his new book -- he has 4 already -- calls the natural semantic
indeterminacy of implicature. Surely, the statement of fact:
????????? You are a mother fucker.
Has to be provided, a la Palma, a sub-Chomskyan structure (it's like the Mekano
piece) in terms of autophoric self-reference:
????????? You are a fucker of your _own_ mother.
This logic is mainly African-American I understand, and may be a relic
of hypotactical expressions hard to translate into the Romance
languages. In Spanish it just doesn't make sense to call a person a
'lover' of the mother. It's almost tautological.
??????? In terms of logical form, the indeterminacy of 'motherfucker'
comes out of its possible logical form being given in Russellian
non-relational terms:
??????? "For every mother, or for at least one mother, not necessarily your
own, you fuck her".
This I claim is vague.
Geary will object that you wouldn't, "in the lingo" call a 'fucker'
someone who just fucks once. But I'm not sure. "Singer" is another case
in point. I would call Julie Krueger a fine soprano, even if I only
heard her once ("For Auld Lang Syne, My Love, ...").
Yost noticed that the ITB lady was engaged in a pragmatic self-contradiction:
???? A: Can I ask you this question?
???? B: No.
makes B sound stupid, so it's a Catch 22 with the lady, as it's usually with
the homeless and underpriviledged.
Analogically, it's impossible to conceive of a (biological) mother who
hasn't been fucked (see Aquinas, "Matrimonium est conceptio pudenda
spermatozoa dignitas novus baby").
So, "motherfucker", what's the big deal?
Geary may say the deal is that paternity (or fatherhood) if a less of a
universal anthropological criterion. Borges saw this in "Brodie's
Report". Natives are always ready to identify one's mother, but not the
impregnator of semen some 9 months before birth. It's too distant a
notion to keep track with.
So, "You motherfucker you" may be a reminder that for each mother who
is loved, there is a loving father -- usually around the corner (up the
storey-building, sleeping).
Geary waxes historical:
"Regarding the Achaeans, the Spartans, the Peloponnesians, the Thracians,
> the Thessalonians, the Lesbians, the Salamis and the Baloneys, all I can say
> is "so what else is new?" You and Lawrence are Loebites and that's as it
> should be. Me? I'm American all the way. Something Helm wouldn't
> understand, but God does.
>
>
Yes, but Loeb was Jewish _and_ American, and for one, thought that he
should fight for his alma mater (Harvard). He was American to the
backbone even though he is buried in Vienna and forgot his New Yorker
lingo as he grew classical. Plus, he mother a Hun.
And there's lots of news regarding the tribes you mention. You should
get hold of ONE Loeb (yesterday I got Apollonius Rhodius, the
Argonautica in just one volume) and it's amazing the indexing so
accurate and the flowing of interesting comment from the Classics.
There's ALWAYS something new. Even if it's your marginal comments to
something old.
Personally, I feel an immense pleasure reading Apollodorus and finding
that I do not need to read the local Buenos Aires poets instead! As
Seaton says in? his preface to Rhodius, "Rhodius comes from an age
where Homer was admired; admired, not necessarily imitated. The stuff
of their poetry and things were only the heroic and remote, under the
philosophy that there is really nothing new under the sun."
Geary will say that there is always something new under the (Saint
Tropez) sun, but that's not the classical point I'm making. The sun
leads us to the glitter and the gold.
When Consuelo Vanderbilt (something new under the sun, vis a vis
Thucydides) was taken to England, she was much offended that the stupid
Brits would say,
????????????? "Consuelo, allow me to tell you that you don't look or sound
American at all"
????????????? "Fuck you, asshole"
she would reply. Eventually she married a lord (Marlborough). What a lady!
-----
"There are obviously many topics you've raised on which you should be taken
> you to task, but it's late ..."
And your grammar is wrong. Can can there be many topics that I have
raised on which I should be taken ME to task? And how far away is Tusk.
Tsk, Tsk, that's a silly excuse. I am obliged, though. Your saying (or
writing) it's late indicates or complicates (my new neologism for
implicates -- I'm reading "Atonement") that Tusk is a foreign country.
"and I have several jobs to do tomorrow"
Tomorrow is another day. And there's always tomorrow. Another lame
excuse I am obliged for, though. Two lames make a straight duck, right?
"-- another
> way of saying that I can't just lollygag around Loebian pools or spend all
> day cleaning my guns like some people can. There's a world out there that
> must be kept working. Yay, me!
>
> OK, then. God bless and etc. Keep the faith, as they say -- your
> heretical faith, that is, for which you will end up burning in hell --
> thanks you, Henry VIII -- another one of your beloved Brits. And keep those
> posts coming. Damn the Andreas, full posting ahead.
>"
Well, we'll see. I suppose I should refresh (or brush up, as they say) my
Finnish now. I hope he is heretical like me.
I was thinking of the motto for war in the subject-line. Geary will
rewrite 'beauty' as 'pussy', qua epitome of the furry little pet. Cfr.
Don Quixote and the damsel in distress as chivalry ideal for a man o
war.
Country is sometimes associated with 'cunt' -- the term in Atonement.
As when Shakespeare says, "Country matters", in Hamlet. Meaning, the
coney, the rabbit.
So that leaves us home -- which is perfectly assexual, except in Cole Porter,
?????????? and the majestic chords
??????????????????????? Eb???????? dim.???? minor +
???????????????????? You'd?? be?? so???? nice
?????????????????????????? to cum home to
?????????????????? It'll be so nice, by the fire!
Cheers,
J. L. Speranza
??? Will Complicaturise for Deplicature
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