Umor, amor, and bookworm repellent

Reviewing The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (ed. Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie), Emily Gowers writes (TLS October 3 2008):

By rejecting transliterated Greek terms like atomi in favour of metaphors like semina (seeds) and genitalia corpora (generative bodies), [Lucretius] craftily presumes the material nature of the smallest units of life in advance of further proof. And the exaggerated trickle of word into word in his honeyed verse is the cleverest means of suggesting organic interrelations in the physical world, most famously through fortuitous phonetic connections: the link between lignum (wood) and ignis (fire) "proves" the metamorphosis of timber into ashes; that between umor (semen) and amor (love) reduces sex to an exchange of bodily fluids.

*

The poem on "all things" [i.e. De rerum natura] is also a compendium of all stylistic moods and registers, with an almost organic identity of its own: a shifting amoeba living out its predicted cycles of growth, decay and rebirth. Where does the abrupt and gloomy ending among the Athenian plague victims leave us? Exposed, like trained Epicureans, to the finality of material thing or hopeful of yet another revival--honeybees rising from rotting corpses?

***

John Keay, in his TLS review of Simon Winchester's biography of Joseph Needham (Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the great secrets of China), notes that Needham became obsessed with notching up Chinese "inventions and discoveries" and awarding a date to each. Winchester provides a representative example of the kind of lists Needham included in his published writings:

Blast Furnace--3rd century B.C.
Book, printed, first to be dated--A.D. 868
Crank handle--1st century B. C.
Bookworm repellent--no date

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reading Thumboo's "Ulysses by the Merlion"

I've just revised a poem written years ago, a poem that delineates the different responses of four readers, of different generations, to the seminal nationalistic poem by Edwin Thumboo . Thumboo is reckoned to be the first major Singaporean poet writing in English. First, Thumboo's poem, then followed by mine. ULYSSES BY THE MERLION (for Maurice Baker) I have sailed many waters, Skirted islands of fire, Contended with Circe Who loved the squeal of pigs; Passed Scylla and Charybdis To seven years with Calypso, Heaved in battle against the gods. Beneath it all I kept faith with Ithaca, travelled, Travelled and travelled, Suffering much, enjoying a little; Met strange people singing New myths; made myths myself. But this lion of the sea Salt-maned, scaly, wondrous of tail, Touched with power, insistent On this brief promontory... Puzzles. Nothing, nothing in my days Foreshadowed this Half-beast, half-fish, This powerful creature of land and sea. Peoples settled here, Brought to th
Read more

Steven Cantor's "What Remains: the Life and Work of Sally Mann"

Image
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic
Read more

Goh Chok Tong's Visit to FCBC

Image
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code.   Examples from ar
Read more