Surely Rush Limbaugh is not so deranged as to believe that the epithet slut applies to Sandra Fluke, the law student who testified before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee on contraception coverage in the Affordable Care Act. No: Limbaugh’s purpose is to intimidate by letting women know the price they may expect to pay if they speak publicly about affordable access to contraception.
Limbaugh’s language has a peculiar resonance for me, as I just taught book 22 of Homer’s Odyssey. In that episode of the poem, a dozen women of Odysseus’ household are executed by hanging. Their crime: sleeping with the enemy, Penelope’s suitors, the young men who have taken over the household in Odysseus’ absence. Odysseus’ son Telemachus calls for the women’s execution, not, as Odysseus has directed, by sword (a “clean” death) but by hanging. And in three prominent translations (Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Fagles, Stanley Lombardo), Telemachus explains his decision by calling the women “sluts.” There’s no equivalent to slut in the Greek. In Richmond Lattimore’s highly literal Odyssey, these women “have slept with the suitors.”
A chilling recognition that might arise in a careful reading of the Odyssey : by the end of the poem, these women are forgotten. When Zeus and Athena work out a resolution to the conflict in Odysseus’ kingdom, they decide that all memory of the dead suitors will be removed from the minds of their surviving relatives. But the women of Odysseus’ house are never even remembered before being forgotten: in the ancient economy of persons, their lives and deaths do not count. The poem, we might say, does not care for them.
I’ve stumbled three or four times in writing this post, not sure what point I want to make about this ugly synchronicity of epithets. Homer’s poem is elsewhere deeply attuned to difficulties of women’s lives, and Odysseus and Penelope’s homophrosunê [like-mindedness] offers a startlingly modern way to think about the meaning of marriage. But in Odyssey 22, it is men who have the final word over women’s choices. Current events are all too reminiscent of that scenario.
Related reading and viewing
Sandra Fluke’s testimony (C-SPAN)
Rush Limbaugh’s remarks (Media Matters)
[The translations: Robert Fitzgerald (1961): “you sluts, who lay with suitors.” Robert Fagles (1996): “You sluts — the suitors’ whores!” Stanley Lombardo (2000): “the suitors’ sluts.” Margaret Atwood’s reimagining of Homeric narrative, The Penelopiad (2005), creates a voice for these women.]
Friday, March 2, 2012
Homer and Limbaugh and epithets
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Mark Bauerlein on learning
Mark Bauerlein on what makes education possible:
For education to happen, people must encounter worthwhile things outside their sphere of influence and brainpower. Knowledge grows, skills improve, tastes refine, and conscience ripens only if the experiences bear a degree of unfamiliarity — a beautiful artwork you are forced to inspect even though it leaves you cold; an ancient city you have to detail even though history puts you to sleep; a microeconomic problem you have to solve even though you fumble with arithmetic. To take them in, to assimilate the objects intelligently, the intellectual tool kit must expand and attitudes must soften. If the first apprehension stalls, you can’t mutter, “I don’t get it — this isn’t for me.” You have to say, “I don’t get it, and maybe that’s my fault.” You have to accept the sting of relinquishing a cherished notion, of admitting a defect in yourself. Poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s simple admonition should be the rule: “You must change your life.”Bauerlein’s insulting title makes me wince. His sub-subtitle — Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30 — makes me cringe. My thoughts about poetry and difficulty are far different from his. But I like what he says in this passage about persistence and humility in the face of the unfamiliar.
From The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2008).
“You must change your life”: “Du mußt dein Leben ändern,” from the last line of “Archaïscher Torso Apollos” [Archaic torso of Apollo].
Related posts
John Holt on learning and difficulty
Learning, failure, and character
“In March read”
What are you planning to read this March that you’ve always meant to read? Me: Euripides.
Other reading posters
“October’s Bright Blue Weather”
“January: A year of good reading ahead”
“The Vacation Reading Club”
[Always: loosely meant.]
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Remove YouTube history
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation: How to Remove Your YouTube Viewing and Search History Before Google's New Privacy Policy Takes Effect. Google’s new policy takes effect on March 1.
A related post
Remove Google search history
[Did you know that YouTube tracks your viewing history? I didn’t. As we used to say in Brooklyn, “It’s none of your bee-eye-business.”]
Remove Google search history
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation: How to Remove Your Google Search History Before Google’s New Privacy Policy Takes Effect. Thanks to this leap year, you have one more day to remove and pause your search history before Google’s new policy takes effect on March 1.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Faux classic typewriter
Related posts
Hemingway’s typewriter
Jack Kerouac’s last typewriter
The legendary notebook of . . .
Montblanc “Yes We Can” pen
[What is the Latin for hipster?]
The “FaceTime Facelift”
Washington, D.C.-area plastic surgeon Robert K. Sigal offers the “FaceTime Facelift”:
“Patients come in with their iPhones and show me how they look on [Apple’s video calling application] FaceTime,” says Dr. Sigal. “The angle at which the phone is held, with the caller looking downward into the camera, really captures any heaviness, fullness and sagging of the face and neck. People say ‘I never knew I looked like that! I need to do something!’ I’ve started calling it the ‘FaceTime Facelift’ effect. And we’ve developed procedures to specifically address it.”For readers of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), life is once again imitating art. In the novel, the use of video telephony via teleputer (TP) results in “Video-Physiognomic Dysphoria”:
People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a TP screen. It wasn’t just “Anchorman’s Bloat,” that well-known impression of extra weight that video inflicts on the face. It was worse. Even with high-end TPs’ high-def viewer-screens, consumers perceived something essentially blurred and moist-looking about their phone-faces, a shiny pallid indefiniteness that struck them as not just unflattering but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable.Thus they turn to “High-Definition Photographic Imaging,” plastic masks, and “Transmittable Tableaux” before returning to “good old voice-only telephoning” — “not Ludditism but a kind of retrograde transcendence of sci-fi-ish high-tech for its own sake, a transcendence of the vanity and the slavery to high-tech fashion that people view as so unattractive in one another.”
Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (via Pinboard)
Infinite Jest, video telephony
[I discovered the “FaceTime Facelift” via kottke.org.]
The picky ones
One small pleasure in life for me is local commercials — sometimes so local (or insular) that advertisers are identified by street address alone. A jeweler on a street about ninety miles from me has been advertising himself on television as le difficile: his commercial shows a series of men “here in Antwerp, Belgium” speaking in French and accented English about “the picky one” and his insistence on the best diamonds. O small-town jeweler, thy reputation fills a metropolis in two languages!
It turns out though that a surprising number of American jewelers are known in Antwerp as le difficile — or la difficile. So many picky ones! Even more surprising: the Antwerp diamond dealers speak of these many picky ones in exactly the same words (in French and accented English). These jewelers hail from Kansas, Missouri, Nevada, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Wisconsin. And from Florida, Florida, Florida, Florida. And perhaps from other states.
A cynic might think that these spots were made by inserting a couple of brief clips of a local jeweler into a ready-made commercial. A cynic might even do a quick search and find a source for these commercials online. I refuse to bow to such cynicism.
Monday, February 27, 2012
On retronyms
On retronyms, from Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day:
When roller skates were invented in the 19th century, it became necessary to refer to the kind used on ice — originally just “skates” — as “ice skates.” When cars began appearing on turn-of-the-century roads, old-style carriages came to be called “horse-drawn carriages” to distinguish them from the new “horseless carriages.” In the 1910s, when sound first came to be synchronized with motion pictures (in “talking movies” or “talkies”), the original type of movie came to be known as the “silent movie.” That is, nobody ever referred to “silent movies” until sound was added to the newer type.And speaking of silent films: I was very happy to see the Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist do so well at last night’s Academy Awards. I love everything about The Artist but its typography.
Wikipedia has a list of retronyms.
[Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009), offers a free Usage Tip of the Day. You can sign up at LawProse.org. Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly site.]
Batshit crazy
Recent developments in American political life have made me curious about the expression batshit crazy. The words come unbidden to my lips when I hear a certain sweater-vested man pronouncing upon matters of contraception, education, marriage, and everything else.
The Oxford English Dictionary explains it all. Since 1971, batshit has meant “crazy, mad, insane.” The OED notes that batshit may also function “as an intensifier, esp. in batshit crazy.” The OED ’s first citation dates from 1993: “His mug is emblazoned with the words: full-blown bat shit crazy.”
A shout-out to that sweater-vested man: Shine on, you batshit-crazy diamond, all the way to your party’s nomination if possible.
[“Since 1971” is a bit of a joke: that’s the year for the first citation. Why the hyphen in batshit-crazy ? “When a phrase functions as an adjective preceding the noun it modifies — an increasingly frequent phenomenon in 20th- and 21st-century English — the phrase should ordinarily be hyphenated”: Bryan Garner, Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009). Garner does not give batshit-crazy as an example; I am applying his maxim here.]
