On an Item in the Vocabulary.

O reader, we were sitting in the smallest Room of our house, thinking on the word transmogrify, viz.

It was a transmogrifying bee
Came droning down on Chucky's old bald head,

the source of which you will recognize at once. We are in the habit of referring to the great Authors as authorities for the use of outlandish words--given that our favorite source is Ransom, the natural tendency is toward Latinisms and similar, such as colorify in "Painted Head," which we believe is a pun on the Latin calor as well; seek out the citation, dear Friend, you will find it seems scarcely otherwise--but in this case the word is not, after all, a coinage of that great Elegiac of our section but in fact a product of the seventeenth century and a pseudo-Latinism.

Pseudo-Latinism--awfully interesting, isn't it? The rectangular Majesty of the Latin language, at least from the perspective of our own untyrannicible and teeming speech, is its transparency; like German it is a language of compounds and compounds of compounds, containing a certain charlatan logic of its own, or semblance of logic, that unmathematical but obvious arithmetic of A and B sum C, C unequal to A sum B. But to pseudo-Latinize is something quite of another order, it is wholly English'd, or post-English, a translation without a referent, a burst of noise between a sea-cutting trans- and an upright -fy. . . but not in this to wax lyrical like those execrable popular books of lexicographical miscellany--which is of course exactly what we are doing. Your pardon; nostra culpa.

But to return to the unmathematical arithmetic, we think it is exactly this logic that makes pseudo-Latin such a disarming beast. A sum B ktl. can only really satisfy us, can't it, when we internalize the notion that a preposition standing alone means very little, and a preposition turned into a prefix standing alone still less? This of course is not true; lay on the Via Appia in Gaul's rags with an oncoming chariot and a broken leg: your hoarse "Ap! Ap!" will make perfect sense to the charioteer. So for such duly domiciliated scholars as ourself, the process of coinage is a sort of alchemy rather than distillation--the combination of unstable elements into perhaps explosive new compounds rather than the release of noble gas into the linguistic atmosphere. Yet this is misleading; even our Renaissance logodaedalist had to bind his semantic pickings to a little suggestive nonsense.

-mogr-, in any event, is a perfectly fine imaginary root, and very suggestive. Lapis mogrifecit | insolenter Vultus / Puerorum gravis | volitans eadem. Zounds! 'Tis practically a Saturnian, were written Saturnians ever.

Anyone can coin a Latinism, dear Reader, but it takes a real sort of charisma to produce a bubble of noise which makes immediate and lasting sense. G-d save the inventor, whoever he was, of the peculiar and tangled verb which has provided us with our theme, and may He save also

Your H. & Ob. S.,
CASTALIANUS

A Dialog on Art & the Culture War.

O Reader, perhaps it will please you to animadvert upon this rather interesting Dialog?

Mettius INTERLOCUTOR; C. Claudius VANDERMEER.

Interlocutor: Hi!
Vandermeer: Howdydo.
Interlocutor: Good, how are you?
Vandermeer: Irritated with the lame efforts of people on my side of the culture wars to defend their interests--look at this. Foolishment. Mr. Scruton, we get it. These points have been made. Your aesthetic philosophy is from the 19th century and you, personally, are losing the culture war for me. (Not to mention he gives a false definition for religio...)
Interlocutor: Let me take a look.
Vandermeer: Listen to him. "Vision of beauty," "attitude of contemplation," "portent of original sanctity," gag, gag, gag. WEAK.
Interlocutor: Oh, I heard about that awful production of Seraglio. But I see what you mean--he misses the idea that beauty itself is just an idea that people can disagree on.
Vandermeer: No! Also weak! Ugh. Obviously only I, single-handedly, can save Western culture.
Interlocutor: Obvs.
Vandermeer: "Your heart fills with joy, and your selfish thoughts are scattered." Oh, gag me with a spoon. I should stop reading this and quit complaining.
Interlocutor: Well, the duty of the artist is to express himself. If that expression is unpleasant or unconventional, oh well. Art that does not find an audience will die out. Everything else becomes part of tradition, no matter how shocking or ugly it seems at first. Like, ahem, Wagner's crazy chromatic assaults on the ear which many opera-goers of his time HATED--and called profane and un-musical.
Vandermeer: Yes, so too with Rite of Spring. Sure, these are stock examples. But I would say it’s just neutral. These new artists were doing something intelligent and structural; it was shocking because people didn't yet know how to "read" it, the way they couldn't yet read modernism and often still can’t.
Interlocutor: But something instinctive and chaotic has no less claim on truth & beauty.
Vandermeer: No--structure, the creation of coherence, is so important. I wouldn't say "express himself," I would say "produce deep realization to ideas"--and by deep I mean that which rewards repeated analysis from different angles and is coherent, rather than working like a sort of intellectual game.
Interlocutor: Yes, I would agree with that, the deep realization of ideas.
Vandermeer: I find that things that are "instinctive and chaotic" and also beautiful are structured on a fundamental level. Pollock, for instance--whom I hate--still, his works have a definite and structuralistic aesthetic. Self-expression in itself is nothing. Most people--probably all people--have very little of interest to say about themselves.
Interlocutor: But you trip yourself up, because an intellectual game can also be coherent. Besides, great art does not have to be coherent; in fact its very power comes from a lack of coherence that allows different interpretations.
Vandermeer: No, what I mean is an "intellectual game" in the sense that you don't have to SEE the art object to get to the point. Koonz' stainless steel balloon animals, for instance. You don't have to see one to do the thinking. A huge portion of our contemporary art is like that.
Interlocutor: Yes, pure concept, no soul.
Vandermeer: Ack, "soul."
Interlocutor: You know what I mean.
Vandermeer: No, I don't--I mean really, do you even? "Soul," what on earth is "soul" in art? I certainly don't have a soul, so I wonder how an art object can? If what you mean is "sophistication of thought," that's one thing, or "nuance of expression" another. Or the combination of the two?
Interlocutor: I certainly don't mean sophistication of thought. Any art that can be adequately explained is no art at all--I mean the passions and internal conflicts that make us individual, and which drive people to make art in the first place.
Vandermeer: I think passions are the last things that make us individual. Even beef has passions. It's our thoughts you’re talking about.
Interlocutor: It does not. Beef has drives.
Vandermeer: A passion is a drive after a hundred years of romanticism.
Interlocutor: A passion is a drive given the introspection of sentience.
Vandermeer: --Fodder, fornication and self-pity decked out in a laurel wreath. Look, what you're talking about is the rationalization of a passion.
Interlocutor: No, it isn't
Vandermeer: Yes it is--the important part--the thoughts by which we unite mind to meat. Or reconcile them, really. Everyone falls in love, everyone is sorry for himself. It's how we turn the hormones into a useable reality that makes us unique, to such an extent as we're unique.
Interlocutor: Yes.
Vandermeer: So it's the thought. The ideal, not hormonal, component.
Interlocutor: The tension between the ideal and the hormonal is what I'm talking about as “passion.”
Vandermeer: But you see that the tension is wholly intellectual. Without the intellectual component all you have is reaction.
Interlocutor: Not really--
Vandermeer: Without intellect we simply follow our drive. There's no tension. Zero. Like animals.
Interlocutor: The tensions themselves can be completely emotional.
Vandermeer: But pure emotion simply makes its way, like water seeking a declivity. It's out of our control until hammered with thought, no matter how broken the thoughts are.
Interlocutor: Right--so?
Vandermeer: So, only after the imposition of thought--which reacts to the drive--do we get what you call a passion. Your passion is a reaction to pre-human circumstances, not a fusion, and should rightly be called a rationalization or ideation. Of the meat.
Interlocutor: Who says it can't be a fusion? isn't a fusion itself a reaction?
Vandermeer: In the sense that the two components feed on each other? Hm. Eliot's idea that emotion can and should proceed from thought comes to mind--So I can see it as a sort of cycle in which the original meat material turns into a fused cycle. Maybe. Drive > reaction to drive > idea > reaction to idea > emotion=drive > reaction, &c.
Interlocutor: Yes, a feedback loop
Vandermeer: Right. Maybe. OK; I'm tentatively sold.
Vandermeer: But to return to the article, I wonder if “In the presence of sacred things, our lives are judged, and to escape that judgment, we destroy the thing that seems to accuse us" is a functional analysis, or just moral self-congratulation. It sounds compelling, but I wonder if it has any relationship to reality.
Interlocutor: I’m certainly rolling my eyes.
Vandermeer: You don't think so? I kind of like it. I'm not sure if I'd put my faith in it though.
Interlocutor: It’s the assumption that art Scruton doesn't like is made only because the lowlife "artists" can't stand the j'accuse of great art.
Vandermeer: Well, It matches my experience of a whole swath of people. Whether true or not, it's an idea in great currency--I've seen Dalrymple use it a few times.
Interlocutor: What is more likely is that artists need to feel liberated to create freely, and not feel like everything has to stand up to the Mona Lisa to be accepted. There is a tyranny of canon that must be constantly challenged if art is to remain fresh & vital & alive.
Vandermeer: I don’t agree--but unfortunately the whole pattern of these City/New Criterion defenses-of-art is so romantic and so polemical and so emphatically neither analytical nor intellectualizing that it immediately brings to mind the Entartete Kunst exhibit--which is exactly what the enemy will respond with.
Interlocutor: Unfortunately, this is something written by a critic whose only impulse is to have his opinion taken seriously. He is not trying to make anything new, only defend the status quo. Conservatism of the bad kind.
Vandermeer: No such thing. Problematically, it's not the status quo he’s after; he doesn't realize he's fighting for a neo-movement. Conservatives have got to start thinking of themselves as revolutionaries.
Interlocutor: “What do we want? The way things used to be! When do we want it? Since always!”
Vandermeer: Yeah, yeah. But the kind of bibble Scruton is retooling didn't work in the first place--it was weak at the turn of the century and it’s exponentially weaker now--so if we don't want to lose this fight permanently we have to stop strutting around with this laesa majestas attitude and start facing the fact that we lost and have to fix the mistakes of our spineless ancestors-once-removed.
Interlocutor: Conservatism lost because it forgot what conservatism is supposed to be about.
Vandermeer: I'm speaking culturally here. Your political arena is a whole different bowl of kraut.
Interlocutor: Still, "reactionary" is not a synonym for "conservative."
Vandermeer: Sure.
Interlocutor: But that's what it's become, culturally as seen here in Scruton’s piece (that’s what you propose, too, you know)--as well as politically. Instead of making the case for positive virtues which should be retained / cherished, it's all about "do-not-want." Defending "our" culture from "them"--again, something you do unthinkingly and all too often.
Vandermeer: People with conservative cultural aims--in the sense of preserving western culture from what has become a metastasized onslaught of, well, nihilistic evilmindedness--have got to be reactionary, though. The enemy is now the establishment. People like myself are in the truly bizarre position of saying "to hell with the establishment," as unwillingly as Cromwell but not as mighty or as good. Who would have imagined? But “conserve” in the sense of architectural conservation, not Blimp toryism. To sustain something endangered, not to set up the status quo as a value in itself--though at this point it's honestly more like creative anachronism than conservation.
Interlocutor: That's fine, but some things are endangered because they have outlived their usefulness.
Vandermeer: Certainly. I'm all about out-with-the-chaff. How many times a day do I use the term '19th century" or "romantic" pejoratively?
Interlocutor: --Too often.
Vandermeer: Hush, you.
Interlocutor: You asked...
Vandermeer: Come on. Even people who would agree, once you’ve explained it, don't seem to realize how rotten both of those influences are in neo-modern thought.
Interlocutor: I concede that it's time the pendulum swung back a bit to the 18th century, in some ways.
Vandermeer: In some.
Interlocutor: Not the chopping-people's-heads-off way.
Vandermeer: Except for James. Long live the republic! But seriously, it's time to look back at the first half of this century. Comb out the bad ideas, take the good ones.
Interlocutor: The thing is bad ideas can't be combed out, they can only be out-competed by good ones.
Vandermeer: Right, of course--which is why dribblers like this person are doing no good at all. I still read these magazines, though, for the snippets of good rhetoric they sometimes produce. "The human body as a mere object among objects, the human spirit as eclipsed and ineffectual," Mm. Good rhetoric. Not inaccurate either. But then he switches right back to stuff that sounds dangerously like fascism--that with pornographic and violent art "we must sully the experiences--such as death and sex—that otherwise call us away from temptations, toward the higher life of sacrifice." Wenn ich "Selbstaufopfergang" höre, entsichere ich meinen Browning.
Interlocutor: Oh, he is saying that moderns feel like we must sully sex & death with prurience? I didn’t understand at first.
Vandermeer: Yes, something unfocused like that.
Interlocutor: He's not as good as Dalrymple.
Vandermeer: Few people are. The man is a sage. He's getting repetitive in his dotage but he's still a sage. Heh. It just keeps going--"the modern stage director who ransacks the works of Mozart is trying to tear the love from the heart of them." Mozart--made with 10% more love! Like Mom's Robot Oil.
Interlocutor: Ha! I know what he means, though. Mozart was a humanist.
Vandermeer: Yeah, I do too. I only wish he were a little bit less of a booby in emphasizing it. --You know, I hope you know how fond I am of you. We have such marvelous conversations.

Would that we were so lucky, dear friend, as to have such colloquy ourself. Nevertheless we remain hopeful and always of course

Your H. & Ob. S.,
CASTALIANUS

Epigrams, and Cowardice.

O Reader, how unfortunate it would be if the disagreeable Person on whose wooly-white sides we have so lustily scribbled, unbeknownst to him, should ever encounter this our nasty

Epigram!

Dear oily, careerist quarter-pint of weasel:
We're sick of your permanent camp on the TA carrel.

It would certainly create a scene. We have actually truncated it--the original, as some may know, was longer and nastier--but we are, alas, a Coward. In an event the original was a bit Loose & Baggy, so let us instead say, that it is not Fear so much as the demands of Wit which have made us retract our tune. Yet, mark our words, never shall the world see Palinode of our vituperation.

(Besides--quarter-pint of weasel? Zounds!)

Regardless, in our enthusiasm for excoriating our local Napoleon we worked up quite a head of steam, and as such immediately produced another

Epigram:

May G-d deliver this lady from her Prince,
Or rather, deliver the poor prince from his Lady,
Since every mother's son in this department
On catching jealous wind of his rapprochement
Will sally forth with baseball bats and fury
And put the interloper's legs in splints.--

this one on a witticism we have long and tediously been making to anyone who will give us Audience, but, O reader, we would be willing to bet up to a Drachma that it is true--for the lady in question is passionately and understatedly Beloved by every male in our little concentration camp of erudition, yes, even including ourself, and as such we would vouch with hard cash for the likelihood here depicted. Yet, dear friend, we still had a single couplet left in us before retiring from the salty foothills of the Muses, namely this final

Epigram:

If our friend and colleague hopes to become a lover,
He needs a bath, some chutzpah, and a barber.

This one we wrote on the finest-humored soul in our department, who, should he see it, would laugh; and who, should he at the same time see the first of these granular jocundities, should not permit it to reach the ears of that arrogant, unctuous, brownnosing quarter-pint of weasel whom we loathe detest & of whose lavish funding we remain lip-bitingly envious.

If it has been unwise to descend to such heights of candor, dear Reader, let the tutelary divinities of the saucy defend

Your H. & Ob. S.,
CASTALIANUS

An Anthology of False Friends, I: Catullus.

O Reader, it seemed to us a humane and useful service--not only to such fellows as attempt to call up useful tools of this kind, but also to ourself, that the misty and tricksy terrain of this our rather addled memory might be steadied by the firm road-building of assiduous grunt Labor--that, as we encounter words amongst the noble Geometries of the Latin which are Mendacious, either from a seeming similarity to terms in the Vernacular, or from false cognates within their native Speech, we might make a list by rather stops and starts and, in so doing, not only reveal our ignorance (for each of these cases gave us pause and recourse to the Lexicon, at the very least to check,) but also, which is by far the better condition, to generally improve the World by the sweat of our Highbrow.

Autumo. to assent; unrelated to Autumnum.
Ceu is not to be confused with seu--as we so often do, subvocalizing them identically. Ceu means just as, while seu = sive.
Cinerarius. A hair-dresser, who curls with hot ash; not, as we first thought, a pyre-attendant.
Coetus. a company; its other spelling, coitus, never takes this meaning.
Continenter. continently, but only rarely; rather continuously, in a row.
Dicare. to dedicate; to be distinguished from dicere.
Excipio. to excerpt; but also to come second in order.
Foedo. to contaminate; related to the adjective, but not the noun, foedus.
Fures. the plural of fur, which we expected to be 2nd decl.; not furiae, i.e. unrelated to furor.
Hyacinthus. not really our hyacinth, but the blue iris.
Inustus and Inustus, the one from inuro, the other a privative of the same root.
Insolenter. insolently; but also in an unaccustomed way, the usual meaning.
Irritus. useless, baffled; the resemblance to our irritated is misleading.
Oppido. exceedingly; unrelated to oppidum.
Papilla. of indecent meaning; not to be confused with papilio.
Probrum. a shameful act; not to be misrelated to probus, an exactly opposite quality.
Lutum. filth, or a dye-plant; not to be confused with luteus, from which it is derived.
Natis. the posterior of a beast or man; not related to natus.
Poples. the knee; but bears a superficial resemblance to our Poplar--though of the wrong declension to be a tree--and is of course no kin to populus.
Quandoquidem. seeing that, not whenever at all--the meaning of quandoque.
Secta. a beaten path or doctrine; distinguish from secor, to which it is misleadingly related.
Servio. to serve as bondsman; unlikely to be confused with servo.
Situs. site; but also disuse.
Solum. the lowest part, ground; cognate to our sole, unrelated to solus.
Sternuo. to sneeze; to be distinguished from sterno, to cast down or strew.
Tenus. so far as, or a stretched cord; unrelated to tenuis or teneo.
Utpote. as is natural or seeing as; not if at all or ever. This is only a false Friend for those of us whose languages begin to blur together after a while--naturally this is from potis, not the Greek particle.
Vegeo. to be lively, or quicken; unlike our contemporary vegetate in the sense of sloth.
Vibro. to brandish as well as to make tremble; the martial sense must not be forgotten under the power of the cognate.

A surprising Friend: tostus, from torreo, whose similarity to "toasted" is wholly appropriate.

It is our sincerest Hope that our assiduous collection--bee-like--of droplets of mendacious cognates shall prove helpful to even one gentle soul of our condition. Dear Reader, do not think us ignorant or pedantic either; if we have given Note of that which is obvious or obscure--for instance our laughing admission of misreading utpote only because our Greek is so unspeakable Poor--as signs of humility, we beg, and not the unfortunate alternatives. Thus, preparing already collecting another instalment from our readings in Vergil, do we remain

Your H. & Ob. S.,
CASTALIANUS

An Epigram.

Dear Reader, whom do you suppose we have made the subject of this our little

Epigram?

What an obscured, abstracted, brooding man
     Who claims that his
     Persuasion is
Confederate (lacking country, blood and clan,)
     And no more Jew
     Than most of you
Still says "haShem" and wishes he could be one.

We cannot but demonstrate also this our other set of tossed-off Verses, regarding which self-impressment (and small measure of affectionate malice) provokes us to provide you with:

Our former lover, faithful to his diet,
Eats greens and starves, but gets no profit by it;
The poor soul weighs a score of scores and seven
And might in four more years be twenty, even.

Zounds, we are a lusty fellow! Yet let us hope the poor boy in all his beloved bulk takes no offense at us, who secretly remain confident that whatever tutelary gods do protect and succor fellows of our Variety shall preserve him from himself and his execrable salads. Meanwhile we have finished culling choice phrases from the Veronese and have practically finished our little Anthology of False Friends from the same, soon to be offered up for your delectation; but until this evening we shall read Vergil and remain

Your H. & Ob. S.,
CASTALIANUS

On Another Bad Habit.

We suffer from what can only be described as a vicious and debilitating disease: O reader, commiserate with us. How shall we reveal to you the causes? An impossible task. In short, we buy books when we are unhappy, beautiful books, at extraordinary outlay of lucre; and once we have brought them Home, and placed our scrawled ex libris on the inside leaf, we shelve them and immediately and wholly consign them to immemorial Lethe. Our Collection has, sad to say, veritably metastasized this year--perhaps to the increase of, oh, a hundred and fifty volumes? And indeed we mean this year, as it reckoned among the Vulgar, not the Academic year--that is to say, since January. Have we read any of them, perhaps you ask? Omniscient Jove knows our guilt, and you, dear friend, can imagine.

Nevertheless there is some Remedy within our long-pale-fingered grasp. We have been lately working on a Catalogue, if you can believe it, which not only renews familiarity with our Holdings, but also shall serve as the basis of our future acquisition--that we might never again forget that we own the same edition of Horace, no, nor at the Instigation of our beloved Professors purchase any Hideous Green and Yellows in ruinous softcover when we own perfectly beautiful editions--and older ones, which you must concur is universally and by far the better--already. But of course, this is but rank and transparent rationalization. Why do we pour time and concentration into typing so absurd and self-gratifying a Record? Because nothing in the world, dear Reader, gives your Castalian such delight as the mere sight and heft of old and tasteful books, and whenas we are Melancholy there is rare Medicine for us so Salubrious as to fondle these beloved old tomes.

And yet of course it is flatheaded of us, not to mention embarassing; what a vulgar and simpleminded old fool, what a superficial creature, delighting in dead paper and creaking cover instead of the immortal Word, how alike to the mad-consuming Latte-suckers whom he as often excoriates as makes love to, remains--with insufficient Shame to mend his execrable Habits, even as he confesses them to you, O indulgent Reader--

Your H. & Ob. S.,
CASTALIANUS

From the Florilegium, I.

O Reader--as perhaps has become clear--your Castalian is in the habit of keeping himself a little notebook full of choice fragments of the Classics, with which he amuses himself in his copious idle hours and, of course, uses as reference-at-hand in the noble process of learned quotation while Writing. We have reasoned that it may perhaps prove amusing to you to cast a benevolent eye across our selections--and you shall doubtless find our taste peculiar, perhaps even perverse, for our florilegium is less an Anthology in the proper sense than--nescio quid sit, dear friend; let us say rather that it's as though some Modernism had a rupture and leave it at that. Should we ever compose a Cento it should be, we reason, rather eccentric.

To amuse you we have included our graceless translations of the lines--do not take this, O Reader, as false modesty: we have dashed these off in unoccupied moments, and regard them strictly as a crib, of no merit or aesthetic whatsoever--as well as some brief commentary, either on the supremely uninteresting topic of Ourself, or else some snippet of secondhand erudition doubtless already familiar to you. Do not regard such insulting pedantry as self-indulgence; consider rather the bald Truth, which is that we are preparing for Orals and, consequentially, are taking every opportunity to do so--including the opportunity of your tolerance, O excellent and ever-suffering attendant of our scribblings. Therefore without further murmuration we commend these late entries of our florilegium into your sophisticate hands. [sic]

670.
nec meum respectet, ut ante, amorem,
qui illius culpa cecidit velut prati
ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam
tactus aratro est. (Catullus XI.21-24)

and may she not look back as she used to after my love, which has toppled by her fault like the flower at a field's edge once touched by the passing plow. Despite the fact that this simile goes all the way back to the earliest Greek lyric, it was justifiably popular with the Romans and we ourselves cannot but find the passage moving.

700.
                              nam tui Catulli
plenus sacculus est aranearum. (Catullus XIII.7-8)

for the wallet of your Catullus is full of cobwebs. The wallet of your Castalian, by contrast, is full of usurious and rapidly diminishing aes alienum.

701.
vos hinc interea valete, abite
illuc, unde malum pedem attulistis,
saecli incommoda, pessimi poetae. (Catullus XIV.21-23)

nevertheless be off with you, get hence, back whence you brought forth your lousy foot--disagreeable objects of the age, worst of all poets. The novi poetae distinguished themselves largely in contrast with other poets. We need hardly mention the pun on pes; this quotation is dear to us, as you may imagine, on account of our intestine hatred of the Confessional poets and their formless, self-involved mutterings. We remain in all our Classical training your loyal Modernist, as you might well imagine, dear Reader. You must also pardon our reference to that peculiar Italian artist, irrelevant to the Poet but significant to ourself.

706.
non dico a populo--nihil veremur
istos, qui in platea modo huc modo illuc
in re praetereunt sua occupati-- (Catullus XV.6-8)

I don't mean from the people--I'm not afraid of them at all, the ones who go about in the street hither and thither, minding their own business ... You must pardon our omissions here and later, dear Reader; our modesty prevents us from providing a good number of such quotations of the Poet which, although suitable for our Florilegium and our private consideration, are unsuitable for the eyes of youths and Ladies such as might happen upon them here. We must not fault the Heathen their improprieties.

702.
a te sudor abest, abest saliva
mucusque et mala pituita nasi ... (Catullus XXIII.15-16)

sweat is absent from you, as is saliva, and mucus and the unpleasant effluents of the nose ... The Romans considered a dry physique a sign of excellent health and clean living.

707.
quae nunc tuis ab unguibus reglutina et remitte (Catullus XXV.9)

which now unglue from your talons and give 'em back. In our department, dear Reader, food especially has a habit of going missing. We might well expect hendecasyllables over any number of Comestibles which we ourself (pudet!) have made off with in the murky hours of the night.

703.
idem nunc retrahis te ac tua dicta omnia factaque
ventos irrita ferre ac nebulas aereas sinis. (Catullus XXX.9-10)

all the same, now you withdraw yourself and permit the winds and airy mists to carry all your ineffectual words and deeds. There is a certain region of aery confusion into which the untrustworthy, for Catullus, send their verbal selves. We are reminded of Dante's Limbo.

704.
o quid solutis est beatius curis,
cum mens onus reponit, ac peregrino
labore fessi venimus larem ad nostrum
desideratoque acquiescimus lecto? (Catullus XXXI.7-10)

what is more delightful than untangled cares, when the mind lets down its burden, and we come back to our household gods exhausted with the labor of travel and sink down on the couch we crave? We are ourselves an extravagant homebody, dear Reader, and identify very much with the homecoming poems of Catullus (cf. XXXI, paene insularum etc.). Not only do we agree with Ransom that homekeeping heads are happiest, but we have been possessed of a terrible longing for our native country ever since joining this singular University, August of last year. There is little we long for so much as the damp foothills of the Smoky Mountains and the cicadas of Tennessee.

705.
nam quo tempore legit inchoatam
Dindymi dominam, ex eo misellae
ignes interiorem edunt medullam. (Catullus XXXV.13-15)

for ever since she read your incomplete Cybele, fires have eaten away at the poor girl's innermost marrow. Would that we were so lucky, dear Reader. We should hope that our Verses, such as they are, might prove more alluring than they have so far proved; but the Youths of this country have no interest in erotic elegy, so much the worse with us. We have continually found, that in such circumstances that we have actually sent a Poem along, that the boy must fail to understand it, or else is indifferent; as we say, so much the better with the Neoterics, so much the worse with us. Do we whinge overmuch? Well, such are the conditions of the time.

711.
caesio veniam obvius leoni. (Catullus XLV.7)

may I cross the path of a pale-eyed lion. Caesius, quite a rare word, is a translation of Greek glaucopis; the first lions of this kind were introduced to Roman blood-sports during Catullus' lifetime and became quite the rage.

It is our fond hope that we have not adopted a fruitless or obnoxious Practice in so exposing our grain-quantity dippings from the Corpus; and in this hope we shall continue, unless persuaded otherwise. And, if you will excuse a personal intrusion, we should like to commemorate by way of a footnote--at least, on paper; for it is foremost in our mind--that today is the Birth-day of one whom we love and who is presently estranged from us; and despite our devotion to you, dear Reader, on this day it is exclusively in address to Him--who shall never, we reason, see these papers--that we remain

Your H. & Ob. S.,
CASTALIANUS