Futile Horn

05.02.2005 - 8:12 pm (and now more uptown)

Huzzah! I have successfully moved a few miles across town. I’m now living more cheaply in a better neighborhood in an apartment that isn’t quite obviously falling apart. The only thing I’m missing that I had before was a view of the downtown city skyline, which I’m pretty sure I can live without. There’s a place downtown that rents out rooms to writers and cites as one of their features a view of the inspirational city skyline. That’s how you know it is for shit.

Oh. Did I mention I was moving? I’m pretty sure I wrote the entry and then lost it before I got around to posting it. Stupid online journal. Why does anyone keep this sort of thing?

Since I’ve returned from New York, I’ve gotten through the first three books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and I read Seneca’s De Otio probably just because I’ve never read any Seneca. This week I am back reading Horace. I guess I’ll do the first book of Sermones. I got a book from the library with translation notes, and yesterday I found that my edition was missing more than 100 lines of the second satire. 100 lines! I screamed and yelled a lot in the coffee shop when I discovered this, but nobody rushed to supply me with the missing commentary. God forbid anybody interrupt their game of dominos for the sake of scholarship.

Actually I think I found out where all those lines went. When I started to read them, I discovered what must have happened to them. What immediately follows is quite filthy! A nineteenth century editor had simple censored them. Some woman is called a cunnus which is as vulgar as its English cognate (a cunnus in white; she is more respectable than a prostitute, who must wear black). Oh oh oh, and if you want to find a prostitute in Rome, you could go to the Circus Maximus and find her in fornice, under the arch, which they tell me is where the bible thumpers get the word from. “Burn in hell, you under the arch be-er!”

Another good thing about living here is that there are plenty of childless, unmarried people over college age. I could survive if I never see a frat boy or sorority girl again. Someone in the building however has a brood of at least four kids, all very close together in age, and I can hear a baby screaming through the wall in the mornings. Well, I guess I can’t expect people to stop breeding entirely. It’d be nice though.

For the time being, I’ve decided to make Yeats my patron poet in the way you have can have a patron saint with no intentions for a Christian life. Part of me really wants poetry, like holiness, to be a worthwhile pursuit, even though they are both deep smoky tunnels spelunked en route to some dead-end chasm of loserhood. I’m not sure I actually like Yeats’ poems, and I get the feeling from the ones I’ve read that I would have found his company intolerable, but I like what he seems to want, his impossible nostalgia brewed in a tea of political chafing, social dissatisfaction, and cultural discontinuity. Poets really are like saints, but for a smattering of unearned grace and an opportunity, no better than the rest of us. It's not even jealousy that makes me say that, which would be bad, but disappointment, which is worse.

Christ, I accomplished nearly nothing of what I hoped for today, although I’m pretty sure I tried. Well, there are still a few hours left. Cheers.

Born to play the funky céilí,
Futile Horn