The Book Meme
Jan. 23rd, 2007 05:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ann_leckieBOOKWORM:
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.
6. Tag 5 people.
I am not tagging anyone. Anyone who wants to, meme away.
It turns out that there are only four sentences on p. 123 of this translation of Aelian's Varia Historia. The fifth sentence would be the start of the footnote.
I'd have been in real trouble if the page had been even-numbered--the facing pages are in Greek.
There's much cooler stuff in this book. It's a sort of odd compilation of whatever happened to take Aelian's fancy (including extracts from other works). It's very educational. I never knew this, for instance:
Wow! Then a few paragraphs later he'll be telling us about something noble that Socrates once said, or giving us a list of heavy drinkers of antiquity (including one who used a funnel and had it poured straight down his gullet). He speaks disapprovingly of chroniclers who tell us that Alexander (yes, that Alexander) was drunk, oh, four or five times in a particular month and spent the next day recovering each time. This must be a lie, Aelian concludes, because if that were the case he'd have killed himself with drinking so heavily!* Obviously Aelian did not go to college the same place I did. (But he does think an awful lot about wine, for someone who disapproves of it so much.)
In other news. There is coq au vin in a pot on the stove. Mmmmm.
Also, I went to Trader Joe's today to get, you know, stuff, and I was hungry, so I got a thing of curry chicken salad with some salad and dressing. Sol Invictus, that curry chicken was delicious. It had rasins in it, and it was just the exact right amount of curry...
In non-food related news, I got some recycled sari yarn, and it is beautiful. Though it's kind of fuzzy, so it's a little challenging to knit with. But oh, so beautiful!
*But he bought the funnel story. Go figure.
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.
6. Tag 5 people.
I am not tagging anyone. Anyone who wants to, meme away.
It turns out that there are only four sentences on p. 123 of this translation of Aelian's Varia Historia. The fifth sentence would be the start of the footnote.
This elegant description of a landscape in northern Greece is not the result of travel by Aelian in those parts; it is almost certainly an attempt to improve upon a similar description in Book 9 of Theopompus' History, the opening words of which are cited in a handbook of rhetoric, Theon's Progymnasmata (ed L. Spengel, Rhetores graeci, Leipzig, 1853-6, vol. 2 p.68 lines 12-16). This acute observation is due to E. L. De Stefani, Berliner philologische Wochenschrift 31 (1914): 92 (perhaps anticipated by Gronovius in his edition). Another elegant description of Tempe, by Dio Chrysostom, is mentioned by Synesius, Dio 3C, but nothing is known of it.
I'd have been in real trouble if the page had been even-numbered--the facing pages are in Greek.
There's much cooler stuff in this book. It's a sort of odd compilation of whatever happened to take Aelian's fancy (including extracts from other works). It's very educational. I never knew this, for instance:
The Cretans are expert archers. They shoot goats grazing on mountain peaks. The wounded animals at once eat the plant called dittany, and as soon as they taste it, all the arrows fall out of their wounds.
Wow! Then a few paragraphs later he'll be telling us about something noble that Socrates once said, or giving us a list of heavy drinkers of antiquity (including one who used a funnel and had it poured straight down his gullet). He speaks disapprovingly of chroniclers who tell us that Alexander (yes, that Alexander) was drunk, oh, four or five times in a particular month and spent the next day recovering each time. This must be a lie, Aelian concludes, because if that were the case he'd have killed himself with drinking so heavily!* Obviously Aelian did not go to college the same place I did. (But he does think an awful lot about wine, for someone who disapproves of it so much.)
In other news. There is coq au vin in a pot on the stove. Mmmmm.
Also, I went to Trader Joe's today to get, you know, stuff, and I was hungry, so I got a thing of curry chicken salad with some salad and dressing. Sol Invictus, that curry chicken was delicious. It had rasins in it, and it was just the exact right amount of curry...
In non-food related news, I got some recycled sari yarn, and it is beautiful. Though it's kind of fuzzy, so it's a little challenging to knit with. But oh, so beautiful!
*But he bought the funnel story. Go figure.