Instead of the usual "Currently Reading" thread we see popping up here
from time to time, what we need is an innovation on that, a novelty or
which would be the same as to say, in some circles, a heresy--where
rather than taking the usual Show & Tell approach of just coming right
out to Post & Boast of your current reading list, the idea will be to
challenge others, "the Panel" to guess what you are reading . . .
What we're talking about here is a fun and exciting Quiz Show approach
to the whole thing, where we play a very snooty, high-brow, terribly
bookish spin-off on that wonderfully, witty and literate TV game show
of the Fifties "What's My Line."
For a most particularly wonderful and witty episode of What's My Line
with host, John Daly and panel of Arlene Francis, Peter Lawford,
Dorothy Kilgallen and Bennett Cerf . . .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DiXT2E9Ccc8A
Every participant member of the Panel other than the Mystery Guest
must don, virtually, his Lone Ranger mask sans eye-holes; to be bound
by his or her solemn promise not to peek (or which is to say,
"Google"), after the Mystery Guest "signs in."
The Mystery Guest "signs in" by posting an excerpt from the eBook of
his chosen mystery author, selected from the many public domain texts
to be found and downloaded from free eBook sites to a laptop,
Blackberry or cell phone--and for the Guest, reading that book is of
course a must, so that questions from the Panel may be answered with
enough authority to make the imposture a worthy one. And yes, that
will part of the fun, for the Mystery Guest, to have a crack at
expressing himself in the voice of his chosen Mystery Author.
The need for the virtual eye-masks is again to say that it is no fair
peeking by means of Googling or Yahooing on a quoted line of the text.
If we don't go it blind, there's no game, no test of detective skill
or wide-ranging, high-brow, snooty literary knowledge. The fun is all
in the questions to the Guest from the Panel which gradually provide
for a collection of clues, leading to the eventual revelation of the
Mystery Guest's author.
Now to begin! WILL the Mystery Guest for this week, enter and sign in,
please!
--
Ah!
<Applause>
But here is a mighty ancient and arcane looking fellow, Panel. And as
he is busy signing in (copy/pasting) to the slate, I will give the one
customary clue: This is a member of the male gender, and he is
sporting, of all things, a toga.
And here is the Mystery Text of the Mystery Guest, complete with the
translator's glosses in brackets . . .
--
The Euxine Sea, as it is called, is self-contradictory in its nature,
and deceptive in its name.
[Euxine=3Dhospitable. One recalls Shakespeare: =97"Like to the Pontick Sea
Whose icy current and compulsive force Ne'er feels retiring ebb."=97
Othel.]
As you would not account it hospitable from its situation, so is it
severed from our more civilised waters by a certain stigma which
attaches to its barbarous character. The fiercest nations inhabit it,
if indeed it can be called habitation, when life is passed in waggons.
They have no fixed abode; their life has no germ of civilization; they
indulge their libidinous desires without restraint, and for the most
part naked.
Moreover, when they gratify secret lust, they hang up their quivers on
their car-yokes, to warn off the curious and rash observer. Thus
without a blush do they prostitute their weapons of war.
The dead bodies of their parents they cut up with their sheep, and
devour at their feasts. They who have not died so as to become food
for others, are thought to have died an accursed death.
Their women are not by their sex softened to modesty. They uncover the
breast, from which they suspend their battle-axes, and prefer warfare
to marriage.
In their climate, too, there is the same rude nature. The day-time is
never clear, the sun never cheerful; the sky is uniformly cloudy; the
whole year is wintry; the only wind that blows is the angry North.
Waters melt only by fires; their rivers flow not by reason of the ice;
their mountains are covered with heaps of snow. All things are torpid,
all stiff with cold. Nothing there has the glow of life, but that
ferocity which has given to scenic plays their stories of the
sacrifices [Iphigenia of Euripides] of the Taurians, and the loves[See
the Medea of Euripides.] of the Colchians, and the torments
[Prometheus of =C6schylus] of the Caucasus.
Nothing, however, in Pontus is so barbarous and sad as the fact that
Marcion was born there, fouler than any Scythian, more roving than the
waggon-life [This Sarmatian clan received its name ??=B5a??=DF??? from its
gypsy kind of life] of the Sarmatian, more inhuman than the Massagete,
more audacious than an Amazon, darker than the cloud [of Pontus],
colder than its winter, more brittle than its ice, more deceitful than
the Ister, more craggy than Caucasus.
More, the true Prometheus, Almighty God, is mangled by Marcion's
blasphemies. Marcion is more savage than even the beasts of that
barbarous region. For what beaver was ever a greater
emasculator . . .
[Castrator carnis. See Pliny, N. H. viii. 47 (Bohn's trans. vol. ii.
p. 297)]
=2E . . than he who has abolished the nuptial bond? What Pontic mouse
ever had such gnawing powers as he who has gnawed the Gospels to
pieces? Verily, O Euxine, thou hast produced a monster more credible
to philosophers than to Christians.
--
JM http://whosenose.blogspot.com/
http://jesusexegesis.blogspot.com/
|
