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Thursday, October 23rd, 2025 09:36 pm
Actual words will appear sometime over the weekend. :)
Thursday, October 23rd, 2025 08:40 pm
Yuletide letter )
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Thursday, October 23rd, 2025 08:22 pm
This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Thursday, October 23, to midnight on Friday, October 24 (8pm Eastern Time).

Poll #33756 Daily check-in poll
Open to: Access List, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 20

How are you doing?

I am OK
12 (63.2%)

I am not OK, but don't need help right now
7 (36.8%)

I could use some help
0 (0.0%)

How many other humans live with you?

I am living single
6 (31.6%)

One other person
9 (47.4%)

More than one other person
4 (21.1%)



Please, talk about how things are going for you in the comments, ask for advice or help if you need it, or just discuss whatever you feel like.
Tags:
Thursday, October 23rd, 2025 09:28 pm

Posted by morbane

There's a new post up on the Yuletide Admin comm regarding Last Day to Sign Up for 2025. Please note that there may have been a delay between that post and this crosspost.

You can go through to DW to check the details:

Dreamwidth Post

If you have follow-up questions, they can be asked in the DW comment section using a DW login, OpenID with another login, or a signed anonymous comment.
Thursday, October 23rd, 2025 08:42 pm

Posted by languagehat

Anatoly quotes a passage from the Telegram channel “Минутка этнографии” (in Russian):

“Словаки клали в гроб к подозреваемому вампиру книжки, желательно на чужом языке, чтобы он пытался их прочесть и у него не было времени выходить из могилы (Низшая мифология славян… С. 259). “

My translation:

In the coffin of a suspected vampire the Slovaks placed books, preferably in a foreign language, so that he would try to read them and would not have time to leave the grave (Lower Mythology of the Slavs, p. 259).

He likes the idea but wonders if it’s true; there is a new book Низшая мифология славян. Этнолингвистические очерки, but he can’t find an electronic copy to check. At any rate, se non è vero, è ben trovato. I knew I’d find a use for that book of Albanian poetry! (One of his commenters suggests that the Slovaks could have put a set of Stalin’s complete works in Russian in the grave. That should work.)

Thursday, October 23rd, 2025 10:06 am
It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!
Wednesday, October 22nd, 2025 10:56 pm
Per the Oaklandside:

Major federal immigration operation will begin tomorrow in the Bay Area

What it says on the tin.  They're staging out at Coast Guard Island in Alameda (that only has one way off of it, BTW).  I sat in on an emergency call with Bay Resistance and there will be some folks out there tomorrow morning.  Not sure what the action is going to be.  Organizations here have been collectively organizing for months so we'll see how it all shakes out. Oakland, the city council and Mayor Barbara Lee are pretty firm in how we collectively feel about this.

Unfortunately, San Francisco has Daniel Lurie as mayor and a bunch of feckless tech bros who think they want Feds in the street but are just now realizing that they have miscalculated with their bullshit (looking at you, Mark Benioff. YOU DON'T EVEN LIVE HERE ANYMORE).

In any case, I have the rapid response numbers on my phone, directions on how to document ICE activities (don't depend it on your phone. It is recommended that folks write information down) and a lot of crankiness. Moreso than my usual level.

Bay Resistance has a Get Ready page with ways to get involved.  Do what you can, where you can.

I am worried. I am worried for Shirley and her staff at the restaurant, for all us out and about on our bikes and walking and living. However, i take heart from New York's response as well as other cities.  The orange fucker is trying to speed run this and the cracks are there.

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2025 09:12 pm
Comics artist Kate Beaton's signature

Kate Beaton had a sore throat after hitting two major festivals before dropping into Munro's Books, but she was every bit as fierce and funny as you would expect, and more.

So glad I dragged my sorry carcass out of the house for this.

Surreally, I missed about 15 minutes of the Q&A because I felt a coughing fit coming on and went to have it out in the street. But it was still great. (Leftover hyper-reactive cough reflex, not continuing illness.)

§rf§
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Wednesday, October 22nd, 2025 06:13 pm
 
This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Wednesday, October22, to midnight on Thursday, October 23. (8pm Eastern Time).

Poll #33754 Daily Check-in
This poll is closed.
Open to: Access List, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 26

How are you doing?

I am OK.
15 (57.7%)

I am not OK, but don't need help right now.
11 (42.3%)

I could use some help.
0 (0.0%)

How many other humans live with you?

I am living single.
8 (30.8%)

One other person.
11 (42.3%)

More than one other person.
7 (26.9%)




Please, talk about how things are going for you in the comments, ask for advice or help if you need it, or just discuss whatever you feel like.
 
Tags:
Thursday, October 23rd, 2025 12:36 am
It's time for another question thread!

The rules:

- You may ask any dev-related question you have in a comment. (It doesn't even need to be about Dreamwidth, although if it involves a language/library/framework/database Dreamwidth doesn't use, you will probably get answers pointing that out and suggesting a better place to ask.)
- You may also answer any question, using the guidelines given in To Answer, Or Not To Answer and in this comment thread.
Tags:
Wednesday, October 22nd, 2025 06:45 pm

Posted by languagehat

Lucas Reilly at Mental Floss asks Why Do Ghosts Say “Boo”?:

People have screamed “boo,” or at least some version of it, to startle others since the mid-16th century. (One of the earliest examples documented by the Oxford English Dictionary appeared in that 1560s poetic thriller, Smyth Whych that Forged Hym a New Dame.) But ghosts? They’ve only been using the word boo for less than two centuries.

The etymology of boo is uncertain. The OED compares it with the Latin boare or the Greek βοᾶν, meaning to “cry aloud, roar, [or] shout.” Older dictionaries suggest it could be an onomatopoeia mimicking the lowing of a cow.

Whatever its origins, the word had a slightly different shade of meaning a few hundred years ago: Boo (or, in the olden days, bo or bu) was not used to frighten others but to assert your presence. Take the traditional Scottish proverb “He can’t say bo to a goose,” which for centuries has been a slick way to call somebody “timid” or “sheepish.” Or consider the 1565 story Smyth Whych that Forged Hym a New Dame, in which an overconfident blacksmith tries to hammer a woman back into her youth, and the main character demands of his dying experiment: “Speke now, let me se / and say ones bo!” […]

But boo became scarier with time. After all, as the OED notes, the word is phonetically suited “to produce a loud and startling sound.” And by 1738, Gilbert Crokatt was writing in Presbyterian Eloquence Display’d that “Boo is a Word that’s used in the North of Scotland to frighten crying children.”

In 18th century Scotland, bo, boo, and bu would latch onto plenty of words describing things that went bump in the night. According to the Dictionary of the Scots Language, the term bu-kow applied to hobgoblins and “anything frightful,” such as scarecrows. The word bogey, for “evil one,” would evolve into bogeyman. And there’s bu-man, or boo-man, a terrifying goblin that haunted man […] It was only a matter of time until ghosts got lumped into this creepy “muckle boo-man” crowd.

Which is too bad. Before the early 1800s, ghosts were believed to be eloquent, sometimes charming, and very often literary speakers. The spirits that appeared in the works of the Greek playwrights Euripides and Seneca held the important job of reciting the play’s prologue. The apparitions in Shakespeare’s plays conversed in the same swaying iambic pentameter as the living. But by the mid-1800s, more literary ghosts apparently lost interest in speaking in complete sentences. Take this articulate exchange with a specter from an 1863 Punch and Judy script:

Ghost: Boo-o-o-oh!
Punch: A-a-a-ah!
Ghost: Boo-o-o-o-oh!
Punch: Oh dear ! oh dear ! It wants’t me!
Ghost: Boo-o-o-o-oh!

He goes on to talk about the influence of spiritualism and traditions carried overseas by Celtic immigrants: “Scotland was a great exporter of people in the middle of the 1800s, and perhaps it’s thanks to the Scots-Irish diaspora that boo became every ghost’s go-to greeting.” For clickbait, it’s surprisingly informative! And A treatyse of the smyth whych that forged hym a new dame is available here, if you want the whole story; the “which that” in the title is striking.

By the way, if anyone’s interested in Media Cultures of the Russian 1990s: Inventing the Post-Soviet Public Sphere, edited by Maya Vinokour, it’s available for free download from Amherst College Press.

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2025 07:54 pm
I decided a little while ago to try one new recipe per week as far as I can manage.

Since then we have made:

Ina Garten's Black Bean Soup, which is basically a mirepoix+bell peppers plus a bunch of black beans, Southwestern seasoning, and vegetable broth. It's similar to a couple of our favorite soup recipes and also to just the way I make black beans for burrito filling, but it's good.

RecipeTinEats' Country Harvest Root Vegetable Soup, which is very simple: a huge quantity of root vegetable chunks (she gives weight of each and we followed this pretty closely, but this style of recipe is easy to substitute of course) and some alliums sauteed with thyme and curry powder for seasoning and then cooked in water till soft, with cream added at the end, pureed with an immersion blender. This was delicious and we will definitely be having it regularly.

RecipeTinEats' Ultra Lazy Creamy Chicken and Broccoli Pasta Bake. I love pasta casserole and want to try more recipes where you don't have to pre-cook the pasta. The pasta came out great and this was delicious, but it's a little rich for me. It's a bit like oven-baked mac and cheese with broccoli in it. The vibes are very creamy and fatty and it just feels extremely heavy as a main dish.

Trying a white bean soup recipe this week. (I like to make soup once a week at least in the fall and winter.)
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Wednesday, October 22nd, 2025 06:08 pm
https://bsky.app/profile/luketurner.bsky.social/post/3m35pa3ywek2h



[Image description: Bluesky post by Luke Turner reading "here is a pleasingly anti-fascist animal painted on the Hurricane of gay RAF pilot Ian Gleed", above a picture of Gleed in the cockpit of his plane pointing to the image on its side of a cartoon cat swatting at and destroying a swastika.]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Gleed (he may have been the fastest RAF pilot to ever make ace, in two days; he was only 26 when he was killed)

Further research by [personal profile] robynbender established that he actually had said antifascist cat painted on all his planes:

http://www.hatfield-herts.co.uk/aviation/gleed.html
Thursday, October 23rd, 2025 12:29 am
Shows: SGA
Rec Category: Action/Adventure
Characters: John Sheppard/Rodney McKay, Teyla Emmagan, Ronon Dex, Elizabeth Weir, Carson Beckett, Even Lorne
Categories: M/M
Words: 7860
Warnings: no AO3 warnings apply
Author on DW: [personal profile] mrshamill
Author's Website: MrsHamill on AO3
Link: Personal Hero (locked to AO3), and here on DW. Plus, there's an excellent podfic by [personal profile] librarychick_94 which is here, or here.
Why This Must Be Read: This is a bit gruelling, but it all works out in the end. It features a badass Rodney saving John on a mission-gone-wrong, pushing himself beyond what he'd thought possible to carry John, wounded, back to the stargate. The rest of the story is about rescuing Ronon and Teyla, and the aftermath of the mission when John regains consciousness and gradually pieces together how Rodney feels about him. Action, then feelings and romance, and it's an enjoyable read.

snippet of the fic under here )

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2025 09:26 am
It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!
Tuesday, October 21st, 2025 06:20 pm
 
This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Tuesday, October 21, to midnight on Wednesday, October 22. (8pm Eastern Time).

Poll #33750 Daily Check-in
This poll is closed.
Open to: Access List, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 29

How are you doing?

I am OK.
17 (58.6%)

I am not OK, but don't need help right now.
12 (41.4%)

I could use some help.
0 (0.0%)

How many other humans live with you?

I am living single.
11 (37.9%)

One other person.
13 (44.8%)

More than one other person.
5 (17.2%)




Please, talk about how things are going for you in the comments, ask for advice or help if you need it, or just discuss whatever you feel like.
 
Tags:
Tuesday, October 21st, 2025 08:13 pm
I wonder how many people have gotten about three hours of research deep into "How to break up with all your Google products" and given up because it's too hard or too much work. This has DEFINITELY happened to me AT LEAST three times in the last ten years.

I'm not even doing it today, I'm just reminded because there's YET ANOTHER post going around about Firefox updating to integrate AI and the hidden switches in about:config you have to use if you want to turn it off. The same post talks about switching your default search engine. In one of these previous times years ago I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo, but DuckDuckGo has been pushing AI more over time and it's really annoying so I've been meaning to switch and -

- at the bottom of the post it said we should all switch to Qwant or udm=14, and so I looked up both of those. Qwant is a French search engine that is aggressively integrating AI, but they are big on not storing and selling your data at least, which would've been nice if not for the llm. udm=14 is a string you can append in Google search that gives you the "old" (pre-AI) style results. (There are other search engines - I found a link to The Search Engine Map, which shows all the ones which give English results - but I feel this experience is representative.)

I'm weighing whether I want to switch browsers. I'm definitely mad enough to, but I hate switching browsers...
Tuesday, October 21st, 2025 04:20 pm

Posted by languagehat

Ilia Simanovsky has a Facebook post that begins (I’ve translated from his Russian and added links):

In the early 1930s, Georgy Shengeli recruited young poets—Arkady Steinberg, Arseny Tarkovsky, Semyon Lipkin, and Maria Petrovykh—to translate, thereby rendering a great service to Russian literature. For the Quadriga (as the friends called themselves), this was an opportunity to make a relatively comfortable living from literary work. Their own muses were not well adapted to Soviet reality: Lipkin was religious, Tarkovsky was criticized for mysticism, Steinberg was assailed for formalism […] For the rest of their lives, the Quadriga depended on translations for their daily bread and in part for self-expression — although, alas, they did not generally have the opportunity to deal with poets of the stature of Milton or Saadi.

In 1934, the aspiring translators Tarkovsky and Steinberg befriended the Montenegrin communist and poet Radule Stijenski, who had emigrated to the USSR seven years earlier. There was no doubt that Stijenski was a communist, but the world hadn’t suspected until then that he was a poet. The three of them immediately realized this was an opportunity. The revolutionary Montenegrin hadn’t yet appeared on the Soviet book market, and it could be expected that if things were approached in the right manner, one book after another would be published, with the author and translators rejoicing in the royalties.

True, there were certain obstacles. Neither Tarkovsky nor Steinberg knew Serbian, and the poet turned out to be so ungifted that even the Montenegrin flavor allowed no hope that anyone would agree to voluntarily read his poems. As it happened, however, these circumstances were actually advantages. Both translators had plenty of talent seeking an outlet, and there was no need to worry about the translations’ similarity to the original—after all, Stijenski had never published in his native language (and remains a phenomenon confined to Russian literature). And speaking of originals, the questions of whether they existed or not, and what we mean by “originals,” have not been entirely cleared up. […]

The translators’ work was easy and creative—unable to publish their own poems, Arkady and Arseny had a great time. It turned out so well that Soviet critics were delighted, and children loved it.

Unfortunately, it ended in lawsuits and the Gulag; I don’t have the heart to translate the rest of the story, but you can get the basics from the Arkady Steinberg link above. (I posted about Maria Petrovykh here, and Boris Dralyuk wrote about Georgy Shengeli here.)

Tuesday, October 21st, 2025 06:23 am
It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!

Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!
Monday, October 20th, 2025 09:19 pm
For our friend/former roommate M's birthday last weekend he decided to host a screening of the recent two-part Three Musketeers film adaptation, D'Artagnan and Milady.

Apparently this is the first French film adaptation in sixty years?! (which I did not know before looking at the Wikipedia just now) and I think we all had a vague conception that, being French, it was likelier to be moderately book-accurate than the run of modern English film adaptations. As it turns out this was foolish and prejudiced of us. French directors have just as much fun picking and choosing their favorite bits of The Three Musketeers and jettisoning the rest as anybody else.

That said: I think most of the changes are quite fun and interesting! Perhaps most notably, this is the most successful Milady Positive Musketeers adaptation that I've yet encountered. At least 50% of the plot changes are in service of ensuring that the Musketeers continue to see Milady as a primary antagonist while ensuring that we-the-viewers are tilting our heads like 'hmm ... but is she though ......'

Case in point: the biggest plot change is that suddenly we are very concerned about Huguenots. Athos now comes from a Protestant family and has an ardent Huguenot brother who is on the other side in La Rochelle; meanwhile the whole conflict is being escalated by Gaston of Orléans, who's the real villain of the piece. Why does Gaston of Orléans need to be the real villain of the piece? So that by comparison Cardinal Richelieu is not so bad, so that the schemes on which he's sending Milady are really not so bad, so actually --

more Milady changes, big spoilers )

The other two biggest plot changes are also very funny to me .... one is that the creative team were like "what do Porthos and Aramis have going on with the Milady plot? Well ... nothing really. So instead we are going to give them a comic b-plot about finding which hot soldier knocked up Aramis' feisty sister. Since when does Aramis have a feisty sister SINCE NOW." more spoilers )

The other is that midway through movie two they slide in a new semi-historical OC (semi-historical because he's based on this guy but sixty years too early) who immediately steals the show in every possible way; he drops the best one-liners in the film, saunters casually in to save the Musketeer's asses on at least two different occasions, and is also the hottest man on the screen. To be clear I love this, big ups to the New Improved Musketeer, absolutely in the spirit of Dumas Pere. It did not at all shock me to learn that the creative team were now angling to make a TV show with this guy as the lead. I hope it succeeds because I'd watch the hell out of it.

Other notes: the costuming is very brown in the way that is clearly intended to shout "historical accuracy!" while demonstrating the exact opposite. One of the friends attendant at the party is a historical costume hobbyist and she spent the whole evening glowering at the screen muttering 'where is everyone's LACE?' And then every so often someone would show up with a plasticky lace border around their neckline and we'd all shout 'LOOK! LACE!' which strangely did not soothe her.

ON the other hand, at one point a character in a fraught chase sequence is shown actually changing horses, which so delighted the horse-knowers among us that they immediately forgave Eva Green every implausible corset lugged straight off the set of Penny Dreadful.

On the third hand: no valets. WHEN will someone make a Three Musketeers adaptation with vales?
Monday, October 20th, 2025 05:58 pm
 
This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Monday, October 20, to midnight on Tuesday, October 21. (8pm Eastern Time).

Poll #33748 Daily Check-in
This poll is closed.
Open to: Access List, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 24

How are you doing?

I am OK.
11 (47.8%)

I am not OK, but don't need help right now.
12 (52.2%)

I could use some help.
0 (0.0%)

How many other humans live with you?

I am living single.
6 (25.0%)

One other person.
12 (50.0%)

More than one other person.
6 (25.0%)




Please, talk about how things are going for you in the comments, ask for advice or help if you need it, or just discuss whatever you feel like.
 
Tags:
Monday, October 20th, 2025 08:28 pm

Posted by morbane

There's a new post up on the Yuletide Admin comm regarding Pinch Hits & Mid Sign-Ups Notes. Please note that there may have been a delay between that post and this crosspost.

You can go through to DW to check the details:

Dreamwidth Post

If you have follow-up questions, they can be asked in the DW comment section using a DW login, OpenID with another login, or a signed anonymous comment.
Monday, October 20th, 2025 08:10 pm

Posted by languagehat

It’s time to play Biblical Crux once again! (Cf. Daughter of Greed, from 2019.) I’m reading Mikhail Shishkin’s 2010 Письмовник (‘Letter-writing manual,’ translated by Andrew Bromfield as The Light and the Dark) despite the concerns about Shishkin’s novels I expressed here, and so far I’m enjoying it (though already there’s a worrying amount of “Oh how I love you! I can’t live without you!” — Shishkin seems to think that’s pretty much what women’s mental life amounts to). In form the novel is epistolary, with alternating letters from a man and a woman, and at one point the woman writes: “Я была уродка из семейства плеченогих, крыложаберных и мшанок. А она — хоровод Манаимский с глазами, как озера Есевонские, что у ворот Батраббима” [I was a freak from the family of brachiopods, pterobranchs, and Bryozoa; she was the dance of Mahanaim, with eyes like the pools of Heshbon by the gate of Bath-rabbim]. I knew about Heshbon (though it’s annoying that Bath-rabbim redirects to that page, when there’s no mention of Bath-rabbim there), but what was this dance of Mahanaim?

It turns out that at the end of Song of Songs 6 or the beginning of 7, depending on the tradition, there’s an obscure passage about “the Shulamite” which doesn’t seem to have attracted many commentators. I haven’t done a deep dive, but the only discussion I’ve found that’s neither antiquated (like Thomas Robinson’s) nor amateur/popular (like Archie W. N. Roy PhD’s) is by J. Cheryl Exum, who just died last year; in her Song of Songs: A Commentary, pp. 225ff., she writes:

[6:13 (7:1 H)] The woman is asked to “return” or come back, presumably from the nut garden, and probably not simply, as Murphy proposes, to turn around and face the speaker. Some scholars understand the verb to refer to turning or whirling in a dance, but the verb šwb does not have this meaning. J. G. Wetzstein’s observations of nineteenth-century Syrian marriage customs, which included a sword dance in which the bride was surrounded by women and men in two groups, led some earlier interpreters to conclude that the woman is here performing a sword dance, but this anachronistic thesis is nowadays rejected (and according to Wetzstein a man might also dance the sword dance; “Remarks on the Song” by Wetzstein can be found in an appendix to Delitzsch’s commentary). Pope proposes reading šĕbî or šēbî for MT šûbî, and translates rather unpoetically, “leap, leap,” in order to produce a dancing Shulammite. The assumption that 6:13–7:6 [7:1–7 H] describes a dance rests primarily on the obscure phrase k/bimḥōlat hammaḥănāyim (“like/in the dance of two camps”) at the end of v. 13, for nothing in the following description of the woman indicates that she is dancing or that a group of people is watching her dance.

We encounter here the Song’s characteristic blurring of past and present: the
story of the visit to the nut garden is recounted as a past event, whereas the
woman is called back in the present, so that the description of her begun in 6:4
can continue. […]

In the reply in 6:13cd the speaker could be either the man, the woman, or the women of Jerusalem. If the women are the speakers who ask to gaze upon the woman in v. 13ab, then perhaps the man responds here in v. 13cd by asking why should they want to gaze as well. But how could they resist, since he has been tantalizing them (and the poem’s readers) by cataloguing her charms? More likely, in my opinion, v. 13ab is the man’s request to see and v. 13cd is the woman’s reply.

But what is the meaning of her reply? The reply begins with an interrogative particle, , which normally means “what?” but can occasionally have the sense of English “how” (in the sense of either “in what way?” or “how much, to what extent?”/“how [much]!”) or “why?” (see DCH V, 150b). […]

One reason the reply is hard to understand is that the comparison to meḥōlat hammaḥănāyim (here translated “the dance of two camps”) is difficult to fathom. If we understood its significance, it would be easier to determine whether the speaker demurs at or approves of the request to look. Will those who look be gazing in awe, as they would at something spectacular? Or will they be looking with curiosity or disdain (so Fox, who revocalizes and sees the reference to “a common dancer who roams the camps of the soldiers”; see also Gerleman)?

Commentators are generally agreed that v. 13cd [7:1cd H] is a comparison, though some read “in the dance” instead of “like the dance,” with a number of Hebrew manuscripts (e.g., Bloch and Bloch). A few see “the Mahanaim dance” as the answer to the question, “What would you see . . . ?” (Delitzsch, Krinetzki 1980, Rudolph; so also Ginsburg and Gordis, translating “like a dance to double choirs” and “the counter-dance” respectively), but this involves positing different speakers in 13c and 13d, and nowhere else in the Song is a couplet divided between speakers. Since the phrase begins with k (“like”) or, in some mss, b (“in”), it is difficult to see how it could be the answer to the question. It is preferable to take the entire phrase as a simple comparison (Murphy 1987: 117): “How you gaze upon the Shulammite as you would gaze upon the dance . . . !”

Meḥōlâ is a dance, though it may designate a performance that includes singing and musical accompaniment as well as dancing (Ginsburg). LXX and Vg., both of which render “choruses of camps,” may have had instrumental and vocal accompaniment in mind (so Pope), for both Greek choros and Latin chorus can refer to dancers and singers.

Mahanaim is the name of a town in Gilead near the Jabbok River. David camped there when he fled Absalom’s coup (2 Sam 17:24–27; 19:32 [33 H]), but Mahanaim is perhaps most famous as the place where Jacob was met by messengers or angels of God. His exclamation, “This is the camp of gods/God!” provides an etiology for the name Mahanaim (Gen 32:2 [3 H]). Some translations read the name here in our verse (e.g., NIV, “as on the dance of Mahanaim”), but as a place name it does not appear to have any significance for the meaning of the verse. As a common noun, the word refers to an encampment, either a military camp or a company of people (see DCH V, 222a). The form in MT is a dual, “two camps” or “a double company.” Perhaps maḥănāyîm, “a double company,” indicates a performance with antiphonal music, dancing, and singing, and possibly ritual games as well (Sasson 1973: 158; see also Pope). The mention of “the dance of two camps” does not mean that the woman is dancing. She does not refer to herself as dancing but rather compares the interest of the onlookers to the interest that the dance of two camps would excite (Murphy 1987: 118). The point of the comparison appears to be that beholding the woman is as mesmerizing as watching a spectacle that arrests one’s undivided attention. The woman is elsewhere compared to grand, awe-inspiring sights, such as Jerusalem and Tirzah, the sun, moon, and dawn (6:4, 10).

Note that the KJV has “the company of two armies,” and various other versions are listed here (scroll down to the end, at “‘the dance of the two companies’ This is a very uncertain phrase! Several theories have been postulated”); the modern Russian translation (7:1) has Shishkin’s “хоровод Манаимский,” while the Church Slavonic one (also 7:1) has “лики полкѡвъ” (something like ‘chorus of armies’). I trust someone out there has thoughts about all this.

Monday, October 20th, 2025 09:56 pm
The AWS outage is affecting DW notifications - some are delayed, some may be lost.

I only noticed I wasn't getting emails about my own comments after I'd already posted a bunch, so I hope they'll get delivered eventually! In the meantime it's probably useful to manually check back for new comments/replies.

(None of the websites and services I used today were noticeably affected otherwise, luckily. I hope everything has come back for everyone else.)
Monday, October 20th, 2025 06:37 am
It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!

Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!
Monday, October 20th, 2025 09:37 am
Except very occasionally if I can locate a spot that currently has reception.

So while that's going on, replies to anything may be delayed, but I'm reading when I can and distractions are still very much appreciated.

ETA: may now be fixed, I am deep in spoon debt and would like to be allowed to falldowngoboomnow.
Monday, October 20th, 2025 01:52 am
Dear Yulewriter,

thank you so much for writing a story for me!

I've requested and received all of these fandoms before - some for many, many years - and I love them all. Two of them are related to my current main fandom (Guardian) through the main actors, so I might mention them more on DW, but please don't think that means I want my other requests any less! Regardless of what we matched on, rest assured that you really can't go wrong here. Just the existence of new fic for any of these fandoms and characters will make me incredibly happy.

My AO3 account is [archiveofourown.org profile] Trobadora, and it's set to welcome treats.

Everything important is in the requests themselves, but if you'd like even more info, general likes etc., here you go:

General Preferences

Likes & Dislikes/DNWs )

Fandoms and characters

Jump directly to:绅探 | Detective L (TV): Luo Fei & Huo Wensi )

L'Oréal 'Time Engraver' Commercials: The Time Engraver, Worldbuilding )

Nantucket trilogy - S.M. Stirling: Kashtiliash & Raupasha )

Ring of Swords - Eleanor Arnason: Ettin Gwarha & Sanders Nicholas )

Starfire series - Various Authors: Zhaarnak'diaano | Zhaarnak'telmasa & Raymond Prescott )

长公主在上 | Eldest Princess On Top: Li Yunzhen & Gu Xuanqing )

1632 series - Various Authors: John Chandler Simpson )

Ahem. Lengthy as always. But I hope you'll find something inspiring in here, and most of all, that you'll have fun writing! :)
Sunday, October 19th, 2025 07:52 pm
This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Sunday, October 19, to midnight on Monday, October 20 (8pm Eastern Time).

Poll #33741 Daily check-in poll
This poll is closed.
Open to: Access List, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 30

How are you doing?

I am OK
15 (51.7%)

I am not OK, but don't need help right now
14 (48.3%)

I could use some help
0 (0.0%)

How many other humans live with you?

I am living single
9 (30.0%)

One other person
15 (50.0%)

More than one other person
6 (20.0%)



Please, talk about how things are going for you in the comments, ask for advice or help if you need it, or just discuss whatever you feel like.
Tags:
Sunday, October 19th, 2025 08:22 pm

Posted by languagehat

Ashifa Kassam reports for the Guardian on some research that falls very much in the remit of this blog:

When researchers asked people around the world to list every taboo word they could think of, the differences that emerged were revealing. The length of each list, for example, varied widely. While native English speakers in the UK and Spanish speakers in Spain rattled off an average of 16 words, Germans more than tripled this with an average of 53 words ranging from intelligenzallergiker, a person allergic to intelligence, to hodenkobold, or “testicle goblin”, someone who is being annoying. […]

“These words can be more offensive, or less, they can be loaded with negativity or with irony,” said Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, a cognitive scientist and professor at Madrid’s Nebrija University. “But taken together, they offer small snapshots of the realities of each culture.”

When it came to the differences between Spanish and German speakers, Andoni Duñabeitia had two theories. German, with its seemingly endless capacity to build new compound words, could simply offer more options, he said. “But it could also be that some people [speaking other languages] just don’t have these words readily available, or it’s harder for them when asked to produce them in a very neutral environment,” he said.

The study, which looked at taboo words in 13 languages from Serbian to Cantonese and Dutch, and across 17 countries, revealed other differences. The word “shit”, or its translated equivalent, for example, ranked among the most frequently used in several languages, including English, Finnish and Italian, but was not in the top rankings in French, Dutch, Spanish or German.

In contrast, words that sought to disparage women, such as “bitch,” turned up across cultures. “I think it comes down to the terribly sexist traditions of many countries,” said Andoni Duñabeitia, who was among the four dozen researchers involved with the 2024 study. “The vocabulary reflects the reality of societies where women have been mistreated, removed from everyday tasks and relegated to the background.”

Click that last link for the study (which is open access); thanks, Trevor!

Sunday, October 19th, 2025 01:28 pm
Dear Yuletide Writer,

Request 1: Killjoys (TV) - Pree
Request 2: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) - Edgin Darvis, Xenk Yendar
Request 3: The Residence (US TV 2025) - Cordelia Cupp
Request 4: Murderbot (TV) - Murderbot, Dr. Mensah, Dr. Gurathin, Pin-Lee (giver's choice)
Request 5: Deadloch (TV 2023) - Abby Matsuda, Dulcie Collins, Eddie Redcliffe (giver's choice)

Details inside )

Thanks!
shrift
Tags:
Sunday, October 19th, 2025 05:14 pm
I felt like iconing more kisses, so I signed up for [community profile] ships20in20 round 02 with Amidst a Snowstorm of Love. Behold, 23 icons, 12 of which are kisses. I had fun... :)

Teasers:


Amidst a Snowstorm of Love: 20+3 shippy icons of Yin Guo and Lin Yiyang )

Every single comment is treasured. All icons shareable! Concrit welcome. Check out my resource post for makers of textures and brushes I use.

Previous icon posts:

Sunday, October 19th, 2025 06:38 am
It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!

Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!
Sunday, October 19th, 2025 09:07 am
I very very much appreciate everyone who has been leaving me questions and comments here, and if anyone would like to add more they would still be extremely welcome.
Saturday, October 18th, 2025 06:05 pm
This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Saturday to midnight on Sunday (8pm Eastern Time).


Poll #33738 Daily poll
This poll is closed.
Open to: Access List, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 28

How are you doing?

I am okay
13 (46.4%)

I am not okay, but don't need help right now
15 (53.6%)

I could use some help.
0 (0.0%)

How many other humans are you living with?

I am living single
10 (35.7%)

One other person
13 (46.4%)

More than one other person
5 (17.9%)



Please, talk about how things are going for you in the comments, ask for advice or help if you need it, or just discuss whatever you feel like.
Tags:
Saturday, October 18th, 2025 03:58 pm
I wrote yuletide promo posts (or just recommendations for two movies I love):

2024's Babygirl (office romance with age gaps and adultery, but in a tender way) and

2013's Inside Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac! The Coen Brothers! Mid-century American folk music! A cat! Llewyn Davis walking so Patrick Zweig could run!)
Saturday, October 18th, 2025 01:49 pm

Posted by languagehat

Frequent commenter cuchuflete writes:

There is an expression heard with some frequency in these parts, “little by slowly”. When I first heard it a quarter century back, it was disconcerting to my Midwestern/Middle Atlantic ears. It, or more aptly I, have now become naturalized and it is ‘normal’ to my ears. Same goes for my Nottingham raised lady. We both savor it.

Last week I googled it. Top of results page was some AI slop declaring it a mistaken form of little by little. Little by slowly has additional meaning, whatever its origins. […] I haven’t been able to find anything about the origin of the phrase.

He cites a Stephen King use: “Now after reading this I’m going to step up my routine, little by slowly (as we say heah in Maine) to improve my distance.” Anybody know anything about the history of this quaint phrase?

Saturday, October 18th, 2025 01:31 pm
It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!
Saturday, October 18th, 2025 07:53 am
https://bsky.app/profile/rahaeli.bsky.social/post/3m3eovdxmwk2z

Okay! This is going to take a while so I had to finish some stuff first, but: Why Da Pope Fucking Up Opus Dei Is A Huge Fucking Deal: a thread

I believe the proposed reforms are currently leaked/not confirmed yet, but this is fascinating.

(ETA: the previous round of Pope-exegesis.)
Friday, October 17th, 2025 06:12 pm
This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Friday to midnight on Saturday (8pm Eastern Time).


Poll #33736 Daily poll
This poll is closed.
Open to: Access List, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 26

How are you doing?

I am okay
13 (52.0%)

I am not okay, but don't need help right now
12 (48.0%)

I could use some help.
0 (0.0%)

How many other humans are you living with?

I am living single
9 (34.6%)

One other person
12 (46.2%)

More than one other person
5 (19.2%)




Please, talk about how things are going for you in the comments, ask for advice or help if you need it, or just discuss whatever you feel like.
Tags:
Friday, October 17th, 2025 08:18 pm

Posted by languagehat

I was reading a story by Carolyn Brown in our local paper (how could I resist the title “History told through hats”?) that began:

In the 1870s, the largest palm leaf hat factory in the world, which produced hundreds of thousands of hats each year, was based in Amherst. A new history exhibit is celebrating Amherst’s connections to millinery (hatmaking) in venues around the town.

And I suddenly realized I didn’t know where milliner came from. So I headed for the OED, where I found (entry revised 2002):

1. † With capital initial. A native or inhabitant of Milan, a city in northern Italy. Obsolete.

1449 That every Venician, Italian..Milener..and all other Merchants straungiers..paye to you..vi s. viii d.
Rolls of Parliament vol. V. 144/2
[…]

1604 You knowe we Millaners loue to strut vpon Spanish leather.
T. Dekker & T. Middleton, Honest Whore i. ii. 32
[…]

1871 Mediolanum, the old Roman city of the ‘half-fleecy sow’, in process of time, became Milano, the city of milaners or milliners.
Ladies’ Repository September 163/2

2. Originally: a seller of fancy wares, accessories, and articles of (female) apparel, esp. such as were originally made in Milan. Subsequently: spec. a person who designs, makes, or sells women’s hats.

1530 Paied to the Mylloner for certeyne cappes trymmed..withe botons of golde.
in N. H. Nicolas, Privy Purse Expences Henry VIII (1827) 33
[…]

a1616 No Milliner can so fit his customers with Gloues.
W. Shakespeare, Winter’s Tale (1623) iv. iv. 193
[…]

1713 The Milliner must be thoroughly versed in Physiognomy; in the Choice of Ribbons she must have a particular regard to the Complexion.
J. Gay in Guardian 1 September 2/1
[…]

1884 A black butterfly is unknown to entomologists, but at present is a favourite insect with milliners.
West. Daily Press 29 May 3/7

1911 There is your public, the readers of the Post—shop-clerks, stenographers,..drummers, milliners.
H. S. Harrison, Queed 151

1986 Her life at home with Mother, who had, surprisingly, been a designer of hats and a court milliner.
A. Brookner, Misalliance x.153

So like jeans coming from Genoa, milliner comes from Milan. I had no idea! (If you’re wondering, as I was, about the odd-looking Queed, Wikipedia has you covered: “Queed is a 1911 novel by Henry Sydnor Harrison, which was the fourth-best selling book in the United States for 1911, and is considered one of Harrison’s best novels, along with 1913’s V.V.’s Eyes.” So many best-sellers lying, covered with dust, in oblivion…)

Friday, October 17th, 2025 04:01 pm
I'm sure everyone but me has already seen this, but I have to share it anyway - this is amazing!



Background info
Saturday, October 18th, 2025 12:39 am
Shows: SGA
Rec Category: Action/Adventure
Characters: John Sheppard, Rodney McKay, Teyla Emmagan, Ronon Dex, Radek Zelenka
Categories: Gen
Words: 3176
Warnings: no AO3 warnings apply
Author on DW: n/a
Author's Website: ltlj on AO3
Link: Inundation on DW, Inundation on AO3 (locked to AO3)
Why This Must Be Read: in this "mission gone wrong" the team, plus a Marine, Radek, and some archaeologists, end up stranded on top of a partly-submerged old city, the Gate (and the jumper) now underwater after a mudslide and flood. It was written for an SGA flashfic challenge "Strange New Worlds and Alien Geography", and while at first the worst they seem to be facing is dampness and discomfort, the world proves to have wildlife that makes things interesting. This is lots of fun, with amusing grumpy banter, John in peril, and a great alien encounter.

snippet of the fic under here )

Friday, October 17th, 2025 09:41 am
that would be greatly appreciated.

Currently trying to support a friend in a Very Bad Situation and it's desperately anxiety-inducing and my brain is trying to eat itself, which also makes me less useful as support, which is bad.

So if anyone would like to ask or discuss anything about Prophet or Dark Souls or IWTV or climbing or, you know, any of the somewhat cheering topics I sometimes ramble about, PLEASE DO. "More of a comment than a question" questions also very welcome.

I cannot guarantee replies in a timely or consistent manner (because of the Situation and also the bad state of my brain) but it would be deeply appreciated nonetheless.
Friday, October 17th, 2025 08:00 am
It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!
Thursday, October 16th, 2025 07:57 pm
This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Thursday, October 16, to midnight on Friday, October 17 (8pm Eastern Time).

Poll #33733 Daily check-in poll
This poll is closed.
Open to: Access List, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 28

How are you doing?

I am OK
12 (42.9%)

I am not OK, but don't need help right now
16 (57.1%)

I could use some help
0 (0.0%)

How many other humans live with you?

I am living single
12 (44.4%)

One other person
11 (40.7%)

More than one other person
4 (14.8%)



Please, talk about how things are going for you in the comments, ask for advice or help if you need it, or just discuss whatever you feel like.
Tags:
Thursday, October 16th, 2025 03:11 pm

Posted by languagehat

Erin Maglaque, last seen here in 2023 discussing Aldus Manutius, reviews several books on the Renaissance — Nine Hundred Conclusions by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (edited and translated by Brian P. Copenhaver), The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Sublime Language by Edward Wilson-Lee, and Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age by Ada Palmer — for the LRB (Vol. 47 No. 18 · 9 October 2025; archived), and it’s full of good things. Some excerpts:

Giovanni Pico​, count of Mirandola and Concordia, was 23 when he travelled to Rome to become an angel. It was 1487. Christendom’s most important priests would be there; the cleverest theologians would debate him. The pope would watch. Pico was going to dazzle them all. He planned to begin with a poetic, densely allusive speech, which almost no one would understand; then he would make nine hundred pronouncements, each more cryptic than the last, e.g. ‘251. The world’s craftsman is a hypercosmic soul’ and ‘385. No angel that has six wings ever changes’ and ‘784. Doing magic is nothing other than marrying the world’ and ‘395. Whenever we don’t know the feature that influences a prayer that we pray, we should fall back on the Lord of the Nose.’ In an ecstatic trance he was going to leave behind his worthless, handsome body and ascend a mystical ladder to join with the godhead, the transcendence of his soul so absolute that his body might accidentally die. This was the Death of the Kiss. […]

Pico’s life touched much of what made the Renaissance the Renaissance. There were the people: Lorenzo de’ Medici, a Borgia pope (Alexander VI), Savonarola. There was the arcane classical scholarship: before Pico, no Christian had studied the Jewish Kabbalah. There was his reputed physical beauty: in paintings he looked like one of Botticelli or Raphael’s angels, pale and androgynous, with intricate golden curls. There was his immersion in the utterly bizarre world of Florentine Neoplatonism. He was friends with Marsilio Ficino, who taught his students to hallucinate by chewing laurel leaves while playing the lyre, who dressed up in a cape made of feathers so that he could be ‘a true Orpheus’. There were love affairs with men and women; there was intrigue and – finally – murder.

The speech with which Pico planned to open his performance in Rome is popularly known as the Oration on the Dignity of Man. The text, with its emphasis on human freedom and the intrinsic value of the individual, has been taught to generations of students as the canonical expression of the Italian Renaissance; it was ‘one of the noblest legacies of that cultural epoch’, according to the 19th-century historian Jacob Burckhardt, who did much to give the book its status. And yet Pico’s writings, as Brian Copenhaver has persuasively shown, are in essence medieval. […]

Pico never delivered his Oration. And it turns out that this most famous speech of the Renaissance isn’t really about the dignity of man at all. It’s about destroying personhood in pursuit of a melting with the One. It’s a script for mystical self-annihilation, the opposite of a humanist argument for man’s distinction in a secularising age. The Oration contravenes the very idea of human possibility that we think the Renaissance is about – yet we think of the Renaissance this way partly because of a centuries-long misreading of it. In which case, does Pico really belong to the Renaissance? Or is our whole idea of the Renaissance hopelessly flimsy, nothing but a collection of fantasies about what it means to be modern and human?

Pico was born in 1463 in Mirandola, near Modena, to a noble family. According to family legend, a circle of flame appeared above his mother’s bed. Pico was a child prodigy in Latin and Greek, with a miraculous memory. As a young teen he went to Bologna to study canon law, and then roved the university towns of Italy and France seeking ever more esoteric knowledge. In Padua, he learned Hebrew and the philosophy of Averroes from the Jewish scholar Elia del Medigo. In Rome, he studied Arabic with the Sicilian Jew who went by the beautifully delusional name of Flavius Mithridates and who translated the Kabbalah into Latin for Pico (he was eventually arrested for murder, heresy and sodomy). When Pico arrived in Florence in 1484, Ficino had just finished, at that very hour, his translation of Plato. Ficino had a theory that the meeting was divinely ordained, and they argued over which of them was Plato reincarnated.

Pico was in his early twenties, tall, good-looking and a genius. He was also rich. He ate off silver plate. His hubris was staggering even in an age and a city known for its swagger. Pico thought he could prove that all of the world’s philosophical and religious traditions were, in fact, one. He would show the secret concord between Aristotle and Plato, long debated but never demonstrated; and he would go further, to show that these ancient philosophies shared essential truths with the Kabbalah and Christian scripture. He read everybody – the Christian theologians of the Middle Ages, the Arabic philosophers, the Greeks, the Platonists, the Kabbalists, the Zoroastrians – but defended no particular school, and extracted the best from each. In 1486, he published his Nine Hundred Conclusions, he wrote the Oration, and he set off for Rome. He also issued a challenge, printed at the back of the Conclusions. ‘The Conclusions will not be disputed until after Epiphany. Meanwhile they will be published in all the schools of Italy. And if any philosopher or theologian from the furthest parts of Italy wants to come and debate, this lord himself – the one who will dispute – promises to pay travel expenses.’

In the Oration, Pico mapped the path to mystical absorption in the godhead. […] His speech was intended as high Renaissance performance art, but that’s not to say it was secular, humanist or modern – rather, it was profoundly weird.

Most of the Conclusions are elliptic; Pico thought secrecy was the point. To put their meaning on the surface would be to ‘cast pearls before swine’. Some in his audience might recognise which were drawing on Aquinas, or on Plato, or Aristotle, or Plotinus, but no one would be able to follow the compressed, allusive trains of logic derived from the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides, or Pico’s references to the foundational text of the Kabbalah, the Sefer ha-Zohar. More than six decades ago, Frances Yates wrote that Pico’s Conclusions are ‘absolutely fundamental … for the whole Renaissance’, and yet it is only now, with the appearance of Copenhaver’s edition and translation, that we have a modern, usable English version of the text. Pico’s enigmatic theses come in at under 17,000 words; Copenhaver uses 158,000 to explain them. This is a feat of scholarship. If you wanted to discover exactly why Pico included the propositions ‘253. Every soul sharing in Vulcan’s intellect is sown in the moon’ or ‘254. From the foregoing conclusion I gather why all Germans are stoutly built and pale in colour,’ Copenhaver makes it possible. (Together they constitute a joke, drawn from a web of references, including to Proclus, Porphyry, Caesar and Tacitus, about astrological influences on geography and character.) But it’s also possible to read the Conclusions in a trance-like state, as a swine grubbing at pearls, perhaps. Piled up they begin to make a certain aphoristic sense […]

Edward Wilson-Lee’s The Grammar of Angels takes up Pico’s interest in ecstatic states. It’s not a biography of Pico (too bad, since we could do with a fresh one in English) but a wide-ranging cultural history of mesmeric sound, from Plato to the Renaissance, loosely organised around Pico’s work. We are reminded of Plato’s just-so story from Phaedrus. Those who encountered the music and dance of the Muses were so enraptured that they forgot to eat, and subsequently died. The Muses transformed them into cicadas, creatures which make hypnotic, incantatory noise from birth to death. And then there is Poliziano’s libretto for Orfeo, an opera which ends with a group of bloodthirsty women tearing Orpheus limb from limb while chanting nonsensical dithyrambs to Dionysus. Wilson-Lee argues that Pico was intellectually intrepid, asking questions about the nature of the created universe – and about how to alter the fabric of one’s own existence – that others hadn’t dared ask; that his experiments with self-annihilation, especially by means of manic speech, magic and music, were audacious beyond those of his most imaginative contemporaries. But Pico himself proves elusive, and flickers in and out of view.

The quest for dissolution led Pico to the Kabbalah. […] The Kabbalah offered its own magic. When God created the universe, he spoke Hebrew. Hebrew letters – their shapes, lines, correlation with numbers – could form the subject of mystical contemplation: ‘388. There are no letters in the whole Law that do not exhibit secrets of the ten numberings in forms, ligatures, separations, twisting, straightness, defect, excess, smallness, greatness, crowning, closing, opening and sequence.’

It wasn’t surprising that, to the pope, the Conclusions stank of heresy. Pico had ‘dredged up the errors of pagan philosophers long since abolished’ and the pope asked him to defend his propositions in front of a commission. Pico was furious. He published an Apology which was nothing of the sort. […] ‘I must change my way of speaking,’ Pico sneered. ‘I’m talking to barbarians, and as the proverb neatly puts it, stammerers understand only those who stammer.’ This was not the wisest strategy when being investigated for heresy. The Conclusions was the first book to be banned by the papacy, more than fifty years before the creation of the Index of Prohibited Books. […]

In Inventing the Renaissance, Ada Palmer tries to identify what was distinctive about the period. Or, as she puts it, what was the ‘X factor’ that explains the transformations we perceive as unique to the age? She combines multiple approaches, circling through the period fifteen times, exploring the way 19th and 20th-century historians created myths of Renaissance exceptionalism; the way contemporary historians have systematically taken apart these myths; the way individual life stories, such as those of Alessandra Strozzi, or Machiavelli, or Michelangelo, or Poliziano, trouble some of the central assumptions underlying the idea of a Renaissance golden age; and – in the most persuasive section of the book – she examines the way debates about Renaissance humanism help us see what, exactly, was new in Italy in the 15th century.

By the end we are not left with much of a Renaissance at all. Palmer wants to ‘scrape off the glitter’, and she does. Her insistence that historians are always in the process of making history – her shorthand for historiographical debate is ‘the History Lab’ – works to undermine any sense that the distinctiveness of the Renaissance can be attributed to one big idea, such as the invention of double-entry bookkeeping, or capitalism, or individualism, or classicising art, or atheism. The Italian Renaissance had nothing that medieval Italy didn’t already possess: ‘All the key qualities were there, currents of trade, art, thought, finance and statecraft, but add some Ever-So-Much-More-So and the intensity increases, birthing an era great and terrible.’ Great, because of all the art and glitter; terrible, because of the endless violence and instability across the peninsula.

Palmer makes the historiography intelligible; she introduces a wide range of characters and anecdotes and lesser-known details, and because of this, the book is a useful introduction to the period. But I found it unbearable to read. The writing is often patronising and silly: from the epithets (calling the Florentine Priori ‘Nine Dudes in a Tower’) to the made-up dialogue (‘Machiavelli: WTF?!?!’) to the use of the word ‘badass’ to describe the mercenary Federico da Montefeltro. Sometimes she is simply confusing, as when she tries to ‘ground’ us in historical time by mapping Renaissance chronology onto modern, so we get unhelpful sentences such as ‘Pope Paul’s death in 1471 = 1971 saw the rise of Sixtus IV (Battle Pope!), so the political turmoil around the Pazzi Conspiracy corresponds to Watergate’ – which prompts a surreal image of a Medici bleeding to death on the steps of a DC hotel. There are many, many exclamation marks (Michelangelo’s David is ‘super naked!!!’) and dollar signs and theatrically spelled words (‘The Renaissance was … loooooong’; scholasticism was ‘increeeeeeeeedibly booooooring’ – I counted the vowels). There are spoiler alerts for things that happened five hundred years ago. There are flights of fancy that veer into farce, as when Palmer imagines Machiavelli weeping at Florence acquiring Unesco protected status and then imagines herself weeping for Machiavelli weeping. Throughout, she writes about herself in a cloying third person, most notably in a chapter titled ‘Why did Ada Palmer start studying the Renaissance?’ Readers surely deserve less excruciating forms of enthusiasm for the subject. […]

When humanists wrote about revivifying ancient virtue, did they really mean it? Or were they merely jobbing scholars who would write whatever their patrons asked them to? Was it all just glitter? ‘Would we want to know what was in their hearts,’ Palmer asks, and if we could know, would it matter? She encourages us to pay attention to Ficino’s account of Cosimo de’ Medici’s dying days, as related to his grandson Lorenzo. On his deathbed Cosimo had called Ficino to his side: ‘Even till the last day when he departed from this world of shadows to go to the light, he devoted himself to the acquisition of knowledge. For when we had read together from Plato’s book … [he] soon quitted this life.’ Cosimo died listening to Ficino reading from Plato. Maybe there isn’t a there to the Renaissance, no single ‘X factor’, but the orchestration of such a scene – in life and in literature – is distinctive; it is the turning of experience into a particular kind of art.

I confess I have little tolerance for aristocrats and rich kids who think they’re entitled to do anything they want (or of writing that is patronizing and silly), but I do love this kind of examination of intertwining lives and what helps define a cultural period. And Nine Hundred Conclusions is a great title; it should perhaps be published together with R.A. Lafferty’s Nine Hundred Grandmothers.