Literary Diversions
I am avoiding work-related email, so here is a bit of poetry in response to the latest meme going around:
From the Song of Songs
How is your beloved better than another,
O fairest of maidens?
How is your beloved better than another
That you adjure us so?
My beloved is clear-skinned and ruddy,
Preeminent among ten thousand.
His head is finest gold,
His locks are curled
And black as a raven.
His eyes are like doves
By watercourses,
Bathed in milk,
Set by a brimming pool.
His cheeks are like beds of spices,
Banks of perfume
His lips are like lilies;
They drip flowing myrrh.
His hands are rods of gold,
Studded with beryl;
His belly a tablet of ivory,
Adorned with sapphires.
His legs are like marble pillars
Set in sockets of fine gold.
He is majestic as Lebanon,
Stately as the cedars.
His mouth is delicious
And all of him is delightful.
Such is my beloved,
Such is my darling,
O maidens of Jerusalem!
(That's the latest JPS translation -- every time I am asked to spontaneously come up with poetry, it seems, I come up with something that's not in English.)
And here is my version of the ubiquitous LJ interests meme. Is it just me, or is every single person with "Judaism" among their interests getting it as one of their selections here?
LJ Interests meme results
Enter your LJ user name, and 10 interests will be selected from your interest list.
From the Song of Songs
How is your beloved better than another,
O fairest of maidens?
How is your beloved better than another
That you adjure us so?
My beloved is clear-skinned and ruddy,
Preeminent among ten thousand.
His head is finest gold,
His locks are curled
And black as a raven.
His eyes are like doves
By watercourses,
Bathed in milk,
Set by a brimming pool.
His cheeks are like beds of spices,
Banks of perfume
His lips are like lilies;
They drip flowing myrrh.
His hands are rods of gold,
Studded with beryl;
His belly a tablet of ivory,
Adorned with sapphires.
His legs are like marble pillars
Set in sockets of fine gold.
He is majestic as Lebanon,
Stately as the cedars.
His mouth is delicious
And all of him is delightful.
Such is my beloved,
Such is my darling,
O maidens of Jerusalem!
(That's the latest JPS translation -- every time I am asked to spontaneously come up with poetry, it seems, I come up with something that's not in English.)
And here is my version of the ubiquitous LJ interests meme. Is it just me, or is every single person with "Judaism" among their interests getting it as one of their selections here?
LJ Interests meme results
- baking:
This is less an interest than a necessity, because I enjoy grain products and I have reasonably high standards for them. I am a good baker of bread, cakes, and pies, but my true love is things which come in a cookie-like form (including bar cookies, drop cookies, rolled cookies, refrigerator cookies, and yeast-raised sweet rolls because what the heck). My second favorite thing to bake is probably the quickbread/muffin genre (especially sweet, but also savory). Recipes are welcome. - criticism:
The ideal gerund for the verb "to experience." The best game in town. The most fun anyone can have without chocolate, sex, and/or prayer. Argument for the sake of heaven. - dorothy l. sayers:
Quite possibly my favorite novelist ever. - fandom:
Matthew Arnold had a point here: "[B]ooks and reading may enable a man to construct a kind of semblance of it in his own mind, a world of knowledge and intelligence in which he may live and work; this is by no means an equivalent, to the artist, for the nationally diffused life and thought of the epochs of Sophocles or Shakspeare, but, besides that it may be a means of preparation for such epochs, it does really constitute, if many share in it, a quickening and sustaining atmosphere of great value." - hellenism:
This does not refer to Greek culture as such, but to the multicultural milieu of the wild and woolly Hellenistic world (everything conquered by Hephaiston's boyfriend) as it stretched into the later years of the Roman Empire. In their time, Hellenistic ideas wove themselves into every religion and people from India to Iberia; now, a few thousand years later, their impact has expanded to cover most of the world. I am not quite a classicist, but I can't help admiring that. - judaism:
In its rabbinic form, an improbably functional fusion of Ancient Near Eastern devotion, Hellenistic philosophy, prophetic nostalgia, and emergency inventiveness, buoyed up by constant argument and leavened with humor (except for Pesach, when we use egg whites). What I do for a living, in the strictest sense of that phrase; what I am trying to do for a living, in the more traditional sense. - metaphysics:
What happens when we don't exclude religion from science -- and one of the nicest concepts borrowed from Hellenistic culture. - piyyutim:
A Greek loan word borrowed into Hebrew to describe a series of horrifically dense and allusive poems written (mostly) in Aramaic by people whose native language was (again, mostly) something else altogether. Naturally, I adore them. If I had the language skills, I would try to write them or at least translate them semi-adequately. - storytelling:
What makes humans human. In my world, this is difficult to distinguish from items 2, 4, and 7 above. - tolkien:
Quite possibly my favorite prose epicist ever. Insane in precisely my kind of way.
Enter your LJ user name, and 10 interests will be selected from your interest list.