Bernie for President 2020

This is not a joke. I'm completely serious: I'm endorsing Bernie Sanders for President in 2020, and I'm doing it now, before the primaries even start.

I've said many times on this blog that I hate Bernie Sanders, and I meant it. And I still hate him. I've blamed him for Trump being elected, and I stand by that. I said back in 2015 that Bernie was the only man who could get Donald Trump elected President, and by God, Bernie did it. I said that the math was clear back in March 2016 that Hillary had it sewed up, just like Rachel Maddow and Barack Obama, and we were right, and I'm not going to discuss it because I can do math, but I don't know how to teach math. And also because most of the people who say they want to debate this don't want to debate, or learn, a goddam thing.

I'm endorsing Bernie this time because I believe that if we don't nominate him this time, he will get Donald Trump re-elected. Because he has a hard core of fanatical, hard-core, unreasonable followers. When Bernie and the Bernie Bros didn't get what they wanted in 2016, they behaved like spoiled babies and wrecked everything.

I do not see the slightest sign that they learned a goddam thing from the experience.

Let me be clear: I'm not talking about the majority of people who voted for Bernie in the 2016 primaries. I'm not talking about the majority of people who put Bernie bumper stickers on their cars. Most of those people were reasonable enough to get behind Hillary before Bernie did, and in a much, much more enthusiastic and meaningful way than Bernie ever did, even though many of them hate her intensely. Even most of the people left of center who hated Hillary still understood that the differences between Hillary and Bernie were tiny compared to the differences between any Democratic candidate and Trump. They were able to grasp the concept of party unity. And the vast majority of people who are supporting Bernie now are going to vote for any Democratic candidate rather than Trump.

I'm talking about the more than 1 million people who wrote Bernie in. I'm talking about the Bernie Bros who didn't vote in November 2016, or voted for Stein or Johnson or Trump, and I'm talking about Bernie, who either can't do the math, or pretended that he couldn't, and honestly, which would be worse?

I'm talking about people who can't be reasoned with.

It will be much more effective to just give these idiots what they want, and unite around Bernie, than it would be to nominate anybody else, and try to get the Bernie Bros to unite around them, and to get support from Bernie himself which would be more than half-assed.

Bernie is far and away the strongest candidate we have for President in 2020, because he has that hard core of idiots who will screw it up for anybody else, exactly the same way they screwed it up for Hillary in 2016, and none of the other candidates has a hard core like that. And he has a hard core like that because he's like that. But he still will be a far, far better President than Trump. Biden or Bloomberg would be much worse presidents than Bernie, and they would still be much, much better Presidents than Trump. Almost any Republican Senator, Congressperson, governor or mayor in the US would be a far, far better President than Trump, but it looks like they're going to nominate Trump for a 2nd term, so this is no time to fuck around. Bernie is the best bet to stop Trump, so I'm 100% behind Bernie. And if I'm in a place where a lot of swing voters can hear me, I'll wear my very best shit-eating grin and pretend to love Bernie, because this is no time to fuck around. (The readership of this blog is very close to 100% Leftist.)

It's easier, it's smarter, to just give Bernie and his Bros want they want. They don't understand the concept of party unity, but enough of the rest of us do. Yeah, it's sort of paradoxical and ironic. Try to enjoy the irony, if you hate Bernie too.

And again, just to be perfectly clear: when I say "the rest of us," I'm including the great majority of people who support Bernie, the great majority of people for whom Bernie would be the first choice. I'm talking about the vast majority of people to the left of center, who understand how important it is that Donald Trump not be re-elected.

Macrobius and the Saturnalia

Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius is known for writing 2 works in the 5th century: Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis, the Commentary on the Dream of Scipio; and the Saturnalia, the work which will primarily concern us here. A third work, De verborum Graeci et Latini differentiis vel societatibus, Differences and Similariites Between Greek and Latin Verbs, has been lost except for fragments.

Macrobius tells his readers that Latin is not his first language. Therefore it is safe to assume that he was not a native of the city of Rome. Where exactly he did come from, which positions he held in the Empire, and his exact dates are matters of considerable controversy. It is safe to assume that he was among the upper class of consuls, prefects and proconsuls. He may have been praetorian prefect of Italy in the year 430, or he may been proconsul of Africa in 410, or he may have been neither. It is fairly safe to assume that his first language was Greek.

The Saturnalia was a week-long Roman holiday celebrated around the winter solstice. In Macrobius' Saturnalia, learned gentlemen gather during the Saturnalia in the year 383 or earlier, and discuss matters of history, literature and philosophy, placing the work in the genre extending back to Plato's Symposium. Just as in the Symposium and other works, the tone of the discussion in the Saturnalia varies greatly, depending to a certain extent on factors such as the time of day, how much the characters have had to drink, whether they're being interrupted by other party guests, and so forth. Those involved in the learned discussion include Praetextatus; Symmachus, famed editor of Livy, who pleaded that pagan altars not be removed by Christian Emperors; Nicomachus Flavianus, who edited Livy alongside Symmachus; someone who is either Avienus the translator of Aratea or Avianus the writer of fables, although called Avienus in either case; and Servius, here a very young man, later famous as the commentator of Vergil.

Vergil is discussed far more than any other topic. Roman history and Roman festivals are discussed with great dignity. An example of some less dignified discussion has to do with the effect of the consumption of food and drink on people's appearance.

Estimates as to when the Saturnalia was written range from ca400 to ca435 or later. The earlier the date, the more likely it is that Macrobius was writing about people he knew personally, and perhaps even describing an actual event in his life. The later the date, the more likely it is that Macrobius is delivering a nostalgic vision of a life before the Christianization of the Empire, a time he knows only by hearsay. It is remarkable that Christianty is mentioned nowhere in the Saturnalia.

For scholars, the Saturnalia is, like Aulus Gellius' Noctes Attica, Quintilian's Rhetores Latini Minores, Severus' commentary on Vergil and Isidore's Etymologiae, an immensely valuable source of passages of ancient literature which are otherwise lost or controversially attested. It also holds a natural interest for those studying the last days of "pagan" Rome.

6 9th-century manuscripts of the Saturnalia survive, and hundreds of manuscripts altogether.

Ammianus

Ammianus Marcellinus, ca 330-395, was a Roman soldier and historian. The 31 books of his Res Gestae originally covered Roman history in the period from AD 96 to 378. The first 13 books have been lost. Books 14-31 cover the period from 353 to 378. Some have speculated that originally there were an additional 5 books, 32-36.

Most of the surviving part of Ammianus' history describes Rome's armies defending the Empire's borders in great battles from Gaul to Persia. The passages describing the city of Rome portray it mostly as decadent and declining. The last surviving book, book 31, describes the Huns (before the birth of Attila) besieging Constantinople -- unsuccessfully. But with hindsight, the tone of the entire history is quite ominous. I cannot honestly say how much this is due to my knowing, as Ammianus did not know, that the city of Roman, and the western half of the Empire, was within a century of collapsing.

Ammianus saw himself as continuing the work of Tacitus, who wrote a history of Rome from the death of the Emperor Augustus, AD 14, to the death of the Emperor Domition in 96. Tacitus had seen himself as continuing the work of Livy, who wrote a history from the legendary beginnings of Rome until the time of Augustus. However, great portions of the work of all three authors have disappeared, so that we can no longer read this history of Rome in one continual sweep, from the end of the Trojan war until near the end of the Western Empire, as it was intended to be read. That could be done for probably only a couple of centuries, as it seems that it was in the late sixth century AD that large parts of these histories, along with much of the rest of Classical Latin literature, began to disappear, whether from the destruction of wars, or from indifference on the part of readers, or the decisions of scribes to copy this text and therefore not that one, or from the disdain of Christians for "pagan" accounts of history, or what have you.

Today, the text of Ammianus derives from the fragments of a 9th-century manuscript, M, another 9th-century manuscript, V, which has been shown to have been copied from M, and 14 manuscripts of the 15th century, all of which have been shown to be copies of V.

Few if any readers would place Ammianus in the same class as Livy and Tacitus as a writer. Livy and Tacitus are justly celebrated as great prose stylists. Latin was not Ammianus' first language, and it is therefore not surprising that his work is rarely praised on purely stylistic grounds. As a recorder of historical events, however, some have held him in very high esteem. For example, Edward Gibbon, who in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, when he reaches the point in his own narrative where Amminaus' history ends, says of him:

"It is not without the most sincere regret that I must now take leave of an accurate and faithful guide, who has composed the history of his own times without indulging the prejudices and passions which usually affect the mind of a contemporary."

Not everyone would agree with Gibbon that Ammianus is unusually unprejudiced, and, let's not dance around the issue, atheists tend to praise him more highly than Christians. Ammianus was not a Christian; seems to have put little stock into religion of any kind; served in the army under the Emperor Julian, who was the only non-Christian Emperor after Constantine the Great and has often been seen as a great monster by Christians and a great hero by atheists; has mostly high praise for Julian, but criticizes what he sees as the fanaticism in Julian's promotion of "pagan" (that is: traditional Roman polytheistic) religion. In short: however prejudiced Ammianus may have been, let's not pretend that the evaluation of Ammianus has been without religious prejudice. I won't pretend that I haven't been drawn to Ammianus to a great degree because of his non-Christian standpoint.

11 of the remaining 18 books of Ammianus' history are devoted to the exploits of the non-Christian Emperor Julian. Julian is often referred to, often sarcastically, as Ammaianus' hero. I think it's fair to say that Ammianus sees Julian as a hero, although I don't think that the sarcasm is necessary -- or effective, either, if you're trying to look like a serious critic of Ammianus and his view of history. As far as whether Gibbon was correct when he characterized Ammianus as unusually unprejudiced -- I think that would be much easier to judge if we could read the missing 13 books of his history, which cover the period between Ad 96 and 353. If Julian were praised in those 13 books, during the discussion of events centuries before his own birth, then I would find the accusations of prejudice more credible.

Trogus and Justin

Pompeius Trogus was a Roman of the 1st century BC who wrote a history of the dynasty of Philip of Macedon, and much miscellanaous related material, in 44 books. Some modern readers have made the mistake of thinking that this means Trogus' history would fill 44 of our modern volumes. Instead, think "book" in the sense of "books of the Bible." 2000 years ago, a book was generally a scroll, and scrolls generally didn't hold as much writing as our books, or codices, as the volumes with covers and writing on both sides of the pages are also called. The Bible, Old plus New Testament, contains 63 books in some versions. Of Livy's 142 books of Roman History, we have 35 books today, plus some smaller bits and pieces. Those 35 surviving books containing approximately the same amount of writing as the 63 books of the Bible, and the 44 books of Trogus' history, as he originally wrote it, mostly likely also contained a similar amount of writing.

Except that only a small fraction of Trogus' original history is known to us today. Some time after Trogus, probably in the 4th century, a writer named Justin (not to be confused with Justin Martyr) collected some excerpts from Trogus' history, a little bit from each of the 44 books, and strung them together with a few of his own remarks. The result is one volume which runs to 300 or 400 pages in most editions. Scholars have tried very hard to separate Trogus' words from Justin's, but the most we can say with near certainty is that most of the volume is fairly close to what Trogus said. In any case, these several hundred pages are one of the major ancient sources for the history of Philip II of Macedon, his famous son Alexander the Great, and their predecessors and successors. Did Justin actually do a good job in selecting and preserving the most interesting and/or the most historically valuable portions of Trogus' work? That's very, very hard to know. What an enormous boon it would be to historians if Trogus' entire work were ever to be recovered!

Other than Justin, there are a few passages from Trogus' history, called prologi, in the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, a few words of praise from Livy and some other writers, and that's about all we can say for sure. It's very difficult to say how much Livy and other historians may have borrowed from Trogus.

Although Livy admired Trogus and the admiration seems to have been mutual, the two historians make quite a contrast. Livy's history is patriotic and centered around Rome, and many passages clearly have been invented in order to make the work more dramatic and entertaining. Trogus' history is cosmopolitan and centered around Greece, and, according to Justin, he criticized Livy, and also Sallust, for embellishing their historical works with fanciful speeches put into the mouths of historical figures.

It's very unfortunate that the great majority of Trogus' work has been lost. Justin's selections from that work, on the other hand, made for a very popular codex during late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: more than 200 manuscripts of Justin survive, which derive from 4 separate sources.

It seems to me that Justin has been somewhat less popular reading lately, because I have not been able to find an edition printed later then the 19th century.

[PS, 17 December 2019: WHOOPS! Otto Seel's Teubner edition is from 1972. And it includes the prologi. Clearly the way to go. My thanks to evagre at the Classics subreddit at Reddit for pointing this out.]

[PPS, 18 December 2019: Thank goodness some experts read my stuff: Professor Alice Borgna, a member of the Facebook group Classics International, says: "It is not true that in academia he is neglected, and that the last edition is Seel’s one (!!). In the last decade, in fact, studies on Trogus and Justin have flourished, an element which your post seems to miss. More than 30 contributions, books or paper, has been published in recent years, and also new editions: a digital one (https://www.forumromanum.org/literature/justin/index.html) ) and -most of all - the new critical edition of Justin from the prestigious series Les Belles Lettres, with text edited by Bernard Mineo and historical notes by Giuseppe Zecchini, whose first volume (book I-X) was published in 2016. The second volume (books XI–XXIII) appeared in 2018, while the third (and last) is expected in 2020. But a lot of other stuff (translation, commentary) has also been published, as you can easily find." Thank you, Professor, but, obviously, some things are easier for some of us to find than for others. Yesterday, after I was made aware that Seel's edition was from 1972, not from the 19th century as I had thought, I asked myself, Well then why didn't LD Reynolds mention Seel's edition in his piece on Justin (Reynolds writes it "Justinus") in Texts and Tradition? And, of course, Reynolds did, and I had overlooked it: page 197, footnote 1. Actually, Reynolds points out that Seel published two Teubner editions, in 1935 and in 1972, and a further article and book devoted to Justin. About the middle third of the long note 1. And I just completely missed all of that. Reminder to self: You're old. Be more careful reading the fine print. Skimming may not cut it anymore.]

I have a reprint, made by the University of Michigan Libraries, of an 1858 edition by Jacques LeCoffre et cie of Paris, and it's not the Michigan Libaries' finest work. 4 of the pages, pp 24, 26, 30 and 34, are printed at an angle, with their tops at 1 to 1:30 on a clock dial and their bottoms at 7 to 7:30, with a few words squeezed and a handful missing altogether. Not all of the pages are in the proper order. Between page 72 and the end, page 355, the left-hand pages appear on the right and vice-versa. An introduction on page i through iv is inserted between pages 352 and 353. But much more importantly, on all the pages, except for the 4 pages mentioned above, the type is all quite legible. Although definitely below average for Michigan Libraries, it's far from the worst reprint I've ever seen. The reprint by a company which calls itself Forgotten books, of the 1782 edition of Raphael Landivar's Rusticatio Mexicana, is far worse. It's missing letters from the beginning of all of the lines on almost all of the right-hand pages. That may be the worst reprint I've ever seen, and I've seen a great number of them.

Surely, a new edition of Justin will appear this century. I would think.

David Butterfield on the Indirect Tradition of Lucretius

The "direct tradition" of an author is the manuscripts, printed editions and others copies of whole works by that author. The term "indirect tradition" refers to the times when an author is quoted and/or mentioned by another author.

I have written once before on this blog about David Butterfield's book entitled The Early Textual History of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. It's a pleasure to return to Butterfield's book and report some of what he found about the indirect tradition of Lucretius, as I examine the question: to what extent can Lucretius said to have been "forgotten" before Poggio found a manuscript of Lucretius in 1417 at a German monastery he did not bother to name? A manuscript which Poggio then lost, as he seems to have lost by far the most of those Classical manuscripts he discovered. To be fair to Poggio: copies were made of most of these manuscripts before they were lost; also, Poggio had very good handwriting, as we can see from some of these copies which have somehow survived.

Butterfield sums up what he has been able to find of Lucretous' indirect tradition between when Lucretious wrote his poem, around 55 BC, and the end of the 10th century, on pp 100-101, where he says: "Fifty-five different Latin authors cited 492 different Lucretian verses in full or in part." On page 100 Butterfield also notes that the indirect tradition indicates that manuscrupts of Lucretius were available in Rome up until the 5th century, in north Africa between the 2nd and the 4th centuries, and, most interestingly, in Spain around the turn of the 7th century.

Lucretius is not always named by these authors who quote him. On pp 47-100, Butterfield goes over the indirect tradition in great detail. I hope these are in mostly chrological order: Lucretius is named by Cicero, Ovid, Vitruvius, Nepos, Velleius Paterculus, Pliny the Elder, Statius, Tacitus, Quintilian, Apuleius, Quintus Serenus, Jerome, Sidonius Appolinaris, the anonymous 8th-century Fragmentum Parisinum de notis the anonymous 9th-century florilegium Exemplore diversorum auctorum, and the anonymous work of the 9th or 10th century known as the second Vatican Latin mythology. That's quite a lot of prominent mentions, by 12 different authors, which would work against Lucretius been forgotten. As for the times when the remaining 43 authors quoted Lucretius without naming him, and as for how often readers would have known that Lucretius was being quoted, that's much more difficult to say.

Butterfield is very conservative in mapping out this tradition: on many occasions, he mentions that other scholars have described passages in various texts as having come from Lucretius, but he feels that the evidence for this is insufficient. For example, papyrus fragments from the 1st century AD have been found at Herculaneum, and some have attributed the texts to Lucretius, but Butterfield maintains that the texts are too short to allow us to be certain of this attribution.

Butterfield stops this phase of his description of the indirect tradition at the end of the 10th century, because these are the only instances, before 1417, where he believes that it can be conclusively demonstrated that another author had direct access to a manuscript of Lucretius. In a footnote on pp 286-286, about two dozen further authors from the eleventh century up until 1417 are mentioned who seem to have been familiar with some part of the text of de rerum natura, but who, in Butterfield's judgment, could have been familiar with the indirect tradition only. That is, instead of referring to a complete text of Lucretius' poem, they may be simply quoting a quotation.

To depart from the theme of indirect tradition and mention direct tradition, while staying with the question of to what extent Lucretius can be said to have been "forgotten" before 1417: there are 3 surviving 9th-century manuscripts of Lucretius, 2 complete and fragments of a 3rd.

On page 32, Butterfield offers a stemma, a diagram showing his theory of which manuscripts were copied from which other ones, which, in addition to those 3 surviving 9th-century manuscripts, postulates the existence of 5 more made between the 9th and the 12th centuries.

And of course there there was more readership of Lucretius, there were more quotations and and mentions, there were more manuscripts. We don't know how many more. Butterfield is not saying that this is the extant of the readership of Lucretius. He's saying that this is the extent of what he can prove.

And it's a great pleasure, for me, to follow Butterfield on his search for all of this evidence. It's great to get into so many details. But, for a long time previously, I already had had a general idea of the size and shape of Lucretius' audience. As had very many others who had some familiarity with Latin literature.

Which is why it seemed so strange to us when we heard about this hugely best-selling book by a Harvard English professor, which claimed, among other strange things, that Lucretius had been forgotten before Poggio miraculously, just by chance, saved him from oblivion, which in turn changed the world, because the world had been completely unfamiliar with Lucretius and all that he had to say.

Dream Log: Reporter in Philadelphia

I dreamed I was a newspaper reporter who lived and worked in downtown Philadelphia. I had some sort of unexplained gift of making myself almost completely unnoticeable, so that I could get up close to people and listen in on conversations they thought were private. Some of my colleagues in journalism referred to me as "the Ghost."

In the lobby of a huge skyscraper was a white-tablecloth restaurant patronized by people who were very expensively-dressed. The restaurant's dining area was separated from the rest of the lobby only by a waist-high partition, with no wall or windows. Against a wall across the lobby from the restaurant, a homeless man wearing an orange-and-black checkered overcoat sat on the floor. Two expensively-dressed men approached him and spoke with him, and I did my unnoticeable thing and listened in.

"Does the restaurant ever give you food?" one of the expensively-dressed men asked the homeless man. He was tall and broad-shouldered and bore a slight physical resemblance to David Harbour.

The other expensively-dressed man was nondescript.

"No," the homeless man answered. "Some of the customers are very nice. They'll get leftovers in a doggy bag and bring it out and give it to me. Good stuff. The duck is out of this world, but all of the leftovers I've had from this place have been outstanding. But the restaurant itself seems to have an official get-rid-of-me policy. The maître d' especially seems to have a hard-on for me."

"That's too bad."

"I can see his point of view," the homeless man said. "Some restaurants will give you food, but I can see why they might not want to. They pay God only knows how much for the rent here, and they see me as bad for the ambiance."

The next day, the two expensively-dressed men-- silk suits, both of them -- were at the same place at the wall where the homeless man usually was, but the homeless man wasn't there. They were looking across the lobby into the restaurant and smiling. The homeless man was there, seated at a table in the dining area, scrubbed and brushed and clipped and clean-shaven and wearing a silk suit, looking like three million bucks.

Suddenly, the maître d', holding the overcoat the homeless man had been wearing the day before, charged up to where he was sitting, shouting something which was unintelligible from where we stood across the lobby, threw the overcoat at the homeless man's feet and literally chased him all over the dining area. The two expensively-dressed men ran across the lobby and into the restaurant and got between the maître d' and the homeless man. I stayed back and watched. The two expensively-dressed men and the maître d' were all yelling at the same time. I couldn't make out what anyone was saying. The homeless man wasn't saying anything. He just looked embarrassed.

Finally, the yelling died down a little, and the two expensively-dressed men stood protectively on either side of the homeless man and walked him out of the restaurant, out of the skyscraper's lobby, around the corner and into an only slightly less-fancy restaurant nearby, where they all three sat down together for lunch.

Frontinus

The ancient Romans were very proud of their aqueducts, and even today, the remains of these structures, standing from France and Spain to northern Africa and Turkey, are amazing to see.

Sextus Iulius Frontinus, AD c35 -- c103, served as Praeter of Rome and Governor of Britain. Although he was a homo novus, that is, a man without an aristocratic family background, he served as consul three times. Having shown great ability as a military commander in Britain -- it is said, for example, that 70,000 members of the Gallic tribe the Lingones surrendered to him -- he was appointed curator aquarum, that is, supervisor of all of the Empire's aqueducts, in the year 97.

Upon assuming this post, the first thing Frontinus did was to acquaint himself with the details of the history and operation of aqueducts now under his care, and to arrange what he learned from his own inquiries, from official documents and older technical treatises, into a short book which he himself intended to use as a reference. It is mainly because of this book that we are familiar with Frontinus today. If you wonder how a book about the history, operation and technical details of acqueducts could possibly fascinate readers for thousand s of years -- read de aquaeductu urbis Romae by Frontinus. If the man was half as good an administrator as he was a writer, then Rome's aqueducts were in very good hands for a few years as Frontinus oversaw them.

Frontinus lists all of the rivers from which the Empire's aqueducts took their water; the length traveled by the aqueducts; the various diameters of pipes used at various places; instances of diversion of water by farmers before it got to the cities; estimations of when such diversions were justified by drought, and when they were unjustified; problems of pollution at various points in the water supply; the names of past officials in the aqueduct system; what Frontinus intends to do as the supervisor of the whole; and a lot more, in a text which is 60 pages long in Kunderewicz's 1998 Teubner edition. Frontinus' text is a model of economical prose. And it demonstrates that economical and technical by no means must equal dull.

Frontinus also wrote a work entitled de re militari (On Military Matters, which is now lost, but is mentioned as a source by Vegetius in his 4th-century book of the same name. A short work entitled strategemata survives, in which Frontinus describes historical accounts of various strategies used effectively by Greek and Roman generals. Dozens of inscriptions have been catalogued which record Frontinus' official positions and great official deeds.

But it is mainly for de aquaeductu urbis Romae that he is remembered. Tacitus, the younger Pliny and Martial all record various positive aspects of his public service, but one wonders how much they would have had to say about him, if they had not also recognized and admired a fellow author.

Of the manuscripts of Frontinus' work on aqueducts which we have today, only one is older than the 15th century. It was written in the 12th century at Monte Cassino, mostly by Paul the Deacon, and somehow survived having passed through the hands of Poggio. Scholars debate whether all of the later manuscripts derive from this 12th-century copy; several MSS shows signs of having come from an 11th-century Germany ancestor. The work was first printed in Rome in 1484; dozens more editions have followed.

Ciceronianism

Several years ago, I read a volume from the I Tatti Renaissance Library entitled Ciceronian Controversies (2007, ed Joann Dellaneva), and thought to myself, How odd! that 420 to 530 years ago in Italy, eminent authors of all genres believed that the only way to write Latin correctly was to imitate Cicero! I blogged about this absurd tendency, to treat a single author as if he, and he alone, were worthy of imitation among all of the authors of an entire language which is thousands of years old, and I moved on.

Imagine (if you CAN) how I feel now, having finally noticed (yes, clearly, I am not the sharpest pencil in the drawer, not the quickest to notice things) that Ciceronianism is alive and well today. Latinists, TODAY, may be arguing a point of Latin writing style or usage, and one of them can point out, "Cicero wrote it this way," and, very often, that will end the debate!

People still study Shakespeare in English classes, and I have nothing at all against that. But does anyone, anywhere, teach English as if Shakespeare were the ONLY English-language author worthy of imitation? If someone does, would it even be necessary for me to enumerate the drawbacks of such an approach?

Well, such an approach is taken -- TODAY. AMONG US -- in the study and teaching of the Latin language. How often? I do not know. Oftener than not? I do not know.

I know only that, now that I have finally noticed that Ciceronianism outlived the Renaissance, I can not ignore it. I can not prevent myself wondering about such things as: is it actually unusual, for someone who has devoted their professional life to the study of Latin, that they might read no Latin at all other than Latin written by Cicero for an entire day? A week? A month? A LIFETIME?

Is it unusual for a Latinist to judge a piece of Latin writing, whether written in the 21st, the 16th or the 1st century AD, by the single criterion of how much it resembles what Cicero wrote?

Is it unusual for a Latinist to assume that everything Cicero wrote was above reproach from a linguistic-stylistic point of view?

And how exactly would those percentages change if, the preceeding three paragraphs, "Cicero" were changed to "Cicero and Vergil"?

Whatever the points of view of Latinists on these and other matters, I don't imagine that I will change their minds. I do drastically over-estimate my abilities much of the time, but I don't over-estimate them THAT much. The best I can hope for is to gain a bit more clarity about those who share my enthusiasm for the Latin language. And of course, not ALL of those people are Ciceronianists, or even Cicero-and-Vergilianists. See for example the Ad Lectorum before the novel Capti by Stephen Berard, who, it is entirely clear to me now, will be judged less than an eminent Latinist by the Cicero-and-Vergilianists, but who is appreciated by some others. And there's no need for anybody to fight over anything here. It's just that there is one more thing to debate, about which, I had mistakenly assumed, people had long since ceased to debate. Excelsior. (Yeah, it's also been very recently that I finally figured out that "Excelsior!" had become a common expression because of Stan Lee, and not because of contemporary Latinists in general. Be that as it may, it's still perfectly good Latin.)

I've Changed My Mind About the Tesla Truck

Two days ago, after seeing it for the first time, I blogged about the Tesla pickup truck, calling it an unmitigated disaster. And now I'm back to tell you two things: 1) I have a very different opinion of the truck now; and 2) a lot of other people have experience something similar: shock at first seeing the truck, and then a very quick change of mind as we keep looking at it.

Let me put this in very plain terms: my first reaction to Tesla's pickup truck was wrong. And I have much less excuse for it than do many other people, because I've studied a bit of art history, and anyone who's studied art history can tell you that, over and over, works of Western art, paintings, mostly, have gotten severely negative reactions when they are first shown, and then gone on to be widely loved and regarded as masterpieces. I've learned not to make a snap judgement if I see a painting and hate it at first. I should have been able to apply this to my reaction to the Tesla pickup, a reaction which, as I admitted in the previous post, was entirely based on its looks. I have less excuse for this than many other people commenting who have never studied art history.

And of course, trucks are not entirely about looks. They are -- theoretically, at least, and in many cases actually -- made for work, and when it comes to horsepower, torque, load capacity, towing capacity and other truck stuff, the Tesla pickup puts up very impressive numbers. Also, of course, it will be much cheaper to maintain and fuel than an internal-combustion-engine truck.

And the people who actually work with trucks, as opposed to driving them as big obnoxious status symbols, pay close attention to such numbers. Because it's work. It's business. It's about the numbers. And looking at the numbers may already have induced quite a number of people look at the Tesla pickup differently, literally and figuratively.

To go back to literally looking at it: I think that the launch may have been unfortunate for more than just the shattered windows. The way that Elon Musk stood in front of it on stage, the angle at which Elon and the truck are shown in most photos and videos, makes the truck look smaller, and above all lower, than it actually is. In those photos, the truck is reminding people of the El Camino, which is not a good association unless you're going for laughs. The El Camino is a 70's-style American sedan with a small truck bed where the back seats and trunk should be, and about the same ground clearance as most other sedans, whereas the Tesla pickup is a big truck with front and back seats and a lot of ground clearance.

So, would I buy one? No. I think it's a good truck, maybe so good that it will be game-changing. If so, it wouldn't be Tesla's first game-changing vehicle. So why won't I buy one? Well, for one thing, I don't need a truck, and unlike many other people who don't need trucks, I'm not going to to buy one. There's also the fact that I'm broke.

But also, it's a Tesla. Teslas are great vehicles, but Tesla is a terrible company. Elon Musk poses as an unworldly geek who just wants to help the world, while ripping off Tesla to the tune of billions of dollars per year. That means that if I bought a Tesla, several thousand dollars' worth of the purchase price would be going straight into Musk's pocket. Meanwhile, everyone except Musk who works at Tesla is underpaid. Anyone who even talks about unions vanishes. Working conditions are nightmarish, "layoffs" are frequent. Musk lies about prices. Musk says the truck will start at $39,900. He also said that the Tesla model 3 would start at $35,000. No-one has ever bought a $35,000 Model 3, and if anyone thinks they're going to get a Tesla pickup for $40,000, their stupidity angers and saddens me. Tesla still won't share their Superchargers with any other electric vehicles. Tesla doesn't sell Tesla parts, or authorize very many people at all to make Tesla repairs. Tesla customer service is a nightmare. And all of the above makes it a more shameless lie when Musk says he's just a selfless friend of humanity.

I might consider buying a Tesla someday if Tesla got rid of Musk and fixed all of those problems. Not before. But there's no denying that Tesla's vehicles are outstanding.

The Tesla Truck is Here, And it's an Unmitigated Disaster

This is really what it looks like:

I stayed up a little bit past my bedtime last night to watch the official launch of this ugly thing at the LA Auto Show, and the reactions on various YouTube channels devoted to EV's, and far and away the most frequent reaction was: "OMG it's so ugly." Even on the channel Now You Know, haven of far-gone Tesla zombies, the top comments this morning are all negative. YouTubers who literally build their own electric vehicles couldn't talk about anything except how ugly it is. I've never knowingly seen an adult man who has just pooped his pants, but after the reveal, Elon Musk, and Zac and Jesse, hosts of Now You Know, all looked as if they had pooped their pants: very embarrassed, physically ill, and trying very hard to smile, but not quite being able to do it.

Two of the officially shatter-proof windows on the truck at the LA Auto Show shattered when they were hit with a sledgehammer to show how shatterproof they are, and yet, no-one talked about that, except as a metaphor for someone's career having been shattered: "Who will be fired?" they asked. And if someone is fired, it won't be because the windows shattered. It will be because this thing is so goddamned ugly.

Maybe we once thought that pickup truck buyers didn't care about looks, and just wanted a truck that would haul. We now know that that isn't true. Looks matter, for pickup trucks too. And this is very, very bad news for Tesla.

There were the usual Tesla fans -- for some reason, they're often referred to as fanboys. They're also often referred to as zombies, but the reason for that is perfectly clear to me -- yelling "Alright! Yeah, Woooooooo!" and "Okay, Elon!" and so forth, at last night's reveal. But last night, there was also a lot more laughter. And it didn't sound like friendly laughter. I think that the model reveals up until now were overwhelmingly attended by the zombies. But the Model 3 is selling several times as fast as any previous Tesla, and it has changed things. Tesla is getting much more mainstream attention now. I think this was the first really public Tesla model unveiling, and oh my God did it go badly.

I haven't talked about how this thing actually functions as a truck. That's because I don't know any of its specs, and I don't know anything about trucks, so its specs wouldn't tell me anything anyway. There are plenty of other people who can tell you all about that. The usual car and truck guys. But, as I mentioned above, last night those guys weren't talking about anything else except how ugly this truck is. It might be the best pickup truck ever made, from the perspectives of performance, reliability, maintenance costs and so forth. But that wouldn't matter as much as how ugly it is. One of those guys who literally builds his own electric vehicles said last night, "That's it, I'm buying a Rivian." Rivian is another manufacturer who will be offering an electric pickup truck for sale soon. And they've been showing pictures of the truck all along, and letting journalists look up-close at the prototypes. (It looks pretty much like a pickup truck. Completely different than this monstrosity from Tesla.)

Tesla didn't do that. They allow a normal amount of glimpses into their upcoming models, usually, but with this pickup, they were completely secretive. It was very unusual. Musk kept saying that it was not going to look like any pickup anyone had ever seen. Turns out he was actually telling the truth for once. I figured that it would be a sort of mild let-down when we finally saw it. I figured people would say, Hm, yeah, it looks like a pickup.

But it doesn't look like a pickup. And not in a good way.

If some Tesla zombies read this post, they will call it a hit piece. But it's not. Musk hit himself right in the face last night. All I'm doing is reporting about it.

Dream Log: Hollywood Freeze-Out Over Papyri Scandal

In real life, there is a major scandal in the world of papyrology: Dirk Obbink,

formerly the head of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project, which is far and away the world's largest collection of ancient papyri, is accused of having stolen some of the Project's papyri and having sold them to the Green Collection, a Christian non-profit organization which runs a museum dedicated to the Bible.

This is really horrible. I hope Obbink proves to be innocent. Stealing and selling ancient artifacts in his care is just about the worst thing a papyrologist can be imagined to have done. Criminal charges have not yet been brought against Obbink, but -- well, it looks really bad. The only possibilities I can imagine are either that Obbink is guilty, or that he has been very skillfully framed. His claim is that he's being framed. We'll see.

I dreamed last night that there was a suspected link between Hollywood and the Obbink scandal. In real life, I am aware of no such suspicion. In my dream, I was selected to serve as a liason between papyrologists and Hollywood during this difficult time, presumably because I know a few words of Latin and have acted in some plays at the community-theatre level and lower.

I dreamed that I was at a Hollywood fundraiser, in order to reach out and establish trust with some Hollywood big-shots, and that my mission wasn't going well. People in Hollywood were very nervous about the scandal, nobody knew me, and nobody trusted me. Antonio Banderas was staying right at my elbow. Apparently he had been given the assignment of keeping an eye on me. His hair was shoulder-length, he was wearing a tuxedo with a white jacket, and he was not overflowing with affection toward me: not smiling, not talking more than he had to, just staying close, as if he were guarding me in a basketball game.

Then all of a sudden he noticed a counter where they were giving out... well, it seemed to be some sort of confection which doesn't exist in real life, as far as I know. It was halfway between a cinnamon roll and a cookie. Ooh, Antonio wanted one of those. One or maybe even two. I darted over to the counter, came back with two lusciously-glazed cookies and gave one to Antonio. He finished it quickly, and I gave him the other one. This definitely cheered him up, but did not make him friendlier.

Then I noticed that the back of his white jacket had been drawn on with a felt-tipped pen or magic marker. Some sort of goofy parody of tailor's markings, with great big dotted lines. I couldn't imagine that Antonio would be happy about this. I could easily imagine that he would blame it on me.

If this weren't enough, Antonio informed me that Salma Hayek was about to arrive, and that she had some sort of official message for me. This made me more nervous than the magic marker on Antonio's otherwise-immaculate white jacket. I was afraid that Salma would find me unattractive. Especially when I was standing so close to Antonio. I wished that I had some time, a few months, to work out really hard and diet very strenuously, before meeting Ms Hayek for the very first time.

But Salma never showed, and after a while Antonio went away.

The benefit was being held in a brand-new multiplex cinema which was interchangeably ugly with every other brand new ugly multiplex cinema anywhere in the world. The entire dream was inside the multiplex, and there was no way to tell whether we were in LA, New York, Duluth, London, maybe Dubai, or somewhere else. I'd heard jet-setters complain about how every new airport in the world looked like every other new airport. It occurred to me that not only did all new multiplex cinemas look the same -- they all kind of looked like airports.

Movies were showing on all the screens throughout the event, with the lights on in the screening rooms, and with no walls between the screens. You could see several screens at once. I assumed they were going to put the walls in before the thing officially opened, but I didn't know. On one of the screens was one of the big-budget animated movies, of which there have been so many in the past couple of decades that for me they have all became a blur. I thought I heard George Clooney's voice coming from that screen, playing a squirrel or a rabbit or something. I happened to turn around at that moment and see George Clooney himself striding down an aisle, all grey: grey hair, grey tux, grey shoes and socks, looking like a gosh-darn movie star. "Hey George, you in this one?" I shouted, waving my head at the screen behind me. George smiled tensely, recognizing me, said, "I think so," and kept moving.

I sat down and tried for a couple of minutes to involve myself in the animated movie, until I noticed a couple of guys sitting behind me who looked like goons. They weren't wearing tuxes, they weren't even wearing suits. One of them had biceps as big as footballs coming out of the sleeves of his black T-shirt. And they sounded like goons, too. Given the general air of hostility toward me at the place, instead of waiting to see whether these particular goons were going to come after me, I went for a walk, looking behind me all the time.

Back out in the lobby, a short guy in an orange suit had three guys spread-eagled against a wall and was frisking them. I asked him to show me his ID. He didn't look like a cop to me. Maybe that's just because I'm old, and there used to be more requirements for cops to be tall. But the guy didn't show me any ID. And I was frustrated, what with huge movie stars icing me, and goons and whatnot. So I wrestled the guy to the ground and searched him, found no badge, no gun, no cuffs, no law-enforcement ID of any kind, nothing. I told the three guys spreadeagled on the wall that I was pretty sure they were free to go.

The short guy in the orange suit kept laughing at me the whole time, a creepy heh-heh, heh-heh laugh.

I was going to leave the building and go for a walk, but I woke up instead.

Classical Latin Literature Which is (Currently) Lost

When we see an iceberg in the ocean, we know that about 9/10 of it is underwater. When we look at the remains of Classical Latin literature, we don't know how much of it there once was.

In the case of individual literary works we very often do not know whether what we have today is the entire work, or almost all of it, or a small fragment of it or what have you. We have some ancient descriptions of the length and scope of certain literary works, but such helpful descriptions are rare. It's more common that we have the work itself, and must decide whether it seems to us to be a finished work. If it seems unfinished, does that mean that the author never finished it, or that a page or more is missing from the copies we have?

One more thing to think about: did Latin authors 1800 or 2000 years ago have ideas about what constituted a finished literary work which were similar to the ideas we have today?

Sometimes the existing manuscripts have big holes in them, or are nothing but tiny scraps, and so leave no doubt that something is missing. But how much is missing? That is very often a difficult question.

Is the author correctly identified? In many cases scholars have concluded that works are misattributed. In further cases, passages from an ancient work are quoted in an ancient or Medieval collection. Sometimes they are extremely helpful missing pieces from an author's work. In other cases, they are falsely attributed. Yes, it'd be wonderful if that was a passage written by Trogus, but...

Trogus was a Roman historian who lived in the 1st century BC and wrote a history of the Macedonian Empire, founded by Philip, the father of Alexander the Great. Ancient writers praised Trogus' history very highly. All we have of that history today is a condensed version, referred to as an epitome, written by a certain Justinus some time around the 3rd century AD.

Scholars today painfully feel the lack of Trogus, but still, we have that epitome by Justinus. In the case of many other ancient Latin writer who were highly praised by their peers, all we have today is that praise.

And how many more may have been praised in pieces of text which have disappeared? That sort of question is somewhere between extremely difficult and entirely impossibly to answer accurately.

The problem of that ignorance is compounded by other things we don't know, such as our ignorance of how exactly these texts we'd so very much like to have, vanished. In trying to explain a certain disappearance, we face the hazard of assuming that we know things which we do not know. Let's take the example of Tibullus, Propertius and Statius. Tibullus and Propertius were Latin poets who lived in the first century BC. They are both very highly esteemed today, sometimes so highly that they are spoken of as among the handful of the very greatest ever to write in Latin. And only a few dozen pages of each of their work has survived, from so few manuscripts that their work very nearly did not survive at all. Statius, on the other hand, a Latin poet of the 1st century AD whose works are not nearly so highly-esteemed, has works surviving today in many hundreds of manuscripts, which together are many times the length of the surviving works of Tibullus and Propertius together.

A scholar today may look at how many manuscripts of Statius we have, and how few of Propertius and Tibullus, and conclude that this shows have great a role chance plays in the survival of ancient literature. But, never mind the lukewarm readership of Statius today, many Medieval texts survive which praise him very highly indeed. It may seem strange to us, but in the Middle Ages Statius may have had a much higher literary reputation than either Propertius or Tibullus.

My point is that literary tastes, opinions about which writer is better than which, sometimes change enormously from one era to another. We must guard against imposing our own opinions upon people of another time, for this may cloud our understanding of what went on in that other time.

And my point in this essay has been merely to point out a few of the factors which make it difficult for us to know how much Classical Latin literature is currently lost, and why, and therefore to urge caution, if one is ever tempted to estimate the amount of this literature which once existed.

Dream Log: NYC: Bridges and Staircases; plus, Jessica Lange

I dreamed yet again last night that I was in New York City. This was one of the dreams featuring an unrealistic New York City. The city I dreamed about last night was even bigger, in its buildings and bridges, and even more bustling in its streets and sidewalks, than the real city.

I was in very good physical shape: I was living in the Bronx, and very often walked to Lower Manhattan. It was winter, and I just zoomed along over the snowy sidewalks.

Some of the unrealistic nature of the dream was that certain landmarks were in different places. For example, the Brooklyn Bridge was in the Bronx, and it was very different from the real Brooklyn Bridge. Much bigger, much broader. To start my walk from home in the Bronx to downtown Manhattan, I had to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge on a pedestrian walkway made of see-through iron mesh which crossed the bridge over the motor traffic. This walkway was four long city blocks long, because the bridge was four long city blocks wide.

Harvard University was in downtown Manhattan in the dream, instead of across the Charles River from downtown Boston, as it is in real life. After walking downtown from the Bronx, I liked to enter a certain Harvard building and walk all the way down a long ground-floor hall to the back of the building, where there was a huge marble staircase which went all the way to the top floor. There were six stories in this building, and each one was enormously high. The ceilings were thirty feet high on each floor. On each floor, bookcases lined the walls, going up to the ceilings, with huge rolling ladders affixed to the cases for access to the higher shelves.

This version of New York City was so huge and so complex that many versions of it were superimposed upon each other; as the dream went on, it became more and more clear that the many-universes theory of physics was partially manifesting itself in human perception there.

It was different times at the same time that it was 2019. I seemed to be younger, and much more physically vigorous, than I really am, although, at the same time, I was my real age, 58. I seemed much more like 19 or 20, in my physical appearance and condition. I was dating Jessica Lange. Although it was 2019, and New York City, and Jessica Lange was there, she was also back in the 1970's, and was also out of the city, filming the Pacific-island scenes of the version of King Kong which was released in 1976. And although it was 2019, Jessica Lange looked like she did in the 1970's.

Also, as a part of the many-universes manifestation, at the same time that King Kong was being filmed elsewhere, and Jessica Lange was both elsewhere and in NYC at the same time, the movie was also being filmed with several other actresses in Lang's role.

Also as a part of the many-universes thing, Jessica Lange and I both were and were not in a relationship. We were in a relationship in one dimension, but in other dimensions she was seeing other people. I was bothered by her other relationships, and I said so. Jessica said that I was being ridiculous, because those other relationships of hers were occurring in entirely different universes, so she wasn't even being promiscuous. She was monogamous with me, because I was the only one she was seeing in this dimension. Jessica pointed out that I could see as many other people in other dimensions as I wanted to, and that wouldn't mean that I was being promiscuous. She said the words "promiscuous" and "monogamous" with a certain mocking pronunciation. It was clear that, even if she had been seeing someone else in the same dimension or universe where she was seeing me, she wouldn't like it at all that I was so jealous and possessive.

Intellectually, I not only understood her position but agreed with it, and also agreed that jealousy is an ugly, un-constructive thing. Emotionally, however, I was still very upset. Moreover, even though it was separate dimensions, separate universes, I could still see everything she was doing with the other guys, just as clearly as if it were happening right in front of me in the same dimension.

Although Jessica and I were disagreeing about certain implications of philosophy and physics, at the same time, it was just another relationship which was difficult because the two people wanted different things from it. We went for long, long walks through the wintry, snowy city, holding hands and not saying much, both of us upset because we wanted to keep seeing each other, but we didn't know how to fix the problems we were having.

For some unexplained reason, Jessica and I both had full access to all of the employees' areas of the New York City Transit Authority. (This seems somewhat ironic to me now that I'm awake, because she and I walked a lot where other people would take a bus or train.) In the middle of a long walk, we went into a subway employees' office to warm up. We helped ourselves to coffee and put our feet up on desks. The employees greeted us in a very friendly fashion and made small talk with us. I whispered to Jessica that maybe my main problem was that she was so beautiful that it was literally driving me insane. Then we both started laughing and crying at the same time. Transit employees saw this and closed in on us with Kleenexes and hugs and kind words, and soon we got a grip on ourselves.

There was a brass box slightly larger than a matchbox, which was traveling back and forth between dimensions. Despite the many dimensions, there was only one of these boxes, and it always stayed the same. At the moment, I was holding it in my hands. It contained a very long, thin brass chain with a clip on the end, from which you might hang keys. All of a sudden, it occurred to me that, because there was only one of these boxes in all dimensions, it might be able to teach me something about multiple dimensions which Jessica and most other people already understood. I suddenly felt very happy. I gave Jessica a big hug. It was one of those winter hugs which are well-padded by many layers of winter clothes. Then I woke up.

Renaissances

In Classical Studies, in Western Europe, there has been a 9th-century Renaissance, the Carolingian Renaissance supported with the enormous power and purse of Charlemagne;

a 12th-century Renaissance featuring John of Salisbury, William of Malmesbury, and great bursts of Classicism in cathedral schools in Chartres and Orleans and elsewhere, and a sudden great rise in interest in Ovid, Virgil, Terence, Horace, Seneca, and Cicero;

the Italian Renaissance we've all heard about, which occurred mostly in Italy, from the 13th through the 15th century, with Dante, Petrarch, Bocacccio, Salutati, Bruni, Biondo,

Poliziano, Ficino, Valla, Pico della Mirandola and so many others;

the 19th century Renaissance featuring British and German universities, and the beginnings of the Classical series from publisher such as Oxford and Teubner;

and perhaps eventually people will look back to our time, to things such as the Living Latin movement, and speak of a 21st-century Renaissance.

The number of Renaissances seems to keep increasing. And I'm sure I've left some out -- should I have mentioned an Insular Renaissance in Ireland and England in the 7th century, or earlier? Wow, I haven't even mentioned the 16th century yet, and Erasmus! They're beginning to crowd together so tightly that there's barely any time left between them. Which would mean that...

Perhaps something which has been reborn so many times hasn't ever actually died. Perhaps Classical Latin and interest in ancient Rome have been pronounced dead many times over the centuries, and this isn't remembered so often today because of the natural tendency to select the best literature and most sensible statements from every era, and forget the everyday pronouncements, however persistent the latter may have been. And so we look back upon the best Classical scholars in every era, and tend to forget about those who insisted that there were no such.

How many more Renaissances will there be?

Elon Musk and Publicity and Money

Recently, Elon Musk donated $1 million dollars to a charity which plants trees, and claims that 1 tree will be planted for every dollar people donate. So, that's good. That's a million trees, assuming that the charity's claims are correct, and I haven't seen any claims to the contrary. The donation has gotten a lot of publicity, and hopefully will lead to many other similar donations, large and small.

Musk probably made the donation because he needed some good publicity, badly -- but still, those million plantings are a very good thing. The example, and the challenge to others to follow the example, are good. Afforestation and reforestation are important parts of repairing Earth's climate and saving our own lives.

And it's especially remarkable that Musk would donate $1 million, given that he is earning no money whatsoever.

No, I didn't really mean that last part. Me saying that Musk is earning no money, that's sarcasm. It's also the claim which Musk is making in his defense in the lawsuit being brought against him by the guy who rescued a youth soccer team from an underwater cave in 2018, and Musk was rushing to the scene to be a part of the rescue with a submarine he'd built, and the young soccer players were rescued before Musk's submarine got there, and Musk reacted to that by calling the rescuer a pedophile.

Musk really needs good publicity from things like the $1 million for trees, because of the bad publicity from things like the whole rescue incident, which make it look like appearing to be a hero is more important to Musk than being one, and that it is extremely difficult for him to share credit with others.

It also seems perfectly obvious to me that it is extremely hard for Musk to share money with others. How can I say that about someone who just gave $1 million to a good cause? I can say it because it seems to me that Musk was just buying goodwill with that $1 million, and buying it pretty cheaply. For a guy who receives $2 billion a year, $1 million is 1/40 of a week's pay. For a new employee at Tesla, who receives $16 an hour, 1/40 of one week's pay would be $16. Which would be a nice contribution to a good cause, but not really astonishingly generous.

Musk was given Tesla stock options worth over $2 billion dollars in 2018. That's what Tesla's own SEC proxy statement says. That statement also says that the $2 billion worth of options are part of Musk's compensation for 2018. I have to admit, I got very tired before I found out what other parts there were, but if anyone wants to look: it's called a proxy statement, filed by Tesla with the SEC.

So, it's good that Musk gave $1 million to that charity. It's also good that Telsa makes EV's, and has sold so many of them.

But the very widespread opinion that the emerging success of the EV industry is due above all to Musk, I think that opinion is mistaken. I disagree. I think we don't know, can't know, what Tesla would have done by now if Musk hadn't taken the company over from its original founders, forced them out, and then won a lawsuit giving him the legal right to refer to himself as the founder of the company. I don't think we know, I don't think we can know, how well other EV manufacturers, and other EV models made by traditional automakers, would have been doing by now, if Musk had never gotten into the automotive industry.

I don't think we can know how well Tesla would be doing if those billions of dollars per year which have been going into Musk's compensation, had instead been going into higher wages for Tesla employees, and lower prices for Tesla automobiles, power-storage systems, solar panels and solar roof tiles and other Tesla products, and so forth.

I certainly don't think that we can know how different the world would be today, it the CEO of the world's largest manufacturer of EV's were actually a nice guy, instead of a ruthless narcissist multi-billionaire who has hit on pretending to be a nice guy as a successful business model.

I don't think anyone can know for sure how much of the technical excellence of Tesla's car is directly attributable to Musk. I'm completely certain that he gets way too much credit for it. (Quick, name 5 other people who've been involved in designing Teslas! Name them right now! No googling allowed!)

Now, being a fan of electric vehicles, and being concerned about the Earth's climate, doesn't necessarily mean that you're blind. There are many intelligent EV enthusiasts who are familiar with his methods of finance and self-promotion. Still, they maintain they the EV "community" owes Musk a lot. I don't think anybody owes this guy, who already has over $20 billion, anything. I don't see exactly how life has been unfair to him. I think that Tesla, and the EV industry in general, would be much better off if it and Musk went their separate ways. Even if that meant a multi-billion-dollar golden parachute for Musk. Sometimes I wonder whether I'm literally the only member of the EV "community" who feels this way. I'm certainly not the only person on Earth who does.

The Situation Escalates

After 10 rewarding months with a 45 pound slam ball, I now have had a 100 pound slam ball for 3 hours.

The 100-pounder is just slightly larger than the 45-pounder, which is about the size of a basketball. Both of them can go slightly non-round, because they're not fully inflated, so they don't bounce, not even when you slam them down to the floor with all your might, hence the term slam ball. Although, the heavier they get, the more common it is to call them dead balls rather than slam balls, and the less common it is to actually slam them. Slamming a ball expends much more energy than simply lifting it, and very few people actually slam dead balls which weigh as much as 100 pounds. Lifting them is plenty of work.

Lifting a 100 pound ball is much more difficult than lifting a 100 pound dumbbell. I have made many visits to a local used-sporting-goods store, looking for a good deal on a heavy ball, and they usually have 100 pound dumbbells, and I can lift them with no problem. Several reps with each hand of a 100 pound dumbbell row:

-- is not a big deal for me. Lifting this 100 pound ball with both hands has been a big deal. I can do it, but after doing it once, I put the ball down again very soon and really, really don't want to do it again. Several dumbell rows on each side leaves me feeling refreshed and energized and pleasantly tingly. Lifting the 100 pound ball off of the ground with both hands and holding it off of the ground for just a couple a seconds makes me hurt all over and want very badly to take a long nap.

This is good. This is how muscles get stronger.

I found the wooden box containing the ball standing on the sidewalk in front of my house in the pouring rain today. I don't know whether Fedex even tried to get it up into the porch. There are are only 2 small steps up from the sidewalk to to the porch.

At first I tried to get the box into the porch using a dolly, but one of the dolly's wheels fell off, so I just lifted it up and took a step or two and set it down inside the porch.

And that's been about the extent of my workout with this "beast." "Beast" is a very common term used appreciatively to describe dead balls which weigh 100 pounds or more -- or even 50 pounds. What I mean when I say that that's been about the extent of it, is that I've lifted it off of the ground several times, using the correct technique so that I lift with my legs and don't hurt my back. I haven't even tried yet to lift it higher than knee-level. I will do many more such low-level lifts, just getting the thing off of the ground, before I even try to get it to chest level. After chest level comes onto the shoulder. Then pressed overhead. Then maybe slamming, or maybe that would just really be an absurd thing to try. Anyway, it will be a while before I have to decide whether or not to slam a 100-pounder.

My readers: are you beginning to feel the awesomeness of this sort of fitness equipment? Or do you suspect that there may in fact be nothing awesome about balls as compared to dumbbells or barbells, and that I may be wrong to think otherwise? You know what? You may be right. Then again, maybe I'm right, and in any case, I'm having a lot of fun, and getting stronger. I strongly encourage you to see for yourself. Medicine balls can be had in every conceivable weight from 1/2 pound all the way up to 300 pounds. Compare a ball of any weight to a dumbbell or barbell of the same weight, and immediately you'll see what a huge difference the different shape makes.

Unanswered Questions About Petronius

It's relatively rare that a book is read by as many as a million people. Big-budget movies which aren't seen by millions of people, on the other hand, are flops. Federico Fellini made big-budget movies which definitely weren't flops. Although the novel is almost 2000 years aold, and the film about 40 years old, I think it is fairly safe to say that more people have seen Fellini's movie Satyricon than have read the work by Petronius on which it is based -- loosely based, Fellini has the decency to say right there in the credits.

No, I don't like Fellini's Satyricon. I don't like Fellini's movies in general. Neither did Pauline Kael. Kael made the argument, which I second, that Fellini never bothered much to develop the characters in his movies, because the main character in every Fellini movie is Fellini. If you find Fellini himself to be absolutely fascinating, as he himself clearly did, then there's a chance that you might like some of his movies almost as much as he did -- and oh, what it must be like to love a movie that much! If, on the other hand, you find Fellini to have been a fatuous egomaniac, come on ever here and have a seat by me and Pauline.

In addition to the egomania, there's the grotesquerie. Fellini loved to look at freaks, at deformed people, people who were very fat or very thin, people with huge scars or boils, etc, etc. I don't, so much. I really appreciate how, in most movies and TV shows, most of the people are ridiculously good-looking and impossibly perfect, in many cases much more perfect-looking than the actors who are skillfully altered to look that way. I get more than my fill of grotesque reality away from the screen.

So, first I saw Fellini's Satyricon, and was greatly disappointed, because I assumed that my disgust meant that I would also find Petronius' Satyricon to be disgusting. Then I read Kael's review of Fellini's Satyricon, which gave me hope that there was much in Petronius' version which I might like, which Fellini had missed. Then I began to perceive that many, perhaps most film critics disagreed with Kael, about Fellini and about a lot of other things. A while after that, I ceased to care very much what most film critics think, about Kael or about anything else. Later, I noticed that the Latin and Greek passage quoted at the beginning of TS Eliot's "Waste Land" is a quote of Trimalchio. By that time, I had begun to think somewhat less of Eliot than I once had, but diciphering that passage both made me think a little more of him again, and made me want to read Petronius. (Is the passage in Fellini's film? If so, I slept through it.) So I read Petronius.

That is to say, of course: I read what remains of Petronius. 195 pages in Konrad Mueller's corrected fourth Teubner edition of 2003.

Which brings us to some unanswered questions about Petronius and his poem. Unanswered as far as I know. As always, if you want to be sure, ask experts, and I'm not one. How long was the Satyricon when it was whole? I believe the best guesses there are: at least several times as long as those 195 pages, perhaps ten times as long, perhaps more. Which would make the Satyricon longer than War and Peace but not quite as long as the Old and New Testament together.

Who was this Petronius who wrote this novel? Yes, boys and girls, it's a novel. The novel wasn't invented by Fielding. Or by Cervantes. Or by Rabelais. Or, for that matter, by the ancient Romans. They got the idea from the Greeks. Was it the Petronius Arbiter who was the style advisor to the Emperor and would-be artist Nero, who was obliged to commit suicide in AD 66, when Nero suspected him of plotting against him? (Did Nero suspect correctly?) That Petronius was not yet 40 years old when he died -- assuming that he is our author, what more might he have written, if the rotten Nero had been wiped out first?

Oh, and by the way, just in case this wasn't already completely clear: read it, by all means read it, it's staggeringly good.

What would our author think of Fellini's film? Did Fellini understand Petronius better than Pauline and I, after all? Has my squeamishness blinded me to vast realms of aesthetic and artistic edification? Has it lead me to read a version of the novel which is pale and anemic and quite unlike the author's intent?

And by the way, here's a question which stopped me dead in my tracks over 30 years ago, and which has bothered me ever since, a question I have not been able to even begin to answer: Why do so many of us grown-ups expend so much time and energy discussing made-up stories with such fearful earnestness? How serious a question was it for me at the time? Well, it struck me as an undergraduate right in the middle of an honors English class,right in the middle of something particularly pretentious which I was saying to the professor and the class, and English was one of my double majors. So, it was, and remains, what you might call a rather dramatic existential crisis.

Onward: more questions: would we have more of the novel today, had Poggio never lived, or never learned to read? Yes, him again: Poggio discovered part of what we know of Petrobius today, in 1420. The manuscript he found was copied, and then, of course, Poggio lost it. Additional manuscript discoveries in the 16th and 17th centuries brought the text to the length it has today. Scholars continue to work on the text, and the condition of the manuscripts continues to give them plenty to do.

Are the manuscripts so scanty because Petronius wrote for a small, private audience? Did so much of the text come to light so late because there's so much gay sex in it? Yes, there's also quite a bit of hetero sex, and violence, in the story, but Christian authorities have always objected more strongly to sex in literature athan to violence, and more strong to gay sex than to heterosexuality.

And, of course, there remains that favorite question of mine: Will still more of the text come to light?