Dream Log: Weird Tarantino Movie

I have not seen Quentin Tarantino's movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Last night, dreamed I was both watching the movie, and in it, as a minor character. It was the late 1960's, like in the movie: hippies, people who hated hippies, miniskirts, huge crappy cars.

In the first part of the dream, Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega,

the hired killers from Pulp Fiction, had been sent to an LA-area mansion to kill someone. When they got there, they realized that their intended victim was a baby, a little girl about a year old. Very quickly, instead of killing the baby, they decide to rescue her and take her away, fleeing from the powerful mobsters who had sent them.

And form that point, the movie quickly changed into a series of terrible Hollywood cliches about tough guys taking care of a baby: Vincent runs around helplessly in a kitchen, trying to prepare a bottle for the baby, and all four walls of the kitchen are becoming completely spattered with stuff; Jules walks into view wearing a baby sling and frowning angrily; etc. All the usual corny "Oh look, the big tough guys don't know what to do and it's so adorable!" - type cliches.

Then suddenly Jules and Vincent and the baby were gone, and the action focused on six actors, four women and two men: Margot Robbie,

the only actor in the dream who was actually in the movie, and five other actors I didn't recognize from real life. Each of the six of them had six cards, one card representing one of them. Each one of them had to arrange his or her six cards in a certain order before they could move on and perform the next scene. These arrangements were very difficult, they often got it wrong and had to make many attempts before they could get on with the movie. And the movie could only proceed when all six of them had arrange their cards correctly for that particular scene, and so there was a lot of waiting around and tempers began to fray.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, the actual stars of the movie if I'm not mistaken, were nowhere to be seen.

Then the cards became large books. One of the six actors, a young woman, not Margot Robbie, nobody I recognized from real life, stumbled and dropped her six large books onto the sidewalk near me. I offered to help her. She had no idea who I was and sensibly turned my help down. But eventually I talked her into going to a nearby store and buying a backpack, which allowed her to carry the books much more easily.

Then I woke up.

Bill Maher & Reginald Foster

I just found out today that the man on the left in this photo,

talking to Bill Maher just outside of Vatican City in Bill's documentary film Religulous after Bill was thrown out of the Vatican, this Vatican priest whom the Swiss Guard allegedly referred to as il benzinaio (the gas-station attendant) because he chose to wear simple working man's clothes instead of a priest's habit, this priest who in Bill Maher's movie agreed with very much of what Bill had to say about the Vatican and Catholicism -- this guy is Reginald Foster, who for almost 30 years lead the Vatican office which was responsible for writing official Vatican documents in Latin or translating them into Latin, Reginald Foster, whom many regard as the world's foremost living Latinist and teacher of Latin, Reginald Foster, the most prominent exponent of Living Latin, which places as much emphasis on speaking and writing Latin as on reading the language, as opposed to many others who concentrate on teaching reading comprehension and have given up on treating Latin as if it were still alive.

What a shame that all Bill wanted to talk about were his banal objections to the Vatican and Catholicism, so banal that a priest who had worked in the Vatican for decades didn't disagree with anything he said. What a shame that he missed the opportunity to talk to perhaps the world's foremost living Latin scholar about -- Latin, a subject about which Foster has a great deal of interesting things to say.

What a perfect example of the sorts of things which New Atheists could learn if they broadened their horizons just a little bit. What a heartbreaking example of missed opportunities to share wonderful things with their audiences of millions, because they can't stop repeating their mantra of "RELIGION IS WRONG AND STUPID AND RUINS EVERYTHING!" for one goddamned second any time they're within shouting distance of any place of worship, let alone the actual Vatican.

*sigh* So anyway, back to the interview as it actually was. I agree with Bill Maher and Reginald Foster that the grandeur and opulence of the Vatican are at odds with Jesus' message of simplicity and renunciation of worldly things. Unlike both Foster and Maher, however, I don't particularly care what Jesus said or thought, and I think it's a real shame to let something so silly deprive you of enjoying the grandeur and opulence, of, for example, the Vatican, which in my opinion is one of the most beautiful man-made places on Earth.

I also wonder what sort of jackassery Bill Maher perpetrated to get himself thrown out of the Vatican. I don't think that's actually shown in the film. Bill claims that he was well-known to the Vatican as one of their great enemies. I wonder whether that's an example of Bill Maher giving himself way too much credit. Maybe I'll get to ask him about that someday. Maybe I'll be able to talk to him and his audience about Latin some day. I'd be a very poor substitute for Reginald Foster for that, though.

Terry Gilliam and Baseball Caps

I believe that Terry Gilliam has said that baseball caps are ridiculous. I haven't been able to find a quote where he says as much, but you know what else I haven't been able to find? A picture of Terry Gilliam in a baseball cap. If he's not bare-headed, he tends to be wearing something like this:

One of the movies Terry Gilliam has directed, The Fisher King, is my very favorite movie, and several more of his movies are among my very favorites. Such was my admiration for Terry Gilliam that until very recently, I just assumed that he must be right on the subject of hats, and that there must be something completely ridiculous about baseball caps which I couldn't see.

How recently? Until last night. Last night I just happened to see a very beautiful young lady, and she just happened to be wearing a baseball cap. Now, I had read Gilliam's remarks about baseball caps decades ago -- or perhaps I heard them, in a radio interview -- and in those decades I naturally had seen many, many baseball caps, and many of them had been worn by beautiful women -- but it wasn't until last night that I actually looked, and, at the very same time, thought about what Terry Gilliam had said about hats and caps, and decided that, no matter what Terry Gilliam thought about it, I didn't think that there was anything wrong with the way this young lady looked.

It wasn't until last night that I thought, perhaps one should give less weight to Terry Gilliam, when he says that baseball caps are ridiculous, than to the billions of people who have worn them and found them to be just fine.

And even if I had still found Gilliam to be infallible up to this point: this morning, while researching this post ( = failing to find that quote about baseball caps), I found some other quotes by Terry Gilliam, about how he hated the Marvel Comics superhero movie Black Panther, and thought that the women in the MeToo movement had "made their own choices," and how he was "tired of white men being blamed for everything." I'm sure it's a great relief to all of the black people in the US who haven't done anything wrong, and are being arrested and imprisoned and shot for being black, that, at least according to Terry Gilliam, they're not being blamed for anything.

So. I guess we learn -- once again -- that nobody's perfect. A man who has directed some magnificent movies can still be a racist, sexist asshole with eccentric opinions about headwear.

An Open Letter to Time + Tide, the Australian Horological Publication

You've got a current headline which reads:

RECOMMENDED READING: Apple sold nearly 10 million more watches than the entire Swiss watch industry in 2019

Well, good luck with the Apple watch crowd. Because all of these recent articles about quartz watches and smart watches are losing us who like mechanical watches and used to like Time & Tide. We had 45 years to start liking quartz watches before the Apple Watch was invented -- didn't happen, did it? And yes, we do know that quartz watches are much more accurate and that smart watches do all sorts of amazing things. We just don't particularly care.

It also will do you no good with me to compare smart watches to electric cars, because I'm already completely on board with EV's. That's right: electric cars and mechanical watches for me, please. And solar and wind power and the death of the oil, coal and gas industry just as soon as possible!

And I'd dump mechanical watches too if they spewed poisonous gases the way internal-combustion vehicles do -- but they don't, do they?

I know, the Apple watch geeks will stare at us mechanical-watch geeks as if we were pods, as if we were simply inexplicable beings. News flash: most people already looked at us that way, and we already knew it, and we already didn't care. To us, the others were always the pods, and right now, anybody who tries to talk us into Apple watches over mechanical watches -- is of course a pod. There's not even the slightest question about it. And there's also not even the slightest question that some of the people who work at your magazine are one of us and not one of you, and they'll quit, and they and we will be just fine. In fact we'll be better because we'll be just a little bit more convinced of each other's genuineness once pods like you have been weeded out.

We had of course assumed that you, Time & Tide, were one of us, but we'll live. We'll live wearing mechanical watches, and sometimes even carrying mechanical pocket watches, and not being the slightest bit tired of having to pull them out of our pockets every time we want to know the imperfectly, mechanically-kept time.

We'll be just fine. Mechanical watches won't disappear. Quartz didn't make them disappear, smart watches and sleazy sell-outs like you, Time + Tide, won't make them disappear. Mechanical watches are already not about maximum profits any more than they're about the absolutely best-available precision time. Rats jumping ship will just make the love and dedication of those who remain shine more clearly. You're just pushing mechanicals further in the direction of art. Art hasn't disappeared.

Manuscripts and Methods by Michael D Reeve

Michael D Reeve, Professor Emeritus of Cambridge University, is a wonderful writer. I suspect that he could take just about any subject which interested him, and write about it with great wit and insight, revealing both the beauty and the importance of that subject to the reader. Fortunately for those of us interested in Classical literature, Reeves has written mostly about the transmission of Classical literature, primarily the Latin Classics, although, as he explains to the reader of the volume under review here, he began his career focused upon Greek. He has published editions of works by Longus, Cicero, Vegetius and Geoffrey of Monmouth, as well as numerous contributions to scholarly journals. Manuscripts and Methods is a selection of 18 previously-published essays by Reeve, plus 2 hitherto-unpublished essays and an introduction, published in Rome in 2011 by Edizioni du storia e letteratura.

The book is divided into 6 sections:

I: The Original, dealing with the author's original copy of the text, also referred to by the pros as the autograph. In the case of Classical Latin, we do not today possess an autogragh for any of the works. The whole task of the profession to which Reeve belongs, scholarly editing, is to restore as nearly as possible the original text. Of course, as Reeve points out, even if we did have the original manuscript, there would almost certainly be some errors in it.

II: Stemmatic Method, the process of determining which of the existing manuscripts are copies of which of the others. Reeve takes the position that it is impossible to be absolutely certain which manuscripts derive from which, but that the stemmatic method is nevertheless the best method we currently have, and that we ought to very carefully do the very best we can with it.

III: Archetypes. An archetype is a manuscript from which all other surviving manuscripts derive, whether as direct copies, or copies of copies, etc. A manuscript may be the archetype off all of the manuscripts of a given text, or it may be the archetype of a group of the manuscripts of that text. We may possess an archetype, or we may theoretically re-construct and postulate an archetype on the basis of existing manuscripts.

IV: Exemplar and Copy. An exemplar is a script from which another one has been copied. One of the essays in this section deals with the topic of manuscripts which were copied from early printed books. This is an example of Reeve pointing out something which only became obvious after he pointed it out. Perhaps many of us tend to think of the invention of printing as having done away with the making of book-length manuscripts, but of course it didn't do so instantly.

V: History and Goegraphy. This section also could have been entitled: The Italian Renaissance, From the Point of View of the Study of Classical Literature. Readers who until now have had no knowledge of or interest in the Renaissance might want to start with this section, which is filled with examples of Reeve re-constructing and describing the lives and careers of Classical scholars of previous ages, something which he does better than anyone else I know, something he does so well that any intelligent reader might find him- or herself suddenly and unexpectedly fascinated with the Renaissance, even if he or she is confronted by many blocks of texts in languages which he or she cannot decipher. This section shows why I rate Reeve, as an essayist, among the very best, alongside Edward Hoagland writing about his own life and Gore Vidal writing about the history and politics of Washington, DC.

VI: Episodes in Editing. The essays in the book's final section each describe a single topic in the history of the struggles to re-create the Classical past, from the Monk Lupus working on the text of Livy in the 9th century, to 21st-century attempts to apply computer technology to scholarly editing.

Throughout the book, there are many and lengthy quotations of ancient authors and Classicists of all eras, in Latin, Greek, German, Italian and French, and I only noticed one translation by Reeve, of Herodotus' Greek into English. The rest is untranslated, and Reeve expects you to be able to read Latin, German, Italian and French.

And it's not just quotations. 2 of Reeve's entire essays are in Italian, and another one is in German. It does appear that to be a Classical scholar these days is to be a polyglot. Reeve's essay in German is not as good as those in English, from a standpoint of prose style, but it is flawless, which is more than I can say for many highly-renowned authors whose first language is German. And those other 2 essays -- they're definitely in Italian. My Italian is good enough that I could see right away that they were in Italian. Maybe we should leave it at that.

The copious polyglotism of the volume, and the lack of translation into English, seems to be a declaration on Reeve's part that he is not particularly interested in a wide reading public. Still, if you can read only English, I would urge you to get this volume and read the English parts. They make up most of the book, and you don't have to know anything about ancient Latin or Greek literature to become fascinated by what Reeve has to say.

And you might just possibly become so fascinated that you'll begin to become curious about all of those non-English parts, so curious that you might just end up learning another language or 3. And learning another language, although it is a strenuous task for all but a very few linguistic geniuses, is a glorious experience. It opens up a whole new part of the world.

Also, I noticed something: whatever Reeve's intentions may have been concerning the size of his target audience -- on the copyright page, beneath "Prima edizione: luglio 2011" ("First edition: July 2011") and the ISBN number, it says: "settima ristampa: gennaio 2017," which either means "seventh printing: January 2017" or "seventh re-printing, January 2017," I'm not sure which. But either way, it might mean that the readership of this book is not exactly narrow.

Is it required reading for many students of the Classics? It would be nice to think that many young people starting out on careers in Classics would be introduced to Reeve in this way. Or was the book in its 7th (or 8th?) printing already by January 2017 because that many people wanted to read it without anyone requiring them to? Or perhaps has word of mouth spread from students to others?

Perhaps I'm getting carried away here, and they're very small printings. I hope not. I hope they're huge. I strongly encourage you to get ahold of this book and read as much of it as you can.