Handel with care

Came upon one of these lately: 

Here is Browne on the genre of picture (he is discussing the curvature of dolphins):

And thus also must that picture be taken of a Dolphin clasping an Anchor: that is, not really, as is by most conceived out of affection unto man, conveighing the Anchor unto the ground: but emblematically, according as Pierius hath expressed it, The swiftest animal conjoyned with that heavy body, implying that common moral, Festina lentè: and that celerity should always be contempered with cunctation.

I first came upon the saying in Moore's frigate-bird:

    As impassioned Handel——


meant for a lawyer and a masculine German domestic
  career——clandestinely studied the harpsichord
  and never was known to have fallen in love,
    the unconfiding frigate-bird hides
in the height and in the majestic
  display of his art. He glides
  a hundred feet or quivers about
    as charred paper behaves——full
    of feints; and an eagle


of vigilance...Festina lente. Be gay
  civilly? How so? "If I do well I am blessed
  whether any bless me or not, and if I do
    ill I am cursed."

I remember, at the time -- I had no Latin at all, then -- assuming that she was paraphrasing the quote in what immediately followed it. (And I had not noticed the parallel between this and the bit in Auden's limestone poem -- he would have been familiar with early Moore in 1948-49 -- where he says, "The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from, / Having nothing to hide." And other Google image results clarify that the thing protruding from the dolphin's face is a proboscis not a parching tongue.)

It is an amusing coincidence that both frigate-bird and porpoise are storm-sensors ("before a storme, hee tumbles just as a hog runs").

I shall close this pointless post -- as Eliot was fond of saying in forewords, all one can do with things that are so transparently good is point -- with a strikingly good observation from David Bromwich's essay on  Moore:

As a composer of words Moore's greatest affinities are with Francis Bacon [...] To be curt, undeviating, end-stopped wherever a thought might enter, but at the same time vivid, striking, inventive in the highest degree conscionable, is the ideal of both writers. [...] "Nature is often hidden; sometimes overcome; seldom extinguished," is a sentence one can imagine her writing, or quoting, as easily as "it is good to commit the beginnings of all great actions to Argos with his hundred eyes, and the ends to Briareus with his hundred hands; first to watch, and then to speed."

Here is the Bacon (I really have to read more of these essays). And for "extinguished" cf. -- in Moore's pangolin -- "curtailed, extinguished, thwarted by the dusk."

"Like bacon in the chimney"

More snoutage, this time from dolphin chapter in Pseudodoxia Epidemica:

Regarding storms, recall the cardinal in Webster who "lifts up's nose, like a foul porpoise before a storm"

(Quote courtesy of Calista)

Word-hoards and lard-hoards

1. In the wake of this exchange, Calista and I have been trading literary sightings of lard, pigs, and/or gross food broadly construed; we've recently started a new tumblr (currently titled "A Child's Larder of Verse" though really there isn't much verse there) dedicated to these. No by-lines as these would be purely embarrassing for me. Swift (Jonathan, not Tom) is the genius of the place.

2. A fascinating Language Log post about the writer Paul West who "emerged from [a] stroke with a near-total obliteration of language" and how he made the best of his way back to language:

Oddly, it was often the most obscure words that were easiest to recover. He struggled with words like blanket or bed, or his wife's name Diane, words that you would think over time should have seeped into his genes. Nevertheless, he could recruit words like postillion or tardigrades to get an idea across. This led to some counter-productive interactions with a speech therapist. Since aphasics often produce nonsense words without realizing that they aren't real words, one of the goals of therapy is to give the patient feedback on which words are real. But West would often produce bona fide words that were unknown to the therapist.  [...]

The intimate wordplay between West and [his wife Diane] Ackerman also eventually resumed, with West fashioning novel terms of endearment as gifts to his wife. The offerings were delightful. Deprived of the usual routes to language, and along with them, the common clichés that many of us struggle to shed, West bestowed on his wife exquisite pet names such as: My Little Bucket of Hair; Commendatore de le Pavane Mistletoe; Dark-Eyed Junco, My Little Bunko; Diligent Apostle of Classic Stanzas.  And at one point, the man uttered what has to be the most searingly romantic sentence ever uttered in history, by anyone, in any language:

"You are the hapax legomenon of my life."

Grief-bacon, contentment-bacon

Dept. of stuff Germans have words for:

1. The German for living the good life is "to live like a maggot in bacon." (Hanging Noodles)

2. The German word "kummerspeck" means "excess weight gained by emotional over-eating" and translates literally as "grief bacon." (Nick Confessore, twitter)

3. From a W.G. Sebald poem that appeared in the New Yorker sometime this year:

A young woman
came up to me
& said that al-
though on vacation
she had spent
all day at
the office
which unlike

her apartment was
air-conditioned &
as cold as the
morgue. There,
she said, I am
happy like an
opened up oyster
on a bed of ice.