I returned from CCCC in San Francisco on the redeye Sunday morning, tired not only from the flight but from that sustained intellectual engagement, my mind happily worn out and smooshed and pushed by all the presentations I went to. It was an odd conference for me: I saw some good panels, about which I’ll post my notes soon, and some bad ones, about which I won’t, except to say that Spencer and I both stayed at one just to see how amazing it would get. What was odd, though, was the number of young-but-getting-established scholars whose reputation and work I know and admire who seemed to be reiterating somewhat old and accepted claims, and the number of new scholars who seemed unaware of the recent body of scholarship on emerging topics: in both cases, I found myself frequently feeling a strong sense of academic déjà vu.

While I was away, my colleague, an Eliot scholar, took care of Tink and Zeugma, for which I’m much indebted to him. I mention that he’s an Eliot scholar because I was a bit surprised by what he left transcribed on my refrigerator in my magnetic poetry set: a poem in English that’s clearly Catullan in nature, and likely one of the spurious Catullus poems (like Catullus 18, 19, and 20) derived from the V manuscript or Verona codex, but one I’d not seen before. In spirit, it’s a bit more strong than Catullus 11, but not quite as filthy as 16:

He can happily copulate forever
Whether beneath a horse, a woman, or delicately to music
But alas, how shall heaven endure
This boy and his tawdry wild protuberance?

I’m not sure about “heaven” — I’m betting it’s caelum, and probably plural rather than singular, so “the skies,” maybe — and Catullus would of course be more direct than “copulate” or “protuberance,” but there’s also the wonderful and clearly Catullan contrast between “delicately” and the, uh, horse. I’ll see if I can try my hand at back-translating it into a Latin hendecasyllabic.

And for now, I’m happy to be back home with the girls, working on some conference notes and starting to read submissions for the Kairos special issue.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Asides. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.