Scan-Happy Spinator
In the last two days, along with a few other tasks, I have scanned and documented twenty-nine images. Fortunately, two of them were diplomas, which I had a chance both to translate and transcribe this time.

Three-Quarters Birthday Yesterday
It's not that I do anything to celebrate it, but each quarter birthday just makes me feel older and older. As opposed to my full birthdays, on which I usually make the ridiculous complaint, "I'm X years old, and I've done nothing with my life."

They Return
Many people (almost too many) I know are returning to the campus of my employer, looking, well, like adults. Of course, I'm always asked what I'm doing. Fortunately, by now, most people I see know that I work for the University, but they are still curious why I have not returned to Chicago.

Hurricane Fabian
As Fabian seems to be on a track to the north and east of the Caribbean Islands, I will not pay detailed attention to Fabian. Expect further word after Labor Day, when its effects on the continental US will be more clear.


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What?
I don't think I managed to get my tongue out of my mouth to say it today when my boss told me that his great uncle was Chair of Chicago's Trustees in the 60s.

Ancestors
I finally discovered the origins of my Italian ancestors yesterday. One quarter of my genetic material resided for time out of mind, I suspect, in the Commune of Reino in Benevento. It seems that some of the Sindaci (Mayors) of Reino are related to me.

Medical Note
One of my friends has been showing indications of low spirits on her blog lately. She is suffering from the awful condition first identified by the French physician at Quebec De Rocheard as "Sectum ex Chicagoense," or withdrawal from Chicago. Unfortunately, I suffer from it, too, and I suspect that we are suffering from the complex form, whose symptoms include:

1. Obsessive longing for a conversation that mentions Plato, ScavHunt, etc.
2. Desire to be near someone named Diamond D, not necessarily to see said person but to know that said person is watching over them like a friendly vulture from some place called "Admin
3. Profound weakness when separated from oolitic limestone. Some sufferers have, by mistake, simply been classified as oolite addicts.
4. Dreams about being lost in the midst of Gothic architecture with a paper whose title has nothing to do with the body of the paper.
5. Muttering in one's sleep "It's omelettes tonight at Center Stage, yummy."

There's only one remedy, I am afraid. Strangely, I may be taking the cure a day earlier than expected. Unfortunately, I'll need to change my ticket to do so.

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Back From the Berkshires

I fished for hours, and I didn't catach diddly squat except other fishermen's bait. I go to back to work on Monday, and then I return to New England for Labor Day weekend.

26 days until I return to Chicago.

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Latin Requests

1. Someone searched for a definition of forsitan , it means "perhaps."

As in: forsitan haec olim meminisse iuvabit
Someday it perhaps will please us to recall what we're doing now
(Not quite literal, but it's hexadecisyllabic, and I need the practice.)

2. No one searched for a definition of currunt , which means, "they run."

As in: caelum, animum mutant, qui trans mare currunt
They who run across the sea find the sky has changed but not their souls.

Other Matters
Pi Kappa Alpha gear is now being advertised above the site. I guess I should stop talking about my current project at work.

My boss asked me and a few others of my age whether they were jealous of professional athletes in their late teens and early twenties who were making huge signing bonuses. (Not boni, Patrick, heh heh). Specifically, he asked something about wishing we were there when they were handing out athletic skills. My boss happens to be my former Little League coach. I replied something to the effect of, "I must have been in the bathroom, and I'm glad of it. I don't need that kind of money and women wanting to come to my hotel room at night." I sent my colleagues into conniptions. Frankly, I don't think it was funny.

Lately, I have had trouble finishing spoken sentences while I seemingly expect that my thought is so banal as to be completed by the auditor.

That's it. I'm going on vacation now.

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A Comment on Current Things and a Reminder of Things Past

Nidra Poller weaves a tale of murder and French hypocrisy and purported decadence.

My favorite part begins, "Star-crossed lovers from anti-warring families in a free world where adultery does not turn women scarlet, divorce is not a disgrace, patchwork families cause no concern...The bare-bones story is not Greek tragedy, Shakespearean drama, Biblical narrative. It's a fait divers: Just one of those things that happen, illustrating nothing. The facts will come out in court, editorialists will pontificate on the futility of seeking vengeance, the bereaved lover will be shown as suffering from the loss of his beloved partner and the destruction of his brilliant career. What more should he suffer?"

Speaking of Shakespearean drama, "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" ( Macbeth , Act V, Scene II [?]). Ooh, so post-modern.

As for disgrace, men of good families and good prospects always have been exploiters and batterers. I was reading a publication from 1836 in which the story is told of a man of good family who courts an attractive and well-mannered woman of more obscure family. He seduces her and leaves her pregnant in the care of her parents, who soon "die of shame." Who knows what happens to the girl herself, who is left like Jane Eyre nearly is, without family, money, or respectability.

Later, the man is converted at a revival and marries an attractive and pious woman. They have children. As their daughters grow into adolescence, the family boards the wife's brother, a medical student, who showers a great deal of attention on his nieces. One niece in particular gets the literal equivalent of Jove's golden shower. The girl is left without reputation to a degree far more than the first case, but her parents simply tell him to leave the area before they prosecute him. Perhaps, the theory was that the other daughters and the son might have prospects provided that the incest story spreads no further than their small town. The wicked uncle goes off and does quite well for himself in society somewhere else.

Was this story true? I don't know. The same publication warned about nannies moonlighting as prostitutes. What I believe is that it falls into the same archetype as Poller's story. Faced with a gross crime, it ties crime to crime with both sex and violence lurking in the background when they are not at the fore. A girl is punished for the sins of her father, while the sins of France and themselves presumably are heaped upon a man and a womam. The psyche is led by a cart horse and whipped at its tail. In the 1836 case, the bystanders shout only that the father is responsible. The wicked uncle is evil, yet he is somehow absolved as the agent of expiation. In Poller's story, the decadence of France, the demand of some within France for cultural purification of American influence, and French anti-Semitism or sympathy for Palestine becomes the scapegoat. Of course, Cantat is responsible, Poller claims, but so are everything for which France will absolve him.

Yes, I am definitely rambling. I really should now attack unjust forms of shame, but I am going to desist. What I am going to warn is that issues of expiation, shame (guilt, whether true or false), larger social forces, and personal and collective responsibility probably are going to enter the national discourse very soon. You see, Mel Gibson, has just made a movie.

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More Fraternities

I now know more about them than I ever wanted to know. It's OK, Todd, I know no dirt about Sig Ep.

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I smashed the middle finger of my left hand in a door this afternoon. It's going to be sore for a long time, I suspect, but I can still bend it.

I have been researching fraternities and sororities at my employer with my boss. Among other things, I now know elements of the ritual of the Alpha Mu Pi Omega Fraternity. Fortunately, they no longer exist.

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Vacation is Coming

I am going on vacation next week in the Berkshires, which are somewhere in Massachusetts. I have not bothered to ask my mother where exactly we are going, but I do like surprises. In preparation for said vacation, I assembled my fly fishing gear yesterday. No, I do not know how to fly fish, but I have nice gear (which my parents bought me three years ago), so I am going to try it out. As for other possible activities, there is always poetry and geology. Something tells me that the Berkshires were deeply involved in the Appalachian orogenic events. (Laurentia into Avalonia...Gondwanaland into Laurentia) Yup, I sorta remember me Earth history. My only regret is that I will miss Patrick's road trip to the east.

Financial Instruments of Yore
I spent much of the day reading a diary of a soldier assigned to a military hospital in France during World War I. I was looking for pages of the diary that could be scanned for the finding aid, but I was intrigued with how much his life reminded me of mine. It was sweet to see him wishing for some Latin and Greek to read. At the beginning, he writes, "forsitan haec olim meminisse iuvabit" (Vergil, Aeneid , Book I). At the end, he quotes Horace, "caelum, animum mutant qui trans mare currunt." I believed the first, but I did not quite believe the second. He gained some surprising maturity and some unsurprising bad habits on his tour. He comments near the end with some regret that his mother wants him to go back to college.

I spent another chunk of the day going through the banknote collection of another man long dead. I saw Continental money, Confederate banknotes, and an 1842 Cashier's Check of the Bank of the United States for $100,000!

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Drug Matters

1. I hate when boomers, especially ones I respect, talk about their former drug habits. They're just alluding to an arena of experiences I have made a conscious decision not to have. If I did drugs or had wild partying stories, I wouldn't tell them. Why do they have to tell me?

2. On a related note: Apparently, pot heads used to form a distinct aristocracy at the University of Chicago as opposed to beer drinkers. Nowadays, it seems that there is no segregation. Pot, pills, pilsen, you can be cool with all of them.

Convention Matters

Soon it will be done. I don't know what to say. It's been a rollercoaster ride, and I wasn't anywhere near Minneapolis. All I can say for now is that Rowan Williams is the answer to my prayers for calling the primates (heads of vaguely autocephalic national churches) together for a meeting. Anglicans need to remember why they're Anglicans, i.e., we discuss our problems rationally and put forward as few ultimata as possible.

I miss National Review. I miss Salon (both of which are on lighter schedules this week).
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He Said, He Said (No More)

The report is in. The charges looked thin. New Hampshire has its bishop. But this is only the beginning.

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Another Day
One co-worker of mine told me that she was amazed by how much work I had done last month. Earlier in the day, she mentioned that it was now August. "Time goes so fast when you get older," she told me and then reminded me that I was halfway through college. Yipe! I feel rather far through college and not far enough, if you know what I mean. I spent the day editing old work, doing mindless though useful work, and helping my boss with yet another investigation of the way my employer's administrative structures came to be. The story, at least, of the last fifty years or so, I know well enough to give a survey course, but it is fun to probe the details.

Convention News
Everything is still in committee, although I would love to see some committee testimony.

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