1) From Hua Hsu’s New Yorker piece “The Otherworldly Ambitions of R. F. Kuang” (archived):
As [Rebecca] Kuang stirred a pot of pasta, I asked Eckert-Kuang [Kuang’s husband] about his dissertation. He paused, with a look familiar to any academic: Do you really want to know, or are you just asking out of politeness? Kuang poured me a glass of wine. I listened as Eckert-Kuang enthusiastically began talking about Kant, adjusting his glasses and grinning to punctuate ideas he found particularly stimulating. Kuang sipped from a mug that listed three check-box options: “Single,” “Taken,” and “Mentally Dating Immanuel Kant.”
“We end up hosting a lot of his department parties,” Kuang told me. “It’s really fun to be surrounded by people in a field of which you have zero knowledge. While I was writing ‘Katabasis,’ I would go around and ask people, like, ‘Can you teach me logic?’ And they were so excited.”
2) From Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, which I am currently reading to my wife at night:
Lord Merlin wandered round with his tea-cup. He picked up a book which Fabrice had given Linda the day before, of romantic nineteenth-century poetry.
‘Is this what you’re reading now?’ he said. ‘ “Dieu, que le son du cor est triste au fond des bois.” I had a friend, when I lived in Paris, who had a boa constrictor as a pet, and this boa constrictor got itself inside a French horn. My friend rang me up in a fearful state, saying: “Dieu, que le son du boa est triste au fond du cor.” I’ve never forgotten it.’
(The quoted line is the end of Alfred de Vigny’s “Le cor.”)
3) I hadn’t thought of Arthur Guiterman in ages, but I quoted the last line of this to my wife, found and read to her the whole poem (which I loved in my long-ago youth), and thought the assembled Hattery might enjoy it:
The tusks that clashed in mighty brawls
Of mastodons, are billiard balls.The sword of Charlemagne the Just
Is ferric oxide, known as rust.The grizzly bear whose potent hug
Was feared by all, is now a rug.Great Caesar’s bust is on my shelf,
And I don’t feel so well myself.
Arthur Guiterman! My junior-high-school English books were full of his ditties.
Sorry not actually relevant but ….
Has Hat seen this?
https://www.discovermagazine.com/a-new-indo-european-language-is-discovered-revealing-life-of-the-hittite-47869
Thread convergence: Another enjoyable light-versifier of Guiterman’s type was Franklin Pierce Adams.
The boa story gets a groan. In an alternate version, the friend sat on his snake and said corps.
The boa story gets a groan.
Yes, from me as well, and I’m sure Nancy M. took pleasure in the thought of the many groans it would cause.
Has Hat seen this?
We discussed Kalasmaic in 2023.
Untergang?
“Gott ist tot, Nietzsche ist tot, und mir geht’s auch schon ganz schlecht.”
Katabasis.
The novel “revolves around Alice Law and Peter Murdoch, two graduate students who venture to Hell to rescue their adviser Professor Grimes, who has recently died.”
The play on phrases -“Dieu, que le son du cor est triste au fond des bois.” versus “Dieu, que le son du boa est triste au fond du cor.” is exactly the sort of thing that linguists of the future (if there are any linguists in the future, that is!) will/should use to establish what the precise phonological realization of BOIS in twentieth century French must have been (sorry, historical linguist here, I know little about literature, so I tend to see everything written in terms of its present or future relevance to historical linguistics).
Hey, you’re singing my song!
Makes sense. Don’t die before your students have defended; that would be rude.
Punch, May 6 1893, p. 210.
An established comedy trope, apparently.