I mean to tell you, he knew how to blow that thing

I am not dead. I seem to have spent the last two weeks solid interacting with people and I am now in hibernation. I spent Saturday at a cherry blossom viewing party at kenjari's, Sunday at eredien's fantastically vegan Alice-in-Lud dinner. Yesterday I watched Séraphine (2008) with Viking Zen and it reminded me that I still haven't written up The Horse's Mouth (1958), which I saw in January and also loved. Or any of the plays I've seen since the weekend before last. Or the ballet. I did read some awesome graffiti in Latin.

Technically I found it last week when I was checking attestations of irrumo for a conversation with grimmwire; I should have posted it then, but I am engaged in losing a game of catch-up with my life. It was scratched on a wall of the basilica at Pompeii:

NARCISSUS
FELLATOR
MAXIMUS

(CIL IV 1825a)

Quite possibly this is the best thing I've read off a wall in my life. Because on the one hand it's your basic for-a-good-time-call graffito: Narcissus [is] the greatest at sucking cock. But on the other, it's completely a parody of Roman tria nomina—praenomen, nomen, cognomen ± agnomen, Quintus Fabius Maximus, Publius Clodius Pulcher, Gaius Fuficius Fango,¹ etc. Thus proving that if you could go back in time and show Monty Python's Life of Brian to a Roman audience in first-century Judaea, they might be a little confused by the alien abduction,² but they'd think Biggus Dickus was hilarious.

1. My favorite Roman name, belonging to one of the great sad gits of the ancient world: the Octavian-appointed governor of Africa in 41 BCE who famously mistook a passing herd of hartebeest for enemy cavalry (being engaged at the time in a territorial skirmish with Titus Sextius, Antony's preferred candidate for the job) and committed suicide. I have no reason to believe I would have approved of his politics or liked him in person, but if I ever start keeping more of a household shrine than three coins, a Yule goat, and a shipwrecked glass bottle, I may light candles for him or something, if only apotropaically. His cognomen is Oscan for "mud."

2. Of course, modern audiences are, too.

While memory holds a seat in this distracted globe

I wonder if anyone has ever done a production of Hamlet where the prince is genuinely driven mad by his experience of the Ghost.

I am watching the RSC production with David Tennant and Patrick Stewart currently being broadcast on PBS—I thought of it when I saw the armored Ghost reach for its son, pull him close and embrace him; he clutches on to his father's cold flesh and it was unexpected and poignant, but no more. It should be strange to be hugged by a dead thing. It should be disordering and profoundly wrong; it should leave you wrecked in all your certainties, not only that a civil mask has been ripped off the corruption of human life, but that heaven and earth are not even secure in their relations. Hauntings are one thing to speak of, another to feel. From that moment on, of course it's a tragedy. Hamlet belongs to the other world. It's put forth its hand and touched him. And how can you think about life the same way after that?

(Okay, John Woodvine rocks as the Player King.)