On Hope

Hope is a dangerous thing. It belongs to religion to pay reverence to Hope and Superstition.

The art of puppetry. What made Quintilian's Institutes of Oratory so successful

Marcus Quintilianus was a very conscientious and cautious man. He saw nothing wrong with the idea that man should be the measure for everything. Man is partly animal, it is true. What is left is social. To the extent that he may be manipulated by language control. Quintilian's instruction on how to achieve this was a gift to all manipulators of history seeking present authority. His work should have been given the title How to fool a man into acting as a perfect social puppet. He carried out coordinated research for the perfection of humankind. And this was two thousand years before the publication of Heinrich Kleist's essay On the Marionette Theatre in which puppets are described as being more graceful than humans.

L'impazienza

A parte forse i pochi casi di un amico del cuore che ti telefona il più delle volte per regalarti qualcosa, o per chiederti semplicemente come stai, tutte le altre telefonate che ricevi sono di persone - la cosiddetta grande cerchia di amici - che vogliono qualcosa. Queste persone non sanno tenere a bada la propria impazienza quando è una cosa che li riguarda. Sanno invece tenerla a bada nel caso contrario ("most people are able to hold their impatience within reasonable bounds" - W. Somerset Maugham).

The myth of Italian mental superiority

Being stupid is like being addicted to drugs, it reflects our higher purpose. There are potential long-term consequences to it but one can still carry on with life. From my experience all cases in Italy hooked on stupidity (about 60 per cent of the adult population) begin with one's presumption of mental superiority.

What a sociopath needs to know

I don’t know why so called normal people make me so uncomfortable. The trouble is, one can never tell a regular person from a sociopath. Choosing to mix with people whom others would think of mixing with it’s a bit like travelling to one of these wonderful places in the Middle East, on the edge of the desert, between the desert and the sea. You hope it'll not be an unattractive desert - dark brown sand and modern buildings with no architectural style. And of course  it’s a five hour flight, and you start being terribly nervous going on El Al, thinking it’s bound to have a bomb on it, you'll keep thinking on the plane I’m about to be blown up, so I’m here one moment, about to disappear the next.

I know there is a particular pattern sociopaths follow, the way they keep their victims in bondage, nice to them one day meanly manipulative the next. But that doesn’t help either. In their own perverse ways they are quite rational. I know they lie a lot. But that’s also s what normal people do. If I had to choose between the company of a normal person and a caught sociopath I’d be more keen on the latter. At least I’d know where I stood with him

Il casino del bi

Il fatto che sia bilingue, come sono bisessuale, sembrerebbe una gran fortuna e invece è un gran casino ...

Religious Trauma Healing

It was pity to see a bar row spoil a couple's little tête-à-tête in Rome yesterday (the couple presumably belonged to one of these modern Catholic social movements, Comunione e Liberazione). A thirty-something man unleashed a succession of uppercut punches after arguing with a younger man over a “boorish” (coatto!) and offensive behavior against a woman. The poor little couple left quickly. It was a mix of her being embarrassed because of what her boyfriend had been saying about the necessity for people to present themselves perfect before God (I'm pretty sure it came from one of the epistles of the New Testament) and her trauma for having come face to face with the sheer brutality of life.

Good judges in the Bible

I don't see why an innocent man cleared of all charges before him ought to be fined for contempt of court after taking the Bible in his left hand and hurling it at the head of the presiding magistrate.

I malati sani

Non c'è nessun dubbio che l'omofobia, di qualsiasi tipo e gradazione sociale - secondo le distinzioni contenute nell'ottimo saggio di Jorge Kantor - sia una malattia mentale, se la schizofrenia è una malattia mentale. Non c'è nessuna differenza tra degli psicotici che infilano il tubo di un compressore nel culo di un ragazzo omosessuale e gli fanno scoppiare le budella e una vecchia deputata pagliaccia che giustifica non la sua omofobia sulla base della Bibbia, come vorrebbe far credere, ma la Bibbia sulla base della sua omofobia. Questa gente andrebbe tutta prima di tutto non semplicemente accompagnata ma letteralmente trascinata in tribunale. E in secondo luogo rinchiusa in qualche posto dove le sia impedito di far danni, da dove non possa più attentare agli interessi sani di quella parte sana dell'umanità (della quale fanno parte anche dei meravigliosi - romanzescamente parlando - delinquenti, che tuttavia non sono omofobi, non sono malati, come invece lo è questo lerciume schizofrenico-paranoideo, questi psicotici in sordina che albergano dapertutto e la cui puzza di m. fa precisamente cagare).

A history of humanity through the higly coloured lens of hyperbaton (conflicts between logical and rhetorical precedence)

Much of the effectiveness of Greek prose depends upon a non-logical development of the thought. A bare logical development would kill the effect (“striking colours, placed side by side, kill each other” – Denniston). This is quite obvious in a reading of any Greek text. Hyperbaton is what strikes most. Whenever a word refuses to wait it will either press to the fore taking its turn in the logical development or be placed late by dislocation of natural order. 

Ἀλλὰ καὶ τοῦτο ἐὰν ὁμολογῶμεν (Plat., Prot., 360a)
(but that too if we admit)
 

instead of

 Ἀλλὰ ἐὰν ὁμολογῶμεν καὶ τοῦτο
 (but if we admit that too).

Τρέφεται δέ, ὦ Σώκρατες, ψυχὴ τίνι; (Prot., 313c)

(nourished, Socrates, is a soul with what?)

 instead of 

ψυχὴ δὲ, τίνι τρέφεται, ὦ Σώκρατες;

(with what, Socrates, is a soul nourished?)