"Recedite, plebes! Gero rem imperialem."

Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?

With thanks to orlandobr, who reminds us that this is the anniversary of Constantine's vision.

Gore Vidal is in mourning.

And justmyself reminds hellas that today is Ochi Day, which I think of as the real Greek Independence Day. You know, when Mussolini decided to conquer Albania, assuming there would be no objection to his army getting there by way of Corfu. Ochi is (modern) Greek for No, General Metaxas' famous answer. Another (more or less) Fascist hero of the times. I hope he is related to the brandy people.

To make a longish story shortish, the Italians got bogged down in Greece, the Germans had to come to their rescue and got bogged down themselves and had to put off the invasion of Russia, and the rest is history. Well, that part is history too, but a part nobody knows. Except for Greeks. And their fans.

Tired, hungry, cranky

Last night's Pragmatists' Forum was at Fordham Law. Coming off the elevator on the third floor the first thing you see is the campus Republican bulletin board, with a large blue poster for next year's Federalist Society convention. I suppose the Democrats' is somewhere in the basement. Never mind, I rather like the Federalists. I was less amused by the copy of a Wall Street Journal op ed piece by, you guessed it, Rush. Walking down the hall I observed photographic portraits of Supreme Court Justices, Frankfurter, Douglas, and, yes, Warren. The latter identified as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren, 1969. Well, how important is history to the study of law, anyway? But surely some of the more senior faculty are old enough to have been alive and awake in 1969. This does not elevate my confidence in the Fordham law degree.

The first presentation was, well, maybe not for me, being a Caucasian and all, one of the oppressors. Still, I couldn't see the point of a Master's thesis in philosophy on Tupac, even as interpreted through the analysis of Cornel West, even at Union Theological Seminary, which serves up a nice Orthodox liturgy on Sunday mornings, and is used for innumerable location shots in those Law and Order episodes which play without ceasing in my living room when the kid is home, and sometimes when she is not.

The second, Leonard Harris on Alain Locke, was worth the walk and the wait and the running out of the red wine before the intermission. Harris drew a sharp contrast between the aesthetics of Locke and du Bois and gave some of the history of the politics of literature in the '20s and beyond. And even today Locke is controversial. He was a happy homosexual, as other men of great wealth have been, and therefore not tormented enough by himself or society for the Queer Philosophers to have any use for him. His sexual preferences did him no harm as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, or even at Harvard before that -- I understand that the dean in those days was openly gay, though somewhat discrete. He was also the brother of Charles Peirce, who remained unwelcome there...

I think I have some baby carrots sitting on a windowsill. They can keep me until Maya can buy a couple of hot dogs from Gray's Papaya when she gets out of the subway.

Good weekend, all.