stephen.news

hypertext, words and more

The New York Times

  • A Brief History of Insults (and So’s Your Mother)

    •

    2 min read

    •

    Deb Amlen, writing for the New York Times

    Speaking of not taking criticism well, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention one of the most hostile “Oh yeah?” insults of the period. The Roman author Catullus’s poem “Carmen 16” was a response to two men, Furius and Aurelius, who were going around telling people that Catullus’s poetry was soft, a euphemism for effeminate. (This was considered an insult in those days.)

    Catullus, who had apparently woken up on the wrong side of the bed that morning, proceeded to let the men know in no uncertain terms that not only had they missed the point of his work, but that he was willing to inflict great bodily harm on them to prove it.

    The poem opens with a criminal threat that is so filthy and violent that it can’t be included here. And, humorously enough, his main point — after threatening the two men — was that sometimes softly rendered messages could be more erotic than openly prurient writing.

    “Carmen 16” is available online for those who are inclined to search for it.

    I am indeed inclined and then some! Translated from the Latin, here’s the hilarious and sexually hostile insult Catullus hurled at Furius and Aurelius:

    I will sodomize you and face-fuck you,

    bottom Aurelius and catamite Furius,

    you who think, because my poems

    are sensitive, that I have no shame.

    For it’s proper for a devoted poet to be moral

    himself, [but] in no way is it necessary for his poems.

    In point of fact, these have wit and charm,

    if they are sensitive and a little shameless,

    and can arouse an itch,

    and I don’t mean in boys, but in those hairy old men

    who can’t get it up.

    Because you’ve read my countless kisses,

    you think less of me as a man?

    I will sodomize you and face-fuck you.

    Dang! Catullus is ready to square up with Furius and Aurelius!

  • Rodeo is Turning America’s Whitest Big City Black

    •

    3 min read

    •

    Tressie McMillan Cottom writing for The New York Times:

    In the historical scope, it makes sense why protracted conflict marred this city. It is less obvious what a Juneteenth celebration would mean for Portland. The city does not have Texas’ history with enslaved people. It does not have the cultural history of the American South. And it is not a central part of the Great Migration story of Black history.

    The Portland rodeo is a celebration trying to fasten Juneteenth’s specific story of freedom from slavery to universal themes of place, home and equality. Now that Juneteenth is a federal holiday, communities across the country are doing the same complicated dance. This nation still has not fully acknowledged its national debt to slavery. How can it find a unifying national message around Black freedom without acknowledging white accommodation of slavery? A rodeo is as good a way to explore those tensions as any other. Like a rider wrestling a bull beneath bright lights, reconciling national narratives is not a pastime for the faint of heart.

    […]

    Like every story about enslavement and the American West, you cannot talk about Juneteenth in Portland without talking about land. “Ivan very intentionally had the rodeo here at the Expo Center,” Oregon State Senator Lew Frederick said. The Expo Center is near Vanport, a formerly Black working-class enclave built around the shipping industry in the 1940s. A massive storm, followed by flooding, wiped Vanport off the map in 1948. Frederick says there remains a notion among Black Portlanders that the flooding was a convenient excuse for displacing the city’s thriving Black enclave.

    Having the rodeo near Vanport is a way of saying that this is an event for you, for us. And that we remember. For State Senator Frederick, Juneteenth is not only about commemorating news of freedom for Galveston’s enslaved people. It is also about remembering in places where a lot of effort has been made to forget. “That’s what Juneteenth is managing, to tell the history that we have not been told. So it can be told in an Oregonian way.”

    Black Cowboys have been around since long before the cattle-driving era, but sadly pop culture has diminished their myth and legend. These folks deserve every right to commemorate Juneteenth and reclaim their much deserved piece of Western Heritage. Bringing people together to acknowledging and reconcile history over song, pageantry and bucking horses sounds like a superb idea. I know where I wanna be next Juneteenth. I’ll see y’all in Portland.