I am seized by a torpor that even extends to the book-buying department, which means that, as torpor goes, it's a pretty serious seizure,Jean Aitchison's The Articulate Mammal was thoroughly enlightening an entertaining, especially the amusing analogy used to try and explain Noam Chomsky's shifting views on the innateness of language (as explained to the Emperor of Jupiter), Amin Maalouf's The Crusades Through Arab Eyes has been duly passed on to Mother, who has found it a welcome distraction during some dark and difficult days and nights. George Steiner's After Babel is sitting on the 'to-be-read' pile, and the bargainous second-hand copy of Wallace Chafe's Meaning and the Structure of Language has a ridiculously stiff cover that means it keeps trying to close itself up when I'm trying to read it. Following on from a recent TV documentary I sent off for a copy of Sean Martin's The Knights Templar, which is a lot more scholarly than I'd expected from his appearance on it (I think it was the big earring that suggested this....). I'm going to try not to get sucked down the whole Templar treasure route, entailing as it does D*n Br*wn and books of That Sort, but it is an intriguing question: when Philip the Fourth of France finally accessed the Templar coffers (having wiped the Order out of existence) and found them empty, where had the money gone? Martin is convinced that the Templars, sensing the end was nigh, had ample opportunity and means to disperse the treasure during the time that the Templar leaders were imprisoned in Paris.
I'm going through one of my periodic reading slumps at the moment , but with Borders gone and Waterstones lacking in browsing appeal (too many celeb biographies or celeb chef cookbooks on display) and not knowing what it is that I fancy reading, I guess I'm going to have to sit slack-jawed in front of the telly a bit more until thoroughly cheesed off with what's on offer. Actually, there was rather a good documentary on last night called Aristotle's Lagoon, which dealt with Aristotle's 'forgotten' natural history masterpiece Historia Animalium. Forgotten? I think not. His understanding of biology informs much of the Aristotelean corpus, and it's one of the first things we studied at uni. It also contains some of the interesting pieces of translation that the Bright-Eyed Boy and I looked at a while ago. The Lesvos scenery was lovely and the presenter charming and enthusiastic, but my main criticism of the whole programme, fascinating as it was, was that it contained no passages from Aristotle's works, and that is a bit of a shame as they are well-observed and occasionally amusing. Aristotle likened a seal to 'lame quadruped'; noted that 'some folk have heard snoring coming out' of a sleeping dolphin's blowhole; that small, round stripey bees are the 'best' sort, with the long bee, the 'thief' bee and the big lazy stingless bee lagging behind; that no living creature 'casts' its back teeth, but dogs lose none at all according to some people and only the canines according to others....Fortunately I'd recorded it, because the lovely scenery, soothing commentary and two glasses of red wine meant that I'd fallen asleep shortly before the end.....
