Digest from urth@urth.net

David Duffy · 22 Jan 2003, 01:14 · from urth-v0301.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: David Duffy <davidD at qimr.edu.au>
Subject: (urth) Re: Digest from  urth at urth.net
Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2003 11:14:42 +1000 (EST)
Message-ID: <urth-v0301-2759 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0301/2759.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Fernando Q. Gouvea wrote:                    =20
>> What is "Malicapata"? An Otherworld disease, or something else?
> Hmmm... a "capon" is a castrated male chicken, from a Latin root that mea=
ns
> "to cut", I think. So "badly cut"?

Of course, he could have just meant a headache ;) or depression.

Googling gave:

http://www.angelfire.com/ri/tucker/gender/eunuchs/terms.html

  The method of striking or crushing is apparent in such words as the=20
  Latin capo, 'capon,' from the Greek kopto, 'strike,' and the Greek      =20
  thlasiae, thlibiae, 'eunuch,' from thlao, 'crush,' and the Sanskrit
  vadhri, 'eunuch,' from vadh, 'strike.' Cutting is shown in the    =20
  Latin castro, 'castrate,' from root kes, in the Sanskrit sas,=20

  In classical times the varieties of eunuchs were as follows: (1)
  Castrati, clean-cut--both penis and testicles. (2) Spadones, whose
  testicles only are removed by a process of dragging. (3) Thlibiae,
  whose testicles are bruised and crushed, the seminal glands being=20
  thus permanently injured--chiefly applied in the case of the very
  young. =20

  [Priests of Cybele are 2 IIRC]

and rather resonantly,=20

Kuefler, Mathew The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and =20
Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity.

"The question of masculinity formed a key part of the intellectual life
of late antiquity and was crucial to the development of Christian    =20
society. This idea is at the heart of Mathew Kuefler's new book, which
revisits the Roman Empire during the third and fifth centuries of the=20
common era. Kuefler argues that the collapse of the Roman army, an  =20
increasingly autocratic government, and growing restrictions on the
traditional rights of men within marriage and sexuality all led to an
endemic crisis in masculinity: men of Roman aristocracy, who had    =20
always felt themselves to be soldiers, statesmen, and the heads of
households, became, by their own definition, unmanly.            =20

"The cultural and demographic success of Christianity during this epoch
lay in the ability of its leaders to recognize and respond to this   =20
crisis. Drawing on the tradition of gender ambiguity in early    =20
Christian teachings, which included Jesus's exhortation that his
followers "make themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of
heaven," Christian writers and thinkers crafted a new masculine ideal,
one that took advantage of the changing social realities in Rome,    =20
inverted the Roman model of manliness, and helped solidify Christian =20
ideology by reinstating the masculinity of its adherents."         =20

while Nutria declaimed:
> I, Nutria, will tell you. It's the scene at the end of the book, which=20
> hints that the helots were massacred by their Spartan owners, immediately=20
> after the Spartans freed them for helping fight in the battle. Which they=20
> were. But it's far from clear in the book what is going on. There are eve=
n=20
> missing pages!
> Bet I'm right. Anyway, that's the one that stumped me the most.

I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you (a smiley is probably in
order).=20

Does anyone feel like comparing and contrasting Latro with the hero
Leonard of the movie _Memento_?  One might be the latter's interest in
emotional (via Pavlovian conditioning) unconscious memory (FWIW the
story idea is said to come from _One Hundred Years of Solitude_)

David Duffy.

--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net