PhD Dropout / Master sounds better than Doctor anyhow, right? / Comics / Illustrated Read-alongs / Currently The Anatomy of Melancholy
“Saturn and Mercury, the patrons of learning, are both dry planets… Poetry and beggary are gemilli, twin-born brats, inseperable companions.” There might be an awful, awful lot of drawings for this subsection, partly because it is the longest so far (ten times as long as the others) but also mostly because I strongly identify with […]
“Tristes voluptatum exitus, et quisquis voluptatum suarum reminisci volet, intelliget [from Boethius: pleasures bring sadness in their train, as any one will perceive who recalls his own pleasures], as bitter as gall and wormwood is their last; grief of mind, madness itself.” I ate too many Oreos last night, so I guess the wormwood […]
“Our villages are like molehills, and men as so many emmets.”
“‘Other sins last but for a while; the gut may be satisfied, anger remits, hatred hath an end, envy never ceaseth.'” (Cardan, lib. 2 de sap.)
Note to self: You skipped Subsection 3, a “Division of Perturbations” because it seemed to make more sense to draw individual perturbations before drawing the catalogue. I guess? Subsection 3 didn’t make much sense, really. Sometimes Burton says there are four perturbations but goes on to name three, and then sometimes there are seven or […]
So as mentioned before, Burton seems to say that there are six types of devils-spirits: fiery, aerial, terrestrial, watery, subterranean, and fairies/nymphs/satyrs/etc, but then terrestrial and fairies/etc. seem to collapse into the same category. Which is to say, I am really not sure what “terrestrial” devils are, according to Burton, but I drew one anyhow. […]
I think it is high time for a picture of a poem. So, a drawing of “All for a Day” by Robert Sward. Hey, look, I illustrated something that isn’t at least 200 years old, preferably 400. Since this is a contemporary poem by a living poet, I’m not going to copy and paste it […]
Do you suspect that you suffer from melancholy? Have you recently offended God? Well, it is just possible that He cursed you. In which case, I guess you need to cancel that appointment with your therapist and pray or something instead. You know who else God cursed with sadness? Nebuchadnezzar: That God Himself is a […]
See? This is me reading. I am really doing it. But I am also so terribly sleepy, and that makes me bad at art. I have both kids home for the summer, and it has been tiring. But not tiresome, that’s for sure. So, I am going to take a few weeks off. After that […]
The Entscheidungsproblem, Computer Science: This one was a doozy. But the main reason I started this website was to champion intelligence in a fun way, in the angry face of the stupidity that seems to be swallowing America. Well, trying to understand the Entscheidungsproblem sure as heck was fun. I emerged a little smarter even if […]
Pituita, or phlegm, is a cold and moist humour, begotten of the colder part of the chylus (or white juice coming out of meat digested in the stomach), in the liver; his office is to nourish and moisten the members of the body which, as the tongue, are moved, that they be not over-dry. So […]
Of the parts of the body there may be many divisions: the most approved is that of Laurentius, out of Hippocrates: which is, into parts contained, or containing. Contained, are either humours or spirits. A humour is a liquid or fluent part of the body, comprehended in it, for the preservation of it; and is […]
This little section is about sinking into a transient melancholy due to, say, a fleabite versus the “continuate disease” of melancholy. Burton does not have much patience for “errant,” or transient, melancholy, and he would prefer people stop calling “oops I stubbed my toe and it sucks” melancholy at all: Melancholy in this sense is the character […]
Lycanthropia, which Avicenna calls cucubuth, others lupinam insaniam, or wolf-madness, when men run howling about graves and fields in the night, and will not be persuaded but that they are wolves, or some such beasts. Aetius and Paulus call it a kind of melancholy; but I should rather refer it to madness, as most do. […]
The diseases of the mind, forasmuch as they have their chief seat in the organs of the head, are commonly repeated amongst the diseases of the head, which are divers, and vary much according to their size. (138) Some days you just can’t shake the frogs off your brain. This post is part of […]
What a disease is, almost every physician defines. Fernelius calleth it an “affection of the body contrary to nature.” Fuschius and Crato, “an hindrance, hurt, or alteration of any action of the body, or part of it.” Tholosanus, “a dissolution of that league which is between body and soul, and a perturbation of it; as […]
Unfortunately, the pernicious fishes aren’t the real problem: To descend to more particulars, how many creatures are at deadly feud with men? Lions, wolves, bears, etc. Some with hoofs, horns, tusks, teeth, nails: How many noxious serpents and venomous creatures, ready to offend us with stings, breath, sight, or quite kill us? How many pernicious […]
Ha! I thought I was finally going to begin the First Partition, but oh no no no no no, there is yet another piece of introductory material. In this short, third (fourth?) introduction, there is a poem. It is in Latin, so here is my editor’s translation: Weep, Heraclitus; here is food for tears In […]
1. Robinson Crusoe on Mars, 1964, dir. Byron Haskin 2. ??? I think that is a misplaced modifier in my list title, but I can’t think of a way to reword it that isn’t super awkward. Adaptations set in space of eighteenth century novels? That sounds bad. I think it is probably obvious that I […]
At last we come to the end of “Democritus Junior to the Reader.” After over one hundred pages of introduction, what parting thoughts does Burton have for us before embarking on the real book? I have overshot myself, I have spoken foolishly, rashly, unadvisedly, absurdly, I have anatomized mine own folly. And now methinks upon a […]
Performativity (specifically Judith Butler’s iteration), Gender Studies: Philosopher and feminist theorist Judith Butler offered a new, more Continental (specifically, Foucauldian) reading of the notion of performativity, which has its roots in linguistics and philosophy of language. She describes performativity as “that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains.” She […]
So 118 pages into this diatribe against humanity, Burton unsurprisingly sums up his argument as follows: “They are all mad.” If you are “reading” along but have fallen 116-118 pages behind, all you really missed is: “They are all mad.” Or more specifically, somewhat, they are all “E fungis nati homines,” which roughly translated means men […]
Nevisanus hath as hard an opinion of rich men, “wealth and wisdom cannot dwell together.” […] Sapientia non invenitur in terra suaviter viventium [wisdom is not found in the land of those who live at ease]. For beside a natural contempt of learning, which accompanies such kind of men, innate idleness (for they will take no pains), […]
“For I see no reason” (as [Aristotle] said) “why an epicure or idle drone, a rich glutton, a usurer, should live at ease, and do nothing, live in honour, in all manner of pleasures, and oppress others, when as in the meantime a poor labourer, a smith, a carpenter, an husbandman that hath spent his time […]
Let them be rude, stupid, ignorant, incult, lapis super lapidem sedeat, and as the apologist will, resp. tussi, et graveolentia laboret, mundus vitio, let them be barbarous as they are, let them tyrannise, epicurise, oppress, luxuriate, consume themselves with factions, superstitions, lawsuits, wars and contentions, live in riot, poverty, want, misery; rebel, wallow as so […]
This section was really pretty dull, to be honest. It was four pages of stuff like this: Some, saith Acosta, would have a passage cut from Panama to Nombre de Dios in America; but Thuanus and Serres the French historians speak of a famous aqueduct in France, intended in Henry the Fourth’s time, from the […]
Log-space transducer, computer science: “A log-space transducer is a type of Turing machine used for log-space reductions.” (Wikipedia)
When a giant angry turnip was elected president of the United States in the apocalyptic year that was 2016, I started to feel a little down. Naturally my response was to buy an unabridged copy of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. My get-out-of-bed-without-crying-plan is to read a little piece of this gargantuan lump of knowledge daily, and I will illustrate it as I go.