PhD Dropout / Master sounds better than Doctor anyhow, right? / Comics / Illustrated Read-alongs / Currently The Anatomy of Melancholy
This section is a real goldmine of insults, or more specifically: insults against greedy ecumenical scholars. I don’t know any of those, not being very godly myself, but still these might be useful the next time you get a bad grade in an English class, and also for instructors to use the next time time […]
“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 […]
This subsection is the longest subsection. Marsilius Ficinus de sanit. tuend. lib. 1, cap. 1, 3, 4, and lib. 2, cap. 16, gives many reasons, “why students dote more often than others.” The first is their negligence; “other men look to their tools, a painter will wash his pencils, a smith will look to his hammer, anvil, […]
Writers don’t escape Burton’s condemnation, even though he is one. Quoting Cicero: “There was never yet true poet nor orator, that thought any other better than himself.” At least I think he’s quoting Cicero there, but honestly his attribution is confusing and I narrowly avoided falling down a weird Atticus/Tully/Cicero rabbit hole. Okay so I […]
Whatever you call it, “overmuch Joy” and love of “immoderate applause” being my personal favorites, pride is no good thing: “This acceptable disease, which so sweetly sets upon us, ravisheth our senses, lulls our souls asleep, puffs up our hearts as so many bladders.” I really wanted to draw a puffed up bladder for this […]
“They do persecute beasts so long, till in the end they themselves degenerate into beasts.” Once again, I was about to move on from this section and make some goddamned progress, but then I didn’t because I drew another goddamned picture. Maybe “immoderate desire of hawking and hunting” is an archaic source of melancholic debauchery, […]
I seem to have drawn a second illustration for Part I, Section 2, Member III, Subsection 12. I’m just really enjoying all these jabs at the rich and covetous if I’m honest: “Austin therefore defines covetousness, quarumlibet rerum inhonestam et insatiabilem cupiditatem, a dishonest and insatiable desire of gain; and in one of his […]
Well, if you don’t have a pile of “money-bags” to sleep on “open-mouthed” (“Congestis undique saccis indormit inhians”) this section will make you feel better about yourself, because at least now you know how to insult Jeff Bezos in Latin. Apparently all those Uncle Scrooges are in actual fact miserable “dust worms” and “fools, dizzards, […]
“As Cyprian describes emulation, it is ‘a moth of the soul, a consumption, to make another man’s happiness his misery, to torture, crucify, and execute himself, to eat his own heart.'”
But being that we are so peevish and perverse, insolent and proud, so factious and seditious, so malicious and envious; we do invicem angariare, maul and vex one another, torture, disquiet, and precipitate ourselves into that gulf of woes and cares, aggravate our misery and melancholy, heap upon us hell and eternal damnation.
This drawing is just a little too much, isn’t it? Well, you know what else is too much? Just absolutely everything right now. So how fitting that today’s section is on fear!
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 […]
This section is mostly about how people eat different things. Some people think that the things that some other people like to eat are gross. Also foods (like frogs and snails) that make one person melacholic and filled with gall might not have that effect on someone else who is more accustomed to eating […]
Hey look, I’m back at work on the read-along! I picked up where I left off: reading the parts of The Anatomy of Melancholy that have not been read in approximately four hundred years. It has been a rough reentry. Today, I read about fruits and vegetables, also known as vegetals. All classical, Medieval, and […]