Ashes

1. I've just finished Henry VIII's Last Victim: The Life and Times of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, by Jessie Childs. Henry VIII executes him in the end, as the title rather gives away, but after the Congo books (I also reread Heart of Darkness) there's something rather restful about brutality which is individually targeted, intentional, and which no one is pretending is for the victim's own good.

2. Today is Ash Wednesday. This Lent, as a bit of a cop-out from anything that involves actual engagement, I am going to read Cassiodorus on the Psalms, either one Psalm per day doing one quinquagene each Lent for three years, or three Psalms per day in order to finish by Easter. (There are 47 days in Lent -- because Sundays don't count towards the 40 -- so I'll have to have a few days with extra Psalms.) I ought to do the former and read it properly in a medieval lectio divina style, moving through lectio, contemplatio, oratio and meditatio. In her second Sandars lecture yesterday Michelle Brown pointed out that almost all of us are illiterate in the sense in which that term was understood by Bede and his contemporaries. But I think I shall just read it, modernly and illiterately, although sometimes I feel tired of only ever scraping the surface of anything. The translation of the first fifty arrived this morning. It has an excellent index of "Arguments, Definitions, Syllogisms, Types of Speech" -- syllogisms come in categorical, enthymematic, epichirema, and hypothetical -- and another of figures of speech, which is full of things like synecdoche and paronomasia which I once knew about and others like tapeinosis and cacozelon which are completely new to me. This Silva rhetoricae should help.

And I'm not going to get my forehead marked with ashes, either -- I did consider it but this year's procession starts at the Corpus emo-bling clock, which put me off.

3. In non-religious news, here is an excellent Britney song -- though it takes a few minutes to kick in. The bassline is quite I Feel Love: