Quis hic locus?*
Apr. 1st, 2015 10:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceWell, here's a lovely thing: the Genius Loci kickstarter has kicked through $22,000 - which means we get a really fancy printed version. With deckled edges and everything. You have less than a full day to join the rumpus, I am just sayin', should you like to do that...
*I really only used this quote as a subject line because locus/loci all I've got; but actually it is Deeply Relevant in More Than One Way. When I was but a schoolboy, unvers'd in anything except Eng Lit and pretension, my bestie and I wrote a play together, called Quis Hic Locus? Tragically we failed to persuade the headmaster to let us produce it as the school play that term (tho' we did get it into the printed calendar, before he put his foot down; my being in the Printing Club might've helped there, I honestly don't remember), but it was a splendid piece, deeply philosophical and asking probing questions about Life and Death and suchlike. We might have been sixteen. And how did we come to have a Latin tag at our fingertips, you ask, given that we had no Latin? And had certainly not read Seneca, even in translation? Why, I reply: we had read T S Eliot. Intensively. He was our Thing that term. (Did I mention sixteen?) As a result of which we not only had an occasional Latin tag, we had Greek too. This play, that we called Quis His Locus? Had previously been called Apothanein Thelo, till someone persuaded us that that was too pretentious for words, and besides we didn't have a Greek font in Printing Club.
*I really only used this quote as a subject line because locus/loci all I've got; but actually it is Deeply Relevant in More Than One Way. When I was but a schoolboy, unvers'd in anything except Eng Lit and pretension, my bestie and I wrote a play together, called Quis Hic Locus? Tragically we failed to persuade the headmaster to let us produce it as the school play that term (tho' we did get it into the printed calendar, before he put his foot down; my being in the Printing Club might've helped there, I honestly don't remember), but it was a splendid piece, deeply philosophical and asking probing questions about Life and Death and suchlike. We might have been sixteen. And how did we come to have a Latin tag at our fingertips, you ask, given that we had no Latin? And had certainly not read Seneca, even in translation? Why, I reply: we had read T S Eliot. Intensively. He was our Thing that term. (Did I mention sixteen?) As a result of which we not only had an occasional Latin tag, we had Greek too. This play, that we called Quis His Locus? Had previously been called Apothanein Thelo, till someone persuaded us that that was too pretentious for words, and besides we didn't have a Greek font in Printing Club.