Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Yesterday was my first full day in Madrid. Woke up at my usual time and worked on the Mothership interview. The gym on my street, Calle Valverde, opened at 9 am. A cute young gay guy was working out there when I arrived. Four other guys came in after me. The equipment was rather worn, but I managed to put in a good workout. Then I went for a run. I had walked around Chuecas on the day of my arrival in Madrid. Yesterday, I ran to the west of my street, and looked around Malasaña. The neighborhood, with its alternative shops and wall posters, reminded me of the Lower East Side. Like the LES, it was also gentrifying, art galleries and such. I decided to walk to the Prado instead of taking the Metro. At the museum, I saw Titian's wonderful "A Knight of Malta with a Clock." Everywhere I was looking for portraits of men in their handsome prime, Caravaggio's young "David with the Head of Goliath" proving an exception. Velazquez was a star of the show. His "L...

TLS May 29 2009 from Brian Vickers' review of Renaissance Figures of Speech , edited by Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander and Katrin Ettenhuber: Sylvia Adamson discusses synonymia, a figure that was central both to classical courtroom eloquence, as a device of vehement emphasis, and to Renaissance writers seeking copia verborum , fertility of utterance. . . . Reading rhetoric depends on recognizing a figure's form and function, and the failure to detect a synonym may have created "one of the notorious oddities of St. Matthew's Gospel," where Jesus is described as riding into Jerusalem on two animals at once: the disciples "brought the ass and the colt, and put on them their clothes, and they set him thereon" (Mt 21:7). Adamson points out that Matthew had failed to realize that Zechariah, the Old Testament prophet whom he cites as prefiguring the event, used the figure synonymia to emphasize the lowliness of the Messiah: "Rejoice greatly, O daughter of...