...and I too, like Ovid, was not allowed to finish.
Though he really was plein du merde, you know - he wrote the Metamorphoses, after all, which was itself in dactylic hexameter. This line says (more or less), "I was preparing to write heavy lines about arms and violent war." (The 'to write' part is not actually present in that line; it appears in the next, and is actually edo, edere, meaning 'to put forth, give out, produce'. Anyway.) But then, to thwart him, Cupid comes and cuts off one of the feet of his epic verse, which makes it closer to the elegiac style, which is the meter of Roman love poetry. Naturally, Ovid is upset by this. He complains that it's not Cupid's job to do things like that - that's usually left up to the Muses, or Apollo might occasionally intervene. But Cupid is insistent. Even when Ovid points out that he doesn't have a girlfriend to write love elegies about, Cupid gives him a Look and says, "I can fix that, you know." So Ovid submits, and we have the Amores.
Well. I have never written anything in dactylic hexameter. Nor have I tried; it's one of those things that seems to lend itself better to Greek than I do, so I've avoided it for want of knowing any Greek at all. Nor have I attempted the elegiac style - my poetry is bad enough under the best of circumstances, let alone when it's about love. So that's out of the picture.
No. I got sidetracked by food.
I am not a great cook. Half the time, I'm not even a good cook. I'm not an obedient cook, either - I change recipes, I skip steps, I mess with baking time. But I'm a persistent cook. I spend too much of my time thinking about food.
And so this blog will, with any luck, be a repository of recipes interspersed with Latin, French, and hats. Reader(s) are/is highly encouraged to post his/her/their own recipes, quotes/phrases in other languages, and hats. We can be eclectic together.
Yours,
Kate
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