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Mostly reading
Jan. 9th, 2015 02:26 pmSo, this helps explain why my internet access has been running so slow all week. (Though the clip of the shark gnawing a cable is just from the files, not this week's actual damage being done.) I've been running slow myself, and the two of us combined - me and the internet - have made the week a wonder of non-productivity.
On the other hand, I did manage some reading - more Vorkosigan, and more George MacDonald (Phantastes, which I didn't think highly of) and the beginning of Ovid's Metamorphoses, which wasn't what I was expecting at all. I thought it would be shortish and made up of disconnected stories involving transformations of people into laurel trees, or deer, mostly as a result of sexual entanglements with the gods. But it turns out to be (so far) a long (fifteen books!) history of the whole mythological world, beginning with
( the creation )
(which was fascinating enough in itself - why did Ovid think the world had two poles, north and south?)
and ending, I gather, though it's fourteen books away, with Aeneas and the founding of Rome.
Two shorter stories from the internet, though. One rather moving story - of the respect paid by a Japanese family, over 140 years, to the burial place of a total stranger.
And one account of an amulet from the sixth century, showing how religions and myths cross over and shift and emerge in new forms, to the tsk-tsk of those expert in classical forms, who are certain that the artist simply Got It Wrong.
On the other hand, I did manage some reading - more Vorkosigan, and more George MacDonald (Phantastes, which I didn't think highly of) and the beginning of Ovid's Metamorphoses, which wasn't what I was expecting at all. I thought it would be shortish and made up of disconnected stories involving transformations of people into laurel trees, or deer, mostly as a result of sexual entanglements with the gods. But it turns out to be (so far) a long (fifteen books!) history of the whole mythological world, beginning with
( the creation )
(which was fascinating enough in itself - why did Ovid think the world had two poles, north and south?)
and ending, I gather, though it's fourteen books away, with Aeneas and the founding of Rome.
Two shorter stories from the internet, though. One rather moving story - of the respect paid by a Japanese family, over 140 years, to the burial place of a total stranger.
And one account of an amulet from the sixth century, showing how religions and myths cross over and shift and emerge in new forms, to the tsk-tsk of those expert in classical forms, who are certain that the artist simply Got It Wrong.
