Mostly reading
Jan. 9th, 2015 02:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
heliopausaSo, 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:
This conflict was ended by a god and a greater order of nature, since he split off the earth from the sky, and the sea from the land, and divided the transparent heavens from the dense air....
When whichever god it was had ordered and divided the mass, and collected it into separate parts, he first gathered the earth into a great ball so that it was uniform on all sides.Then he ordered the seas to spread and rise in waves in the flowing winds and pour around the coasts of the encircled land. He added springs and standing pools and lakes, and contained in shelving banks the widely separated rivers, some of which are swallowed by the earth itself, others of which reach the sea and entering the expanse of open waters beat against coastlines instead of riverbanks. He ordered the plains to extend, the valleys to subside, leaves to hide the trees, stony mountains to rise: and just as the heavens are divided into two zones to the north and two to the south, with a fifth and hotter between them, so the god carefully marked out the enclosed matter with the same number, and described as many regions on the earth. The equatorial zone is too hot to be habitable; the two poles are covered by deep snow; and he placed two regions between and gave them a temperate climate mixing heat and cold.
(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:
This conflict was ended by a god and a greater order of nature, since he split off the earth from the sky, and the sea from the land, and divided the transparent heavens from the dense air....
When whichever god it was had ordered and divided the mass, and collected it into separate parts, he first gathered the earth into a great ball so that it was uniform on all sides.Then he ordered the seas to spread and rise in waves in the flowing winds and pour around the coasts of the encircled land. He added springs and standing pools and lakes, and contained in shelving banks the widely separated rivers, some of which are swallowed by the earth itself, others of which reach the sea and entering the expanse of open waters beat against coastlines instead of riverbanks. He ordered the plains to extend, the valleys to subside, leaves to hide the trees, stony mountains to rise: and just as the heavens are divided into two zones to the north and two to the south, with a fifth and hotter between them, so the god carefully marked out the enclosed matter with the same number, and described as many regions on the earth. The equatorial zone is too hot to be habitable; the two poles are covered by deep snow; and he placed two regions between and gave them a temperate climate mixing heat and cold.
(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.
