heliopausa (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
heliopausa) wrote2017-05-19 06:44 am
heliopausa) wrote2017-05-19 06:44 am
Entry tags:
Back, a bit dazed
It's been a full-on few weeks, including (as was always on the cards) a funeral. I feel like such an idiot to need to learn again and again (I am so sick of this) about the finality of death and what living in time means. Time is change and things not being the same. Yes, of course. Everybody knows that.
Well. Well, so back to Dreamwidth. What can I write about? Books and video/television viewing? Okay...
My reading took a huge dive - I abandoned both the books I was properly, attentively, reading, and will have to start them all over again. Mostly, I just read scraps of things picked up from what was around. Two such things were:
Sallust, Jugurtha and The Cataline Conspiracy, as translated for a Penguin Classic, I think - it was an oldish paperback, anyway. I read them because I was pleased to be learning even one name of an African king, even if he was a ratbag (according to Sallust), and also because I vaguely wondered if looking at pre-Caesar Roman evolutions might give me some ideas of how to look at how things are changing politically, now. But mainly just because the book was to hand.
I also read great chunks of the Iliad, in an online translation by Ian Johnston of Vancouver Island University, in order to argue (amiably) with someone about whether Paris was a coward etc. (I would be delighted to discuss such stuff while it's fresh in my mind, if anyone's interested.)
I've watched three oldish British television renderings of PD James novels featuring the detective Adam Dalgliesh. The first one I saw was about the residents of a stately old abbey, stuffed with priceless art, facing the prospect of its shutting down. The second one was about the residents of a stately-home-turned-museum, facing the prospect of its shutting down. The third one was about the residents of a stately home, facing the prospect of... but I gave up on that one before we'd even got to the second murder, because I thought I was getting the drift.
I watched - now this is good! - parts of several episodes of an Australian six-part mystery, called Seven Types of Ambiguity - yes, of course the title's a steal, and that's not something I like, in general, but the Empson book is part of the plot, sort of. The acting and the writing is mostly very, very good, and the cinematography as well. I had to leave and so have missed the closing episodes, but what I saw was very good indeed, good enough to have conversations with strangers about. (What? I'm not sure if that's a sane measure of anything.)
Well. Well, so back to Dreamwidth. What can I write about? Books and video/television viewing? Okay...
My reading took a huge dive - I abandoned both the books I was properly, attentively, reading, and will have to start them all over again. Mostly, I just read scraps of things picked up from what was around. Two such things were:
Sallust, Jugurtha and The Cataline Conspiracy, as translated for a Penguin Classic, I think - it was an oldish paperback, anyway. I read them because I was pleased to be learning even one name of an African king, even if he was a ratbag (according to Sallust), and also because I vaguely wondered if looking at pre-Caesar Roman evolutions might give me some ideas of how to look at how things are changing politically, now. But mainly just because the book was to hand.
I also read great chunks of the Iliad, in an online translation by Ian Johnston of Vancouver Island University, in order to argue (amiably) with someone about whether Paris was a coward etc. (I would be delighted to discuss such stuff while it's fresh in my mind, if anyone's interested.)
I've watched three oldish British television renderings of PD James novels featuring the detective Adam Dalgliesh. The first one I saw was about the residents of a stately old abbey, stuffed with priceless art, facing the prospect of its shutting down. The second one was about the residents of a stately-home-turned-museum, facing the prospect of its shutting down. The third one was about the residents of a stately home, facing the prospect of... but I gave up on that one before we'd even got to the second murder, because I thought I was getting the drift.
I watched - now this is good! - parts of several episodes of an Australian six-part mystery, called Seven Types of Ambiguity - yes, of course the title's a steal, and that's not something I like, in general, but the Empson book is part of the plot, sort of. The acting and the writing is mostly very, very good, and the cinematography as well. I had to leave and so have missed the closing episodes, but what I saw was very good indeed, good enough to have conversations with strangers about. (What? I'm not sure if that's a sane measure of anything.)
no subject
I'm impressed that you've read Sallust in Latin! Yes, most of those appearing in the narrative are ratbags, save for those in the Good Old Days he fantasises about, where honesty and restraint prevailed.
As for debate - I'd love to hear your opinion about whether the Iliad-writer subscribes to the character-voiced attitude that women are properly seen as mere chattels. I was taking the POV that the writer doesn't subscribe to this view, and that the Iliad was intended for a female audience as much as a male - the person I was discussing with was of the view that no, in those days that was just how it was seen by everyone, including the writer and the male audience.</iN
no subject
My professional training was as a classicist. It is one hundred percent irrelevant to the jobs I have nowadays unless you count writing (in which case it informs pretty much everything), but it made me very happy at the time.
save for those in the Good Old Days he fantasises about, where honesty and restraint prevailed.
I really love how from certain angles all of history looks like an endlessly receding succession of generations yelling GET OFF MY LAWN.
I was taking the POV that the writer doesn't subscribe to this view, and that the Iliad was intended for a female audience as much as a male - the person I was discussing with was of the view that no, in those days that was just how it was seen by everyone, including the writer and the male audience.
My immediate if inelegant response is that the person you were discussing the Iliad with is stuffed full of wild blueberry muffins. I am coming at this conversation from a slight angle in that I subscribe to the idea of Homeric epic as an eventually codified oral tradition rather than a single-source narrative with an identifiable writer/author, so for me it's less a question of an author's views than cultural values reflected in the epic, but there is good reason to believe that the assumed audiences of both the Iliad and the Odyssey included women as well as men, not least the fact that we find women in the audiences of epic performances in the Odyssey.