Unbidden, my mother apologized the other day for something that wasn't hers, namely the pressure to stay in college instead of taking a medical withdrawal the term I had surgery. (I would've been allowed to return to school subsequently without penalty, but they wouldn't have pro-rated the fees, of course.) I was off for our one week of spring break, and then I resumed carrying a backpack uphill to class daily.
It wasn't hers because I didn't grant her my choice (and she didn't know enough about how US universities operate to make a good guess about my options). The responsibility is shared unevenly between a dead person and me, and I think my concerns then were valid, given that he tried truncating my undergrad studies the next year---because, he said, not for the first time, I wasn't taking it seriously enough. Dude who had left secondary school unfinished told me I was doing undergrad wrong.
Unlike Sana in Jalaluddin's Detective Aunty, I always knew my mother was good for more than cleaning, cooking, and child-minding. It still took some effort to learn to see her as a person, however.
On the way back from the MRI, in accordance with the local observance of the hundred and twelfth birthday of Wendell Corey, I found and talked to a dry stone wall.
Current Music:The Electric St. Lucy, "Harlem Roulette"
This spooky ghost story has a central pairing that I feel like I may have requested as an original work: Widow/Female Fake Psychic/Ghost of a Female Bog Body.
My Darling Dreadful Thing is set in the Netherlands in the 1950s, which is a selling point all by itself as I love unusual settings. Roos is a young woman whose abusive fake psychic mother forces her to participate in her fake seances. But though Roos does not communicate with the spirits sought by the desperate, grieving customers, she actually does have a spirit companion, a bog body whom Roos has bound to her and named Ruth.
Roos is delighted when Agnes, a biracial (Indonesian/Dutch) widow, takes her as a companion and spirits her away to her neglected Gothic mansion in the middle of nowhere. The mansion is otherwise occupied only by Agnes's sister-in-law, Willamine, who is dying of tuberculosis, and has a marvellously bizarre Gothic history. Roos falls hard in love with Agnes, with whom she has a surprising amount in common.
But this whole story is being told in retrospect, as a series of interviews Roos is having with a psychiatrist who is trying to determine whether she's mentally fit to stand trial for murder. Something very bad happened at the mansion...
Very enjoyable, very gothic, very atmospheric. I'm excited to read van Veen's other two books. I looked her up to see if she's actually from the Netherlands (yes) and learned that she's one of a set of non-identical triplet sisters! I don't think I've ever read a book by a triplet before.
The Ainu are an indigenous people native to northern Japan and nearby parts of Russia. Kayano Shigeru (1926-2006) was a leading activist for Ainu rights in Japan, and eventually became the first Ainu member of the Japanese legislature. But his career in the Diet came after the publication of this book, which mixes memoir, history, and ethnography.
Kayano relates what he knows of his people's oppression in the 19th century, when the Japanese government pushed many Ainu groups onto marginal land and conscripted people for forced labor at minimal pay. This leads into his own childhood, when his family's generational poverty was exacerbated by his father's alcoholism. As a young man Kayano came to feel ashamed of being Ainu, culminating in a demeaning job at an Ainu-themed attraction, performing sacred dances five times a day for gawking tourists.
But the tourists' ignorant questions sparked Kayano's realization that there should be a real Ainu museum curated by actual Ainu people and fostering respect for their culture. He was inspired to travel the Ainu lands collecting one traditional tool or piece of clothing at a time (and always paying the people who made them) and eventually succeeded in opening the museum and renewing his own sense of pride in his heritage.
This short book highlights important issues, but I have to be honest—I found the presentation pretty dry. Maybe it's partly the translation? I also noticed that Ainu women weren't given much attention; Kayano has a wife, but her only character trait shown in the book is "supportive of her husband". But I'd say the book is still a good resource on a significant figure in global indigenous rights.
(As an aside: This book was on my TBR list for at least 15 years. This year I'm really trying to either read some of the long-time lingerers or admit I'm not going to read them, so having read this is a great success for me!)
How has this month been going? I woke up to spring and didn't even realize. It looks the part: the occasional crocus, a faint fluff of clouds in a harebell sky. Hestia is absorbing the sun-flood from my desk. I will be celebrating the equinox with an MRI. My major accomplishment of yesterday was successfully wresting a permit from the Parking Department. I am filing a request for an intercalary year.
Knowledge is power, but perfect knowledge is impossible.
Suppose you knew when and how you were going to die. Could you avoid crossing the street in front of a speeding taxi? Get a mammogram in time? Stop smoking right now?
You might have to learn to face certain death with aplomb.
Possibly, everything in space and time already exists, just like a museum diorama, unchangeable as the evolution and disappearance of the dinosaurs. Their story began two hundred thirty million years ago, when Thecodonts began to walk upright. It ended 65 million years ago when the eight-ton Tyrannosaurus rex got squashed by a giant asteroid.
Perhaps God has already thought things through. Or perhaps, in an atheistic universe, space-time exists such that all its event-lines are locked in place from beginning to end. For the dinosaurs, it was a fatal surprise when an immense rock from space the size of Halley's Comet smashed into Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and blasted out a crater 175 kilometers across.
But it was fate, kismet. The moving finger wrote, and it had to happen. Orbits had intersected, and God, or anyone with a telescope, could have seen it coming.
Philosophers and physicists have propounded for and against this idea of a pre-determined universe. Despite its logical consistency, Western minds can’t quite get around the fatalism. It means that no matter what we do now, we can’t change anything. We are as fierce, beloved, and doomed as T-rex. Our big brains make no difference.
So, you have no free will. You were pre-destined to read this essay, in fact. You can’t change a thing, can you?
Ah, but you have. One small example: Do you remember your school teacher when you were seven years old, Mrs. Sobel? In reality you were nine years old when she was your teacher. Yet you go on blithely making decisions thinking that you live in the seven-year-old-with-Sobel universe.
Mentally, we rearrange events to happen the way we think they should have happened. Then we interact with other people, every one of us with deluded memories, and we change our evolution and redesign our fates en masse.
Worse yet, without monumental research into every moment of your past, you can’t even know what you’ve misremembered. You may have forgotten major events, or made up others out of thin air. You may be planning a vacation to the Yucatan. You hope to swim at the white sand beaches, play a little golf, and take a day trip to the Maya ruins of Uxmal. Or have you already gone? Can you be sure? Was Mrs. Sobel there? Did you see any dinosaurs?
That’s why, in the Yucatan, the ancient Maya wrote down their history. They needed to remember everything that happened because they believed time moved like a wheel, which is why their calendars revolved in circles. Dates would repeat. When time turned around again, if they knew what had happened on the same date the last time, they could be prepared. Their records indicated that huge floods usually destroy the world on a certain date, 13 Baktun 0 Katun 0 Uinal 0 Kin. Fortunately this date doesn’t recur often, most recently on December 23, 2012, by our Gregorian calendar. But was the Earth destroyed? No, because we were prepared!
Knowledge is power. But you have to have accurate information.
And you don’t. You’ve already forgotten who knows what, and so have I.
What’s going to happen next? Somewhere, someone might have known, but we’ve ruined it for them. You may wish to quit smoking, get a mammogram, or look both ways before crossing anyway. We still need all the aplomb we can get, because we will all die, we just can’t know when.
***
This essay appeared in Issue 2, Summer 2002, of Full Unit Hookup magazine. Illustration: This painting for NASA by Donald E. Davis depicts an asteroid slamming into the Yucatan Peninsula as pterodactyls glide above low tropical clouds.
foulard (foo-LARD, fuh-LARD) - n., a lightweight twill- or plain-woven fabric of silk or silk-and-cotton, usually having a small printed design; a piece of clothing, especially a necktie or scarf, made of this fabric.
Taken from French in the 1820s, where it had both meanings -- in contemporary French foulard mostly means a headscarf or neckerchief -- but there the trail runs cold and is officially declared origin unknown.
And that ends an undeclared theme week of words related to clothing in some way, but really was five words that happened to pile up together randomly.
If you have dyslexia, what strategies helped you master writing? Was there anything that helped when you were of school age? If you weren't able to deal with it during school, how have you dealt with it since then?
If you have kids with dyslexia, how have you helped them with the task of writing?
And every one of those recs is better than the books. Well, I've shared my opinion on the books, the problems and characterization are insufficiently balanced for dual viewpoints.
But anyway, that's not what I'm thinking about. What I'm thinking about is Fabian and his generically shitty parents who clearly don't care about him very much. ( Read more... )
Took till about 2 pm but all of the brush from yesterday's activities has been burnt up. I got pretty hot and tired. Drank about a gallon of water/gatoraid. Missed the rock show/conference in Willits. Oh well, next time. Tomorrow is planting little plants in the garden, finishing the compost bin cleanout and cleaning the filthy horse corral. There are still broccoli plants to put out, some pink mitzuna and dill that really wants to be planted out. I'd love to transplant some of the baby marigolds but don't think they are quite ready yet, we'll see. I might even risk planting out squash and cucumbers... There is a big kerfuffle going on down in SF about doors. All four of the doors that lead to the garden need replacing. The bottom of the downstairs flat door was substantially rotted with the exterior face peeling off up about a foot. ICK. We like getting lots of light into the house so chose doors that were 3/4 glass with about 18 inches of wood on the bottom. Sadly they don't actually make that door in an exterior model. These are aluminum clad doors that come with an exterior finish that matches the windows. We thought we might use a different manufacturer but of course the finishes don't match. In fact the color pallets were so different we couldn't even see a contrasting color we could use. Sigh. So full glass, double pane doors. They have a coating on one pane that is virtually unbreakable so no security worries.
Life is so short. I want to say that I don't know what to say, but I do. I was very intensely into LJRP/DWRP in my 20s; at a time when other people were doing uni and postgrad and forming friendships with people at uni, I was making RP friends. I slowly drifted away from a lot of people, without even meaning to, because life happens, but they were present for a very important, very intense part of my life and I kept meaning to reach out and get to know them again. And then someone dies, and I realise it's too late. A strange, wistful feeling. I think I'm crying more because people I love are grieving than anything else, because I didn't know AJ very well anymore, but really, what a loss.
If there's any upside, it's that this motivated everyone to get back in touch. We are all so much older than we used to be, and some people we still can't find, but it's so nice to get back in touch.
Watched:
I'm still deep into the Prince of Tennis marathon. I remembered nothing of this junior selection camp filler arc until I got to the point where they were all like, wow, Sengoku got shredded!!! Why is that the thing I remember? The boxing style tennis is hilarious, sorry to say. Also, Samada telling Atobe he doesn't care about Atobe's obsession with Tezuka and then Dan faithfully reporting this to Tezuka is hilarious.
Though Tezuka slapping Ryoma to the ground just because Ryoma wants to play a tennis game Tezuka didn't sanction is um serious values dissonance moment, because I think this makes Tezuka look shitty and the anime does not.
A trailer has been released for Fruit (果实, pinyin: guoshi), an upcoming Taiwanese baihe live action mini-drama. It starts airing on 27 March on this YouTube channel.
I can't believe I dreamed an entire opera whose closing performance by a small local outfit I was all set to attend before it was canceled at the last unavoidable minute. It was a Gian Carlo Menotti from 1948 and had never before received a Boston premiere. I had read its libretto for years because it was full of sand and sea-haunting: No body that presses its mouth to the shore closer than your mouth to mine. No eye that fades into the haze of the sun more fixed than your eye to mine. No ship of a letter that crosses the seas faster than my hand to yours, unless it has foundered, unless it has torn on the black rocks of the heart. It had one of his terse, enigmatic titles, The Visitor. The company that had put it up was called Marmalade and Gold, an allusion whose meaning did not escape the event horizon of waking, and specialized in bare-bones, slightly more than concert performances of oddities or undeserved obscurities of the twentieth-century opera world: I remember perusing the catalogue of previous seasons on their website and approving of their choices, all of which I suspect of not existing outside of the hour or so I was asleep. Erich Wolfgang Korngold did write a bunch of operas, mostly before—very popular choice—leaving Germany, but I do not believe a 1932 Der lahme König was among them. I am having a terrible week for which the external world offers nothing in the way of respite and even if I didn't get to hear any of its music, I appreciate the inside of my head attempting to furnish a break of art.
Current Music:The National, "Don't Swallow the Cap"
Unexpected sunshine & an even more unexpected 15 degrees C. The pots I planted up with randomly-chosen bulbs last November are starting to reveal some of their secrets!
marocain (MAR-uh-kayn, mar-uh-KAYN) - n., a heavy cross-ribbed crepe fabric, usually made of silk, wool, or both.
Known in full as crepe marocain. From French (crêpe) marocain, Moroccan (crepe), from Maroc, Morocco, from Medieval Latin Marrochium, Marrakech/Marrakesh.
Because Becky Mahoney and I know each other, I boosted a Bluesky giveaway for her upcoming vampire novel Thrall (coming out next month!) in the spirit of friendship and then was somewhat surprised to discover that I had in fact won the giveaway -- surprised but delighted, obviously, since I've loved all of her previous books even when they weren't LUCY CENTRIC DRACULA RIFFS!! focused around a COLLEGE PIRATE RADIO STATION!!!
The central character of Thrall is Lucy Easting, who has just transferred into beautiful, isolated, mountainside Rollins University from community college, in a bid to get away from her stressed and depressed mother and live a life she's excited about for a change.
Alas! her first college party results in a couple of neck puncture marks, a marked tendency to experience severe migraines in sunlight, and a tragic susceptibility to the ominous vampire voice in her head that occasionally takes over her consciousness and directs her towards uncharacteristic action.
Fortunately! the college is full of prospective allies who are willing to take a chance on Lucy despite her regrettable thrall situation, including but not limited to the host of the local college late-night radio show, who has been a target of the vampire since her sophomore year and has been using the airwaves to try and fight back; Lucy's RA, a determined young woman with very nice arms, who came to the school to investigate after a terrible fate befell her high school ex-boyfriend Jonathan; and the very nice, normal party host who has no previous vampire experience but feels just terrible about the whole situation and is not about to relinquish responsibility for sorting the situation out! it was her party!!
It's a really charming book on a number of levels, but my favorite thing about it as a Dracula riff specifically is how much it's thematically invested in Lucy as a side character -- the narrative is consistently very clear that the vampire is not particularly interested in Lucy; he's obsessed with Athena the radio show host and everything else he's doing is part of his elaborate cat-and-mouse game with her, including incidentally overturning Lucy's life as a by-the-by -- and how Lucy makes the book her own story anyway by sheer force of determination not to be cut out of it. Lucy's energy really drives the book: she wants to live, and she wants to live a life on her own terms, and she's not about to let one horrible encounter take that away from her.
Just after 8 my phone dinged and reported that Mark O would be at the house in 10 min. Oops. I sprang out of bed where I was finishing my morning coffee, Yanked on work clothes and went out to say hi. Breakfast was eaten at the speed of lightning while filling nalgene bottles with a dilute gator aid. Thus provisioned we got in the Gator and went down to the pond (Norgard's Pond) to continue my clearing out of vegetation. On the way we stopped to pick up the last of the pile of brush that I had abandoned due to it having a rattlesnake in it. I looked carefully where the rattlesnake had been, didn't see any snake so we started pulling out the last 4 or five small pieces of brush. One was kind of stuck in the ground where a gopher had pushed up dirt. I yanked on it, then decided to get a different grip. On my way to a new grip I looked down to see the snake about 18 inches away. This produced a scream and a leap away. We stood on the road and looked down where the very, very cold sleepy snake was. Mark said: where is he, I cant see a snake. Right there, 6 feet away, under that little poison oak branch! Super hard to see. Should have taken a picture. Mark was brave enough to go get the last two pieces of brush, staying at least 4 feet away. The poor snake never rattled, and almost didn't move as we pulled a branch out from underneath it. We fastened the 4" x 25' strap around the brush and drug it down to the turnout by the pond. The one I just cleared by burning for two days. The rest of our project was to clear the next 100 feet of roadside. Mostly we were cutting down young live oak trees that had sprung up on the extremely steep bank between the road and the pond. They all got dragged back to the turnout and cut up so I can burn them. Tomorrow if possible. We were working very close to the place where our road Y's with one side going up a steep hill and the other out around the pond. About 25 feet beyond the Y there is a huge tree, a valley oak I think. It has road signs nailed to it. Several years ago a live oak seedling began growing up in front of that tree. It had gotten big enough that it obscured the signs and thus frequently confused UPS drivers who then often delivered packages to our gate. Said young tree is gone now and the signs are once again in full view. Better for UPS drivers and for emergency vehicles.
This Flash game by Argentine developer Daniel Benmergui presents a scene with a woman in a rowboat looking up at a man sitting on the moon. As the player you can snap photos of different portions of the scene and move them around, leading to different resolutions of the scenario. Is this some sort of romantic game that I'm too aro to understand? I do remember this game making the rounds in the late 2000s and being held up as evidence on the pro side of the burgeoning "can video games be art?" debate. Personally I have always found this debate tedious and misguided, proving nothing except that "art" is a poorly defined term which is used to arbitrarily judge elements of culture as worthy or unworthy. So that's probably why I never clicked any of the links to I Wish I Were the Moon.
Coming to it now, my strongest impression is that it doesn't demonstrate anything about art, but it does demonstrate (yet again) that I am extremely aromantic. The game is supposed to be a representation of a love triangle; I do know that. But it makes my brain do the thing that it's been doing my entire life, which is to interpret romantic scenarios that I don't understand as anything other than what they are intended to be. (My brain does this especially with songs, which tend to be worded vaguely enough that it's easy to do. This breakup song could be about a friendship turning sour! This passionate love ballad could be about any kind of love and it doesn't even have to be about a person! It could be about a city or a fandom or a celestial body!!)
So what is the moon in this game? It's something the man loves which is separating him from the woman in the rowboat. Who says it has to be a person? It could be his career or his faith or his family or just about anything! I guess you could argue that one of the essential qualities of art is that it's open to interpretation, but let's not and say we did.
The 2008 version of I Wish I Were the Moon is playable in a Flash emulator here. In 2022 the developer also offered a free remaster on his itch.io page here, but I have to say I think it lacks some of the charm of the original.
If you like futuristic military techno-thrillers, you’ll probably like this book. Do I need to say more? Let’s consider the many varieties of book reviews including consumer, preview, sponsored, literary, professional, and academic. In this case I’m a reader (or consumer, if you prefer that term, which I don’t). This is a preview because the book will be released April 7 (although you can pre-order it). It’s almost sponsored because I know Bruce and critiqued earlier versions of the opening chapters, and he sent me a free copy of the final book, but I’m writing this review because I want to give my honest opinion. Tips on how to write a review usually recommend writing a summary of the book. To my thinking, this habit largely results from an unexamined hangover from middle school book reports when you had to summarize a book to prove to the teacher that you actually read it, no matter how tedious your summary was (and is). We’re adults now, and we have all the tedium we need. You can just read the book blurb, which is blissfully brief. A critical assessment is also recommended for a review. In this Electromagnetic Assault, bullets fly around and things blow up a lot. For this reason, I found the battle that takes place in my old neighborhood in Milwaukee especially entertaining. There are endless plot twists, as befits a book of this type. To say more would spoil your fun. So much for my summary and assessment. The reviewer is also advised to mention relevant information about the author. Bruce is a former Air Force officer. You will notice the expertise. More broadly, I think there three types of book reviews: • The first is for readers who haven’t read the book but wonder if they want to. That’s what we’re doing here. • The second is for readers who aren’t going to read the book but want a useful, thoughtful summary from a professional so they can feel like they’ve read the book. The review provides a lengthy non-tedious analysis. You can often read these in upscale magazines and academic settings, which is not where we are now. • The third kind of review subjects the novel to literary criticism regarding its writing style and thematic development. I think the very short chapters add to the velocity of the book, which is an appropriate attribute for a thriller. To discuss its literary merits further, we would both need to have read the book, and so far only one of us has. To conclude, I believe Electromagnetic Assault is a worthy addition to its sub-genre. Enough said.
I always dislike when people ask which books of the Iliad are must-reads. Unsurprisingly, I think they all are pretty necessary. But I do have to concede that there are some that can be skipped without losing too much of the sense of the whole, and there are others that are absolutely crucial. Iliad 16 is pretty near indispensable to the plot of the poem (as anticipated in Zeus’ speech in book 15), but it also has critical engagements with the epic’s themes and connections with larger narrative traditions. It just may be one of the top 4 books of the Iliad, depending on your interests.
Book 16 has three major components, but splits more easily into two parts. The first part is the meeting between Patroklos and Achilles and the preparation for the latter to lead the Myrmidons into war in the former’s place; the second part is the aristeia of Patroklos that includes some wholesale slaughter along with the death of Sarpedon, and ends with Patroklos’ own fall. I think the book could also be seen in three movements: the preparation, the rallying of the Greeks and death of Sarpedon, and the excess, ending in Patroklos death at Hektor’s hands. The plot of this book engages critically with the major themes I have noted to follow in reading the Iliad: (1) Politics, (2) Heroism; (3) Gods and Humans; (4) Family & Friends; (5) Narrative Traditions, but the central themes I emphasize in reading and teaching book 16 are heroism, Family & Friends, Gods and Humans and Narrative Traditions.
Book 16 is also the second longest book of the Iliad (book 5 is slightly longer at 909 lines): given its detail and how important it is not just to this epic but to other narrative traditions, there’s no way to talk about everything. In my posts on book 16, I think I will stick to a simple scheme: the beginning (Patroklos speaks to Achilles), the middle (Patroklos kills Sarpedon) and the end (Hektor kills Patroklos). Book 16 is remarkable for many reasons, but one of them is how it picks up the action from book 11, when Nestor spoke to Patroklos and encouraged him to convince Achilles to return to war or take his place in turn. As I wrote about in discussing book 13, the narrative is still in the epic’s longest day and for all we know Achilles has been watching the action since he sent Patroklos to investigate.
When Patroklos arrives, Achilles addresses him with a simile that has caught some attention over time.
Homer, Iliad 16.2-19
“So they were fighting about the well-benched ship, Then Patroklos stood next to Achilles, the shepherd of the host, Pouring out warm tears like some dark-watered spring That drains its murky water down a steep cliff. When swift-footed Achilles saw him, he pitied him, And addressed him, speaking out winged words: “Why do you weep, Patroklos, like some little girl Who is racing alongside her mother asking her to carry her As she pulls on her clothing and holds her back as she hurries— She looks at her with tears until she picks her up. You look like her, Patroklos, as you shed your tears. Is there something you need to tell the Myrmidons or me? Have you alone heard some message from Phthia? People say Menoitios, Actor’s son, lives still and Peleus, the son of Aeacus, lives among the Myrmidons. We would truly grieve together if these two were dead. Or are you upset over the Argives, that they are perishing Among the ships, because of their own arrogance? Tell me, don’t keep it secret, so we can both know.”
Sosias (potter, signed). Painting attributed to the Sosias Painter (name piece for Beazley, overriding attribution) or the Kleophrades Painter (Robertson) or Euthymides (Ohly-Dumm)
There have been multiple interpretations of this simile. Kathy L. Gaca argued in a 2008 article that this evokes the experience of a mother and daughter pair in war, fleeing capture and abuse at the hands of enemy warriors. Others, like David Porter, have been cautious about how much the image should be particularized to such a moment: suggesting that the simile may also look ahead and back to other conflicts and parts of this poem. Like Gaca, I can’t help but hear the echoes of a city under siege and Agamemnon’s earlier threats; yet, I think we can’t be sure what audiences would have thought about.
Here, too, we can think of the tension in the relationship imagined. Achilles frames Patroklos as someone who desperately needs him just as he also implicitly acknowledges that he needs Patroklos too. There’s something thematically crucial in the mother’s headlong rush, in her interest to get something done, regardless of the child’s needs at that moment. This is something Celsiana Warwick highlights well in her discussion where she argues that “ the Iliad uses maternal imagery in martial contexts to highlight the conflict between the Homeric hero’s obligation to protect his comrades and his imperative to win timē and kleos, “honor and glory.” Maternity in Homeric poetry is strongly associated with protection, and maternal imagery is primarily applied to warriors engaging in the defense of their comrades” (2019, 1). This reading resists modern gender distinctions and instead looks at a pattern in epic that is charged at this particular moment where Achilles’ own concern for his honor results in the failure of his role as a protector. As Warwick writes, “The image of the mother ignoring the needs of her child represents the way in which Achilles at this point in the poem is ignoring the needs of the Achaeans, whom he described as his children at 9.323–7” (9).
As Rachel Lesser summarizes (174-176), this simile also demonstrates that Achilles is actually concerned by Patroklos. As anyone who has lived with a toddler knows, you can put off the tugging and the crying, but ultimately a child needs care. A good parent, while focused elsewhere, learns to balance self and other and responds as they can. The problem is that sometimes there’s no balance of response that will serve all needs. Achilles answers Patroklos’ call and sends him to war with the Myrmidons, but not without a warning not to overstep and take the honor that is truly owed to Achilles.
One thing to address here is the status of the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos. My standard answer in teaching the Iliad is to acknowledge that some early audiences received their relationship as romantic/sexual, clear from references in fragments of Aeschylus and later authors like Plato and Aeschines. The epic, however, is not explicit about the status of their relationship and this can be understood in two ways. First, the genre of heroic epic is generally reticent about sexual activity apart from the fact of its occurrence. When sexuality is detailed, it is usually a problem. Second, I suspect that Homeric epic was in part responding to differing sexual customs among their audiences. While pederastic relationships (that is, between an older male and an adolescent) seem to be acceptable in certain contexts in ancient Greece, there were variable sexual customs in different places and times and Homeric poetry endeavors to represent a composite picture of a heroic past that most Greek city-states could see themselves in.
So, I think the core message is, yes, the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos was meant to be profound and significant, but how to ‘code’ it was left to audience interpretation as a feature of Homeric caginess. In recent years, there has been both a scholarly reappraisal of their relationship and a greater interest in modern audiences to frame their relationship as sexual. Recent discussions framing their relationship as on the spectrum from “homosocial” to “homosexual” brings nuance to the discussions and important background material to considering their relationship (see especially the work of Celsiana Warwick and Rachel Lesser). Scholarly frameworks, however, say little about the reception of Patroklos and Achilles as a couple (e.g. ‘Patrochilles’) by modern audiences. Such a reception, which seems largely positive and affirming, is to me a testament of the protean power of Homeric poetry. The echoes of a conjugal relationship between the pair are undeniable, as Celsiana Warwick demonstrates in her article. But the subtlety and the nuance of the relationship is such that it is affective for audiences invested in a broad spectrum of sexual mores.
A short Bibliography on Patroklos and Achilles in book 16
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
Allan, William. “Arms and the man: Euphorbus, Hector, and the death of Patroclus.” Classical Quarterly, N. S., vol. 55, no. 1, 2005, pp. 1-16. Doi: 10.1093/cq/bmi00
Anderson, Warren D. “Achilles and the Dark Night of the Soul.” The Classical Journal 51, no. 6 (1956): 265–68. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3292885.
Burgess, Jonathan. “Beyond Neo-Analysis: Problems with the Vengeance Theory.” The American Journal of Philology 118, no. 1 (1997): 1–19. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1562096.
Clark, Mark Edward, and William D. E. Coulson. “Memnon and Sarpedon.” Museum Helveticum 35, no. 2 (1978): 65–73. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24815318.
Fantuzzi, M. 2012. Achilles in Love. Oxford.
Gaca, Kathy L. “Reinterpreting the Homeric Simile of ‘Iliad’ 16.7-11: The Girl and Her Mother in Ancient Greek Warfare.” The American Journal of Philology 129, no. 2 (2008): 145–71. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27566700.
Karakantza, Efimia D.. “Who is liable for blame ? : Patroclus’ death in book 16 of the « Iliad ».” Έγκλημα και τιμωρία στην ομηρική και αρχαϊκή ποίηση : από τα πρακτικά του ΙΒ’ διεθνούς συνεδρίου για την Οδύσσεια, Ιθάκη, 3-7 Σεπτεμβρίου 2013. Eds. Christopoulos, Menelaos and Païzi-Apostolopoulou, Machi. Ithaki: Kentro Odysseiakon Spoudon, 2014. 117-136.
Kesteren, Morgan van. “ERASTES-EROMENOS RELATIONSHIPS IN TWO ANCIENT EPICS.” CrossCurrents 69, no. 4 (2019): 351–64. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26851797.
Ledbetter, Grace M. “Achilles’ Self-Address: Iliad 16.7-19.” The American Journal of Philology 114, no. 4 (1993): 481–91. https://doi.org/10.2307/295421.
Lesser, Rachel. 2022. Desire in the Iliad. Oxford.
Warwick, C. (2019). The Maternal Warrior: Gender and Kleos in the Iliad. American Journal of Philology140(1), 1-28. https://doi.org/10.1353/ajp.2019.0001.
Also known by other names. Used primarily for indoor physical activities, but not as much as formerly as the flat sole has no arch support, unlike more modern sports shoes. The name, though -- Samuel Plimsoll (1824-1898) was a Bristol merchant and politician who devised the load line marks painted on the sides of ships. The marks on the soles included patterns that reminded people of the most prominent load line mark is ⦵ (or o), and so the shoe was named after the marks named after the man.
Fang Fiction by Kate Stayman-London hasn’t been on the TBR for that long (October 2024), but it seemed a perfect fit for this theme! I love seeing fandom and fanfiction appear in other genre fiction, especially when there is meta-exploration of the fandom aspect. In the world of Fang Fiction, supernatural beings including vampires are real, as is inter-dimensional travel, but very few know this. Instead, the lives of vampires, trapped in a shadowy version of Manhattan Island, are known to the mundane world through the trilogy of soapy “Blood Feud” novels written by the reclusive August Lirio.
Though about fandom, this book is also about survival after a past sexual assault, so please be warned if that is a trigger for you. Tess Rosenbloom is a graduate student in English at Columbia University, where she met her best friend and roommate Joni Chaudhari. However, after being date-raped by her crush at a party, Tess flees her friends and school where her rapist is a fellow student. She ends up as night manager of a queer hotel, unable to sleep or talk about her trauma, and estranged from Joni who doesn’t know what happened. Instead she submerges herself in Blood Feud fandom, even writing a popular article for Buzzfeed on the many theories that the vampires are real.
Then one of the vampires from the books appears in New York City, and because of that article, seeks out Tess for help. Tess can’t rely on the series canon to figure out what’s happening, plus her PTSD leaves it almost impossible for her to trust anyone, especially not vampires who could kill her. However, she can’t resist the pull of knowing more.
There were a lot of plot threads: Joni and Tess’ reconciliation, Tess’ recovery and new romance, Joni’s secondary romance, the warring vampire clans, and the mystery of August Lirio. I think all the different threads slowed the pace, and I wished there had been more fandom and less romance (that’s a me thing, not the book’s fault), but I was satisfied with the ending.
In the week leading up to and week of my moontime I mistakenly thought I'd relapsed into depression, because my PMS symptoms were that bad. The day after I finished bleeding, I wrote the rest of Dollshops & Deathmages, in a dramatic restoration of my spirits and creativity. I don't want to be miserable and listless for half a month, even if I'm in a creative flow for the other half. In quite the synchronicity, The Cozy Creative posted a video about how her menstrual cycle affects her creativity.
It made me feel better, knowing that I'm not alone in having to plan my writing work around moontime, but I really wish my symptoms would be limited to the week of moontime because two weeks is a lot of time lost.
Now to wait for the other authors participating in the cozy fantasy anthology to finish their stories. I've also talked to my cover designer about a cover for Dollshops & Deathmages, because after the anthology has run its course the participating authors will release their stories individually as they see fit. I'm hoping to make Dollshops & Deathmages an evergreen prequel novella and occasional reader magnet for the subsequent cozy books I have planned, so it needs its own cover.
Back when I was employed, I saved up and got myself covers for a couple of the cozy books I'm writing (Dragons & Debutantes and Pumpkin Jack Proposes) since covers are the biggest authorial expense. Dollshops & Deathmages wasn't planned for because I didn't know I was going to participate in a cozy anthology until the opportunity came up, and I crafted this story specifically for this anthology. So I have had to commission the cover for this now, not in advance like the others.
My parents are decently supportive about this indie author project and funded the cover for Dollshops & Deathmages, but I'm not decently grateful because I wanted their support long before this and didn't get it. If I'd gotten their support before this I would've had a job and would've been able to pay for my own covers. Their opposition to me taking that job was very gendered, so I don't feel privileged at all. Even though I am.
I'm bitter and prideful whenever I have to ask them for money, and when they sweetly tell me I have only to ask them, I'm overwhelmed by anger because they could have been supportive all along but only chose to be after I was driven into a corner and had no options left.
I think the contrast between them happily giving me handouts vs. their crashout when I wanted to work at the bookstore is probably because they like me being at home and dependent. I mean it makes no sense that they're supportive about this, but weren't supportive about the stable salaried thing.
I apologize to those I misled or led on by attempting to create reality earlier; as our pinch hits are not yet all claimed, there is a further delay.
Pinch hit #32 is due at 11:59pm EDT, Thursday 26 March or your best offer. To claim, please reply with your AO3 name, and let me know if you're claiming 5k or 10k. You're also welcome to claim by emailing mod.modzilla@gmail.com.
If you have a current pinch hit, I'm happy to discuss extensions. However, your deadline is not automatically extended. Please contact me if you'd like more time.
Minimum requirements: An art gift must be a completed comic at least 10 pages or 40 panels long; a fic gift must be a story at least 10,000 words long. You can also fulfil a pinch hit by giving two complete half-length works, if your recipient has opted into that for the fandom(s) you are creating in. Any work must be for a fandom your recipient has requested and one character/relationship/worldbuilding tag requested in that fandom, and must avoid their DNWs.
Uzma Jalaluddin, Detective Aunty (2025): when the landlord of her daughter's small clothing boutique is murdered, Kausar drops everything to go. Kausar's (white) friend feels sure that Kausar will find out what really happened. But her daughter wants help with housekeeping and child-minding, not an adult peer's support.
I'm only in ch. 3, I don't care currently whether books stick the landing (though I like this one so far), and ch. 2 is great for its tender forthrightness: when a kid (even a thirtysomething adult, like Kausar's daughter) is used to seeing a parent in a certain way, that's how the two are paused, unless the child makes an effort to grow a bit more. It's not something that the parent can shift solo.
It's been more than a week since I posted! Part of that's just life being busy; part is that osprey_archer is here!
Today we went to Bright Water Bog, swung on a swing, ate some cranberries, and saw ice forming. It was sunny, but a cold wind was blowing, and a few flurries of snow came down.
(We also went to the Smith College Botanical Gardens, but this is a drive-by post! So there's only the one photo.)
Oh my GOD can it be spring yet, I am SO TIRED OF WINTER. There is a tiny tiny tiny pink nubbin of rhubarb in the garden. No asparagus yet. I cannot wait to get the dopamine hit of seeing my summer clothes for the first time in months.
The NT's production of The Importance of Being Earnest is of course a delight (Sharon D. Clarke deserves a knighthood and Ncuti Gatwa wears clothes, and few clothes, to perfection); velveteenrabbi and D's Pesach class is as excellent as one might expect; somewhere on this desk is an embroidery needle and I am convinced the gherkin is going to stab herself with it. Wednesday is actually largely unscheduled and I need only survive the conference Thursday, which requires me to leave the house at godawful o'clock.
I am looking forward to the three-hour train ride and the Dessa concert so much. And then I get a weekend in my favorite city! I have been promised brunch and a museum and rainbow cookies and bagels. (Promised by myself and I intend to follow through in every particular.)
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Electromagnetic Assault by Bruce Landay
