A live-action drama based on Taiwanese baihe novel Her Lips, Her Kisses (她的唇，她的吻, pinyin: ta de chun, ta de wen) by Xi Cheng (希澄) has started filming as of 25 April. This will be released under the English title She and Hers (why is every recent baihe-related live-action thing called this, smh) and is planned to have 12 episodes of 30 minutes each.
The novel is centred on the fashion industry, and focuses on the relationship between industry rivals Wei Lan and Xiao Li-xuan. At least, Wei Lan believes they are rivals; she has no idea that Xiao Li-xuan has been nursing a secret crush on her. One of the leads will be played by Yuan Moyao, who has a supporting role in Fragrance of the First Flower. Further information (in Chinese) available here and here.
This is to my knowledge the first baihe novel to have been licensed for a live-action drama (i.e. a multi-episode production, which excludes When We Met). From what I gather, Xi Cheng is a pretty popular author on the Taiwanese scene. She publishes mainly on Popo (her profile here). She also has an Instagram account. Her Lips, Her Kisses has been published in print (though my usual purveyor isn't offering international shipping on it) and as an ebook that can be purchased through, as far as I know, Kobo and Google Play (just search the Chinese title).
My solar "kit" is on the way! It has taken months for me to finally make up my mind to purchase it, but summer is at hand and we have had our first days above 95F, the point at which the house cannot keep itself cool enough for comfort. I'd love to get a whole house system, but that was about 3 times what this cost and is just out of reach right now. That said, the components of this system can be upgraded. To make it a "whole house" system I'll need to add a couple of panels, an inverter and batteries for storage. If I choose to keep a connection to our utility (the despised PG&E) I'll also need to do a bunch more wiring in the house so the solar system is completely separate, or get an expensive utility transfer unit. The kit includes 9 solar panels, a "mini-split" heat pump and wiring. The heat pump runs on solar as long as the sun is out, but drops to grid power when solar isn't enough (no battery storage with the kit). Yes, quite expensive up front, but it should pay for itself within two or three years. Here is a link to the system I got: shopsolarkits.com/products/eg4-24k-hybrid-solar-mini-split-kit-r32
It is all about the garden. More stuff getting planted, more wood compost going on. Slowly working through my inventory of plants in small containers that need a home. The last beds that needed to be cleared of winter plants and made ready for summer are clear and most are planted. I'm down to the two beds that I saved space in for okra. I think it is finally warm enough to start okra plants and have them happy to grow. One or two tomatoes has reached 4 feet in height. There are lots of flowers but so far not a lot of fruit setting. Beginning to get the first summer squash. Next Morning: Okra seeds are soaking, they will go into seed starting mix later today. Of course today is a very cool, windy day, not at all good okra germination weather. Good thing I'm starting them indoors on the heat mat!
Review copy provided by the author, who is a close friend of decades standing.
This is the first book in a sweeping space opera series (Vega Victrix), but many readers will be relieved (may even throw parades or dance in the streets) to discover that this volume has an ending rather than merely stopping for a minute until the next one. Also, the second one will be out at the same time! More on that in a few days.
Corin Oshima is afraid of her past catching up with her--literally. After her horrible mission on Rossem, she traveled away at more than the speed of light. So when Rossem's history was altered, so was Corin's, and it's only a matter of time (again, literally) until the information wave traveling at the speed of light reaches her and obliterates her past, providing her with a new one--or, if she is too untethered to the current world, taking her out with it.
But she's not just sitting around waiting for time to make fools of us all. As all of us conscientious souls know, there's always work to do--and unfortunately there are always exploiters trying to spend their time treating people and lands as profit sources instead. Further complicating Corin's life are aliens who are rational but very much not human in their priorities, political complications among the human "Houses"...and the person she least wants to see in the universe right now. Even a well-educated and interestingly modified future human like Corin has her hands full!
I have read this entire series to date in draft and am thrilled to see that it's going to be available to the rest of the world so you all can talk to me about it. Highly recommended.
After 40 years together, Don and Rodney face the end of the world from a black hole that will swallow the Earth in exactly one month. So they embark on a road trip to keep a promise they made to their son.
Klune sells very well at my shop. He is good at doing what he does, and what he does is gay, twee, and glurgy. I did not enjoy The House on the Cerulean Sea and I did not enjoy this either. Both of them made my eyes glaze over. I started both of them, disliked them both, started skimming, still was bored and irritated, then skipped to the end to see how it all came out. Then I learned some information that made me revise my opinion of the book even lower. In the case of The House in the Cerulean Sea, it was an interview where he mentioned that his sappy, trivializing book was inspired by the Sixties Scoop. In the case of We Burned So Bright, it was his afterword.
For the second time in a row, Hestia has evinced great interest not in the bruised leaves of catmint I have brought home, but the smell of it on my hands which fires up an instantaneous purr and much excited butting of the head. It took me a season to identify the purple-flowered ground cover in my parents' front yard as Nepeta × faassenii, after which I have started to see it everywhere around my neighborhood, e.g. this afternoon while out walking with a_reasonable_man and the encyclopedia of plants on his phone which also named for me the wind-shaken white frou-frou of a Chinese fringe tree. Last year when it was already on the far side of fall, I picked up May Theilgaard Watts' Tree Finder: Identifying Trees by Their Leaves in Eastern North America (1939/2025) which the season has now leafed out enough for me to experiment with. For Memorial Day the sun has come lazily out and the temperature fogged up to the point where stepping outside in even a washer-worn overshirt was a miscalculation. nineweaving has sent me a pair of folk albums that went majority-missing in the crash of Bertie Owen. I am re-reading Kay Chronister's The Bog Wife (2024) to keep in with the zeitgeist. Two sprigs of the lilac in the back yard remain.
The comm read-along for The Creator's Grace will start on Sunday 21 June!
Where to read: You are free to read either the Chinese version or the English translation published by Rosmei (I would recommend the Chinese version over the English if you have a choice of languages open to you). I'm taking the version currently available here on JJWXC as the 'definitive' reading version of the Chinese text for the purposes of this read-along.
How it works:We're going to read two chapters from the Rosmei version of the novel each week, and I will indicate which JJWXC chapters those correspond to. This will be around three to four chapters in Chinese, and 50 to 60 pages in English. I'm using the Rosmei edition as a baseline not because I particularly respect it, but because Rosmei has condensed the chapters in a way that doesn't preserve, indicate or even hint at the chapter breaks in the original. As an indicator, the first chapter from the Rosmei edition covers the first three chapters from the JJWXC original; the second chapter covers the fourth to seventh chapters. This can be adjusted if people find this level of commitment too high and would prefer a lower weekly cap on the amount of reading to be covered each week. I will put up a master post each week with a brief summary of the chapters covered. Posts will be members-locked to facilitate free discussion.
Please feel free to ask any questions/indicate your commitment in the comments below, and feel free to DM me if you would prefer not to comment publicly.
When you pick up an old children's book because it says it's about a tiny glass mermaid coming to life, you probably don't expect most of the story to involve the main character going to another world where she has to face an evil pirate witch who wants to nonconsensually adopt her. Admittedly this all happens while they're lugging around the now full-sized mermaid so she can be the best friend of the other world's sole mermaid, but if they miss the deadline she'll turn back to glass, while the witch pirate throws spells at them, but... Did I mention that all of this takes place inside a Christmas tree?
This is a pretty fun book but like many older children's books, recounting the plot is like describing a half-remembered dream.
We might have gone to the Amble Puffin Festival yesterday; it's something we've enjoyed in the past. But it's a long wy, and it was hot - not as hot as it has been in the south of the country, but hot enough that the lazy option looked very attractive. So we went for a stroll in Crook Hall gardens; the kind of stroll that consists mostly in moving from one seat to the next, making the most of every patch of shade.
This particular green shade is in the 'Shakespeare Garden':
I know that the idea of a 'Shakespeare Garden' is to include every plant mentioned by the poet, but all I could find about this particular one is this ten-year old article, which describes it as an aspiration. I suspect that the yew tree is carrying a lot of the load here, though the dominant theme seems to be the purple globes of alliums.
Meanwhile, the cathedral supplied a musical background with a sustained peal.
On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, creating one of the world’s worst nuclear accidents. A haibun is a Japanese poetic form that combines prose and haiku, usually describing an event or travel. This is a haibun about my guided tour in April 2006 of Chernobyl.
I visited Chernobyl, and I also visited the National Chornobyl Museum in Kyiv, which tells the heartbreaking story of what happened and holds irreplaceable artifacts. Over the weekend, Russia deliberately destroyed the museum.
***
A military checkpoint marks the entrance to the Exclusion Zone, the contaminated area roughly 30 kilometers around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. More than 100,000 people were evacuated within days of its explosion and meltdown in April 1986. At the Chernobyl Interinform Agency, in a room filled with maps, we met our tour guide, Yuriy, who cheerfully answered our questions in Ukrainian and English. Then we reboarded our bus to head toward the areas marked in red on the maps.
his pocket dosimeter
ticking ever faster
our guide keeps smiling
As we approached the nuclear power plant complex, we passed the rusting cranes and beams of buildings whose construction had been halted overnight. But there is a new building.
Visitor Center —
women plant tulips
wearing face masks
The cesium and plutonium that spewed out during the disaster washed into the soil, so digging requires precautions. Plants pull radioactivity back up through their roots, as a Geiger counter set on the pavement and then on the lawn can prove.
keep off the grass:
twice the dose
as asphalt
We moved on to Pripyat, a city built for the power plant’s workers and families. Its 50,000 inhabitants were told they were only leaving for three days, although authorities knew it would be effectively forever: the radiation will subside to livable levels in one thousand years.
busy ants —
do they notice?
the city is empty
It was a model Soviet city, with lovely tree-lined boulevards and many amenities. Its designer even had one rose bush planted for every inhabitant.
among the weeds
still a few
roses
We visited on the day after Palm Sunday. With no palm trees in Ukraine, the faithful gather willow buds and bring them to churches to be blessed. Willows were growing in Pripyat.
pussy willows
nine hundred eighty more
quiet springs
The tour company owner, Alexander Sirota, had been a boy in Pripyat when the disaster happened, a third-grade student at School No. 1. It was partially collapsed, spilling books, furniture, and students’ possessions across the cracked and mossy sidewalk.
a string of beads
on the ground: everyone looks
no one touches
We got back on the bus and passed through the “Red Forest.” These were pine trees growing next to the power plant that were directly under the path of the worst fallout. The pine needles turned red overnight; the trees died, were cut down and buried where they had grown.
Red Forest
dust to dust — only
Geiger counters wail
Our guide pointed out a tall metal grid: the early warning radar screen for Chernobyl II, a supposedly top secret nuclear missile site close to the power plant. An American spy satellite passed over the area 28 seconds after the explosion, and US analysts, who knew about the site, thought a missile had been fired and considered a nuclear strike in retaliation. Then they thought a missile had exploded in its silo because it didn’t move. Finally they realized it was the nuclear power plant exploding.
Chernobyl II
the bigger danger next door:
who knew?
And so we left, with one final stop at a Ukraine Army checkpoint to test our radioactivity. We all passed. Our irradiation during the seven-hour visit had been slight. No tee-shirts, no souvenirs.
Friday, I get a text from the staffing agency asking if I can work at X place on any of five or six different shifts. I take a realistic look at those shifts and the five I'm currently working and text back that I can do Monday, 4 - 12 - before my 12 - 8 shift at the same place.
Sunday I work 12 - 8. I get home around 9, I chat with my family, I hang out, and at around 3pm I head to bed. At 5:30, Manager at X place calls and says "This isn't like you, where are you?"
....
I did go in for that Sunday shift, but I also forwarded her a screenshot of what I actually agreed to. Because geez. And you can believe I did not kill myself cleaning on the overnight.
I've written two stories about Sweeting, a decommissioner of deities working for the Ministry of Divinities in an authoritarian country that refers to itself as the Polity. The first was The Inconvenient God, a novelette, in which Sweeting had to decommission a god of truancy and slacking off who was causing embarrassment for a prestigious university. The job didn't go as planned. The second was Lagoonfire, a novella, in which it seemed initially like one of the retired gods whom Sweeting first decommissioned might somehow be causing problems for a resort development. Looking into the case revealed all kinds of unexpected things, including things about Sweeting's own past that she would have liked to keep securely buried.
Lagoonfire came out in 2021. In the intervening five years I've been writing a novel that follows directly on the events of Lagoonfire, and recently I finished it. In the meantime my publisher, a micropress, closed up shop, but the woman behind it kindly agreed to read the novel anyway, and even more kindly agreed to publish it! Hurray! So at sometime in the nearish future, maybe-probably within this year or early next year, we will be able to share A Flash of Scarlet with you.
Even though it's a sequel, I've written it so that you can read it without having read Lagoonfire (and Lagoonfire and The Inconvenient God are completely independent of each other). As with the earlier two stories, this one is about how the past will never, ever, stay past. It WILL come forward again. This one features incipient divinities, spirits, and ghosts, and, unfortunately for Sweeting, more dealings with Civil Order, the Polity's feared police force. But (to her own surprise) she's not without friends and resources, both divine and earthly.
My sister spent ninety minutes on the phone with me, helping me rewrite the pollinator garden plan for the THIRD TIME, and she is truly the best and what the fuck is wrong with the Parks Department? Not everyone has a sister who is a literal professional expert on pollinator garden design!!!
celli helped with an Excel thing last week and my friend C. loaned me a cart so I could lug the giant bag of garden dirt up to the community garden, and I am so lucky in my friends.
I wrote the Tatler Fairyland story in slow agonizing 100-words chunks and I hate it, the voice isn't quite right, but it is 1600 words long and I do think the premise is fundamentally sound. I'm going to sleep on it and do a last read-through in the morning before I send it to crit group, at the literal last possible second. (How the fuck do I turn this deadline-driven writing practice into something that can produce a novel, I ask. How.)
Once I send the story to crit group, I will reward myself with ice cream and a meeting with someone from the group building a pollinator garden nearby and then I will send the pollinator garden plan off and call it done for now.
One of my favorite skirts has been mended and it was not even that hard. It's not a perfect fix but it is better than it was! I need to sit down and catalog my sewing stash so I know what mending I have and then I can prioritize. I impulse-bought a couple of patterns from Tammy Handmade and that also needs to be done. The makerspace will be great during the summer: air-conditioning!
This is the weirdest spring ever — a forty-degree (F) swing overnight? Impossible to deal with.
It is undoubtedly a sign of improvement that in just the last week I have begun to dream and remember it for the first time in months, but now I get to be irritated that I am not camped out at the Harvard Film Archive for their summer repertory series of quota quickies and British B-movies, absolutely none of whose stars seem to exist in my waking life, let alone their directors or scripts. Most of them were crime melodramas. None had been recovered from the early filmography of Michael Powell. It has been so nearly impossible for me to watch movies, I appreciate my brain trying to make up the obvious loss.
Sometimes when people are talking in real life, or you can see this on TV shows and in movies, they do a very quick knee bend. Why do we do this? Sufficient googling answered the question of "Why do we click our tongues" (it's a discourse marker, thanks) but I haven't narrowed this one down yet and I can't figure it out by reasoning and observation of my own and others' behavior.
Reading: I am still slowly working through Braiding Sweetgrass, which is well suited to a gradual reading of one chapter at a time. I've also started in on The Vegetable Gardener's Container Bible. And I started reading Diary of a Keen Gardener (Mary Keen), but I think I'm bouncing off it after a chapter; no slight to the book itself, but so far I don't think it's my thing.
I finished reading To Ride a Rising Storm and now have to wait for however long for the next book. (Ah, for that window of childhood when I was quite young and ransacking the adult SFF section of the library and thus completed series were in epic supply. OTOH, it was all by definition books from the '80s or earlier, so.) I'm currently reading Eden Robins' Remember You Will Die, which is really neat so far.
And my copy of the new Yotsuba&! (vol. 16) arrived and I devoured it almost immediately. It remains the one manga series that gets read AT ONCE whenever there's a new release. It remains impossibly charming. It's also not a series I would ever have imagined making me rear back in surprise--the scope of the story is incredibly small! It's a slice-of-life about a five-year-old!--but this volume did that. Amazing. Watching: A bit more Justice in the Dark (we're now one episode shy of halfway through) and a bit more Witch Hat Atelier. (I have now confirmed via Goodreads that I only ever read vol. 1 of the Witch Hat Atelier manga, back in 2020. The timing may explain why I remembered essentially nothing about it.)
In the last post on Iliad 21, I suggested that the supernatural violence of the book from when Achilles starts to fight the river Scamander to the realization of theomachy within the Iliad has the effect of overwhelming audiences, if inducing in them a ‘fog of war’ sensation as the events described get bigger, louder, more chaotic. The increase in intensity is both a function of Achilles’ rage and a narrative crescendo to help emphasize what comes next (the final meeting of Hektor and Achilles). As the noise quiets and the chaos simplifies, the narrative creates space for the speeches and encounters of book 22.
But the violence of 21 is about more still than building up the plot. It also dramatizes the danger intrinsic to a hero like Achilles and the cosmic disorder inherent to a world that mixes gods and mortals. One of the broader themes of the Iliad and the Odyssey together is the movement of the history of the divine world toward a settlement closer to the lives of Homer’s audiences. One metaphysical question attending Greek epic is why there are no demigods in their world.
As Barbara Graziosi and Johannes Haubold argue in their Homer: The Resonance of Epic, the Iliad and the Odyssey work in concert with other ‘Homeric’ poems (the Hymns) and the works of Hesiod to tell the story of the development of the cosmos up to the point of the basic perspective of the Archaic age in Greece. This process takes us from the creation of the world in Hesiod’s Theogony to the life of work and human intrigue described in the Works and Days. The Homeric narratives provide dramatic vignettes from steps along the way: The Hymns detail how individual gods came to occupy their sphere of influence and the epics tell about the end of the generation of heroes.
As Elton Barker and I discuss (probably too much) in Homer’s Thebes, Hesiod positions the end of the race of heroes as happening in the wars around Thebes and Troy. And, as I mentioned in a post on Zeus’ “plan”, a fragment from the lost epic, the Kypria confirms that this is all part of the cosmic order.
From left to right: Poseidon, Dionysos, Zeus. Black figured neck-amphora, 540 BC. National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen
Hesiod, Works and Days, 161 165
Evil war and dread battle destroyed them (tous men), some at seven-gated Thebes in the land of Cadmus, when they fought for the flocks of Oedipus, and others (tous de) when it had led them in their ships over the great deep sea to Troy for lovely-haired Helen.
“Some have claimed that Homer is riffing on another story. For people say that the earth was weighed down by an overpopulation of human beings, and since there was no sense of reverence among them, she asked Zeus to lighten her burden. First, Zeus arranged the Theban War right away. He used that to kill a lot of them, and then in turn he caused the Trojan War, because he listened to Momos’ advice. This is what Homer calls the plan of Zeus, since he was capable of destroying them all with lightning or floods (kataklysm). Momos prevented this, offering instead two plans: first, Thetis’ marriage to a mortal and then the birth of a beautiful girl. From these two events there would be a war between Greeks and barbarians which would result in unburdening the earth because so many were killed.
This story is told in the Kypria composed by Stasinus who says as follows (Cypria fr. 1) There was a time when the countless mortal clans Constantly weighed down the broad chest of the trampled earth. When Zeus noticed, he felt pity and in his complex thoughts Devised to unburden the all nourishing land of human beings. He sowed the seeds of the great conflict around Ilion To lighten that weight through death. And so at Troy The heroes were dying and Zeus’ plan was being fulfilled.
I think that one helpful way to imagine book 21 is to see it as a rapid re-progression from the creation of the Universe and its potential theomachies to an explanation for why the gods are less involved in human affairs in ‘real life’ than in epic poetry. At the same time, the exploration of Achilles’ excess in his choosing of sacrificial victims, his refusal of a suppliant, and his onslaught against the river, emphasizes just how much suffering has been caused by a ‘hero’. The exchange of Poseidon and Apollo in the later half of the book emphasizes some of these themes.
Homer, Iliad 21.435-469
Then the powerful shaker of the earth addressed Apollo: Phoibos: Why indeed do the two of us stand apart? It isn’t right Now that the rest have begun. No, it would be more shameful If we returned to the bronze-threshold of Zeus on Olympos without fighting. Start, since you are the younger by birth. It isn’t right for me Since I was born earlier and know more. Fool, you have a thoughtless heart. You don’t remember How many evils we two suffered over Ilion, Alone of the goods, when we had to serve Arrogant Laomedon for a year thanks to Zeus For some promised pay. He ordered us around, telling us what to do! I myself built the wall around the city for the Trojans, I made it broad and very fine, so the city would be unbreakable. And you, Phoibos, herded their ambling cattle In the glens of forested and hilly Ida. But when the year’s seasons produces the end of our contract, Then that monster of a man cheated the two of us Of all of our wages. And he sent us away with a threat. He promised he would tie our feet and hands up And sell us to islands far afield. Then he threatened to cut both our ears off with bronze! The two of us went back again with angry hearts Enraged over the money he promised us but didn’t pay. Now you are currying favor with his people and you don’t try Along with us to make sure that the arrogant Trojans die out Completely and horribly with their children and wives.”
Far-shooting Apollo then answered him in turn: “Earth-shaker, you would not describe me as wise If I made war with you, at least, over the mortals, Those unlucky creatures who grow like leaves At one time flourishing into life, eating the fruit of the fields, But then they shrink and wither. Come, let’s stop our fighting As fast as we can. Let them fight on their own.”
So he turned him back by speaking like this. For he was ashamed To engage in violence with his father’s brother.”
Laomedon Refusing Payment to Poseidon and Apollo [Debated attribution, 17th Century)
One of the striking things about this passage is the repeated language of evaluation or judgment: Poseidon (and then the narrator) are concerned with shame and propriety. It may seem strange that Poseidon spends so much time describing their mistreatment at the hands of Laomedon, but it works thematically well for this section. First, it shows how the Trojans failed a test of theoxeny (when gods go in disguise to test people); second, it demonstrates that gods themselves suffer pain from human beings; and, third, I think it also implies that humans suffer from these exchanges as well. Imagine how much less suffering there would be if the Trojans’ did not possess a wall built by Poseidon!
While Poseidon focuses on the insolence of the Trojans, extending the behavior of the long-gone forefather to the entire city, Apollo steps quickly away. He does not emphasize their shame, but his own prudence, or imprudence were he to fight Poseidon for the sake of mortals. In a way, Apollo echoes Glaukos in book 6 of the Iliad when he compares human generations to the leaves. (Note the similar battlefield context and the use of the image of brevity if not futility to disengage from a fight through speech.) But this also echoes Sarpedon’s speech to Glaukos in book 12 when he says they must fight and die because they are mortal. The general argument of the Iliad—and I think a theological/metaphysical theme for the epic world—is that humans receive glory because they sacrifice what they have in short supply. Human life can have morality, shame, duty, and meaning because there are consequences that cannot be surmounted by time.
For the gods, whose lives cannot change because the cosmos is fixed in place by Zeus’ order, there’s no advantage from fighting with or about mortals any more. The gods, from the Homeric perspective, can gain no honor; they can not actually change. The only thing they receive any longer from mingling with human beings is pain—the loss of honor, as in Poseidon’s shaming by Laomedon; the physical pain Aphrodite feels when Diomedes wounds her in book 5; and, most of all, the emotional pain of loss Zeus feels for the death of Sarpedon alongside the terrible grief Thetis faces in empathizing with her son and anticipating his death.
Apollo, the god who started the divine actions in the Iliad, is shown here declaring he has had enough. And while the speech is short, Poseidon agrees. They leave the battle to let the mortals work it out for themselves as the gods watch from the distance in lives of eternal ease.
Paolo Fiammingo, “Apollo and Poseidon Punishing Troy“
A short bibliography on Homeric Gods
A W. H. Adkins. ”Homeric Gods and the Values of Homeric Society.” JHS 92 (1972) 1-19.
W. Allan. “Divine Justice and Cosmic Order in Early Greek Epic” JHS 126 (2006) 1–35.
Burkert, Walter.1986. Greek Religion. 119-125.
G. M. Calhoun. “Homer’s Gods: Prolegomena”. TAPA 68 (1937) 24-25.
Barbara Graziosi and Johannes Haubold. Homer: The Resonance of Epic. London: Duckworth, 2005.
Jenny Strauss Clay. The Wrath of Athena: Gods and Men in the Odyssey. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.
—,—. The Politics of Olympus: Form and Meaning in the Major Homeric Hymns. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
—,—. Hesiod’s Cosmos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003
Erwin Cook. The Odyssey in Athens: Myths of Cultural Origins. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.
E. R. Dodds. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley, 1951.
Erbse, Hartmut (1986). Untersuchungen zur Funktion der Götter im homerischen Epos. Berlin: de Gruyter
Barbara Graziosi and Johannes Haubold. Homer: The Resonance of Epic. London: Duckworth, 2005.
Christopher Gill. Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy and Philosophy: The Self in Dialogue. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Jasper Griffin. Homer on Life and Death. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Heiden, Bruce 2002. “Structures of Progression in the Plot of the Iliad.” Arethusa 35 (2002) 237-54.
Emily Kearns. “The Gods in the Homeric Epics.” In Robert Fowler (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Homer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 59-73.
Lamberton, Robert. 1986. Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition. Berkeley and Los Angeles.
N. J. Lowe. The Classical Plot and the Invention of Western Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
W. F. Otto. 1954. The Homeric Gods The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion. Trans. M, Hadas.
Pietro Pucci. “Theology and Poetics in the Iliad.” Arethusa 35 (2002) 17-34.
Naoko Yamagata. Homeric Morality. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994.
Some of you might have heard about the chemical tank that is about to explode or leak gallons of toxic goo. Well, the cut-off is about four blocks from us. Some neighbors have bailed, but most of us are indoors, windows shut. We have filters going and masks at hand in case the thing blows--the air is fine otherwise, so I open up the house and stand in the doorway to air things out every so often. Being closed in, no walks, means I'm getting a lot of stuff done.
I lost my sweet little dog a few days ago. I am missing her every time I turn around and she is not a shadow at my heels, or pressing her warm little body against my side or nudging me for scratches or to fill her puzzles so she can work them.
Getting ready to travel east in a few days, trying to wrangle hotel res being one of my chores.
Much reading and writing.
Closing comments--send any good wishes by mental telepathy!
but you shouldn't ignore somebody who's outside at 11:30pm, sobbing on the ground in the rain.
And indeed I did not ignore her, but everybody else was studiously looking the other way. (She declared that she was fine and did not need me to call anybody. I don't know if I believe that she was fine, but she got up and walked to the bus stop and didn't stagger as she did so, so okay. Also, I saw as she stood that her phone was clearly working, so she really didn't need me to call anybody.)
![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
apod_feed
The upper galaxy might be more photogenic, but the lower galaxy is more unusual. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
douqi posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
baihe_media
