Larry’s Pretty Good Journal

A few links of wildly varying importance:

How a Broken Benchmark Quietly Broke America — specifically, the US’s official “poverty level” is a lie, based on outdated conditions and assumptions. Depressing but explains a lot. (I suggest skipping down to the first heading.) (via??)

For Decades, Cartographers Have Been Hiding Covert Illustrations Inside of Switzerland’s Official Maps (via)

World’s first film in ancient Sumerian released by Trinity College filmmakers. Available as an embed in the article. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from The Boxer, Simon & Garfunkel.

Okay, so, like, there’s this classicist? And he retold the original Star Wars trilogy, yanno, as an epic poem? And it’s like totally been published?

AND I’M SO. THERE. FOR THIS.

Except here. Even if it’s very bad, I am so there. As put by chestnut_pod in a recent comment, this is far enough up my alley to be at City Hall. (via)

---L, so there.

Subject quote from The Odyssey of Star Wars: An Epic Poem, Jack Mitchell.

One last mythic narrative poem for this round, this one not only not a sex farce but also not actually from the trunk (it did get published). Possibly, despite the ending, the most straight up romantic story I’ve ever written.

Psyche, at Midnight, in the Dark (537 words) by lnhammer
Fandom: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Metamorphoses - Apuleius
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Eros/Psyche (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore)
Characters: Eros (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Psyche (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore)
Additional Tags: Secret Identity Fail, Divine Marriage, MacGyvering a Lamp, Romantic Angst, Poetry, Couplets
Summary:

She waited one full year and one day more
but still he didn’t tell her. And when for
one more last time she asked to see the face
that in the darkness she could only trace,
he stopped her with a finger on her lips—
“You cannot.”

Or, how the stories we tell blind us.

---L.

Subject quote from What Is Love, Howard Jones.

One last Greek myth sex farce—I’ve written other mythic poetry, but none of the others are farces.

Girl-Fight on Helicon (1097 words) by lnhammer
Fandom: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Metamorphoses - Ovid
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Muses & Pierides (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore)
Characters: Erato of the Muses (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Calliope (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Melpomene (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Thalia of the Muses (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Clio of the Muses (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Euterpe (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Terpsichore (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Urania of the Muses (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Polyhymnia (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Argus Panoptes (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Original Female Character(s)
Additional Tags: Sex Farce, Cheerleaders, Frat Parties, Choral Poetry, Metamorphoses, This Place Is For The Birds, Alternate Universe - High School, Poetry, Rhyme Royal Stanzas
Series: Part 4 of Greek Myth Sex Farces
Summary:

A rhyming rumble in the gym. At stake:
    The Cheerleading Championship of all Greece.
Pieria Academy had come to take
    The challengers on their home court down a piece.
    Not Atalanta’s balls, not Golden Fleece,
Not wife-swapping in Troy would beat this brawl.
’Twas almost bigger than school basketball.

Or, the elite nymphs from Pieria Academy aren’t underestimating the upstarts of Helicon Community College, are they? Nahhh.


Honestly, I think this one justifies its existence with the crack about “wife-swapping in Troy.”

—L.

Subject quote from Right-Hand Man, Lin-Manuel Miranda.

More Greek myth sex farce—possibly the defining work in that genre in my canon, despite having written “The Myrmidons” first.

Hospitality (1799 words) by lnhammer
Fandom: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Metamorphoses - Ovid
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Baucis/Philemon (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Zeus/Baucis (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Zeus/Philemon (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Hermes/Baucis (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Hermes/Philemon (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Zeus/Hermes (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore)
Characters: Baucis (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Philemon (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Zeus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Hermes (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore)
Additional Tags: Sex Farce, Dark Bedroom, Watch out for the cradle, Stubbed toes, Young married couple, Data Sampling, Modern Retelling, Chaucerian AU, Poetry, Rhyme Royal Stanzas

Summary:

Imagine, if you will, two gods on earth,
pretending that they’re mortal men to test
whether, within the realm of death and birth,
the laws of hospitality for guests
were honored in the heart or were repressed.

Or, what happens when the myth of Baucis & Philemon is retold as a Reeve’s Tale AU.

---L.

Subject quote from “Calls from Springfield,” Hillary Scott.

Well this is ... interesting.

1. Quarreling.

O Goddess, chant it out, the choler grown
In Peleus' son, aggrieved Achilleus,
Simply deathful, sheerly doleful for
Achaians; wholly numerous warrior souls

It sent to Hades but to dog-throngs down
By Troy and divers birds the corporal dead
In piles it highly proffered, all for prey,
And Zeus’s will thus came to pass outright,

As this began when first Atreyedes,
Monarch of chiliad-lancers, and Achilleus, bright
With God, in breaching1 closed like enemies.
Which of the Gods to rupture in a fight

Provoked them? Leto's son, whom Zeus begot,
For he a fulsome plague on Argives brought.

This being the opening partially-rhymed* sonnet (of 1823) from F. L. Light's translation of the Iliad. That it's not as bad as Hobbes's translation is a very weak defense. Available from Audible and in three volumes covering books 1-8, 9-16, and 17-24.

Found via this list of Homer translations. No thanks necessary.


* Reading on, the dominant rhyme scheme is xaxa xbxb xcxc dd, often slant-rhymed, but the first two stanzas here are just a little too slant for me to hear the chime.

---L.

Subject quote from Macbeth V.5.26-28, William Shakespeare.

"This American Lear" (via)

How to cut a bagel into two interlocking rings. Spoiler: Use a möbius-strip shaped cut. (via)

Infographic: deaths in the Iliad by the numbers. Patroclus kills more named Trojans than Achilles. (via)

Subject quote from "Under Pressure," Queen feat. David Bowie.

Three literary links:

25 things learned from closing a bookstore. "If you think people with trucks avoid you when you're getting ready to move to a new apartment, just wait until you're closing a bookstore." (via)

The properties of the social network of characters in the Odyssey and Beowulf suggest there is a historical basis on real people at its core, in contrast to that of Tain Bo Cuailnge, which has a more artificial geometry. (original paper, via forgotten)

A short story about confusing the NSA with emails of Finnegan's Wake and Hopkins. (via)

---L.

Books recently devoured upon arrival in-house:

Cross Game v7, Mitsuru Adachi - Contains v14-15 of the Japanese edition -- one more volume to go. I am once again reminded of just how good Adachi is at storytelling, as the implications of the events of v6 continue to reverberate and the characters prepare for the climactic summer qualifying tournament. (I use "reverberate" deliberately -- echoes, structural and ironic, are a major tool in his kit.) Highly recommended, still.

Girl Meets Boy, Ali Smith - This is billed as a retelling of Iphis and Ianthe, but it's not so much that as a genderqueer romance with characters conscious of Ovid -- including two separate summaries of Ovid's version, one told in character. A fun, breezy read, though the partial implication that one solution to the problems of the world is to go Brazil-ending is not as encouraging as was probably intended.

Fly by Night, Frances Hardinge - I want to sit this book down in a locked room with Westmark and then eavesdrop as they try to figure out whether how much to trust each other, and what's to be gained by turning the other in. Wonderful evocation of pre-modern espionage, even though too much time is spent without the goose. I am inexplicably without the sequel.

The Sound of Waves, Yukio Mishima - I gather this is the Mishima novel I'm most likely to connect to. I must say, it's a good unraveling of exactly why secret lovers in Japanese poetry angst over discovery so much. I get the very strong impression that, even though the heroine is (like the hero) so very much An Ideal it's not even funny, Mishima did not like women. I also get the impression Mishima preferred the unreflective type in his boy-toys. All carping aside, I like the story itself -- I'm guessing it's in some sense based on Daphnis and Chloe? The parallels are too strong to not be deliberate, but was it direct or indirect influence is the question.

Books taking longer to digest:

Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription, Thomas LaMarre - The odd subtitle obscures that this is really a study of the poetics of Kokinshu-era poetics and its entanglement with calligraphic styles (so nothing as expansive as the main title suggests). It's thinky enough that I have to take time off every five pages to process. It probably helps that I was already, in my own unsystematic way, already working toward some of the author's arguments (regarding the relationship between pivot-words and names-of-things poems), but other parts, I don't yet understand enough to evaluate.

A Waka Anthology, volume 2: Grasses of Remembrance, Edwin Cranston - 1100 folio pages do not go down in a single gulp. Or even two.

Tsunaide Tsukurou: Yunitto Origami (roughly,* "Let's Connect and Make: Unit Origami"), Tomoko Fuse - It is likewise impossible to rush through an origami book -- all the more so for unit origami.** Fuse is one of my three favorite origami artists,*** and this book hasn't been translated, that I'm aware of -- found in used book store's foreign-language section, along with several Japanese origami books from the library of someone from Alberta. I kept myself to under five, but snagged all of Fuse's, and I started on this as the looking the most interesting.

Haiku: The Poetry of Nature, ed. David Cobb - On the other hand, while it's possible to read a haiku collection in a single sitting, doing to so pretty much misses the point. This one has a pretty good mix of traditional and modern poets, generally in reasonable translations, plus lots of pretty pictures from the Japanese collection from The British Museum.


* This can probably be rendered more idiomatically.

** The domain of such implied instructions as "Now make 19 more of those so we can assemble them."

*** Robert Lang and John Montroll.

---L.

And, indeed, there should be nothing to regret for drawing Thor riding a cat. (via)

The cat, OTOH, might regret quite a bit.

... nibble on they tiny feet

---L.