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Go toward the light, child, hey? Steer by the sun
These last few days were much better than the previous. Even if I had to catch a train at seven in the morning on Wednesday.
I had wanted to hear Michael Silk's "Greek Tragedy and Shakespeare: Meaning and Metaphysics," since the e-mail had advertised Euripides' Ion and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, and I was not disappointed. The lecture dealt partially with the difference between gods that are glimpsed around the edges of the action and gods that are present underneath all the world, and then the further interactions of these human and divine registers. The juxtaposition of the mythical past with the present and all the layers of time that come into play when the present is the past. That the ability to see a god often points the way to madness, if not destruction: Ion shouts for his mother to look away as Athena descends for the deus ex finale, Cleopatra can see the ghost of her lover Antony only as she dies; she alone stares the sun in the face. The tourists in Ion who come to see the shrine, chattering about art and sculpture and myth, entirely unaware that they are in a tragedy; the man who brings Cleopatra her fatal asps is credited in the text as a clown (I thought, like white-faced Death in The Seventh Seal). Metatheater when Cleopatra speaks bitterly of the mime and mockery that her love affair with Antony will become and alienation effects at the close of Ion where the happy ending of fortunes reversed leaves the characters all stunned and stranded. Whether the landscape of Delphi itself is Apollo. I've never studied Antony and Cleopatra, but Ion was the first play I ever read in Greek and Euripides still my favorite tragedian, and the lecture was definitely worth only an hour's sleep the night before.
And then, because![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
schreibergasse and Grace are made of awesome, we went out for Thai food and ice cream afterward with other people and I crashed on their couch, which is more comfortable than anything that folds out onto the floor has a right to be. Admittedly I was incoherent tired, but I still fell asleep within an hour and that's usually impossible for me. And between all the Girl Genius that I caught up on while waiting for Loreena McKennitt to transfer to schreibergasse's laptop and the volume of Narbonic to which the household of rushthatspeaks and gaudior introduced me on Monday, I think I have fulfilled my mad science quota for the month. Now if only I could make gerbil-powered robo-radishes of doom.
Thursday had fewer mad scientists, but more conversations with professors and an early dinner with the divinity student who so far as I know does not have a livejournal, and on the train back to Boston I finished re-reading Gene Wolfe's The Book of the Long Sun (1993—1996) for the first time since college. This provoked me to stay up and re-read The Book of the Short Sun (1999—2001) for good measure, and therefore I am surprised that I did not dream of unreliable narrators. Instead, I dreamed of archaeological museums and a girl in a desert with too many teeth and a rifle. Okay, then.
Four days left to nominate poems for the 2007 Rhysling Awards.
Buy T-shirts! Save Pandemonium!
I had wanted to hear Michael Silk's "Greek Tragedy and Shakespeare: Meaning and Metaphysics," since the e-mail had advertised Euripides' Ion and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, and I was not disappointed. The lecture dealt partially with the difference between gods that are glimpsed around the edges of the action and gods that are present underneath all the world, and then the further interactions of these human and divine registers. The juxtaposition of the mythical past with the present and all the layers of time that come into play when the present is the past. That the ability to see a god often points the way to madness, if not destruction: Ion shouts for his mother to look away as Athena descends for the deus ex finale, Cleopatra can see the ghost of her lover Antony only as she dies; she alone stares the sun in the face. The tourists in Ion who come to see the shrine, chattering about art and sculpture and myth, entirely unaware that they are in a tragedy; the man who brings Cleopatra her fatal asps is credited in the text as a clown (I thought, like white-faced Death in The Seventh Seal). Metatheater when Cleopatra speaks bitterly of the mime and mockery that her love affair with Antony will become and alienation effects at the close of Ion where the happy ending of fortunes reversed leaves the characters all stunned and stranded. Whether the landscape of Delphi itself is Apollo. I've never studied Antony and Cleopatra, but Ion was the first play I ever read in Greek and Euripides still my favorite tragedian, and the lecture was definitely worth only an hour's sleep the night before.
And then, because
schreibergasse and Grace are made of awesome, we went out for Thai food and ice cream afterward with other people and I crashed on their couch, which is more comfortable than anything that folds out onto the floor has a right to be. Admittedly I was incoherent tired, but I still fell asleep within an hour and that's usually impossible for me. And between all the Girl Genius that I caught up on while waiting for Loreena McKennitt to transfer to schreibergasse's laptop and the volume of Narbonic to which the household of rushthatspeaks and gaudior introduced me on Monday, I think I have fulfilled my mad science quota for the month. Now if only I could make gerbil-powered robo-radishes of doom.Thursday had fewer mad scientists, but more conversations with professors and an early dinner with the divinity student who so far as I know does not have a livejournal, and on the train back to Boston I finished re-reading Gene Wolfe's The Book of the Long Sun (1993—1996) for the first time since college. This provoked me to stay up and re-read The Book of the Short Sun (1999—2001) for good measure, and therefore I am surprised that I did not dream of unreliable narrators. Instead, I dreamed of archaeological museums and a girl in a desert with too many teeth and a rifle. Okay, then.
Four days left to nominate poems for the 2007 Rhysling Awards.
Buy T-shirts! Save Pandemonium!
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I am very, very confused in places. :)
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Exodus from the Long Sun has some weird ellipses. I go back and forth between thinking that the book ends with a genre-bending blowout of conventions and thinking that it completely implodes. (And my reactions are a little impaired anyway, since I actually read this one first: I picked it up in a friend's dorm room for lack of anything else to read, and halfway through realized that I should maybe start at the beginning . . .) But I really like the character work, and that counts for a lot with me.
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And hurrah for mad scientists.
Instead, I dreamed of archaeological museums and a girl in a desert with too many teeth and a rifle.
Interesting. Were the museums and the girl connected to each other, or featured in separate dreams?
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I didn't wake up between them, but they were in separate dreams. In the museums, I was accompanied by someone who was a slight variation on a person I know in real life, while the girl in the desert had a whole cast of characters that so far as I know don't exist outside my head.
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If I might ask... had she too many teeth in the sense of double rows, or much smaller than normal teeth filling up a normally-sized mouth?
My dreams have got very boring lately, and I'm not tending to remember them. I hope that changes soon. (Although I'd rather not have any more dreams of leering over-tall hominids in yellow hats, which end with me standing up from the bed to punch them and instead finding myself awake and punching the bookshelf.)
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They were all normal-sized and there were too many of them for her mouth. They might have come in multiple rows, but I mostly remember that she smiled and no human smile should have been able to hold that much whiteness and sharpness, but they weren't fangs or the spiny teeth of deep-sea fish: ordinary teeth, very clean, and too many of them. Needless to say, it was not a reassuring smile.
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I shouldn't think so, no. That image sounds far more disturbing than would be fangs or spiny teeth.
There were most always deep-sea fish on sale in the market in Cork City, whole and lying on ice. Some sort of flattish broad-bodied critters with great numbers of needle-like teeth and huge staring eyes, the head of them seemingly as big as the body. In a sense I'm glad I wasn't seeing them every shopping day as a child; they'd've been nightmare material, I'm sure.
Hope your dreams are more pleasant tonight.
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Cowboy bars are, however, in great abundance. And really, they just don't measure up.
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You're welcome. The topic of this one turned out to be particularly dear to my heart—I love Euripides' uncomfortable gods.
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With regard to Girl Genius and Narbonic, if you can find (online somewhere?) the sequence that Phil Foglio drew for Narbonic a few years back at Christmastime, you will like it. Very much.
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This I must see. I've only read the short story Shaenon K. Garrity wrote for Girl Genius.
Thanks!