Surrounded by buildings and artsy city stock
Despite the snow emergency lights flashing blue all over town since yesterday afternoon, the promised storm was a thin dusting in our back yard and some rain. I am sad not only because of the reinforcement of climate change, but because I really had been looking forward to snow. I miss it. Yesterday morning I found myself at the Back Bay T station for a doctor's appointment and it seemed unreal yet calendrically undeniable that I had not been out there in four years. I meant to wander around afterward and look for the former site of the Copley Theatre, but all I had time to do was make it to my next appointment. Have some links.
1. Graham Fuller's "Powell and Pressburger: the glueman cometh" is a beautifully detailed discussion of A Canterbury Tale (1944), which I am resolved to see someday in a theater. I am afraid I cannot accept any heterosexual reading of Colpeper, but at least the author is one of the very few critics of my experience to have paid attention underneath the closing credits.
2. I read Lilian Bowes Lyon's "Daybreak" (1941) and Edward Field's "World War II" (1967) within a day of one another; there is no moral, except that they chimed.
3. Obviously I took the internet quiz to determine which ancient epic poem you are. It seems to have determined that I am "the argonautica: like if homer and the library of alexandria fucked." Please advise if I should feel attacked.
4. When I was feeling particularly bad,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch sent me some volcano snails.
5. I was close to tears while reading about the unexpected altruism of elephant seals, which I suppose will continue to happen to me for some time when some small thing in distress is saved. The existence of the Hitler beetle made a sort of astringent chaser.
"Art makes me happy!" Rob just had to listen to me yell. "Why do people make it so difficult to make art?"
1. Graham Fuller's "Powell and Pressburger: the glueman cometh" is a beautifully detailed discussion of A Canterbury Tale (1944), which I am resolved to see someday in a theater. I am afraid I cannot accept any heterosexual reading of Colpeper, but at least the author is one of the very few critics of my experience to have paid attention underneath the closing credits.
2. I read Lilian Bowes Lyon's "Daybreak" (1941) and Edward Field's "World War II" (1967) within a day of one another; there is no moral, except that they chimed.
3. Obviously I took the internet quiz to determine which ancient epic poem you are. It seems to have determined that I am "the argonautica: like if homer and the library of alexandria fucked." Please advise if I should feel attacked.
4. When I was feeling particularly bad,
spatch sent me some volcano snails.
5. I was close to tears while reading about the unexpected altruism of elephant seals, which I suppose will continue to happen to me for some time when some small thing in distress is saved. The existence of the Hitler beetle made a sort of astringent chaser.
"Art makes me happy!" Rob just had to listen to me yell. "Why do people make it so difficult to make art?"
no subject
I'm sorry it was not gay enough! At least with the Second Punic War you get Hannibal!
I, um, have to confess that I thought that if an epic poem ate another epic poem, it would be, well, um, epic. Very cool and meta-textual. Maybe that's where I went wrong.
Dunno. I chose my answer hearing "fucked up" in a tone of appreciation, like Boston-regional "wicked."
I have sadly never before heard of the Pharsalia and missed your joke; I am desolated.
It's not entirely a joke! The Pharsalia kind of is what happens when one poem burrows into another and devours it from the bones out, but it is also a poem I love. It's so difficult to recommend because the last time I checked I still didn't love any of the verse translations and the prose one by Robert Graves should be avoided with tongs, but it is a diamond-cut pitch-black splatterpunk anti-epic of the Roman civil war of 49–45 BCE enacted in some of the weirdest hexameters I have ever read for myself. It's never met a trope of its genre it won't subvert, invert, or pervert, at its core a furious grief for the ruination of the world and a bitter glee in pulling down the props of imperium, even on the poet's own head; it was incomplete at ten books when its author was caught in conspiracy against Nero and forced to commit suicide. No one knows how he would have ended it. It is a ghost poem that haunts itself. I was translating pieces of Book 6 in 2010, but it never amounted to a complete project. I did write "Lucan in Averno," which now sometimes makes the rounds on classicist Tumblr.
no subject
I am very much entertained that we mostly agree about the value of an epic poem's eating another epic poem, but did not provide the same answer. The general tenor of the quiz makes me think that your Bostonian "fucked-UP" interpretation is probably right.
Thank you for describing the Pharsalia for me. I love your descriptions so much. I will avoid the Robert Graves translation for sure. I knew the salient facts about Lucan's end because of "Lucan in Averno," because I looked him up; but I had forgotten the name of the work he was engaged in.
P.
no subject
You're welcome, and thank you!
I will avoid the Robert Graves translation for sure.
He hated the poem. He spends the entire preface tearing it down with its author for their failings both moral and artistic and then takes the priggish revenge of rendering its genuine weirdness as flatly and dully and without any of the shock effects he so disdains as possible. I carried a red-spined, black-paged edition of I, Claudius (1934) like a talisman everywhere for a year in high school and I still wanted to go back in time and punch him.
I knew the salient facts about Lucan's end because of "Lucan in Averno," because I looked him up; but I had forgotten the name of the work he was engaged in.
In your defense, it's also and nowadays more academically called De Bello Civili (On the Civil War). The Pharsalia is the older name, but the one I'm stuck with.