sovay | We just ended up clutching at the empty rituals like gamblers clutching long odds

Current Music: Frank Turner, "The Next Storm"

We just ended up clutching at the empty rituals like gamblers clutching long odds

I am glad to read that a classicist on Tumblr whom I do not know feels validated by a poem I wrote a dozen years ago, because she's right in turn about the linkage of ideas that led to its writing: the evocatio of Juno from Veii in 396 BCE, the evocatio of Tanit from Carthage in 146 BCE, the assimilation of Tanit to Juno Caelestis rather than Ištar-starred Venus, the self-fulfilling loop of enmity that a double-thefted goddess makes of the Aeneid and under it all the irony that Vergil even in his Renaissance aspect as magician could not foresee, that Carthage-haunted Rome was itself built on the needfire of the most famously sacked city of the ancient world, Troy whose gods Aeneas salvaged from the night of its destruction and now we remember Rome as the epitome of decadence, the eternally, contagiously falling city.

Also I had just been turned down by a housing situation that I had painfully wanted, but the classical stuff was all still bang on.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

a) I love how much your people love you
b) The same user has the same beef I do with the French hoods in Wolf Hall, namely WHATTT, costume department, WHAT are THEM THINGS, Reasons I Do Not Watch Period Drama Even Though I Think My Own Book Would Slap as a Limited Series as Filmed by Merchant for the BBC
c) we should ipso fact-ses (it's more than one fact, don't tell me if the phrase can apply to two facts, you can hold on to knowing you are right and I am just caffeinated enough to know I would be wrong) invite this person to tea by rights as her elder queers.

a) I love how much your people love you

The undertapped classicist grad student market! (Technically the other person completed their degree and is now just a classicist.)

b) The same user has the same beef I do with the French hoods in Wolf Hall, namely WHATTT, costume department, WHAT are THEM THINGS, Reasons I Do Not Watch Period Drama Even Though I Think My Own Book Would Slap as a Limited Series as Filmed by Merchant for the BBC

Your book would slap as a BBC series and you would slap anyone who tried to do twenty-first-century hair.

c) we should ipso fact-ses (it's more than one fact, don't tell me if the phrase can apply to two facts, you can hold on to knowing you are right and I am just caffeinated enough to know I would be wrong) invite this person to tea by rights as her elder queers.

*hugs*

I'm kind of waiting to find out if we know someone who knows her. It just seems like a plausible Venn chain.

That is so cool!

That is so cool!

I understand it is somewhat of the entire point of publishing, but it remains unreal to me to run across evidence of strangers on the internet who have read my work!

Edited 2025-09-14 05:36 (UTC)