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 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.

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