So yesterday I had to spend the afternoon at a surprise doctor and today Autolycus had to spend the morning at a surprise vet and it looks like we'll both live, but surely, surely there is a point past which enough already has more than expressive force? Have some links.
1. Oh, good, I last saw this plot in Laurence Yep's Dragon Cauldron (1991): "Ancient forest found at bottom of huge sinkhole in China."
2. Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
moon_custafer: roll to be assigned a Wikipedia page. I got the Jackknife Bascule Bridge in Thunder Bay, Ontario. It looks like a nice bridge to me.
3. Thanks tospatch, the inevitable crossover between Danger UXB (1979) and living with cats: "Every day, over 25,000 people venture forth into their cats' box, armed with only scoop and extra sand . . ."
4. I highly recommend these chapter illustrations for Howl's Moving Castle (1986) and find this rendering of Throgmorten, the Asheth Temple Cat ever more relatable.
5. I have been meaning to share for months my favorite recipe for a protective amulet described in Christopher A. Faraone's The Transformation of Greek Amulets in Roman Imperial Times (2018): "The beryl gem, transparent and bright as the sea. An image of Poseidon in a chariot should be carved into it and anyone who travels on the sea would be protected from troubles." When I went looking for further information on the Nautical Lapidary in which this recipe is preserved, I found some tantalizing internet fragments of Sabino Perea Yébenes' "Magic at Sea: Amulets for Navigation" in Richard L. Gordon and Francisco Marco Simón's Magical Practice in the Latin West: Papers from the International Conference Held at the University of Zaragoza, 30 Sept–1 Oct. 2005 (2010), including another recipe from the Lapidary which may have just displaced the beryl: "The coral, sewn into a piece of seal-skin and tied as an amulet to the top of the mast, serves to counter the wind, waves and turbulence in all manner of waters." All of this material, of course, still feels like something a dead stranger would be studying, not me, even though twenty years ago I had late-night conversations at a symposium enduring enough to exchange e-mail addresses with one of the editors of the latter volume, our correspondence long wiped from the digital aether with the rest of my college e-mail. It's one of the reasons I am so fascinated by the circulation of my ghost poems among classics students on Tumblr. It is stupid how traumatizing my exit from academia was, except here we are.
Thematically, I suppose,selkie has just sent me a replacement copy of Sheri Holman's A Stolen Tongue (1997), my own having been lost like several other books I had lent to friends when I had to leave New Haven. I am reading it in the sunlight. Things I have said in the shower lately include "Whether the unexamined life is worth living or not, I think it's a lot less interesting than the other kind" and "Ours is not to reason why, ours is to try not to die, I guess."
1. Oh, good, I last saw this plot in Laurence Yep's Dragon Cauldron (1991): "Ancient forest found at bottom of huge sinkhole in China."
2. Courtesy of
moon_custafer: roll to be assigned a Wikipedia page. I got the Jackknife Bascule Bridge in Thunder Bay, Ontario. It looks like a nice bridge to me.3. Thanks to
spatch, the inevitable crossover between Danger UXB (1979) and living with cats: "Every day, over 25,000 people venture forth into their cats' box, armed with only scoop and extra sand . . ."4. I highly recommend these chapter illustrations for Howl's Moving Castle (1986) and find this rendering of Throgmorten, the Asheth Temple Cat ever more relatable.
5. I have been meaning to share for months my favorite recipe for a protective amulet described in Christopher A. Faraone's The Transformation of Greek Amulets in Roman Imperial Times (2018): "The beryl gem, transparent and bright as the sea. An image of Poseidon in a chariot should be carved into it and anyone who travels on the sea would be protected from troubles." When I went looking for further information on the Nautical Lapidary in which this recipe is preserved, I found some tantalizing internet fragments of Sabino Perea Yébenes' "Magic at Sea: Amulets for Navigation" in Richard L. Gordon and Francisco Marco Simón's Magical Practice in the Latin West: Papers from the International Conference Held at the University of Zaragoza, 30 Sept–1 Oct. 2005 (2010), including another recipe from the Lapidary which may have just displaced the beryl: "The coral, sewn into a piece of seal-skin and tied as an amulet to the top of the mast, serves to counter the wind, waves and turbulence in all manner of waters." All of this material, of course, still feels like something a dead stranger would be studying, not me, even though twenty years ago I had late-night conversations at a symposium enduring enough to exchange e-mail addresses with one of the editors of the latter volume, our correspondence long wiped from the digital aether with the rest of my college e-mail. It's one of the reasons I am so fascinated by the circulation of my ghost poems among classics students on Tumblr. It is stupid how traumatizing my exit from academia was, except here we are.
Thematically, I suppose,
selkie has just sent me a replacement copy of Sheri Holman's A Stolen Tongue (1997), my own having been lost like several other books I had lent to friends when I had to leave New Haven. I am reading it in the sunlight. Things I have said in the shower lately include "Whether the unexamined life is worth living or not, I think it's a lot less interesting than the other kind" and "Ours is not to reason why, ours is to try not to die, I guess."
