The day was so brilliantly autumnal that I braced myself for a sudden squall after sunset, but instead I spent two hours once the moon and the relevant planets had cleared the treeline adjusting the right ascension and the declination on the telescope and it was wonderful. First the sand-colored bead of Saturn in the ellipsis of its rings and a kind of dim glitter we eventually determined were its brightest moons. Then an interlude of our moon as crisp and weird as a monochrome matte painting which sent me to the National Audubon Society's Field Guide to the Night Sky (1991) because I couldn't remember the name of the enormous crater exploded across its western face which turns out to be Aristarchus. Finally Jupiter banded like jasper in a line of its own moons, Ganymede, Io, Europa, Callisto. The field of vision was so small with the Barlow lens on that they would all slide off down the plane of the ecliptic as the night kept turning over us—the clock drive is still out of commission. I had the afterimage of the moon across my eyes even after I came inside.
Earlier in the evening I attended my first lecture in three years, Lorelei H. Corcoran on mummy portraits of Roman Egypt. I took no notes this time except for e-mails exchanged with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
selkie who was also virtually in the audience, but I loved that Dr. Corcoran opened with no time for the persistent misconception that the portraits should be viewed as assertions of essentially aristocratic Greek identity in Egyptian colonial surroundings, as if their subjects were expatriates keeping up the traditions of home in some sort of Greek Raj; she used the next hour to demonstrate instead that elements of design in the portraits acting as visual complements to the text of the Book of the Dead attest to the complex, fluid and hybrid, but quintessentially Egyptian identities of the people who commissioned these images in continuity with funerary rites as old as the Predynastic period. I appreciated an analysis of the costs assuming that one might save a lifetime for a funeral or the entire family might chip in to pay for it, meaning that the ability to afford a portrait is no longer considered the gotcha marker of social class any more than hairstyles provide an infallible guide to dating, since the ancient world was just as prone to vintage crazes as the modern. I had not known that out of thirteen hundred portraits, we have only twenty whose subjects are named, although I was delighted that the one in residence at Girton College inscribed Ἑρμιόνη Γραμματική was proud enough of her literacy to carry it as an equal identifier into the afterlife. I had not known it was called proleptic dress to furnish a child untimely dead with the painted accoutrements of the adulthood they never lived to attain. I loved the description of the composition of mummy portraits as "passport-like," the cards and papers of the underworld. (I had a nightmare once where that didn't work, but maybe that was because it wasn't mine.) It makes sense that painted jewelry should track not necessarily to actual grave goods but to the post-mortem aspirations of the deceased. The last question from the audience was whether Corcoran has a favorite mummy portrait, to which the answer seemed to be a young girl in Cairo with gilded stucco and an Isis crown and the Horus child in the intaglio of one of the gems that frame her face. She said firmly that despite the conventional image of the Greeks bringing civilization to the rest of the world, the rest of the world was doing very well, thank you.
Earlier in the afternoon I went for a walk around the reservoir and did not remember to bring a camera, but I borrowed my father's phone a couple of times. ( A known name with a different face. )
I had started the day in too much pain to make it to an appointment, but I have filed the rest of it under accidental vacation and regret nothing.
Earlier in the evening I attended my first lecture in three years, Lorelei H. Corcoran on mummy portraits of Roman Egypt. I took no notes this time except for e-mails exchanged with
selkie who was also virtually in the audience, but I loved that Dr. Corcoran opened with no time for the persistent misconception that the portraits should be viewed as assertions of essentially aristocratic Greek identity in Egyptian colonial surroundings, as if their subjects were expatriates keeping up the traditions of home in some sort of Greek Raj; she used the next hour to demonstrate instead that elements of design in the portraits acting as visual complements to the text of the Book of the Dead attest to the complex, fluid and hybrid, but quintessentially Egyptian identities of the people who commissioned these images in continuity with funerary rites as old as the Predynastic period. I appreciated an analysis of the costs assuming that one might save a lifetime for a funeral or the entire family might chip in to pay for it, meaning that the ability to afford a portrait is no longer considered the gotcha marker of social class any more than hairstyles provide an infallible guide to dating, since the ancient world was just as prone to vintage crazes as the modern. I had not known that out of thirteen hundred portraits, we have only twenty whose subjects are named, although I was delighted that the one in residence at Girton College inscribed Ἑρμιόνη Γραμματική was proud enough of her literacy to carry it as an equal identifier into the afterlife. I had not known it was called proleptic dress to furnish a child untimely dead with the painted accoutrements of the adulthood they never lived to attain. I loved the description of the composition of mummy portraits as "passport-like," the cards and papers of the underworld. (I had a nightmare once where that didn't work, but maybe that was because it wasn't mine.) It makes sense that painted jewelry should track not necessarily to actual grave goods but to the post-mortem aspirations of the deceased. The last question from the audience was whether Corcoran has a favorite mummy portrait, to which the answer seemed to be a young girl in Cairo with gilded stucco and an Isis crown and the Horus child in the intaglio of one of the gems that frame her face. She said firmly that despite the conventional image of the Greeks bringing civilization to the rest of the world, the rest of the world was doing very well, thank you.Earlier in the afternoon I went for a walk around the reservoir and did not remember to bring a camera, but I borrowed my father's phone a couple of times. ( A known name with a different face. )
I had started the day in too much pain to make it to an appointment, but I have filed the rest of it under accidental vacation and regret nothing.
