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From the times of the Greeks and Trojans when they sang of arms and the man
This would be the post that isn't about Arisia.
1. R.I.P. William Duell, the reason I am disproportionately fond of Andrew McNair, Congressional Custodian. He can be heard for about thirty seconds as the Messenger in the original Blitzstein production of The Threepenny Opera (1954); I noticed him among all the other character actors in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). I would see him every now and then on Law & Order and be glad he was still working.
2. Tilda Swinton on Virginia Woolf's Orlando. "In my attic is a box containing two of the costumes Orlando wore in the film. One day, I know my son will find them and try them on. One day—soon, I expect—my poetry-writing daughter, his twin, will pick up Woolf’s book and try it on for size." Yes, I will buy that edition, thank you.
3. Roman brothel tokens! I love ancient erotic art. It's not that it's rare: it's just much more rarely displayed. One of the reasons I found myself grinning like an idiot through the MFA's Aphrodite and the Gods of Love when![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks and I visited in November is that it's full of things like a beautifully carved hermaphrodite or a marble relief of a winged, bird-footed siren mounting a man while he sleeps. Trying to find an image of the latter online, I have just found one of the great blog posts about classical art.
4. I am incredibly amused that Badass of the Week has done a feature on the historical figure I generally think of as "the nice one from I, Claudius." (They did Arminius back in 2005. Their articles have gotten rather more comprehensive and more sweary since then.)
5. Impostor syndrome and how to get rid of it. I seem to have convinced myself that if I say more than three sentences on a subject together, I will bore the pants off the person I'm talking to. This despite the fact that I spent some time last night boggling that my 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T essay has been tweeted and possibly even retweeted—I don't even have a Twitter account. People I don't know have demonstrably been finding it interesting. But then of course that's Dr. Seuss, not me. [edit: Look, I said I was working on this!]
1. R.I.P. William Duell, the reason I am disproportionately fond of Andrew McNair, Congressional Custodian. He can be heard for about thirty seconds as the Messenger in the original Blitzstein production of The Threepenny Opera (1954); I noticed him among all the other character actors in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). I would see him every now and then on Law & Order and be glad he was still working.
2. Tilda Swinton on Virginia Woolf's Orlando. "In my attic is a box containing two of the costumes Orlando wore in the film. One day, I know my son will find them and try them on. One day—soon, I expect—my poetry-writing daughter, his twin, will pick up Woolf’s book and try it on for size." Yes, I will buy that edition, thank you.
3. Roman brothel tokens! I love ancient erotic art. It's not that it's rare: it's just much more rarely displayed. One of the reasons I found myself grinning like an idiot through the MFA's Aphrodite and the Gods of Love when
rushthatspeaks and I visited in November is that it's full of things like a beautifully carved hermaphrodite or a marble relief of a winged, bird-footed siren mounting a man while he sleeps. Trying to find an image of the latter online, I have just found one of the great blog posts about classical art.4. I am incredibly amused that Badass of the Week has done a feature on the historical figure I generally think of as "the nice one from I, Claudius." (They did Arminius back in 2005. Their articles have gotten rather more comprehensive and more sweary since then.)
5. Impostor syndrome and how to get rid of it. I seem to have convinced myself that if I say more than three sentences on a subject together, I will bore the pants off the person I'm talking to. This despite the fact that I spent some time last night boggling that my 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T essay has been tweeted and possibly even retweeted—I don't even have a Twitter account. People I don't know have demonstrably been finding it interesting. But then of course that's Dr. Seuss, not me. [edit: Look, I said I was working on this!]
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Thanks for the link to Germanicus-as-Badass! I'm not actually sure they've gotten more profane, though there's definitely been a proliferation of certain phrases like "with logs he chopped down with his dick".
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Amen!
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Okay, okay! I told you it's a problem!
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"Well, once Arminius realized that he was totally screwed over and was actually dealing with total dicks he busted out a plan to fuck Rome's shit up once and for all. He took a brief leave of absence from the military and traveled to Germany to try and unite the tribes there for a counterattack against the Roman aggressors. The German tribes liked the idea of killing Roman bitches, so they decided to join up and stab some things with their axes and/or swords."
"In 6 AD, Augustus dispatched the 20-year-old Germanicus to lead an army to quell the Pannonian Revolt—a particularly nasty showdown in which those pesky Balkan tribes got a little uppity and started butchering Roman officials with axes and clubs, so Germanicus had to go down there and lay the smackdown by ramming his gladius up everyone's collective shitholes and then used their impaled corpses as cocktail umbrellas at a fancy dinner party celebrating his full-court domination of the enemy."
I think if nothing else, they've gotten more creative.
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TILDA SWINTON, HAVE MY BABIES.*cough*
I mean, er, yes: I will buy that edition, too.
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TILDA SWINTON, HAVE MY BABIES,I knew she could act. I knew she was brilliant. I knew she was brain-stoppingly hot.
I didn't know she could write.
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Fetchgetwant.
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I am so goddamned tired I tried to read that as German.
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Good to know! I'd never heard of it!
(Though it publishes people I like. And somebody plays the music of Victor Jara.)
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Perhaps Gaiman's not the best example here, what with the way we both feel about American Gods, but I at least don't think anyone finds him boring, yet he too feels like a huge pretender sometimes.
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I appreciate it. It's not even so much that I feel like a pretender, I think, as that I have gotten—for years—into a very unhelpful spiral in which I assume that other people's interest in my company or whatever I have to say is either a function of the material under discussion, in which case it has nothing to do with me, or a sort of kindly effort on their part, in which case it's simply tolerance, not liking. I can't imagine that I impress anyone anymore. There is objective evidence to the contrary in several directions of my life, but the inside of my head is not a very objective place right now, except where other people are concerned.
(And then the next turn of the spiral: and if you talk about it, that's exactly the sort of un-endearing neurosis that scares a person away . . .)
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I know how that is.
and if you talk about it, that's exactly the sort of un-endearing neurosis that scares a person away . . .
No! Damnit! Aargh! And I know how it is, but STILL: no damn it aargh! Next time that particular message starts looping and repeating on you, could you please tell it that I said it was BS all the way down? Kthnxbai.
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I know it's garbage. It's just persistent garbage.
Thank you.
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He didn't bother to write a speech, since he knew it wouldn't win....
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Well, I do consider that an entirely reasonable reaction.
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2. Oooh! Many thanks for that. I hope her twins are as beautiful and bright and strange as she is.
3. Do you know the Warren Cup?
4. Heh.
5. Get over it. You rock.
Nine
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Yes, although not personally. This kylix is probably the first piece of Greek erotic art I ever saw.
Get over it. You rock.
I'm trying.
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ΗΕΠΑΙΣΚΑΛΕ ΗΕΧΕΗΣΥΧΟΣ
I get "The girl is pretty" but "Hold still"?
I'm trying.
Good! We'll remind you.
Nine
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I think the first eta is a particle: ἦ ἔχε ἥσυχος.
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His memory for a blessing.
2.
That's a lovely essay. Thank you for linking it.
3.
Coolness. That blog post is amusing, and I'm grateful to you for saving me the time googling to find that relief with the siren. I've wondered for a while how bird feet would work on a human-type body.
4.
That is amusing. I just spent way too much time on the Badass of the Week site--it's almost as dangerous as TVtropes, I think. Could use some better research, I think,* but still, it's got a certain style to it.
5.
*hugs* It's not just Dr. Seuss, it's you writing on him. You're one of the most fascinating people I know, and you've actually got an incredible gift for making a huge range of subjects interesting. My only regret's that I don't get the chance to hear you talk about things more often.
*For heaven's sake, Queen Méabh didn't put a spell on the Ulstermen to give them the birth pangs--it was a curse laid on them to avenge the mistreatment of a woman who was forced to run a race against horses whilst pregnant with twins.
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Agreed on the occasional fact-checking, but I am still made unreasonably happy every time they decide to write about the ancient world:
Seriously, it seems like the only time you really hear any reference to the badassitude of the Persians is in the preface to a book about how Alexander the Great came in and conquered their asses without breaking a sweat. This is total bullcrap. Back before the Macedonian conqueror was a twinkle in his psychotic mother's evil, pulsating eye, ultra turbo hardasses like Darius of Persia were out there using their insane powers of colon destruction to lay waste to the countryside and exert their utter and complete dominance over the Middle East in the most violent and awesome ways imaginable.
—Darius the Great
Don't assume, however, that just because he was a theater mastermind Aeschylus wasn't a badass. If this guy were a real-life writer/director, he'd be like Clint Effing Eastwood, because while he won alot of awards forhis theatricalaccomplishments, he could also beat the holy living crapstick out of you without even blinking. For instance, when the Persian Emperor Darius II got a total hard-on for destruction and decided he was going to single-handedly burn all of Greece into cinders with a blowtorch and urinate on the ashes, Aeschylus was one of the first guys to grab his sword, strap on a thick suit of bronze body armor, and tell the most powerful Emperor in the world to go sodomize a set of lawn furniture.
—Aeschylus
Even before they were an ever-expanding empire hell-bent on world domination and the unconditional submission of anything they even remotely perceived as an enemy, the Romans were still pretty colossal jackasses. While this statement can confidently be broadly applied to almost every single dealing between the time that Romulus first suckled a she-wolf and when Mehmet the Conqueror's Turkish forces overran the last bastion of Constantinople nearly two millennia later, the Iberian peninsula is as good a place as any to focus on the good people of Latium and their crush-tastic propensity for violently ruining the lives of everyone in their general vicinity.
—Viriathus
Well, beating down the Numidians was great and everything, but by this point a new threat was brewing, and this one was just outside Rome's doorstep. Three major barbarian tribes from the North—the Cimbrii, the Teutones, and the Ambrones—were on the move. Four hundred thousand people, including men, women, and children, were wandering around Europe, tearing shit apart, searching for a place to settle, and presenting the Roman Senate with an immigration problem that would give Ron Paul a coronary. The sort-of-well-known Roman commanders Caepo and Manlius rode out to stop the barbarians' march towards the Alps, but not even a guy named Manlius could stop this horde of bloodthirsty warriors—in a series of epic beatdowns the Romans got their fucking asses hammered into the ground like tent pegs, losing 80,000 soldiers and leaving the door wide open for these angry Germans to rush in and pummel Rome into rubble with their nutsacks.
—Gaius Marius
Also, the Duke of Wellington:
One day, the dashing young officer asked this total hot giga-babe named Kitty Pakenham to marry him, but her brother told him that he was a pathetic nobody loser who should go fuck himself with a chainsaw and then smash his head shut in a car door. Getting epically cock-blocked only succeeded in making Wellesley sincerely fucking pissed, however, so he went and took all of that insane pent-up sexual frustration out on the Dutch.
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There's something deliciously licentious in sampling stuff that enflamed the ancients. In a similar vein, have you ever checked out any shunga?
... "the nice one from I, Claudius."
There weren't many nice ones in that family ...
I don't even have a Twitter account.
Twitter is Facebook for people with ADD. But it has some good points. If you got an account I would definitely follow it (as, no doubt, would others).
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Or stuff they thought was perfectly normal to hang around the house. (Have an apotropaic phallus! With a little phallus of its own!)
In a similar vein, have you ever checked out any shunga
Yes; I think I discovered the genre in grad school. "Abalone Fisherwoman with Octopus" is the first one I remember noticing.
There weren't many nice ones in that family ...
Well, Claudius thinks he's nice.
If you got an account I would definitely follow it (as, no doubt, would others).
Thank you. I don't plan on it. I think I maxed out my patience for social media with Facebook this summer.
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It is beautifully-carved - I suppose the hermaphroditiness is visible from the other side?
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Yes, which I'm a little sorry there isn't a photograph of—the figure's gender is ambiguous from the back, but not under the tilt of the hips from the front, the half-visible breast. I wondered if Tanith Lee had seen it when she wrote "Empires of Azure."
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Don't bother with Twitter; slum it with Facebook, at best.
Be splendid at Arisia.
- M
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No: it's appreciated. Thank you.
Don't bother with Twitter; slum it with Facebook, at best.
I read Facebook; I don't post except for comments. I have nonetheless put in an application to read yours.
Be splendid at Arisia.
Thank you. I shall try.