From the times of the Greeks and Trojans when they sang of arms and the man

[sovay]

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 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!]

Comments

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

Perhaps this will make it easier to dismiss impostor syndrome, perhaps it won't, but I think it was rushthatspeaks who told me about the time Neil Gaiman realized that American Gods had made it onto the bestseller list. First Gaiman was happy, then he thought something like, "What does it really mean in the greater scheme of things? In a hundred years, most likely no one will have heard of my work, just like no one remembers the top-selling authors of 1899." Then he realized he was a classic case of impostor syndrome.

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.

[sovay]

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.

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 . . .)

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

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.

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.

[sovay]

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.

I know it's garbage. It's just persistent garbage.

Thank you.

[ckd]

Which is also why his Hugo acceptance speech for American Gods ends with "Fuck, I got a Hugo!"

He didn't bother to write a speech, since he knew it wouldn't win....

[sovay]

"Fuck, I got a Hugo!"

Well, I do consider that an entirely reasonable reaction.