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Where the streets have no name, but they have history
My life is getting away from me again. This happens when I don't sleep. Last week, despite containing some excellent movies, was a bad patch. Last night, however, I crashed shortly after three in the morning and actually stayed asleep until my headache woke me at eleven-thirty. And it is cool out and sunny and I don't have anything to do except catch up on work, e-mail, and laundry, which is amazingly mundane. Have some links.
1. Minoan catering! I would eat the hell out of beer-simmered octopus.
Also courtesy of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hawkwing_lb: "How a Prince Became a Princess." The gorgeous seventh-century aristocratic tomb discovered last month in Tarquinia still belongs to an Etruscan couple, but the ashes placed with the jewelry box are male and the complete skeleton with the iron lance is female. Please catch up, media reportage. Grave goods are buried with the ones to whom they mattered most.
2. Linked from the original 1976 Brimstone and Treacle, I found a 1974 BBC interview with Denholm Elliott. Right off The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), with most of the parts he's best known for—Marcus Brody, Mr. Emerson—still in future. It's an excerpt, but it's interesting. "I was very unhappy at school and was sent to the psychoanalyst, as a matter of fact, to try to sort my head out, and she suggested that some therapeutic—this is how my career started!—a good therapy would be the stage . . . Well, then I applied to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and managed to get in, but I only lasted one term, because they wrote my mother and said, you know, 'Much as we like the little fellow, he's wasting your money and our time. Take him away!' And that was it."
3. Yay, someone who isn't me is writing about Eric Portman: Andrew Spicer, "The Mark of Cain: Eric Portman and British stardom" (2009). Perhaps I can hope for a biography.
4. It's Poetry Challenge Week at Terri Windling's. I don't think I've ever written anything inspired by Little Red Riding Hood. (Just Lupercalia, which doesn't count outside of Tanith Lee's "Bloodmantle.") Maybe this afternoon. [edit] Okay, I remembered one. I posted it. I write a lot fewer fairytales than myths.
5. I know I've linked Charles W. Cushman's photos of New York in the 1940's before, but I like them so much. So does my friendlist, apparently.
My current music is fromkate_nepveu, who referred to it as a "transformative work." It reminded me of Patti Smith's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," braiding original poetry through familiar lyrics. I've liked Smith ever since rushthatspeaks sent me "Gloria" and four other tracks from Horses (1975) one night in New Haven; I should look up more of K'naan.
1. Minoan catering! I would eat the hell out of beer-simmered octopus.
Also courtesy of
hawkwing_lb: "How a Prince Became a Princess." The gorgeous seventh-century aristocratic tomb discovered last month in Tarquinia still belongs to an Etruscan couple, but the ashes placed with the jewelry box are male and the complete skeleton with the iron lance is female. Please catch up, media reportage. Grave goods are buried with the ones to whom they mattered most.2. Linked from the original 1976 Brimstone and Treacle, I found a 1974 BBC interview with Denholm Elliott. Right off The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), with most of the parts he's best known for—Marcus Brody, Mr. Emerson—still in future. It's an excerpt, but it's interesting. "I was very unhappy at school and was sent to the psychoanalyst, as a matter of fact, to try to sort my head out, and she suggested that some therapeutic—this is how my career started!—a good therapy would be the stage . . . Well, then I applied to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and managed to get in, but I only lasted one term, because they wrote my mother and said, you know, 'Much as we like the little fellow, he's wasting your money and our time. Take him away!' And that was it."
3. Yay, someone who isn't me is writing about Eric Portman: Andrew Spicer, "The Mark of Cain: Eric Portman and British stardom" (2009). Perhaps I can hope for a biography.
4. It's Poetry Challenge Week at Terri Windling's. I don't think I've ever written anything inspired by Little Red Riding Hood. (Just Lupercalia, which doesn't count outside of Tanith Lee's "Bloodmantle.") Maybe this afternoon. [edit] Okay, I remembered one. I posted it. I write a lot fewer fairytales than myths.
5. I know I've linked Charles W. Cushman's photos of New York in the 1940's before, but I like them so much. So does my friendlist, apparently.
My current music is from
kate_nepveu, who referred to it as a "transformative work." It reminded me of Patti Smith's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," braiding original poetry through familiar lyrics. I've liked Smith ever since rushthatspeaks sent me "Gloria" and four other tracks from Horses (1975) one night in New Haven; I should look up more of K'naan.
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There was some great music in that post, especially by people I'd never heard of. Thank you for sharing!
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Thanks for letting me know!
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I hadn't been following the discovery closely, but I had seen previous announcements of the tomb of an "Etruscan prince" and I had seen the hopeful identification with Tarquinius Priscus. (I mean, if Richard III can turn up in a car park, anything's possible these days.) This was the first I'd seen of the correct sexual classification of the remains. I'd like there to be other burial sites that can be examined for comparison—were Etruscan women buried with a wider range of grave goods than scholarship has generally been crediting? Etc.—but I don't know enough about the state of the field. I was primarily familiar with tomb paintings and sarcophagi.
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I will say off the bat: it's not an uncommon practice to sex burials (i.e. assign a sex to the remains) based on grave goods. Skeletons are often not well-preserved, which makes sexing on the basis of osteological measurements difficult if not impossible -- and those measurements are a matter of statistical probability, anyway, not clear-cut divisions. A pelvic notch that's on the wide side might be a woman who hasn't given birth, or it might be a man who just had kinda wide hips. Etc. Nowadays we have the option of higher-tech approaches . . . but those cost a fair bit of money, which means they aren't always used. Grave goods have the advantage of being easy.
And, of course, the disadvantage of being a self-reinforcing circle. Spear = man. How do we know this? Because men were buried with spears! So in that light, yes, absolutely, it's important to set the record straight here about the fact that the person with the lance was female and the one with the jewelry was male.
Having said that, the article kind of goes flying off into the deep end of "yay feminist history." The fact that the Greeks talked about how liberated and licentious Etruscan women were does not in fact mean that Etruscan society was wonderfully egalitarian. In fact, there's a time-honored tradition of talking about how liberated those foreign women are as a way of smearing the foreigners -- often in great exaggeration of reality. The art makes it likely that yes, Etruscan women had more freedom to hang out in public than Greek women did, but the rest of it? Much more dubious. As for Livy: it isn't like the Romans had a really high opinion of their early kings, so I wouldn't take him as an unbiased source when he tells us Tullia drove a chariot over her father.
I do think it's important to ask ourselves, "what's the significance of the arrangement of the grave goods?" Because it is unquestionably interesting that he had something that's usually coded as female, and she had something coded male. I find that fascinating. But leaping to the assumption that it was obviously her spear and that means she was a strong emancipated woman . . . that's going a bit far.
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I agree that it's scholarly thin ice to posit Etruscan society as some kind of feminist utopia based on a single burial and I am well aware that almost everything we can read about the Etruscans comes filtered through sources with their own varying reasons for emphasizing, minimizing, appropriating, or defaming aspects of their culture—I trust tomb paintings which depict women as participants in banquets and spectators at games much more than I do the Greek or Roman interpretations of these scenes, because it's the trouble-in-River-City model: Etruscan women dine with their men? TOTAL SLUTS I AM TELLING YOU THEY DO IT RIGHT ON THE DINING ROOM FLOOR. (Plus those sarcophagi with the couples in bed with each other. Those people don't stop boning even after they're dead.) I don't have a problem assuming that the woman in this instance was buried with the spear because it had some significance to her rather than to the other person in the tomb. I don't know what that significance was. I don't need it to mean that she was the ass-kicking warrior princess of seventh-century Tarchna, awesomely entertaining as that would be. I just hit that line cited by the article's author—"La lancia, con molta probabilità, era stata posta come simbolo di unione tra i due defunti"—and thought suddenly of How to Suppress Women's Writing: "She wasn't buried with a spear. She was buried with a spear, but it belonged to her husband. She was buried with a spear, but it was symbolic of her marriage . . ."
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If the field hasn't noticed that men also hold babies, seriously.
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Cool. I expect you know Alanis Morissette's version of the Blackeyed Peas' "My Humps"?
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No, she said, with some trepidation . . .
[edit] *snerk*
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I keep telling you not to keep just strewing your stuff through the centuries. Someday they're going to find that black-figured redware takeout jar you left at Abu Simbel (you know, the one with the sprinting nubile young things on it) and they'll all be really confused.
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Just because your graffiti was covered by the Thera explosion . . .