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
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.
1. Minoan catering! I would eat the hell out of beer-simmered octopus.
Also courtesy of
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

no subject
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 . . ."
no subject
no subject
If the field hasn't noticed that men also hold babies, seriously.