#some of my favorite articles/book chapters of the year are not on jstor though...

[finelythreadedsky]

JSTOR Wrapped: top ten JSTOR articles of 2023

Coo, Lyndsay. “A Tale of Two Sisters: Studies in Sophocles’ Tereus.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 143, no. 2 (2013): 349–84.

Finglass, P. J. “A New Fragment of Sophocles’ ‘Tereus.’” Zeitschrift Für Papyrologie Und Epigraphik 200 (2016): 61–85.

Foxhall, Lin. “Pandora Unbound: A Feminist Critique of Foucault’s History of Sexuality.” In Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome, edited by Mark Golden and Peter Toohey, 167–82. Edinburgh University Press, 2003.

Garrison, Elise P. “Eurydice’s Final Exit to Suicide in the ‘Antigone.’” The Classical World 82, no. 6 (1989): 431–35.

Grethlein, Jonas. “Eine Anthropologie Des Essens: Der Essensstreit in Der ‘Ilias’ Und Die Erntemetapher in Il. 19, 221-224.” Hermes 133, no. 3 (2005): 257–79.

McClure, Laura. “Tokens of Identity: Gender and Recognition in Greek Tragedy.” Illinois Classical Studies 40, no. 2 (2015): 219–36.

Purves, Alex C.  “Wind and Time in Homeric Epic.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 140, no. 2 (2010): 323–50.

Richlin, Amy. “Gender and Rhetoric: Producing Manhood in the Schools.” In Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome, edited by Mark Golden and Peter Toohey, 202–20. Edinburgh University Press, 2003.

Rood, Naomi. “Four Silences in Sophocles’ ‘Trachiniae.’” Arethusa 43, no. 3 (2010): 345–64.

Zeitlin, Froma I. “The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia.” Arethusa 11, no. 1/2 (1978): 149–84.

[figbian]

disability studies & classics: some introductory texts!

as a disclaimer, this is not a complete list and not intended to be. i don't necessarily agree with everything in these texts, either – i'd be happy to discuss what i like/don't any time :-) that said, i included them because i find them useful or important or because i liked them enough i wanted to talk about them. further, not all of these texts are accessible (as in, free and online); send me an ask or message me if you want access to something & if i can i will send it to you.

in case you're looking for more sources but don't know where to find a good list, this – though as of posting (may 2023) is two years out of date – is a list of works on disability in the ancient world. it's very cool!!

disability theory/crip theory

Keywords For Disability Studies (book, edited by Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin) - this series of essays can be really helpful in situating yourself. i find them occasionally a bit oversimplified, but overall they're pretty good, especially if you're new to the field.

Beginning With Disability: A Primer (book, edited by Lennard Davis) - this is another helpful way to situate yourself! i haven't read all of it, but i found the introduction pretty informative for dipping your toes into disability studies :-)

Disability Goes Cultural: The Cultural Model of Disability as an Analytical Tool (book chapter, by Anne Waldschmidt ) [open access on jstor here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1xxs3r.5] - this article to me has its flaws but ultimately contains what i think is the most useful model for articulating & analyzing disability in the ancient world.

if you're interested in more specific disability theory stuff, feel free to send me an ask!

books/articles on greece and rome

truthfully, this is the danger zone for me as a latinist, who finds a lot of stuff supposedly on greece and rome to ultimately be about greece. further, i have bones to pick with these books, but they remain either the best we've got or otherwise foundational:

Mental Disorders in the Classical World (book, ed. William V. Harris) very medical, but still kind of interesting to look at and i haven't found anything better?

The Eye of the Beholder: Deformity and Disability in the Graeco-Roman World (book, Robert Garland) the foundational work but i kind of dislike it, tbh.

Prosthetics and Assistive Technology in Ancient Greece and Rome (book, Jane Drycott) i haven't read much of this yet, but i like drycott and this is going to be my post graduation treat!

Life as a Cyclops: Mythology and the Mockery of the Visually Impaired (article, Jane Drycott) really enjoyed!

Why does classical reception need disability studies? (article, Hannah Silverblank and Marchella Ward) i found parts of this preachy and wasn't super pleased with the thoroughness of the scholarship, but here we are!

A Cultural History of Disability in Antiquity (book, ed. Christian Laes) i don't like laes much but i found some chapters of this really enjoyable

Disability Studies and the Classical Body (book, ed. Ellen Adams) NOT OUT YET!!!!! but very excited for it.......

books & articles on greece

ancient greece has way more scholarship when it comes to disability, or at least this is my experience. i'm less interested in greece, but i still have a lot of articles and books i like + some i know are integral to the field. this is kind of an eclectic list of things i know are Important vs just neat lmao:

The Staff Of Oedipus (book): truthfully, i've only ever read the chapter on blindness (which i enjoyed!). it's not a perfect book, but it's so foundational and can be pretty interesting

The Discourse of Disability in Ancient Greece (article) - one of my favorite articles! i love rereading this :-) i think it's got some super interesting analysis on lysias 24 and the word ἀδύνατος. really cool if you're interested in the construction of "disability" as an identity.

Hephaestus the Hobbling Humorist: The Club-Footed God in the History of Early Greek Comedy (article) - i really enjoyed this article because of how it presents hephaestus, tbqh. im not sure how good it is – dying to hear from hellenists about it, actually – but hephaestus as funny because he's disabled (but not in an ableist way) was very interesting.

"Breathe Upon Us an Even Flame": Hephaestus, History, and the Body of Rhetoric (article) – in all honesty, i don't like this article very much, but what dolmage is doing is super interesting (trying to reconsider hephaestus as a figure), and so i included it. worth taking a look at.

Temporary versus Long-term Madness (article) - this article was a lot of fun for me.

books & articles on rome

full disclosure, i'm a latinist. i love rome. there's less out there but i have so, so much more to say about it. some good places to start:

Approaching Disabilities a Capite ad Calcem: Hidden Themes in Roman Antiquity (book, edited by C.F. Goodey, Christian Laes, and M. Lynn Rose) - this has some problems; i hate christian laes a lot but he's very good at citing lots of ancient examples! overall, the individual essays in this make it better than laes' own book, but they are disjointed.

Disabilities and the Disabled in the Roman World: A Social and Cultural History (book, by Christian Laes) - did i mention i hate christian laes? i don't like how he writes about disability, and at the same time he's incredibly prolific and good at citing ancient sources, so he's incredibly useful. read him if you want ancient examples, but be wary of how he talks about disability, because i think he fails as an abled person to think of disability as anything but bad.

Heroes and Outcasts: Ambiguous Attitudes Towards Impaired and Disfigured Roman Veterans (article, by Van Lommel) - i don't remember how situated van lommel is in disability studies, but i found this article & his work in general on roman veterans interesting enough to include.

there's so, so much more out there! this is just a taste! i tried to be conservative so as not to overwhelm, and even then this reading list is huge. i'm sure in a couple months i'll want to revamp this post lmao but i wanted it to be out there so people can at least see it esp since i promised to write this months ago. disability studies and classics is SO much fun and so novel and so exciting. so much to learn! so much to talk about! if you're interested in a specific topic, i can see if i can help you find more on it, but please keep in mind im currently only a student :-)

[clare-with-no-i]

ok. ok. ENOUGHHH i have stared at and deleted too many of these lovely asks. I have to be honest with you all. GOD I am so nervous rn.

so the truth is that I have recently been able to confront the fact that I have severely underdeveloped, if not even deeply flawed, book opinions (specifically wrt fiction, non-fiction I feel much more confident about). as in, I don’t read nearly enough fiction because of a) law school and b) during undergrad I barely read anything other than JSTOR articles and my professors’ textbooks. I am a book fraud. I know very little, and I am not very good at even discerning what draws me to books and what repels me from them. so here are my feeble contributions to the Tumblr book discourse, which you all have to take with a grain of salt because I’m not the reader that I should be or that I want to be yet. sigh

I am a Sally Rooney enjoyer to the nth degree, my favorite being Normal People because I got much more invested in the characters than I did in her other novels, but I am woman enough to admit that I think Conversations With Friends is a better book from a story standpoint. so she’s at the top.  I also have been loving Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which has some absolutely beautiful poetic prose that moves me.  I have been recently really enjoying Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, although I’m only a few chapters in — same with Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers.  I read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History a little over a year ago and did not enjoy it as much as I feel like I should have, but I think that also speaks to the fact that I was in a VERY weird place mentally while reading, so I want to give it another shot. but even when I wasn’t loving it I do remember that her descriptions of Ancient Greek storytelling and imagery were so beautiful and helped spur me to continue writing theogony.  I did not love Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne book but I feel like fans of Greek mythology should read it just to see how they like it. I finished Otessa Mosfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and stared at my apartment’s wall thinking “what did I just experience” so there’s a non-review of that book, I suppose.

I enjoyed Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows! I haven’t read the second one, though, because I feel like after reading Shadow and Bone I got tired of that entire universe very quickly lol. I am also always and perpetually a fan of Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle, which I think really beautifully elaborates on the things that I loved so much about the Miyazaki film.  I also tend to be a fan of all things Gabriel Garcia Marquez, though I haven’t read his works since my Spanish literature classes in college.

I really would love to get more into fantasy and adventure novels and fun things like that but I am so nervous that I won’t like them for whatever warped reason my brain might produce that I just…don’t read them. LMAO. god. OCD is really a sonuvabitch.

god. ok. I feel like I’ve run a marathon. hope this is comprehensive enough for all of you lovely people. I'm going to go nap and/or to therapy.

[notbecauseofvictories]

hi sarah! you'd been talking a lot about the history of blues/bluegrass a few months ago and i just remembered it so i was wondering if you have any book/article recommendations for the history of those genres?

Absolutely! My research has tended to focus on the history prior to the 1960s, since by that point both blues and bluegrass had mostly settled into the genres we recognize today.

BLUES is technically older, and the creation of black Americans, based on a Southern threading together of spiritual music (itself with deeper, trans-Atlantic African roots), slave working songs, and uniquely African-American folk ballad traditions. It encompasses an incredible amount of regional variation, as well as religiosity, and a slide into sub-genres like dirty blues and its euphemistic cousin, hokum blues. (If you want to hear the difference, listen to Lucille Bogan’s “Shave ‘em Dry” versus Bessie Smith’s “I Need a Little Sugar in my Bowl”.)

Sources for the Blues:

Samuel Charters’ “The Country Blues” was published in 1959 and is considered the groundbreaking history of the genre. The book has some failings and errors (it definitely over-romanticizes black life) but it really was the first of its kind and ignited all the study afterwards. Charters’ recordings of the blues artists he spoke with and interviewed has also been made into an album of the same name by Smithsonian Folkways.

There’s no way I can talk about the blues without referencing Alan Lomax—an ethnomusicologist and director of the American Archive of Folk Culture, who, when the Library of Congress stopped funding folk music recordings, went on collecting them independently. “The Land Where Blues Began” is both the title of his account of finding those recordings, and the documentary he directed and narrated for PBS. 

For more of a straightforward history, I recommend "Deep Blues“ by Robert Palmer or “Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music” by Ted Gioia. They’re both good “big picture” histories.

A lot of blues histories are written by white historians and critics—with the exception of LeRoi Jones’ “Blues People” (since publication, Jones has changed his name to Amiri Baraka). It’s less a history than a theoretical project, an ethnography and sociological history of the people blues came from and why black people could make the blues in the first place. Still, it’s a great read and deserves to be on this list.

I’ll also give a shout out to “The Black Musician and the White City” by Amy Absher, which is all about the music scene in Chicago—the chapter I’ve linked here is a fascinating picture of what the music scene looked like, as the Delta blues branched off into Chicago blues and black musicians struggled to make inroads into a highly segregated profession (also, a look at the tension between largely-white unions and black communities in Chicago that continues to inform city politics).

If you’re looking for introductory reading….

I found this article on African-American Song from the Library of Congress a good starting place—it’s only partly about the blues, but I think it’s good to understand the context of blues, and the various other styles that were co-evolving with it. Blues, string-band, vaudeville, gospel….all these genres were talking to one another, and understanding that gives you a better grounding for the actual history of the thing.

Though less formal, PBS actually created “The Blues - Classroom” in 2003, which is a repository of lesson plans and essays to accompany the seven-part film series of the same name. It’s a great, quick resource, if you’re just getting started.

BLUEGRASS is much younger, if you’re going by when Earl Scruggs invented the particular picking style every banjo player since has imitated—or co-equally created, based on old-time string band music and what Al Hopkins in the 1920s called “hillbilly music.” You’ll often see the genre referred to as “bluegrass and old-time music” as a way of referencing both the pre-WWII folk/hillbilly music that gave rise to the genre as well as all the followed after Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys. (Though the debate as to what “counts” as bluegrass is so ubiquitous that the International Bluegrass Music Association message boards gave it an acronym: WIBA, short for “What Is Bluegrass Anyway?”)

Sources for Bluegrass & Old-Time:

A pretty foundational text in this area is Neil V. Rosenberg’s “History of Bluegrass”—Rosenberg almost exclusively studied bluegrass in the US, and had a column in Bluegrass Unlimited (the “bible of bluegrass”) for years. If you want just a taste, there are a number of his articles on jstor. Personally, I recommend “From Sound to Style: The Emergence of Bluegrass.” (He tends to be overly partial to Bill Monroe, but it is a heavy-hitter book in the area.)

There are a number of personal accounts that I could list here—for instance, Bill Monroe (the ‘father of bluegrass’) has a biography that’s supposedly pretty good, and Butch Robins, who later played banjo for the Blue Grass Boys, has a video series where he talks about bluegrass and his experience as a musician. However, I don’t know if these are actually enjoyable resources for anyone except the true devotee.

“What is bluegrass anyway? Category formation, debate and the framing of musical genre” by Joti Rockwell, from Popular Music. I love a good categorical debate!

Some of my favorite post-1960s bluegrass comes out of what I would call “folk resistance music”—figures like Pete and Mike Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard, all wielded the particular sound of bluegrass, but in a way that made it ideologically more similar to blues or traditional folk music. As someone who watched Harlan County, USA at a tender point in her life, I have a particular affection for Hazel Dickens, and I did enjoy her biography “Working Girl Blues.”

If you’re looking for introductory reading…

The Library of Congress entry on bluegrass music is a good place to start.

The Journal of American Folklore did an entire issue on hillbilly music and its influence on bluegrass. You can find it digitized on jstor here, including a very instructive article called “Introduction to Bluegrass” by L. Mayne Smith, himself a musician of the folk music revival.

……..as a final note, I also want to point out that though it’s tempting to think of blues as distinct from bluegrass/hillbilly/old-time, as well as easily separated out from folk, gospel, jazz, ragtime, vaudeville, and traditional English/Irish/French/West African/etc. sounds, it’s simply not true. Talking about these musical trends as separate and distinct ignores the fact that many were happening at the same time, evolving concurrently and together, borrowing extensively from one another as musicians swapped techniques, styles, and dirty tricks. 

By way of example, the “blue” in “bluegrass” comes from the addition of blue notes, which is also where you get “the blues.” Bluegrass definitely borrowed them from the African-American artists who had been blending blue notes and various styles of gospel music for decades by that point. But blue/bent notes are popular in Irish and English folk music as well, particularly on various types of mouth harps and pipes (…in America, mouth pipes became the diatonic harmonica, which, along with the banjo—itself evolved from West African gourd instruments—gave birth to cowboy blues. It’s all a huge, weird, mess of people making noise.)

Nevertheless, there are intense politics wrapped up in who each genre “belongs” to. As Lil’ Nas X’s “Old Town Road” recently demonstrated, music genres often serve to keep “black” music and “white” music as distinguishable as possible—even when the sound is the same. This has been true since the origin of record labels, when recordings of black artists were “race records,” or “string-band” and white artists made “hillbilly” or “old-time.” (They sound very similar and frequently borrowed instrumental techniques from one another.) It doesn’t help that bluegrass rose to prominence with an all-white band, at a time of intense racial tension and as many Civil Rights activists and black historians were reclaiming the blues as a distinctly African-American sound. More recently, Joe Thompson and Tony Thomas (a fiddler and a banjo player, respectively) have spoken out about their experiences as black musicians in a musical subculture that is often designated for-and-by white people.

I bring this up not to invalidate the sources I’ve listed above, but to point out that the story of blues and bluegrass and the space between them is complicated—there’s not just one story to tell. The 1960s’ blues fetishism has been equally damaging and helpful; the idea that bluegrass is “white” music is in a sense correct, but also a gatekeeping mechanism to keep black artists out of music they have always participated in and influenced. Much like every other aspect of American history, there is a dense and complex interplay between race, class, and self-made mythology that historians are still unpicking.

But goddamn, the music is cool.