antigoners

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it's okay, ulysses ogre. you can back up and try dubliners, it's a short story collection with much more straightforward prose, you can dive deep on one piece at a time, and once you've toyed around with that then I'm sure you'll have an easier time with ulysses. besides, I had an irish lit professor who'd been studying finnegans wake for twenty years and she said she still didn't really know what was going on in it. ulysses ogre, what really matters is if you are enjoying your time with literature and feel like you are gaining something, not whether you reach the "correct" conclusions. there's no need to try and force yourself through something if you feel like you aren't on an even enough plane with the text to reap any of its rewards.

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let's 😐 with mama

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tes THDPSSSSPS 💜

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grabbed all of the ebook versions of the folger shakespeare library's annotated versions of shakespeare's plays (+sonnets and poems) and put them all in one place in case anyone is interested

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Clay loom weight decorated with an owl, Greek, 5th Century BCE

From the Acropolis Museum

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euripides was definitely kind of a misogynist (he's bizarrely insistent in his plays that married women should leave the house? maybe this was normal in his time? but it doesnt SEEM normal in the context of his plays, it seems like it was common for women to leave the house but people liked to scold them for it) but he's also a good enough writer that he's unusually woman friendly for the time. like, you cant write a good female character without understanding a woman as a full person, and "understanding a woman as a full person" is kind of a high bar for ancient greek men. its odd, to read. the empathetic misogynist

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historical inaccuracies in period dramas are okay as long as i like them

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i say i like tragedies and everyone’s all like ‘why do you like sad stories? are you depressed?’ and never ‘how was the catharsis? was the catharsis fun?’

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Re: my observation that the average undergraduate now seems to have much greater familiarity with Homeric epic and at least some Greek literature (esp. tragedy) than with the Aeneid or any Roman material, I think there’s a myriad of things at work here but at least one is that we’ve reverted to this weird cultural construct where ancient Greek myth and literature is viewed as universal while Roman literature is viewed as particular and this affects what books are taught e.g. in high school and college English classes but also what gets mined for retellings. and I also think Roman material is often imagined as being more deeply implicated in the ideological framework of patriarchal western imperial society and like, in some cases perhaps that’s fair, but I would argue as a literary historian that Roman poetry is precisely where we see the cracks forming in Roman gendered imperialism just like Greek tragedy is where we see the cracks forming in Athenian gendered imperialism. whether we want to commit to any idea of authorial intent is a different question but imo it’s impossible to read e.g. Roman elegy or pastoral or even Lucan and come away with the pop-culture idea of the iconic masculine Roman subject (hell, I think even the Aeneid questions the conventional notion of masculine Roman virtus that Lucan absolutely shatters, but that’s another discussion)

anyways this also gets combined with a dynamic that’s really maddening to me as a classicist where anything Roman is almost exclusively gendered as masculine in popular culture (see the Roman Empire meme, but also the subculture of Jordan Peterson bros roleplaying as stoics and reading or pretending to read Marcus Aurelius) whereas on the Greek side we have Anne Carson’s Sappho translations and a total saturation of feminist rewritings of Greek myth, Homeric epic, and tragedy. this is actually really weird from the perspective of a Roman social historian, given that women are far more visible in Roman material (esp. from the 1st century CE onward) than they are anywhere in classical Greek society, and it has the consequence that Roman poetry (except, like, Lucretius I guess) gets sidelined because the types of dudes that are going to maybe read Marcus Aurelius or Tacitus are definitely not going to read Catullus or Vergil’s Eclogues or even the Aeneid given that poetry itself is often gendered as feminine in the 21st century popular imagination, and the types of non-classicists who like Anne Carson’s Sappho and feminist approaches to Greek myth are also probably not going to read Roman poetry

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AncientAbe: oough agh. Abe eat stick for dinner with bug dessert

ClassicalCarl: every thing either is, or it is not

MedievalMike100000: isnt it wonderful to serve our glorious God's chosen leader into victory and blood. fight with me and we will Die

RenaissanceRick237: looove the classics. we should build a religion out of the classics

RomanticRoger85: look at my beautiful panting isnt the sun so beautiful in my paiynting. everything is so wonderful btw.

ModernistMark: i think youre all stupid bullshit. what matters is my awesome child who ive decided to name Logic and will raise on only the most stringent of technological progress and reform and industrialization. The Great Societie

PostmodernPat: its in my blood its in my blood its in my blood its in my blood its in my blood its in my blood its in my blood its in my blood its in my blood its in my blood

metamodernistsophie: lets b cringe togedur

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“ὃ δ᾽ ὄλβιος, ὅν τινα Μοῦσαι φίλωνται: γλυκερή οἱ ἀπὸ στόματος ῥέει αὐδή. - But he is blessed, whomever the Muses love: Sweet speech flows from his mouth.”

— Hesiod, Theogony 96-7.

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would you still love me again?

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May all your seas be wine dark and all your dawns rosy fingered. Amen.

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having to wait for the next book in a series to be released is evil wtf. all literature should have already been written 2000 years ago so i don’t have to wait to read it now

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finally made a quiz for the classics nerds! which member of the house of atreus are you?

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definitely sci-fi, fantasy, and spec-fic! my dads an author who writes literary fiction, so that's basically what I grew up on, and the genre conventions and overall style of fantasy and sci-fi are completely foreign to me lol. excited to try them out!

Current reads for @batmanisagatewaydrug 's book bingo! been heavily enjoying this challenge, always good to bring myself out of my comfort zone, though I haven't yet hit the ones i actually think are gonna be a struggle for me lol