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LINK ROT / INTERLUDE 01 / JANUARY 15, 2025

Link Rot is a multimedia webserial following those within a research station. Once dedicated to the study and containment of a newly discovered life form, complications arise following its unexpected merge with the station's AI. INTERLUDE_1 - In which everything has already gone wrong.

General warnings can be found in the 'About' section.

fun fact: while writing this i got sick twice. the second time i was cursed by one of my editors. well whatever, here

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Ever heard of a Sexy Legs Cockroach? No? Ever wanted to see someone make an anthropomorphic cockroach? ...No? Well.

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prints | patreon

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okay MORE thoughts on the orestes now that the play has been percolating in my head for another day:

(i notice i seem to be pondering this one more than i usually do? there's something in its strangeness and how morally challenging it is. there's so much friction in it. also its events genuinely took me by surprise and shocked me. my mind-tongue is still prodding at it)

apparently scholars have always been struggling to neatly assign this play a genre, and i see why. what IS it trying to do to the audience? it's like a tragedy that can't be contained in its own tropes and formulae, and the mythological characters won't behave and play their parts. interesting to learn that euripides wrote it at the end of his life, and likely invented this section of the narrative himself. the play feels cynical in ways, almost disillusioned.

the contrast to the eumenides is even bigger and feels more intentional than i first thought, because now i realize ORESTES AND ELECTRA ARE PUT ON FORMAL TRIAL IN THIS. euripides pointedly abandons aeschylus' narrative where the murder of clytemnestra leads directly to the invention of a formal legal process. that process (or at least some parallel form of it) already exists in the orestes! and our protagonists DO NOT RESPECT IT, they turn to more crime and murder instead of facing their sentencing

orestes' main defensive argument, that he was used as a divine tool to punish clytemnestra for her crimes, falls apart when he eagerly decides to kill helen and potentially her innocent daughter. NO GOD TOLD HIM TO DO THAT! (although pylades did, and that pylades-apollo connection from the oresteia is still on my mind)

i also failed to mention yesterday how hype pylades is about the idea of a suicide pact. it's very orestes going "my suicide--" and pylades like "no no no *takes his hand* OUR suicide :)"

i don't have a good point about that, i just think orestes and pylades' relationship feels even more interesting on this level of unhinged loyalty and mutual sacrifice

OH THE PHRYGIAN SLAVE IS MEANT TO TALK IN GARBLED, SIMPLISTIC GREEK??? because obviously it isn't his native language! that didn't come through in the translation i read. ohh that's so interesting, really adding to the chaos of the scene. it's a messenger speech falling apart, tripping over itself, failing to make itself understood, when messenger speeches are usually so concise and informative. wow!

i keep thinking about what a horrific time hermione is having. most of all when she hears apollo tell orestes "you shall marry the young girl whose throat you currently have your blade against". the famously insane man who kidnapped her and has been threatening to kill her for the last fifteen minutes. i mean, the horror. imagine.

generally how, idk, simplistic apollo's decrees feel when the situation has devolved this far... it really makes me ponder the idea of deus ex machinas not being salvation or resolution, but more the gods tying up loose threads only to their own satisfaction. many thoughts.

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Oedipus & his sons: Polynices and Eteocles, he curses them

Statius / The Thebaid - A Song of Thebes

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Ares Ludovisi

Roman copy after a Greek original from ca. 320 BC

Restored in 1622 by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680)

Pentelic marble

Museo Nazionale Romano di Palazzo Altemps

** Visit my Links page for my other blogs & Facebook Pages

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Sophocles, from "Electra: A Tragedy," translated by Anne Carson

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:/

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i think the correct way to read the odyssey is to believe absolutely everything the characters say during your first read, and on the second read you doubt EVERYTHING that isn't described happening in realtime by the narrator. after that you explore your personal sweetspot of what might be lies and what the characters' agendas might be

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Cleveland Museum of Art, 1945.13

Sleep and Death Cista Handle 400-375 BC Italy, Etruscan, early 4th Century BC Bronze With base: 18.5 x 18.3 cm (7 5/16 x 7 3/16 in.); without base: 14 x 17.4 cm (5 ½ x 6 7/8 in.) Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund 1945.13

Sleep and Death carry off the body of Sarpedon (Iliad, XVI.667-684)

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Odysseus relating his story at the court of Alcinous by Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg (1783–1853)

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“Finally Orestes, embittered and disappointed with kin and kinship, philoi and philia, turns to his friend and co-murderer of Clytemnestra, Pylades, who himself has been rejected by kin, his father. The two friends now seek to reconstitute (with Electra) a new family, based not on blood but the spilling of blood. In a kind of manic elation, they throw off guilt and remorse and escape the sentence of death by acting out their own conflicts instead of continuing to suffer with them.”

— Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece, Bennett Simon

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this was just a study that got out of hand (hence the non-existent costume design) but anyway. i think about hektor and andromache a lot. especially hektor choosing to leave troy's walls knowing he will die and knowing that his city won't get razed until he does. and how he can't really not go out and die. and andromache knowing that.

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Tons of photos, article dated April 10, 2024

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no more nestor slander! "his speeches are so random and nonsensical!" genuinely they always hold some pertinent lesson or example he wants the younger commanders to consider and follow. he's not only a main advisor of the greek campaign, but also their main historian (and when you consider that he has outlived generations you realize just how powerful that is, because he gets to decide how those stories are framed and conveyed, as the sole surviving witness of so many heroic feats and losses! history may be decided by the victors, but when those victors eventually die it is nestor who gets the final say).

"he's always bragging about how strong and brave he was in his youth, it's so annoying". idk, isn't there something achingly human in his grief at (and almost recurring realizations of) inhabiting an increasingly deteriorating body? in his self-consciousness of not being able to participate among the younger men he advises? no one who knew nestor in his prime are alive anymore, he is the only custodian of his own story as well as those of his past comrades.

"he's so long-winded!" yes, famously so! and i love that it's such a recognizable way for elders to behave, even centuries later. nestor is not a warrior or argonaut or adventurer anymore, his words and wisdom are all he has left to contribute. he knows he's getting towards the end of his own lifespan, and when he dies his perspective (three times the life experience of anyone else!) will be lost, so he makes sure to hold the floor and share his stories/histories when he can, for as long as he can. of course he does.

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Staff Pick of the Week

My staff pick is The Life and Death of Jason, a Metrical Romance by William Morris with decorations by Maxwell Armfield. This edition was published by Dodd, Mead and Company in New York in 1917.

William Morris was born on March 24, 1834 in Walthamstow, near London, England. He was known for being a being a leader in the Arts & Crafts movement, a socialist activist, and for founding the Kelmscott Press in 1891 which helped kick start the contemporary fine-press movement. Morris was also a poet and author, and his poem The Life and Death of Jason was first published in 1867. It chronicles the exploits of the Greek mythological hero Jason, leader of the Argonauts, and his quest for the Golden Fleece. Morris was a follower of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and worked closely with the artist Edward Burne-Jones who illustrated several Kelmscott Press books, including the 1895 edition of The Life and Death of Jason.

I chose this 1917 edition of The Life and Death of Jason, printed 21 years after the death of William Morris in 1896, because of Maxwell Armfield’s wonderful illustrations. Maxwell Armfield was a British artist and writer who was trained in Arts and Crafts principles. I first came across Armfield’s Jason early in my time at Special Collections when I worked as undergraduate assistant shelving books in the department. Now several years later and much wiser about William Morris’s lasting legacy, I really see the connection of this book has with earlier editions even though it is aesthetically very different. This is made clear in Maxwell Armfield’s “Note on the Drawings” which precedes the text:

“In the case of an epic, one feels, I think, that the important quality of the décor should be unity not so much with the ideas of the text as with the book as book, and unity also within itself.

This point of view must consider the embellishment not so much as illustration proceeding from the text as a continuation of the binding and page purposing to present the text to the eye; or as commentary on certain aspects of the matter not necessarily touched on at all by the author.”

This holistic approach to book design is very much in line with Morris’s principles, even if the illustrations are more modern in appearance than the Kelmscott Press’s medievalist aesthetic.

For an even deeper dive into Maxwell Armfield��s artistic interpretation of The Life and Death of Jason, I recommend the article: Illustrating Morris:The Work of ]essie King and Maxwell Armfield by Rosie Miles published for the Journal of William Morris Studies in 2004.

View more posts about William Morris.

–Sarah, Special Collections Graduate Intern