The Prison of His Days

Me: doo be doo...What to do first...Oh! Reading on satyr-plays! I should do that before my analysis of the genre of the Alcestis!

Reading: Blah blah rape as comedy is one of the oldest tropes in the book blah blah.

Me: Well. That was instructive. Hey, I've done a bit of my Alcestis paper now! I'll treat myself to a bit of 358/2 Days replay funtimes!

Roxas: *goes to the Coliseum* Slaying Heartless is the only fun I know how to have that doesn't involve a specific flavor of ice cream.

Phil: Well, gotta go. Errands to run, nymphs to chase, you know how it is.

Roxas: *does not know how it is*

Me: *now DOES know how it is o gods why*

I wasn't sure whom to accuse of betraying me, but since the reading was called "Ithyphallic Males Behaving Badly" and the game was rated "Totally For Kids", the blame ends up firmly on the Disney side of the scale for lying to me with lies. LIES I TELL YOU.

And now I have shared this with you. Hah.

Being a classics major rocks because:

1. After coming out of a class, someone says, "I want to be Odysseus when I grow up".
2. This person is not me.
3. I can therefore agree enthusiastically.
4. A third person says, "Odysseus is ponerós to the max."
5. This makes sense to me.
6. And also to them.

We're weird and we know it, but damn it, we stick together because no one else will understand why we are laughing.

Hilarious academic quote du jour: "to be a citizen means always having a place to put your penis".

Healing cock: tired old PWP device, or staple of archaic gynecology?

(Hint: the answer is, "Yes.")

Of course, "Your womb is moving around! Go find a man to bonk you until you get pregnant!" is actually in many ways a step up from, "Stick garlic/oil of bitter almond/myrrh/anything else vaguely medical and/or expensive up places garlic was really never meant to be stuck". I mean, at least it's cheaper. And less likely to involve sticking a deadly poison into your vagina. Yeah, that'll cure your breathing problems, alright! It'll also cure your breathing.

Since the headcold hasn't gone away, I count myself lucky to be living now rather than then.

(Readings also give rise to other interesting questions, such as, "Was there really sufficient case history of 'pubescent virgin has visions and goes suicidally crazy' to warrant an entry on its cure?" [The cure, of course, was Healing Cock.])

Makes Galen look insanely advanced, since he was willing to propound that maybe a woman was moping because she was in love with a dancer, rather than because her UTERUS WAS WANDERING AROUND. Of course, that was after the first human dissection, which helps.

Also, women are spongy and cold, like wet wool. The more you know...

Dear KH fandom,

I am in ur fandom, pastichin ur epics.

They should know better than to give classicists a prompt like "historical AU". The only prossible result is participles EVERYWHERE and fun with names and then EVERYBODY DIES. HAHAHAHAHAH!! Fear my nerdery!

(It's totally historical. In a Herodotean way. "Father of lies" is such a harsh term.)

I have no idea why I appear to be punch-drunk on writing epic. Maybe all the silly got bottled up while I was being srs bard?

Also wrote & posted lately And the Puzzle that is Me, because actually I *couldn't* think of anything for that prompt around the sound of Simon & Garfunkel. Except occasional Amy Lowell. Which didn't help. So it doesn't make so much in the way of sense. But that's okay. I seldom do.

Working on stuff...got a bit of Cartoon Heroes written. And most of the thing I picked up for lgbtfest. W00t.

For the record, my major is the lulziest major. "Hello, class. Today we're going to talk about pederasty. Here, look at some vase paintings that would get you booted off of LJ if you posted them."

Okay, so basically Jason? Is an incredibly obnoxious bitch who needed to be punched in the face more as an adult.

I am of course enjoying Medea immensely. It helps that I am supposed to think the above about Jason. Also, I introduced my class to the term "mansplain" today. (Jason: I know it can be difficult, living in exile... Me: Stop mansplaining, you bitch.)

So while I kind of want to stab someone now, it's in a constructive way, caused by Jason being written as a total pig, rather than a destructive way, caused by fail.

Some day, since nobody else seems to be going to do so, I am going to write a book. A nonfiction book. And this book will be about fandom. It will be about the history of (Western) fandom, how it goes back much farther than we in the modern day think--since, after all, who owns Hercules? Where would Virgil be without Homer? Does Ovid have a copyright on Ariadne? Our culture makes distinctions between what is okay and fanfic, but these distinctions are false. They're covering up the actual distinction, which is that intellectual property laws changed the rules...and, of course, fanfic must be weird, because it's written by women and queers--and queer women! End of world alert! And I wish to investigate when exactly fandom switched from being respectable (done by men) to not (done by women). And then I wish to explain in short little words how we are not weird, we are not deviant, we are not new, we are tapping into a vein of creativity that's as old as Western civilization--upon which Western civilization was founded!--so there's nothing wrong with us.

Because someone in fandom, someone who is one of us, someone who understands, needs to write the seminal text on fanfic before some (straight, white, male) outsider does one that looks at us like crazy people or bugs on a slide, above all like others. Because we're really not, and I may not know a lot about psychology, but I've got a smattering of gender theory (okay, more than a smattering, but by people-talking-about-gender-theory standards, it's assembled from bits and bobs all over) and I know a lot about storytelling.

Some days, anyway. Some days it's exactly as bad as I made it out to be.

I think now is the time when I should be grateful that I am in college, where professors are much less likely to flip out over backchat. See, the Greek professor friendly-but-incompetent tried to assign 8 sections of Lysias III for Thursday (!). To give you an idea of how much that is, we only had to do seven over the weekend. So I said, "I think that's a little much to have to do in two days." To this he replied, "Do you really think so?" As anyone who knows me would know, this is not the way to get me to pipe down. A phrase that questions the validity of my opinion like that, with extra faintly condescending? Bad plan. Because my response was, "Yes, yes I do." ...So we only have to do six sections. Which is still a lot, but less ridiculous.

And then I went to Roman History, away from which I came with a Julio-Claudian family tree. I was surprised it could be done in two dimensions, to be honest. What I have learned: everyone was married several times, at least once to their first cousin. (In a random moment of fangirl, I have this urge to show this chart to every fictional monarch and say, "This? Nooooo.")

And in Latin, we're starting the Ars Amatoria! Book three, too, which is Ovid's advice for women on how to get a man. Obvs. very entertaining. It only becomes more HILARIOUS when I perform a quick mental association and read it with "Popular" from Wicked playing in my head. I'll teach you the proper poise when you talk to boys, little ways to flirt and flounce--ooh! I'll show you what shoes to wear, how to fix your hair (really--there's a section on hairstyle and what color of stola you should wear, though I believe we're skipping that, because I for one am not desperately interested in ancient Roman hair-care tips) everything that really counts~! Only, y'know, in Latin, and therefore much more erudite. Trufax.

How much am I loving this already? Well, we had the first 82 lines due for Thursday, and I've already done them. All of them. Because it is WIN.

On Thursday, there's going to be a lecture on "The Romans and Ritual Murder". Fun, y/y? Plus, I get Greek extra credit for showing up and writing up a little response thingy. Awesomesocks! (We do not get Latin extra credit, but then we do not need it.)

Wow, I may actually do all my homework with limited flailing this week. That never happens.

Why college is awesome: today I got to go listen to a classics BNF (specializing in Virgil) give a talk about his analysis of the Aeneid as related to the early Augustan Age, and what Virgil was saying about both--was he using Aeneas purely to show the good bits, or to highlight the bad? It was most excellent. He was a very interesting speaker, and although I haven't actually read the Aeneid yet, I was fascinated and felt that several new perspectives were rattling around in my head afterward.

( Blah blah classics blah blah Marvel blah )

My fandom did it first. Pretty much guaranteed.

Gods and little fishes, I am tired. All day, and some of yesterday, I've been in that state where you see your hands moving and don't associate them with yourself. I feel very detached, like I'm not connected to my body. I'm watching my hands type this, click-click-click, and I still don't feel that the words are written by me, that the hands are moved by me. It's a very odd feeling. I need sleep.

I'm not going to get it tonight, though, because I've got to do my APEuro notes tonight. I hope.

----

In much more interesting news, I got Bronze Age volume 2 out of the library. It's Yet Another Trojan War story. I haven't read vol. 1, but hey, it's not like I'll miss anything!

Report: I didn't like it. It was in historical mode, sans (or mostly sans) gods as gods, and more about politics and events. It was also very wide-reaching, over all the people and events. Myself, I thought that was a failing. Trying to tell about everything, it ended up about nothing. I couldn't see people often enough to get invested in them. I, of course, miss and mourn the gods. Someone ought to keep them in.

Some things that really really got me:

Achilles was dark and Patroclus fair. What's more Helen was dark. Congratulations, inkers! You have just totally screwed up my character perception--and my internal eye is stronger than your drawings! Achilles has red-gold hair. He is described as such. It's the demigod trademark, that unnaturally fair hair. Menelaus has red hair too, by the way, as well as Odysseus, so you can stop drawing Odysseus with dark hair, kthx. But...dark-haired Achilles? Dark-haired Helen? Does not compute. No way, no how.

The names were screwy. Yes, I realize that there are at least two ways (Greek or Roman) to write them, but you should never do what was done here. Patroklus? Kassandra yet Clytemnestra? No. Pick one and stick with it. I know you want to write Ajax, no Aias, and Menelaus, not Menelaos. So leave Herakles out of it! Inconsistency is evil.

As a history, I thought it very good. However, it was crap as a story, as a re-telling. It didn't live, didn't have anything powerful behind it. The gods were gone, and all their poetry with them. The larger-than-life, realer-than-real stories of the heroes were gone. Everything was life-size, exactly. The poetry, the sense of a great, powerful force behind the ships, was gone. And the Achaeans were a musical people. Without that music, there is nothing left.

The story told nothing new, nothing in a way or from a perspective I hadn't seen before. It was the classical literature, with all the gods taken out and the demigods reduced to mortal, all combined together and forced to reconcile. It was nothing new. And since it could not measure up to the beauty of the originals--it didn't even try--it fell flat. It failed as a story, as a legend. Accurate history-as-she-is-taught, but none of the magic left. That annoys me, because I know it could be done. A comic could be made that brought the sheer beauty and terror (as the dawn) into focus.

It could be done, but it wasn't. That's what gets me.

Oh, and they kept calling Agamemnon the "High King" too. That annoyed the heck out of me.