am i so dear? do i run rare?

pascale ❦ twenties ❦ she/they mad femme dyke, classics student, & joanna newsom devotee.

[kyniklos]

a pair of critical fabulation poems i wrote about the Agora Bone Well

deeply indebted to Saidiya Hartman's writing about her methodology in "Venus in Two Acts," as well as the survey of the site by Maria Liston, Susan Rotroff, and Lynn Snyder.

the original poems have footnotes and around 2300 words of commentary, because they were written as part of a research paper. i'll give some of the most important details here, but i'll gladly send the full commentary to anyone interested.

most important is that the poems are built around actual funerary inscriptions from the (roughly) hellenistic period. the first is for Hymnis, daughter of Evandros, 1st cent. BC (Palatine Anthology VII, 643), and the second is for the midwife Phanostrate, mid 4th cent. BC (Athens, National Museum, 993).

the choice of a mother and a midwife as the subjects of the elegies was because of my decision to use funerary epigrams as the basis i wrote the poems around. one of the key tensions in critical fabulation is between calling attention to the gaps in conventional historical narrative and filling in those gaps. the goal of Hartman's critical fabulation is not to fill gaps and provide closure, that is when we risk writing to console ourselves rather than grappling "with the precarious lives which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance" (Hartman 2008, 12). since none of the individuals buried in the well received any sort of conventional funerary rites or commemoration, trying to imagine through poems who they were would only be an exercise in consoling myself. instead, i wanted to write about those people who might've interacted with the well and who i could verify in funerary epigram, as well as those that Liston et al suggest might've made use of the well. by choosing to highlight those who were afforded conventional funerary rites and commemoration in epigram, I hope to highlight that those in the well were not, for whatever reason, be it age or low social status.

Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, vol. 12, no. 2, June 2008, pp. 1–14.

Liston, Maria A., et al. “The Agora Bone Well.” Hesperia Supplements, vol. 50, 2018.

[thanksbrunette]

[bobbole]

Dimitri Mellos, Gas station near lake Prespa, northern Greece, 2006

[probuccalfat]

you people will make anybody a daddy dom it’s so scary

[souvenirs]

[spitfaggot]

happy birthday, gilbert baker. (june 2, 1951 — march 31, 2017)

[crustystherat]

Random thing for people to consider is that since Laika is the saint of one way trips should Felicette be known as the saint of safe landings since she did make it back to the ground safely

[somefishycat]

tu LANCES félicette ? tu lances son corps comme la fusée ? oh ! oh ! prison pour les scientifiques ! prison pour les scientifiques pendant Un Mille Ans !

[bug-yogurt]

You can understand the French perfectly fine with only context but the English translation I got still had me floored

[tyrian-red]

my erotic fanfiction is more historically accurate than yours. here it claims that shes moaning 'yes,' however classical latin didn't have a word that corresponds to Modern English 'yes,' i.e. an affirmative answer to an interrogative. You could have easily avoided this glaring implausibility by allowing her to moan plus, 'more'—as exemplified in my critically acclaimed fic with an unprecedented number of kudos (eleven). I recommend that you log out of AO3 and return only after acquiring satisfactory knowledge of the subject matter.

[torturelabyrinth]

Pale fire club remix

I was the shadow. I was the shadow. I was the shadow. I was-was the shadow. I was was was was was was was was wastheshadow wastheshadow wastheshadow wastheshadow

Of The Wax. Wing. Slain [beat drop]

[mervynbunter]

In the Iliad, too, the protracted duel between Hector and Achilles — running over several hundred lines — culminates in a brutal final exchange. When he realises there is no escape, Hector begs Achilles to return his body honorably to his family for burial, and not to allow it to be eaten by the dogs; but Achilles refuses him even this mercy and, before killing him, goes so far as to say that he wishes he could devour him himself.

αἲ γάρ πως αὐτόν με μένος καὶ θυμὸς ἀνήη ὤμʼ ἀποταμνόμενον κρέα ἔδμεναι, οἷα ἔοργας, ὡς οὐκ ἔσθʼ ὃς σῆς γε κύνας κεφαλῆς ἀπαλάλκοι, οὐδʼ εἴ κεν δεκάκις τε καὶ εἰκοσινήριτʼ ἄποινα στήσωσʼ ἐνθάδʼ ἄγοντες, ὑπόσχωνται δὲ καὶ ἄλλα, οὐδʼ εἴ κέν σʼ αὐτὸν χρυσῷ ἐρύσασθαι ἀνώγοι Δαρδανίδης Πρίαμος· οὐδʼ ὧς σέ γε πότνια μήτηρ ἐνθεμένη λεχέεσσι γοήσεται ὃν τέκεν αὐτή, ἀλλὰ κύνες τε καὶ οἰωνοὶ κατὰ πάντα δάσονται. I wish I could eat you myself, that the fury in my heart would drive me to cut you in pieces and eat your flesh raw, for all that you have done to me. So no man is going to keep the dogs away from your head, not even if they bring here and weigh out ten times or twenty times your ransom, not even if Dardanian Priam offers to pay your own weight in gold. Not even so will your honoured mother lay you on the bier and mourn for you, her own child, but the dogs and birds will share you for their feast and leave nothing.

Shakespeare’s hugely condensed version of their encounter is, as we have seen, entirely different, reducing many pages of exchanged speeches, sallies and divine intervention into an ignominious few lines. All the same, Achilles seems to echo remotely the Homeric original. Immediately after the speech quoted above, the retreat sounds, and Achilles speaks again:

The dragon wing of night o’erspreads the earth And, stickler-like, the armies separates. My half-supped sword, that frankly would have fed, Pleased with this dainty bait, thus goes to bed.

Both the sentiment and even the construction here (‘would have fed’) recalls Achilles’ final speech to Hector in Iliad 22, ‘I wish I could eat you myself’. The one element of the Homeric scene that is retained is the most monstrous.

Chapman did not publish his version of Iliad 22 until 1611, but I don’t think that means we need to assume that Shakespeare was looking directly at the Greek. It is much more likely that, when he decided to write a fashionably Homeric play, he consulted some kind of Latin edition. In fact, even a version as compressed as the Ilias Latina could have given him this particular detail, since this is one of the handful of passages that the Ilias Latina translates quite closely:

Quid mea supplicibus temptas inflectere dictis pectora, quem possem direptum more ferarum, si sineret natura, meis absumere malis? Te uero tristesque ferae cunctaeque uolucres diripient, auidosque canes tua uiscera pascent. “Why do you try with your words of supplication to bend my heart, you whom I could, like wild beasts their prey, consume, if nature allowed it, in return for all my suffering? For sure, the grim beasts and all the birds will tear you apart, and the hungry dogs feast on your entrails.”

Bifold authority: Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida”

[eddysonline]

The original flag, by Gilbert Baker, June 25, 1978.

[animentality]

[theshitpostcalligrapher]

last line hit like a mack truck

ink: diamine oxblood

[bijoumikhawal]

Okay. Weekly crowdfunding post!

As I've gone over my car is kind of fucked right now and not drivable or repairable at the price I can afford. I'm fundraising for next months transit costs roughly, the expense of the tows/"repair"/first week of ubers, and for some of the down-payment. Ubers on my commute average $25-30, and I have a little saved for the down-payment, so for this week the goal is $250 at least, as well as ideally the unmet goal from last week. I'm making weekly posts in hopes that this will encourage donations.

Unmet goal from last week: 291

Combined goal of last week and this week: 541

$FaeKhawal and ko-fi.com/rosebijoumme are my paylinks. Tbh I prefer cashapp because kofi takes a cut from me. I also have venmo and PayPal but those have my dead name, so dm me if you want to use those

[bijoumikhawal]

Additionally you can donate directly to the gofundme here:

Donate to Urgent Support Needed for Reliable Transportation, organized by Idris Arazi

In the past 6 months I moved states and had to sell my old car because i… Idris Arazi needs your support for Urgent Support Needed for Relia

[bijoumikhawal]

155/250!

[t0ast-ghost]

Can’t explain it but they’re really cunty in this photo

[vulcussy]

Art grad student answer: it's the contrapposto.

This is a counterbalanced pose where the weight is rested on one leg and the hips and shoulders are tilted in opposite directions. It emphasizes the curves of the body.

[leonkennedy4ever]

How am I looking at the ice cream now that the prices are so fcking high

[mvartworks]

All hands on deck - octopus

[itwoodbeprefect]

bruce springsteen narrating kitchen safety instructions from the perspective of a frying pan:

[argonavta]

Greco-Roman curse doll

2nd century CE

[taraxippos]

A Cursed Figurine

I had the opportunity recently to revisit an interesting artifact at the Louvre. It is a small nude female figurine with hands and feet boun