This was my art school’s water fountain. Drink from them wolf tiddies
Assignment misunderstood. I have now built a city.
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@scrytime
This was my art school’s water fountain. Drink from them wolf tiddies
Assignment misunderstood. I have now built a city.
Give it a day
Ancient Roman Mosiacs
Ariadne, I think we're a little lost
best metaphors for the city-state:
ships
weaving
bees
Haters will see you become a plebeian to attain the position of tribune and be like, “he couldn’t ascend the traditional cursus honorum”
Ambulance with the Caduceus on it: disappointing but kinda funny
Ambulance with the Rod of Asclepius on it: Good and normal
Ambulance with *both* The Caduceus and Rod of Asclepius on it: Fucking hysterical. Are we going to the hospital or the morgue? Who knows!
When I walk into the mall and see Christmas decorations up the day after Halloween, I feel the same way Hamlet did when his mom married his annoying uncle so shortly after his father’s death.
Thrift, thrift, Horatio! the Halloween Mars Bars/Did coldly furnish forth the Christmas stockings
With Homer, there is no marveling or blaming, and no answer is expected. Who is good in the Iliad? Who is bad? Such distinctions do not exist; there is only men suffering, warriors fighting, some winning, some losing.
On The Iliad, Rachel Bespaloff
i want to make a "he should've been at the club" post about hamlet but there's so much controversy about his actual age that i can't while still maintaining any claim to academic integrity
"should hamlet have been at the club", the world's longest unanswered question in the history of academia, still ongoing after 400 years of debate
From this first property (the ability to turn a human being into a thing by the simple method of killing him) flows another, quite prodigious too, in it's own way, the ability to turn a human being into a thing while he is still alive. He is alive, he has a soul; and yet– he is a thing. An extraordinary entity this– a thing that has a soul. And as for the soul, what an extraordinary house it finds itself in! Who can say what it costs it, moment by moment, to accommodate itself to this residence, how much writhing and bending, folding and pleating are required of it? It was not made to live inside a thing; if it does so, under pressure of necessity, there is not a single element of it's nature to which violence is not done.
The Iliad, or The Poem of Force, Simone Weil (Translated by Mary McCarthy)
Shakespeare had a whole play about crossdressing. You think you're better than Shakespeare?
the public theater appears to be doing an antigone production about antigone wanting to get an abortion and i really hate to say this but a more interesting and interpretively honest adaptation of that play would have antigone as a pro-lifer
did antigone effectively utilize girlpower when she asserted that all lawmaking should be beholden to religious fundamentalism and conservative traditional values
i think a lot about how antigone is honestly fairly conservative by today's metrics and how no one progressive wants to recognize this because it has to coexist with the fact that they identify with/want to be her
don't keep this in the tags
[image description: tags reading "# i think she swings both ways! # she champions traditional values sure but she also challenges creon's autocracy and undermines his appeals to rule of law. as a monarch # which in an athenian context matters too i think # re: my post where i let them parrot left and right wing talking points in turns." end description.]
i think it is rly productive to point out how creon is pulling an autocratic move that athenian audiences would see as a real political problem but! i actually don't agree that antigone's undermining of that appeal to autocracy/monarchical power is all that progressive or proto-leftist. @finelythreadedsky put it rly well in the replies:
did she effectively utilize girlpower by putting the aristocratic oikos over the democratic polis in the fifth-century dramatization of the tensions between them??? anyway i think my reading of antigone as a character is deeply informed by that one article on women and culture in herodotus' histories which shows how women, when they do act in history, act as conservative agents to 'correct' the actions of men who've departed from traditional values
so antigone's rejection of creon's claims to authority imo don't read as necessarily democratic. even if we read antigone as a democratic figure, athenian democracy wasn't synonymous with progressivism or what we would recognize today as leftist political values.
i also really appreciate situating antigone's actions as a woman in the public sphere within the context of women who act similarly in historiographical texts. it's a later point of comparison but i find that plutarch (and even to a very limited extent livy) does a similar thing with women who intervene in the political misbehavior of men and are held up as positive exemplars for doing so. i should also note that it makes a difference that women in these types of narrative are often from aristocratic or royal families. if our contemporary assumption is that a woman standing up to a male politician is automatically progressive, we might lose out on seeing the nuances around how some women in greco-roman texts (although certainly not all and who knows about real life) are not seen as bucking the normative order of things but actually restoring and representing them. the literary/narrative trope of the woman who is forced by socio-political decadence to step out of the private sphere and become a conduit for traditional values is one we can recognize even today in conservative and reactionary discourse.
i think the real challenge antigone poses for adaptation among progressive audiences is that, if we do start to explore the conservatism of antigone's position, creon doesn't exactly offer a positive alternative for us to hold up as the 'good guy,' which links to the tags' observations above. and when what an adaptation really wants is to reflect an assumption about the audience's values back at the audience via the authority of classical text, it wants to have a 'good guy' to represent those values. and and and creon's perspective is at times explicitly misogynist, something that would make it very hard for him to be a sympathetic hero or perspective in a feminist reading.
ultimately, i find antigone is more interesting if we let go of the idea that there must be a character who is a stand-in for the audience's values and allow antigone and creon to both be challenging to us in ways that disrupts the authoritative-affirmative feedback cycle of "we are like the ancient greeks so that means we are uniquely enlightened because the ancient greeks were uniquely enlightened."
also i just think women characters are more interesting when we let them be unlikable. i'm tired of women and girls (maybe especially girls) from classical literature having to be reduced to a mirror that reflects back a very narrow, milquetoast subsection of feminism, as i think lots and lots of us on classics tumblr are. it's just antigone has so canonically been accepted as a progressive feminist hero that it can be hard to see the ways she is getting that kind of treatment. a really interesting feminist reading could take a conservative, reactionary, hyper-religious antigone as a starting point for probing why some women are indoctrinated into or even drawn to those kinds of ideologies (and this is where something like a focus on the aristocratic background could be translated into a contemporary consideration of how class and other kinds of privilege engender reactionary ideologies in women).
anyway this is why i like elektra better when it comes to loudmouth girls who hate their families. she was always wearing her ugly on her sleeve.
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.
Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream
Nearly all the Iliad takes place far from hot baths. Nearly all of human life, then and now, takes place far from hot baths.
The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, Simone Weil
(Translated by Mary McCarthy)
the fact that helen of troy is a mother is soooo crazy to me bc no one ever ever ever looks at her like that. they will give her every other title except mother. what if she’s not the face that launched a thousand ships or menelaus’ wife or paris’ lover or aphrodite’s pawn or the traitor or the downfall or the most beautiful woman in the world what if she is just a girl’s mom sometimes. does anyone remember??? she has a little girl. she used to rock her to sleep
And for Homer's warrior, glory is not some vain illusion or empty boast; it is the same thing that the Christians saw in the Redemption, a promise of immortality outside and beyond history, in the supreme detachment of poetry.
On The Iliad, Rachel Bespaloff