"Some people."

From mental multivitamin, a perfect example of how academia can dampen the imagination (for example, the ability to imagine a humorous class comment)…

The week we were to discuss Tess, he opened as always, with a leading question about our response to the novel. For whatever reason, the class was silent, almost guiltily so. Didn't they read it? I wondered. He asked again. The absence of pseudo-erudition became most uncomfortable. We can sit here all night, people, the professor sighed.
Well, I offered with a light laugh and a glance around the room, that Angel is rather a slow one, eh? Who knew he'd be such a pill?
I was being a smartass. The lone journalism major among this set of English prof wannabes, I turned in papers according to conventional standards -- double-spaced, one-inch margins -- and I actually read the books. Every book. Every page. Of course I realized that Angel was a creature of the conventions and limitations of his time, but wasn't it fun to call him out on his double standards from the relative comfort and social tolerance of the late 1980s?
I guess not.
The professor spent the next two hours using my remark to demonstrate how utterly "some people" missed the point of the novel, how "limited" readers are when they can only frame their responses from their own experience, and so on. And my classmates? Who hadn't even read the feckin' novel? What a bunch of sycophants they turned out to be: Oh, yes, professor. Some people. So limited. How foolish.  

That's a prof who's pretty sure of himself; most of the classics proffies I know would be filled with gratitude to realize that someone had done the reading that day ... and was willing to talk about it! Pin It

Funny

Classics Ryan Gosling

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Is the Iliad campy?

After I saw Skyfall last weekend, the spouse and I discussed the inherent campiness of action movies. Action movies are supposed to have become more thoughtful on the heels of the Bourne Identity series, but they are still full of heroes who think nothing of chasing a villain over rooftops on a motorbike, then getting shot, then fighting said villain on top of a moving train.

Is there an inherent campiness to such unrealistic deeds? And does Greek lit get to do an end-run around this by making heroes the sons of gods and goddesses? I understand campiness to be an amusing lack of realism. In a Greek context, of course, amusing and realism may have looked very different than they do to us.

It's accepted that certain parts of Homer's poem are meant to be funny, mostly passages involving gods behaving badly. In fact the gods are probably acknowledged to be the campiest part of the Iliad. But are the human characters, particularly Achilles, ever campy? As this NY Times blogpost recently argued, we find sincerity without irony amusing; did the Greeks? 

"I hate that man like the gates of hell who hides one thing in his heart and says another" (Il. 9.312-313)

As far as unrealistic deeds of arms, such as the slaying half the Trojan army in the Scamander river, followed by a very credible effort to conquer the river itself, the Greeks do have an advantage in their tradition of hemitheoi, half-divine heroes. We can't say, "but a person couldn't do that …" because in an important sense Achilles is not a person, or not just a person. As far as I can tell, Achilles' seriousness is taken seriously throughout the Iliad, when he withdraws from battle, when he mourns Patroclus, and even in the Odyssey when he rails against death (the hero who chose an early, glorious death with full knowledge).

Still, there is a reason Odysseus and his poem are more popular today, as a subject of scholarship and as a cultural touchstone. Whatever the original audience's stance towards Achilles may have been, the possibility of ironic distance helps us deal with his implacable, uncomfortable forthrightness in our more 'nuanced' age. As the NYT piece pointed out, we modern ironists mock what we secretly long for:

But Y2K came and went without disaster. We were hopeful throughout the ’90s, but hope is such a vulnerable emotion; we needed a self-defense mechanism, for every generation has one. For Gen Xers, it was a kind of diligent apathy. We actively did not care. Our archetype was the slacker who slouched through life in plaid flannel, alone in his room, misunderstood. And when we were bored with not caring, we were vaguely angry and melancholic, eating anti-depressants like they were candy.

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'Achilles had only 2 heels'

A little knowledge of myth can be a dangerous thing, as this guest blog at Scientific American demonstrates:

When I think about [cancer] research, two other Greek legends come to mind: The legend of Sisyphus and the Odyssey. Every day, Sisyphus rolled a rock up a mountain and then had to watch how it would roll back down again. This was his punishment decreed by the Greek gods. It reminds me of a lot of experiments that we scientists perform. When we feel that we are getting close solving a scientific problem we sometimes realize that we have to start all over again. Similarly, Odysseus’ long and exhausting journey is also a metaphor that appropriately characterizes a lot of real-life scientific research. Odysseus did not know if and when he would ever reach his destination, and this is how many of us conduct our research.I googled “Odyssey” and “cancer” to see if I could find news articles that allude to the scientific Odyssey of cancer research. To my surprise, I did find a number of articles, but these were not descriptions of scientific “Odysseys”. They were reports of cancer patients who described how they had undergone numerous different cancer treatments, often with little improvement. I realize that it is easier to market scientific ideas with a simplistic Achilles metaphor than to point out that science is long-winded and at times disorienting journey, similar to the Odyssey. 

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"Clever choices from the past"

Mary Beard's description of the art outside BBC headquarters:

It's one of those neatly simple ideas that works partly because it is so simple, and because it joins the familiar with the strange, and makes clever choices from the past.

I love this and wanted to make sure I saved it somewhere. It seems to me the second part works equally well as a description of Augustan poetry, or of modern poetry with classical influences (like Anne Carson's). 

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The original 007

The opening of Skyfall this week connects to my love of historical novels via John Dee, an Elizabethan secret agent who signed his letters "007".

Dee was a mathematician and astrologer who taughts many of Elizabeth's advisers. The novel The Spymaster's Daughter emphasizes his interest in codes and his role in breaking the cipher used by Mary Queen of Scots.

The double 0 in Dee's signature stood for "your [Elizabeth's] eyes only" and 7 was chosen because of its cabalistic associations.

More historical novels involving Dee: Shadow of Night, The Queen's Fool

The John Dee Society is dedicated to publishing Dee's works and assembling a catalogue of his library, one of the largest in England before it was dispersed.

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Mirror, mirror

I recently started watching the tv show Once Upon a Time, and I've been looking at the ancient roots of some of its fairy-tale themes. Magic mirror have always been part of the show, since the evil queen from Snow White is arguably the main character:

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But in a recent episode there was a magic mirror in which absent loved ones appear, shades of Harry Potter's Mirror of Erised:

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Assuming that ancient mirrors were crummy, I wondered if they would seem magical before they provided an accurate reflection. But, first misconception: ancient mirrors were capable of an accurate reflection. Obsidian mirrors recovered from Turkey work well, as this image shows:

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Ancient Greek mirrors were made of copper, iron or silver; glass mirrors are first found in ancient Rome. It seems that even if ancient mirrors did not allow you to count all your nose hairs, they seemed mystical enough for a few legends to grow up around them. 

The Encyclopedia of Magic and Alchemy says that the witches of Thessaly wrote oracles on mirrors, and that Pythagoras foretold the future using a magic mirror. Ancient healers suspended a mirror in water to determine whether a sick person could be healed. These folkloric uses of mirrors are echoed in literature, as with the mirror analogy in Republic 10. The mirror on the moon found in Lucian, in which you could see your family on earth, demonstrates how magical mirrors could seem. However, as Fairytale in the Ancient World explains, the oracular role in Snow White was filled by more typical oracle figures, such as the moon or sun.

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'I drank what?'

I was writing a lecture on Plato this morning and decided to run over to Etsy as a study break. Etsy is a site with lots of little shops selling handmade and vintage items. These are my favorites that feature ancient Greek themes (no affiliate links, I just love Etsy):

I started out looking for Plato-related products. There's the usual repackaging of serious quotes, but also this delightful magnet. Notice you still receive nerd points, since you have to be "in the know" to identify the bust as Socrates.

Wonderfully weird knitted and crocheted hats are another Etsy speciality. This toddler hat is supposed to look like Leonidas' hair and beard. You be the judge (Of course, there are no contemporary images of Leonidas):

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A benefit of the internet age is that it's given so many people a forum for their quirky sense of humor, and when it's that rare breed, irreverent classics humor, all the better.

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