'Sherlock' and the paths of song

A couple of shows I enjoy, 'Sherlock' and 'Alphas', employ these weird floating visualizations of the internet. 'Alphas', a show about mutant counter-terrorism agents, has a character whose only job is to use his ability to 'see' data streams. 'Sherlock' uses the technique in a scene where the irascible detective demands privacy so he can go to his 'mind palace', a sort of mental Google.

I wondered why this interested me so much, and then I remembered a passage from Homer: the Poetry of the Past. Here's a taste:

The way [oimai, "paths"] is used in early Greek indicates that it was a … term for the … themes of epic…. Apparently… the relative fixity and stability of themes was figured in Homeric language by describing them as if they were tracks cut into some landscape. The process of singing was thus a progress, and Hesiod could sum up his election as a poet by saying that the Heliconian muses "made me walk upon [the path] of singing." To proceed from one topic of heroic song to another was to "move along" the paths of song, expressed in another apparently technical word, _metabaino_, to pass from one place to another. (42-43)

Travel was antiquity's metaphor for mentally cataloguing information, whereas disembodied text and images seem to be our way of envisioning this process. Our minds really are reshaped by changing methods of communication.

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'Sappho' by Peggy Glanville-Hicks

Enjoy this excerpt from the opera 'Sappho' by the Australian composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks. The work, completed in 1963, had it debut just this year. The Australian has a biography of the composer. 

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Are those knucklebones in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

I try to find the funny in academic research whenever I can, and I was amused to come across the "spinning hetaira" this week. The spinning hetaira is to be a woman on Greek vases, who is approached by a man or boy holding a pouch as she spins wool. It is presumed that the pouch holds money with which to pay for the 'hetaira''s services. A few problems with this, as argued by Gloria Ferrari (in Figures of Speech: Men and Maidens in Ancient Greece): 1) The women are not dressed as hetairai 2) It was part of a hetaira's mystique to avoid dealing directly with money 3) Identical pouches are identified as holding game pieces, not money, in other contexts.

But what's really enjoyable is the way Ferrari gets to poke gentle fun at the attitude that all spinning women in the vicinity of bags are courtesans:

"A prim figure (fig. 5) enthroned and spinning, is labeled the madam of a brothel. A scene of men and boys approaching, bag in hand, a figure wrapped like a mummy and holding a mirror can be described as "a hetaira seated in the porch of what is surely a brothel." (Fig. 6). A sense of the grotesque makes a fugitive appearance in Keul's remarks on this vase: Is the whole family on an excursion to the neighborhood whorehouse? Surely not, even in classical Athens" (13)." 

It's all in the adjectives: prim figure, fugitive appearance, etc. Funny stuff (for academic writing anyway).

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