Cornocopia, or maybe potpourri
Mar. 10th, 2006 03:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vaznettiIt is chilly, dark and rainy outside, although I hope that most of the slush that made my walk in to work so treacherous this morning has been washed away.. There is not enough caffeine in the world to keep me focused on a day like this, and I'm thinking that going home and lying on the couch would be a good plan for the rest of the afternoon.
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I have copied this style of updating from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
musesfool, in case that wasn't obvious, but it feels like it's working for me. Of course, for all I know she's totally offended and you're all totally bored, but that's the problem with lj, isn't it?
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I don't know whether this is cause or effect, but I love the Romans. I realized this as I was thinking about teaching today -- I have such a strong sense of many of these people as individuals, flawed and bitter and poor excuses for human beings though they may be. I mean, I lecture on Solon and Akhenaten and Cyrus, but without the sense that they were real human beings in the way that Pompey or Antony or Julia (Augustus' daughter) are real to me. Themistocles and Alcibiades are like characters out of an epic to me -- real people, but somehow larger than life, more like ideas than human beings. But even the Romans who do Very Big Things, like Caesar and Augustus, are still recognizable as human beings to me -- and then there are people like Caelius and Clodius and that awful Marcus Marcellus, and I realize that most of these names come from the tail end of the Republic, but I feel the same about twisted, miserable Tiberius and empty-headed Germanicus, and Seneca and Vespasian. All of them, really, at least the ones I know anything about. You'd cross the street -- if not the country -- to avoid most of them, but they're real.
* * *
My birthday approaches -- a week from Sunday, in fact -- and I already have the best birthday present ever lined up, as BH is flying in that day to stay for almost a month.
* * *
I am trying to do a little writing each day, in hand on the notepad I keep in my purse. Mostly it's a matter of writing a sentence here and a sentence there; if I can get two lines of dialogue out I'm doing well. I have so many stories which are half-finished to nearly finished hanging around, and none of them are very long or very complicated, but I write for a while and then I just get stuck. Many of them have been sitting around for two years or more. It's a little sad; I remember being able to bring stories to some kind of conclusion without the deadline imposed by a ficathon, but it's been a long time.
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My sweater, for some reason, smells like cigarettes; this is very confusing, but I guess I haven't worn it since coming back from England. But nothing else I wore there smells so strongly.
* * *
I have copied this style of updating from
musesfool, in case that wasn't obvious, but it feels like it's working for me. Of course, for all I know she's totally offended and you're all totally bored, but that's the problem with lj, isn't it?* * *
I don't know whether this is cause or effect, but I love the Romans. I realized this as I was thinking about teaching today -- I have such a strong sense of many of these people as individuals, flawed and bitter and poor excuses for human beings though they may be. I mean, I lecture on Solon and Akhenaten and Cyrus, but without the sense that they were real human beings in the way that Pompey or Antony or Julia (Augustus' daughter) are real to me. Themistocles and Alcibiades are like characters out of an epic to me -- real people, but somehow larger than life, more like ideas than human beings. But even the Romans who do Very Big Things, like Caesar and Augustus, are still recognizable as human beings to me -- and then there are people like Caelius and Clodius and that awful Marcus Marcellus, and I realize that most of these names come from the tail end of the Republic, but I feel the same about twisted, miserable Tiberius and empty-headed Germanicus, and Seneca and Vespasian. All of them, really, at least the ones I know anything about. You'd cross the street -- if not the country -- to avoid most of them, but they're real.
* * *
My birthday approaches -- a week from Sunday, in fact -- and I already have the best birthday present ever lined up, as BH is flying in that day to stay for almost a month.
* * *
I am trying to do a little writing each day, in hand on the notepad I keep in my purse. Mostly it's a matter of writing a sentence here and a sentence there; if I can get two lines of dialogue out I'm doing well. I have so many stories which are half-finished to nearly finished hanging around, and none of them are very long or very complicated, but I write for a while and then I just get stuck. Many of them have been sitting around for two years or more. It's a little sad; I remember being able to bring stories to some kind of conclusion without the deadline imposed by a ficathon, but it's been a long time.
* * *
My sweater, for some reason, smells like cigarettes; this is very confusing, but I guess I haven't worn it since coming back from England. But nothing else I wore there smells so strongly.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-03-10 08:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-11 03:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-10 08:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-10 10:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-10 09:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-10 10:08 pm (UTC)Oh, but it is, isn't it? That's the best thing about it. If you forget that it's about real people, you're missing the point. What you have to say about Roman sculpture is very telling, I think -- the way they really do aim for something which seems like the portrait of a real person, rather than an ideal human form. They do look so contemporary (and even the women with the crazy hairstyles seem real to me.) I'm sure it ties into the way they leap off the page.
And the thing about Elegabalus explains everything.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-10 11:37 pm (UTC)If you have never read it, I recommend the insanely trashy Child of the Sun (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000E684R6/qid=1142033582/sr=1-7/ref=sr_1_7/104-8456536-8503103?s=books&v=glance&n=283155) by Lance Horner and Kyle Onstott. (You may remember Onstott as the author of Mandingo.) These two have written quite a lot of RomeTrash together together, but the Heliogabalus one is my fave.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-11 01:36 am (UTC)I am definitely keeping an eye out for that.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-11 01:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-10 10:01 pm (UTC)And wrt to the writing: yay!
no subject
Date: 2006-03-11 01:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-10 11:05 pm (UTC)I think the essential humanity is why I'm so excited my thesis is going to be about memoirs and memory. It's easy to think of the lead Bolsheviks as real, but now my literary emigres are too. They're elitists, and snobs, and Smarter than You, but we all know people like that.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-11 03:05 pm (UTC)::coughs:: Indeed.
Yes, that's one of the fun moments of any historical project, when you suddenly start seeing the people as people rather than just names on a page and a string of actions.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-11 10:00 pm (UTC)Did my Masters in Soviet Studies back when there was such a beast; mostly reading late Roman Republic these days -
Friended you - hope you don't mind. You sound terrifically interesting!
no subject
Date: 2006-03-11 12:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-11 07:45 am (UTC)Sidenote: they're currently showing Rome on German tv, several months after you reviewed it, and I find myself saying stuff like "but where is Fulvia, because when Octavian later has his propagandists say that Antony got trained to letting a woman rule him by Fulvia, he can't exactly replace F. with with own mother, can he?" Whereas I saw recently one of those old Italian sandal movies from the 50s which got Miltiades and Themistocles confused and just smiled benignenly...
no subject
Date: 2006-03-11 03:11 pm (UTC)I suspect that if I worked on Alexander and his band of merry men more seriously, they'd become real as well. Especially the ones who aren't young and pretty, oddly enough.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-11 03:37 pm (UTC)M & T confusion: trust me, you don't want to know.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-11 10:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-11 03:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-11 10:01 pm (UTC)Great post!