Cornocopia, or maybe potpourri

[vaznetti]

It 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 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.

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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.

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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.

Comments

[kaseido.livejournal.com]

I totally agree with you about the Romans, and especially from the last couple generations of the Republic. People you could totally see on C-SPAN, or People Magazine, or the DC lunch hotspots, people I do feel as if I know, and know how they'd respond in new situations...

Great post!