#Edith levin

[iridescentmidnights]

Oh look Jen 10 concept art I forgot about lol

[chicinsilk]

US Vogue October 1, 1971

Donna Mitchell wears a black wool pantsuit cut to perfection, like a man's tuxedo. With a white satin shirt and a black satin beret oversized like a blooming rose. Pantsuit. By Gustave Tassell, in Lafitte wool. Beret by Mr. John. Piaget watch: Van Cleef & Arpels. Edith Imre wig, as arranged by Suga. Pin and bracelet, Lee Menichetti for Polcini, shoes by Herbert Levine.

Donna Mitchell porte un tailleur-pantalon en laine noire coupée à la perfection, comme un smoking d'homme. Avec une chemise en satin blanc et un béret en satin noir surdimensionné comme une rose épanouie. Tailleur-pantalon. Par Gustave Tassell, en laine Lafitte. Béret de Mr. John. Montre Piaget : Van Cleef & Arpels. Perruque Edith Imre, telle qu'arrangée par Suga. Épingle et bracelet, Lee Menichetti pour Polcini, chaussures Herbert Levine.

Photo Richard Avedon vogue archive

[justforbooks]

Dame Maggie Smith

A distinguished, double Oscar-winning actor whose roles ranged from Shakespeare to Harry Potter

Not many actors have made their names in revue, given definitive performances in Shakespeare and Ibsen, won two Oscars and countless theatre awards, and remained a certified box-office star for more than 60 years. But then few have been as exceptionally talented as Maggie Smith, who has died aged 89.

She was a performer whose range encompassed the high style of Restoration comedy and the sadder, suburban creations of Alan Bennett. Whatever she played, she did so with an amusing, often corrosive, edge of humour. Her comedy was fuelled by anxiety, and her instinct for the correct gesture was infallible.

The first of her Oscars came for an iconic performance in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969). Miss Brodie’s pupils are the “crème de la crème���, and her dictatorial aphorisms – “Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life” – disguise her intent of inculcating enthusiasm in her charges for the men she most admires, Mussolini and Franco.

But Smith’s pre-eminence became truly global with two projects towards the end of her career. She was Professor Minerva McGonagall in the eight films of the Harry Potter franchise (she referred to the role as Miss Brodie in a wizard’s hat) between 2001 and 2011. Between 2010 and 2015, in the six series of Downton Abbey on ITV television (sold to 250 territories around the world), she played the formidable and acid-tongued Dowager Countess of Grantham, Lady Violet, a woman whose heart of seeming stone was mitigated by a moral humanity and an old-fashioned, if sometimes overzealous, sense of social propriety.

Early on, one critic described Smith as having witty elbows. Another, the US director and writer Harold Clurman, said that she “thinks funny”. When Robin Phillips directed her as Rosalind in As You Like It in 1977 in Stratford, Ontario, he said that “she can respond to something that perhaps only squirrels would sense in the air. And I think that comedy, travelling around in the atmosphere, finds her.” Like Edith Evans, her great predecessor as a stylist, Smith came late to Rosalind. Bernard Levin was convinced that it was a definitive performance, and was deeply affected by the last speech: “She spoke the epilogue like a chime of golden bells. But what she looked like as she did so, I cannot tell you; for I saw it through eyes curtained with tears of joy.”

She was more taut and tuned than any other actor of her day, and this reliance on her instinct to create a performance made her reluctant to talk about acting, although she had a forensic attitude to preparation. With no time for the celebrity game, she rarely went on television chat shows – her appearance on Graham Norton’s BBC TV show in 2015 was her first such in 42 years – or gave newspaper interviews.

Her life she summed up thus: “One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act and one’s still acting.” That was it. She first went “public”, according to her father, when, attired in pumps and tutu after a ballet lesson, she regaled a small crowd on an Oxford pavement with one of Arthur Askey’s ditties: “I’m a little fairy flower, growing wilder by the hour.”

Unlike her great friend and contemporary Judi Dench, Smith was a transatlantic star early in her career, making her Broadway debut in 1956 and joining Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre as one of the 12 original contract artists in 1963.

In 1969, after repeatedly stealing other people’s movies, with Miss Brodie she became a star in her own right. She was claiming her just place in the elite, for she had already worked with Olivier, Orson Welles and Noël Coward in the theatre, not to mention her great friend and fellow miserabilist Kenneth Williams, in West End revue. She had also created an international stir in two movies, Anthony Asquith’s The VIPs (1963) – she didn’t just steal her big scene with him, Richard Burton complained, “she committed grand larceny” – and Jack Clayton’s The Pumpkin Eater (1964), scripted by Harold Pinter from the novel by Penelope Mortimer.

Before Harry Potter, audiences associated Smith most readily with her lovelorn, heartbreaking parishioner Susan in Bed Among the Lentils, one of six television monologues in Bennett’s Talking Heads (1988). Susan was a character seething with sexual anger; the first line nearly said it all – “Geoffrey’s bad enough, but I’m glad I wasn’t married to Jesus.”

And the funniest moment in Robert Altman’s upstairs/downstairs movie Gosford Park (2001) – in some ways a template for Downton Abbey, and also written by Julian Fellowes — was a mere aside from a doleful Smith as Constance Trentham turning to a neighbour on the sofa, as Jeremy Northam as Ivor Novello took a bow for the song he had just sung. “Don’t encourage him,” she warned, archly, “he’s got a very large repertoire.” Such a moment took us right back to the National in 1964 when, as the vamp Myra Arundel in Coward’s Hay Fever, she created an unprecedented (and un-equalled) gale of laughter on the single ejaculation at the breakfast table: “This haddock is disgusting.”

Born in Ilford, Essex, she was the daughter of Margaret (nee Hutton) and Nathaniel Smith, and educated at Oxford high school for girls (the family moved to Oxford at the start of the second world war because of her father’s work as a laboratory technician). Maggie decided to be an actor, joined the Oxford Playhouse school under the tutelage of Frank Shelley in 1951 and took roles in professional and student productions.

She acted as Margaret Smith until 1956, when Equity, the actors’ union, informed her that the name was double-booked. She played Viola with the Oxford University dramatic society in 1952 – John Wood was her undergraduate Malvolio – and appeared in revues directed by Ned Sherrin. “At that time in Oxford,” said Sherrin, “if you wanted a show to be a success, you had to try and get Margaret Smith in it.”

The Sunday Times critic of the day, Harold Hobson, spotted her in a play by Michael Meyer and she was soon working with the directors Peter Hall and Peter Wood. “I didn’t think she would develop the range that she subsequently has,” said Hall, “but I did think she had star quality.”

One of her many admirers at Oxford, the writer Beverley Cross, initiated a long-term campaign to marry Smith that was only fulfilled after the end of her tempestuous 10-year relationship with the actor Robert Stephens, with whom she fell in love at the National and whom she married in 1967. This was a golden decade, as Smith played a beautiful Desdemona to Olivier’s Othello; a clever and impetuous Hilde Wangel to first Michael Redgrave, then Olivier, in Ibsen’s The Master Builder; and an irrepressibly witty and playful Beatrice opposite Stephens as Benedick in Franco Zeffirelli’s Sicilian Much Ado About Nothing, spangled in coloured lights.

Her National “service” was book-ended by two particularly wonderful performances in Restoration comedies by George Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer (1963) and The Beaux’ Stratagem (1970), both directed by William Gaskill, whom she called “simply the best teacher”. In the first, in the travesty role of Sylvia, her bubbling, playful sexuality shone through a disguise of black cork moustache and thigh-high boots on a clear stage that acquired, said Bamber Gascoigne, an air of sharpened reality, “like life on a winter’s day with frost and sun”.

In the second, her Mrs Sullen, driven frantic by boredom and shrewish by a sodden, elderly husband, was a tight-laced beanpole, graceful, swaying and tender, drawing from Ronald Bryden a splendidly phrased comparison with some Henri Rousseau-style giraffe, peering nervously down her nose with huge, liquid eyes at the smaller creatures around, nibbling off her lines fastidiously in a surprisingly tiny nasal drawl.

With Stephens, she had two sons, Chris and Toby, who both became actors. When the marriage hit the rocks in 1975, after the couple had torn strips off each other to mixed reviews in John Gielgud’s 1973 revival of Coward’s Private Lives, Smith absconded to Canada with Cross – whom she quickly married – and relaunched her career there, far from the London hurly-burly, but with access to Hollywood.

She played not just Rosalind in Stratford, Ontario, but also Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra to critical acclaim, as well as Judith Bliss in Coward’s Hay Fever and Millamant in William Congreve’s The Way of the World (this latter role she repeated triumphantly in Chichester and London in 1984, again directed by Gaskill). But her films at this time especially reinforced her status as a comedian of flair and authority, none more than Neil Simon’s California Suite (1978), in which Smith was happily partnered by Michael Caine, and won her second Oscar in the role of Diana Barrie, an actor on her way to the Oscars (where she loses).

Smith’s comic genius was increasingly refracted through tales of sadness, retreat and isolation, notably in what is very possibly her greatest screen performance, in Clayton’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987), based on Brian Moore’s first novel, which charts the disintegration of an alcoholic Catholic spinster at guilty odds with her own sensuality.

This tragic dimension to her comedy, was seen on stage, too, in Edna O’Brien’s Virginia (1980), a haunting portrait of Virginia Woolf; and in Bennett’s The Lady in the Van (1999), in which she was the eccentric tramp Miss Shepherd. Miss Shepherd was a former nun who had driven ambulances during blackouts in the second world war and ended up as a tolerated squatter in the playwright’s front garden. Smith brought something both demonic and celestial to this critical, ungrateful, dun-caked crone and it was impossible to imagine any other actor in the role, which she reprised, developed and explored further in Nicholas Hytner’s delightful 2015 movie based on the play.

She scored two big successes in Edward Albee’s work on the London stage in the 1990s, first in Three Tall Women (1994, the playwright’s return to form), and then in one of his best plays, A Delicate Balance (1997), in which she played alongside Eileen Atkins who, like Dench, could give Smith as good as she got.

The Dench partnership lay fallow after their early years at the Old Vic together, but these two great stars made up for lost time. They appeared together not only on stage, in David Hare’s The Breath of Life (2002), playing the wife and mistress of the same dead man, but also on film, in the Merchant-Ivory A Room With a View (1985), Zeffirelli’s Tea With Mussolini (1999) and as a pair of grey-haired sisters in Charles Dance’s debut film as a director, Ladies in Lavender (2004). Smith referred to this latter film as “The Lavender Bags”. She had a name for everyone. Vanessa Redgrave she dubbed “the Red Snapper”, while Michael Palin, with whom she made two films, was simply “the Saint”.

With Palin, she appeared in Bennett’s A Private Function (1984), directed by Malcolm Mowbray – “Moaner Mowbray” he became – in which an unlicensed pig is slaughtered in a Yorkshire village for the royal wedding celebrations of 1947. Smith was Joyce Chilvers, married to Palin, who carries on snobbishly like a Lady Macbeth of Ilkley, deciding to throw caution to the winds and have a sweet sherry, or informing her husband matter-of-factly that sexual intercourse is in order.

She had also acted with Palin in The Missionary (1982), directed by Richard Loncraine, who was responsible for the film of Ian McKellen’s Richard III (1995, in which she played a memorably rebarbative Duchess of York) and My House in Umbria (2003), a much-underrated film, adapted by Hugh Whitemore from a William Trevor novella. This last brought out the very best in her special line in glamorous whimsy and iron-clad star status under pressure. She played Emily Delahunty, a romantic novelist opening her glorious house in Umbria to her three fellow survivors in a bomb blast on a train to Milan. One of these was played by Ronnie Barker, who had been at architectural college with Smith’s two brothers and had left them to join her at the Oxford Playhouse. Delahunty finds her new metier as an adoptive parent to a little orphaned American girl.

She was Mother Superior in the very popular Sister Act (1992) and its sequel, and her recent films included a “funny turn” as a disruptive housekeeper in Keeping Mum (2005), a vintage portrait of old age revisited by the past in Stephen Poliakoff’s Capturing Mary (on television in 2007) and as a solicitous grandmother of a boy uncovering a ghost story in Fellowes’s From Time to Time (2009).

As this latter film was released she confirmed that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer and had undergone an intensive course of chemotherapy, but had been given the all-clear – only to be struck down by a painful attack of shingles, a typical Maggie Smith example of good news never coming unadulterated with a bit of bad.

Her stage appearance as the title character in Albee’s The Lady from Dubuque at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in 2007 was, ironically, about death from cancer. She returned to the stage for the last time in 2019, as Brunhilde Pomsel in Christopher Hampton’s one-woman play A German Life, at the Bridge theatre, London.

Cross, who was a real rock, and helped protect her from the outside world, died in 1998. But Smith picked herself up, and went on to perform as sensationally and beguilingly as she had done all her life, including memorable appearances in the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films (2011 and 2015) and two Downton Abbey movie spin-offs (2019 and 2022). Her final film role was in The Miracle Club (2023), co-starring Kathy Bates and Laura Linney.

She had been made CBE in 1970 and a dame in 1990, and in 2014 she was made a Companion of Honour. Her pleasure would have been laced with mild incredulity. A world without Smith recoiling from it in mock horror, and real distaste, will never seem the same again.

She is survived by Chris and Toby, and by five grandchildren.

🔔 Maggie Smith (Margaret Natalie Smith), actor, born 28 December 1934; died 27 September 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[thefudge]

If I may dare ask what are your favourite romance novels?????

this will sound obnoxious, but i tend to love romance best when i encounter it in other genres (and i could definitely make a list of novels from different genres where the romance isn't the point but it goes so hard for me, and i think i have made some lists like that in the past? i really have to organize my books/book recs/book rec tags. and maybe make more lists)

but if we're going by novels that are considered and (could be) classified as romance, here's an imperfect list:

all of austen of course, but especially pride and prejudice and persuasion

jane eyre by charlotte bronte

the age of innocence by edith wharton

anna karenina by tolstoy (where i think i'm fonder of the kitty/levin pairing)

doctor zhivago by boris pasternak

gone with the wind by margaret mitchell (hate/love relationship but i am not immune to it, i'm afraid! i will say i prefer the book to the movie)

excellent women by barbara pym (god, i love the grumpy hero/heroine pairing here)

bridget jones's diary (the first book especially)

girl with a pearl earring by tracy chevalier (the movie too! colin firth and scarlett johansson had such good chemistry, it was surreal)

the blue castle by l.m. montgomery (love that we have a genuine "plain jane" heroine that doesn't turn out to be beautiful if she lets down her hair or any of that nonsense)

the french lieutenant's woman by john fowles (a postmodern romance, in many ways, but the yearning is so good)

spring snow by yukio mishima (i do think this is a romance, first and foremost, and my goddd, the angst and the yearning)

eligible by curtis sittenfeld (a modern p&p retelling; i know a lot of ppl hate this one but i really like it, though it could have been shorter. some of the lizzy/darcy moments in this book made my brain go brrr. the humor is great too)

sofia khan is not obliged (but just the first book in this series - another fun p&p retelling with a muslim heroine)

conversations with friends by sally rooney (i promised i wouldn't stretch the genre but this to me read as more of a romance than anything. and though i struggled with some parts of this book, i will admit that the affair between frances and nick did get to me. there were some particular sex scenes where rooney was doing what i like with the smut in terms of revelation and vulnerability)

the princess diarist by carrie fisher (okay, i'm doing it again, this is technically classified as memoir but again, the sections about harrison ford?? INSANE in terms of romantic anguish and angst. theee RPF of all time)

who's that girl by mhairi mcfarlane (some scenes in this book literally made my heart skip a beat?? this is a celeb/journalist romance that really worked for me. mcfarlane doesn't always strike the right chord with me but here, omgg. i hated her a bit for that ending, but some of the moments between the hero and heroine made me kick my feet like a lil kid)

birthday girl by penelope douglas (i don't know if i'd call this favorite, but it did the age gap thing right, while also being hot and well-written. it didn't toootally win me over, but i appreciate it when an author takes the "fell for my boyfriend's dad" trope seriously)

[princesssarisa]

Opera on YouTube

I've shared links to complete opera performances before, but I love to share them, so I thought I'd make a few masterposts.

These list are by no means the only complete filmed performances of these operas on YouTube, but I decided that ten links for each opera was enough for now.

By the way, some of the subtitles are just a part of the video, while others require you to click CC to see them.

Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute)

Hamburg Philharmonic State Opera, 1971 (Nicolai Gedda, Edith Mathis, William Workman, Christina Deutekom, Hans Sotin; conducted by Horst Stein; English subtitles)

Ingmar Bergman film, 1975 (Josef Köstlinger, Irma Urrila, Håkan Hagegård, Birgit Nordin, Ulrik Cold; conducted by Eric Ericson; sung in Swedish; English subtitles)

Salzburg Festival, 1982 (Peter Schreier, Ileana Cotrubas, Christian Bösch, Edita Gruberova, Martti Talvela; conducted by James Levine; Japanese subtitles)

Bavarian State Opera, 1983 (Francisco Araiza, Lucia Popp, Wolfgang Brendel, Edita Gruberova, Kurt Moll; conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch; English subtitles)

Metropolitan Opera, 1991 (Francisco Araiza, Kathleen Battle, Manfred Hemm, Luciana Serra, Kurt Moll; conducted by James Levine; English subtitles)

Paris Opera, 2001 (Piotr Beczala, Dorothea Röschmann, Detlef Roth, Desirée Rancatore, Matti Salminen; conducted by Ivan Fischer; no subtitles)

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, 2003 (Will Hartman, Dorothea Röschmann, Simon Keenlyside, Diana Damrau, Franz Josef Selig; conducted by Colin Davis; no subtitles) – Act I, Act II

La Monnaie, Brussels, 2005 (Topi Lehtipuu, Sophie Karthäuser, Stephan Loger, Ana Camelia Stefanescu, Harry Peeters; conducted by René Jacobs; French subtitles)

Kenneth Branagh film, 2006 (Joseph Kaiser, Amy Carson, Benjamin Jay Davis, Lyubov Petrova, René Pape; conducted by James Conlon; sung in English)

San Francisco Opera, 2010 (Piotr Beczala, Dina Kuznetsoca, Christopher Maltman, Erika Miklósa, Georg Zeppenfeld; conducted by Donald Runnicles; English subtitles)

La Traviata

Mario Lanfrachi studio film, 1968 (Anna Moffo, Franco Bonisolli, Gino Bechi; conducted by Giuseppe Patané; English subtitles)

Glyndebourne Festival Opera, 1987 (Marie McLaughlin, Walter MacNeil, Brent Ellis; conducted by Bernard Haitink; Italian and Portuguese subtitles)

Teatro alla Scala, 1992 (Tiziana Fabbricini, Roberto Alagna, Paolo Coni; conducted by Riccardo Muti; English subtitles)

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, 1994 (Angela Gheorghiu, Frank Lopardo, Leo Nucci; conducted by Georg Solti; Spanish subtitles)

Teatro Giuseppe Verdi, 2003 (Stefania Bonfadelli, Scott Piper, Renato Bruson; conducted by Plácido Domingo; Spanish subtitles)

Salzburg Festival, 2005 (Anna Netrebko, Rolando Villazón, Thomas Hampson; conducted by Carlo Rizzi; no subtitles)

Los Angeles Opera, 2006 (Renée Fleming, Rolando Villazón, Renato Bruson; conducted by James Conlon; English subtitles)

Opera Festival St. Margarethen, 2008 (Kristiane Kaiser, Jean-Francois Borras, Georg Tichy; conducted by Ernst Märzendorfer; English subtitles)

Teatro Real di Madrid, 2015 (Ermonela Jaho, Francesco Demuro, Juan Jesús Rodríguez; conducted by Renato Palumbo; English subtitles)

Teatro Massimo, 2023 (Nino Machiadze, Saimir Pirgu, Roberto Frontali; conducted by Carlo Goldstein; no subtitles)

Carmen

Herbert von Karajan studio film, 1967 (Grace Bumbry, Jon Vickers; conducted by Herbert von Karajan; English subtitles)

Vienna State Opera, 1978 (Elena Obraztsova, Plácido Domingo; conducted by Carlos Kleiber; English Subtitles)

Francisco Rosi film, 1982 (Julia Migenes, Plácido Domingo; conducted by Lorin Maazel; English subtitles)

Metropolitan Opera, 1987 (Agnes Baltsa, José Carreras; conducted by James Levine; English subtitles)

London Earls Court Arena, 1989 (Maria Ewing, Jacque Trussel; conducted by Jaques Delacote; English subtitles)

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, 1991 (Maria Ewing, Luis Lima; conducted by Zubin Mehta; English subtitles) – Acts I and II, Acts III and IV

Arena di Verona, 2003 (Marina Domashenko, Marco Berti; conducted by Alain Lombard; Italian subtitles)

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, 2006 (Anna Caterina Antonacci, Jonas Kaufmann; conducted by Antonio Pappano; English subtitles) – Acts I and II, Acts III and IV

Metropolitan Opera, 2010 (Elina Garanca, Roberto Alagna; conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin; English subtitles) – Acts I and II, Acts III and IV

Opéra-Comique, 2023 (Gaëlle Arquez, Frédéric Antoun; conducted by Louis Langrée; English subtitles)

La Bohéme

Franco Zeffirelli studio film, 1965 (Mirella Freni, Gianni Raimondi; conducted by Herbert von Karajan; English subtitles)

Metropolitan Opera, 1977 (Renata Scotto, Luciano Pavarotti; conducted by James Levine; no subtitles)

Teatro alla Scala, 1979 (Ileana Cotrubas, Luciano Pavarotti; conducted by Carlos Kleiber; no subtitles)

Opera Australia, 1993 (Cheryl Barker, David Hobson; conducted by Julian Smith; Brazilian Portuguese subtitles)

Teatro Regio di Torino, 1996 (Mirella Freni, Luciano Pavarotti; conducted by Daniel Oren; Italian subtitles)

Teatro alla Scala, 2003 (Cristina Gallardo-Domâs, Marcelo Alvarez; conducted by Bruno Bartoletti; Spanish subtitles)

Zürich Opera House, 2005 (Cristina Gallardo-Domâs, Marcello Giordani; conducted by Franz Welser-Möst; no subtitles)

Robert Dornhelm film, 2009 (Anna Netrebko, Rolando Villazón; conducted by Bertrand de Billy; no subtitles)

Opera Australia, 2011 (Takesha Meshé Kizart, Ji-Min Park; Shao-Chia Lü; no subtitles)

Sigulda Opera Festival, 2022 (Maija Kovalevska, Mihail Mihaylov; conducted by Vladimir Kiradjiev; English subtitles)

[cctinsleybaxter]

2023 in Books

I need to stop bragging that I’ve got this reading thing all figured out, because man if 2023 wasn’t a year of terrible books. I liked less than half of the 37 I read and nothing quite gripped me in the way it has in years past… but to put it more optimistically I liked a full third of what I read, and the ones I liked best were a fascinating and unexpected silver lining. Without further ado:

Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand, trans. Brian Hooker

Tell this all to the world- and then to me. Say very softly that… she loves you not.

I read a couple of plays this year for the first time since college and liked them fine, but there’s a reason this has been adapted five million times. Everyone go watch Megamind right now.

Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand

Of all the found footage-inspired horror fiction I’ve read this one makes the best case for existing in its chosen medium, as a 70s UK folk rock band are interviewed about the summer they spent recording what would become their final album [thunder crashes.] It reminded me of a Tana French mystery in its language and ability to make space feel lived-in; the character writing is so strong I realized that at some point I had stopped checking the interview headings to know who was speaking. Hand unfortunately distrusts her audience to read between the lines at a few crucial moments (and ruins what would have been a perfect ending and a deeply affecting scare by gilding the lily, or, in this case, photograph), but I love that she went from seemingly by-the-numbers American YA fiction to a meticulously-researched and truly unique horror novella. Puts other writers working in the genre to shame.

A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin

Reminiscent of the best kind of TCM suspense thriller (and was adapted into one), but could only exist as a book for the kind of narrative tactics it employs. Levin is brilliant at setting and character; I think any one of his contemporaries would have leaned into archetypes for this sort of story, and he instead distinguishes his proper nouns in subtle, clever ways that lend them the weight a noir needs. Can’t wait to read more of his stuff!

All the Names They Used for God by Anjali Sachdeva

I’d like to know why this anthology got hit with what a friend has termed a pottery barn throw pillow cover + a ‘the tiny things we know to be small’ title, because the eponymous story isn’t even called that! It’s just The Names They Used for God, and is, appropriately, about two women kidnapped by a religious extremist group. High risk-high reward; I think taken at their base premise the stories could have been insufferable and are instead strange, compelling, and fantastical. There’s a methodicalness and, I don't know, lack of whimsy? to them that’s unusual for fantasy, but also an absence of any one goal or moral in the way Le Guin speaks so highly of. It made me feel the way I did reading and adoring Kelly Link in middle school, and Sachdeva has a much different style that I guess works all the better on adults. My favorite was Robert Greenman and the Mermaid.

Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Lauren Hillenbrand

Someone recommended this to me via Tumblr anon over five years ago, so let me start by saying if that was you I’d like to thank you properly! This book rules! It was written in ‘99 so falls prey to a very specific kind of jingoism, but the mechanics of that are interesting in and of themself. Seabiscuit the animal is a lens through which to view turn-of-the-20th-century America written from the precipice of the 21st; his story told through the expertly-researched biographies of his owner, trainer, and jockey. Hillenbrand is not only a good pop nonfiction historian, but has been a sports writer since the 80s and I never imagined the genre could be so thrilling as I did reading her work. Horse racing is insane and no one should be riding these things btw.

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

It was one of the great livery-stableman’s most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.

Wharton came from old money New York*, was deeply disillusioned with it and pined for rational (i.e., even more insane) social and political scenes, had myriad thoughts about women and gender relations, and held a love for interior design. I learned all of this after reading but it’s apparent on every page; deeply funny and perceptive, fantastic use of language, the moments where it lost me completely nothing if not interesting. What sticks with me the most are a flair for the operatic and an ability to voice both the feeling and consequences of losing oneself to imagined scenarios. Read the pink parasol scene.

*Ancient Money New York; the saying ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ is apocryphally attributed to her father’s side of the family

Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World's Largest Owl by Jonathan S. Slaght

We’d return to our camp to huddle in the freezing tent and wait for our owls in silence, like suitors agonizing over a phone that never rings.

One of the better pieces of science writing I’ve read in a long time, as Slaght frames rural communities as a quintessential part of ecology rather than a barrier to it. His style is amiable and matter-of-fact (sometimes overly so; the amount of metric GIS directions, help), but he's super engaging and clearly holds just as much compassion for people and history as he does animals and natural landscapes. The Blakiston’s fish owls he’s studying are described as unreal, with hoots so low and quiet it sounds like someone has thrown them under a blanket. You can listen to them here.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Took my breath away and surprised me in a way a book hasn’t in years. I'd read Clarke’s 2004 novel when I was maybe fourteen and had vaguely positive but mostly neutral memories of it, and Piranesi being sci-fi-fantasy that came recommended by Tiktok had me very dubious. I ended up devouring it in the way I haven’t read books since I was fourteen; more of a mystery than the suspected high fantasy, with characters I would do disservice to in trying to describe in brief. While the mystery isn’t difficult to ‘solve’ (I’d argue the book also skews young!), the story ends in a way that’s both deeply unexpected and in the only way it could have.

Honorable mentions

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, trans. Peter Washington

[Jigsaw voice] Every man has a devouring passion in his heart as every fruit has its worm.

I spent so much time running my mouth about this one on Tumblr there’s really not much left to say. I think it’s a work of genius that was physically exhausting to read, and I’m sticking it with the honorable mentions mostly because I remember The Three Musketeers being the better book. If you want to read Dumas- and you should- start with that one.

Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead

I would’ve liked this more had I read it in my late teens/early 20s, but I still think it’s pretty good and would absolutely recommend to anyone in that age bracket. Things that normally annoy me about philosophical first-person lit fic didn’t matter under the weight of Jon’s narratorial voice. He reminded me a little of Lynda Barry’s Maybonne in his understanding and depictions of community and family; his stream of consciousness letting contradictions sit rather than trying to explain them away (Whitehead also makes sex very prosaic and pretty-sounding while still being frank and gross about it, which is a rare talent!)

The Seeds of Life: From Aristotle to da Vinci, from Sharks' Teeth to Frogs' Pants, the Long and Strange Quest to Discover Where Babies Come From by Edward Dolnik

This one fell in the rankings because the writing isn’t my favorite (think early days Vulture article rather than NYT), but I cannot stop referencing it in conversation. I want to read the whole thing to people and make them understand how truly unfathomable it is not only that every one of us is the product of 1 sperm and 1 egg, but that anyone ever figured out how that process works. When Western Europeans first started using microscopes they studied water; there were gross little bugs in there to watch and enjoy, so when semen was revealed to have its own bugs no one was shocked, but they also weren’t impressed. We would not see one enter an egg until EIGHTEEN SEVENTY-FIVE.  

Killer Dolphin by Ngaio Marsh

The Malaise of First Night Nerves had gripped Peregrine, not tragically and aesthetically by the throat but, as is its habit, shamefully in the guts.

Has made it into my top 5 favorite Inspector Alleyn mysteries. I’m not keen on Marsh’s theater settings (and there are a LOT of them), but a convoluted setup made this one all the more rewarding. The final revelation as to a point of blackmail is visceral and bizarre in a way I haven’t seen from her before.

The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

We all have dirty hands; we are all soiling them in the swamps of our country and in the terrifying emptiness of our brains. Every onlooker is either a coward or a traitor.

Best read in conversation with other writers, I wouldn’t recommend Fanon as the end-all-be-all introduction to communist and socialist thinking (the fact that he inadvertently describes what was going wrong with the USSR at time of writing is fascinating), but he explicitly invites that conversation and the value and impact of his work really can’t be overstated. Our points of disagreement tend to be in regard to nationalism, not his condonation of violence.

Persuasion by Jane Austen

Fascinating to see how Austen was thinking about relationships near the end of her short life. I laughed to see the idea of preferring your brother-in-law’s family to your own was back in full force from my own favorite Emma, as well as an eleventh-hour ‘maybe I should ship the villains??’ My biggest issue is that, like Emma, Persuasion is written in third person limited narration, but Anne is fundamentally Good™ so doesn’t need to learn anything about herself or the world; critic Bob Irvine points out that she and her dashing, misogynistic sailor are beset rather than changed by it. That said I love a people being beset by people (concussed temptresses) places (Bath) and things (cars), and Austen's writing style is really firing on all cylinders here.

[captain-lonagan]

MCD Rewatch S1 E44: Zoey's Story

Do you need to watch this? 2%

Is it fun to watch? 2%

Summary: Laurance is suddenly not here I guess? Aphmau lassos Levin (lmao) and runs to the guards, who have rushed to the scene after hearing her scream. Aphmau returns home with her kid, where a doctor says that Levin "walking" to Laurance at the end of last episode was likely him being magically levitated since his baby legs can't walk yet. Aphmau spends the rest of the episode building an extremely dangerous playground with cliffs on 3/4 sides and no railings. She sees a ghost or shade of Sasha in Sasha's old house and tells nobody about this.

Personal Notes:

LMAO WE AINT RESOLVING SHIT

Levin in lasso

Laurance is gone, Aphmau grabbed Levin and ran. guards on the scene after they heard Aphmau scream

new doctor NPC Dr. Doctor, says Levin was enchanted to walk to Laurance since his baby legs can't walk on their own

Levin is fine, doctor recommends making a safer outdoor playspace

Zoey was a wife and mother who got banished (for stupid reasons) and didn't have her banishment lifted (her husband got a government job) until her kid was all grown up. she missed his entire childhood and they were never really able to reconnect emotionally

"Crazy start to this episode" JESS???

guards have a Guard Academy they can call for reinforcements for. where tf is this academy who is the leadership WHAT THE FUCK IS A GUARD IN THIS WORLD??

playground building

procrastinating building + insane ramblings

What Remains Of Edith Finch child-death-off-a-cliff ass swing placement jesus christ

Jess' filler word instead of "um" is "anyway!" and its getting frustrating because it sounds like she's course correcting her ramblings to something important but she isn't. she goes "ANYWAY" and continues talking about the same thing. she does this multiple times per minute

end playground result isn't exactly ugly, just extremely dangerous

OW LOUD ELEPHANTS AT KIKI'S PLACE

Logan is sick

GHOST OF SASHA IN HER OLD HOUSE?? OR SOME TYPE OF SHADE/ECHO??

APHMAU DOESN'T TELL THE GUARDS ABOUT THAT?? GIRL THE TOWN IS ON HIGH FUCKING ALERT ARE YOU GONNA TELL ANYONE ABOUT THE ENEMY SPIRIT WITHIN CITY LIMITS??? DALE IS LITERALLY TWO HOUSES OVER YOU JUST WALKED PAST HIM

[everydayesterday]

Thoughts.  Ramblings.  

I have finished reading Anna Karenina.  I will certainly agree that it is a fulfilling epic, and considers much about the self, love, religion, class, government, nationalism; that isn’t up for debate.  I found myself, from various points in my life, in many of the characters—the soulless, haughty Vronsky, the mad Anna, the humble and meditative Levin, the fool that is Stiva.  

And yet, I am unafraid to criticize what is considered one of the greatest novels ever written [look at me, puffing out my chest].  I cannot for the life of me understand how Vronsky and Anna fell in love to begin with.  That part wasn’t developed to my liking; it was too quick, and too certain.  The young man fawns over her, yes, as he is awestruck for but the simplest of reasons; but what is her attraction to him as something more than a pretentious narcissist, juvenile in his pursuit?  I felt no liking or compassion for him, even at the drama near the end of the book, and even though part of me lives in him [though here it must be said that it is the vapid, toxic side of myself that makes the connection].  

So, after spending 900 pages with it, I find myself drawn to compare it to another tome that considers the goings-on of the aristocracy, and find it to be less than Edith Wharton’s Twilight Sleep if I am to rank them.  That may be more a reflection of my thrill about her words.  It handles the subject matter with frivolity instead of the cold, serious weight of the Russian winter that steals the daylight from Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and the like.  Truly, you must read hers (!!!).  

[terror-of-the-seas]

Decided to spend July reading fairytale-adjacent books. I was going to set an order but I won’t read at all if I do so here’s a list of various books I might read this month

1. Witches abroad by Terry Pratchett (1/7/23)

2. Water song by Suzanne weyn (1/7/23)(does this even count it took an hour)

3. Beauty sleep by Cameron dokey(1/7/23)

4. Fire and hemlock by Diana Wynne jones (2/7/23)

5. Little thieves by Margaret Owen(3/7/23)

6. Painted Devils by Margaret Owen(8/7/23)

7. The Wild Girl by Kate Forsyth

8. The blue rose by Kate Forsyth

9. Night Dance by Suzanne weyn

10. Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine

11. Princess of the midnight ball(9/7/23), princess of glass(10/7/23), and princess of the silver woods (12/7/23) by Jessica Day George

12. Gilded by Marissa Meyer

13. North Child by Edith pattou

15. A court of thorns and roses (as a last resort)

16. Cinderella is dead by Kalyan Bayron

17. Book of a thousand days by Shannon hale

18. The goose girl by Shannon hale(31/07/23)

19. The world above by Cameron dokey

20. Deerskin by Robin McKinley

21. Beauty by Robin McKinley(2/7/23)

22. Belle by Cameron dokey (1/7/23)

23. Accidental cinderella by Emily evans

24. Accidental Snow White by Emily evans

25. An offer from a gentleman by Julia Quinn(25/7/23)

26. Hag: Forgotten folktales (8/7/23)

27. Half a soul by Olivia Atwater(12/7/23)

28. Ten thousand stitches by Olivia Atwater(13/7/23)

29. Long shadow by Olivia Atwater (17/07/23)

30. Girl, serpent, thorn by Melissa bashardoust (27/7/23)

[aboutanancientenquiry]

Molly Levine reviews and criticizes the “post-colonial” book of Phiroze Vasunia “The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander”

The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander. Classics and Contemporary Thought, 8

Phiroze Vasunia, The gift of the Nile : hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander. Classics and contemporary thought ; 8. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. xiv, 346 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.. ISBN 0520228200 $45.00.

Review by

Molly Levine, Howard University.

myerowitz@aol.com

In the past decade, considerable scholarly attention has focused on the evidence for ancient traditions regarding Greek indebtedness to Egypt. Attention has focused especially on the texts adduced by Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (= BA) texts which Bernal used to support his hypothesis of an “Ancient Model” of early, “massive” contacts between Egypt and Greece.1 Phiroze Vasunia’s The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander, while not explicitly conceived as a response to Bernal, remains in a very real sense just that. Vasunia examines many of the same texts as Bernal, but from a different perspective. The avowed goal of his book is “to examine a particular case of ethnocentrism which is localized to the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E., to inquire into its methods and its grammar, and to investigate the factors that motivated it, the ideologies that sustained it, and the real and sometimes devastating uses to which it could be put by Greeks” (17).

In focusing only on what the ancient Greek texts on Egypt tell us about the Greeks, Vasunia heeds the advice of Edith Hall, who argued against Bernal that Greek traditions on contacts between Greece, Egypt, and the Levant cannot and should not be used as evidence for historical realities in the Bronze Age. Rather, Greek depictions of “Others”, including Egypt and Egyptians, should be read only for what they can tell us about the contemporary ethnic world view of the ancient Greeks themselves.2

Like Bernal, Vasunia insists that Greek discourse on Egypt is the source of many contemporary themes that can be traced back through the European Renaissance and the Enlightenment (17-18). But with the exception of a useful, though brief, summary of the historical relations between Greece and Egypt during the Egyptian Late Period from 664-332 B.C.E. (20-29), Vasunia uses historical materials primarily as a ‘reality check’ for his broader interpretation (19-20), and is “less concerned than Bernal with establishing historical facts” as such, and instead focuses on “representation, rhetoric, and the politics of literature” (17).

A few examples can illuminate some critical differences in the approaches of these two scholars to the question of how to read Greek texts on Egypt. For Vasunia, Isocrates’ Busiris, a text to which Bernal devoted several pages (BA I, 103-108) and Vasunia an entire chapter (“Reading Isocrates Busiris,” 183-215), rather than affirming a tradition of Greek cultural indebtedness to Egypt, “is largely orthodox in its reinscription of the other…[perpetuating] the cultural stereotype of Egyptians as xenophobic and inclined to human sacrifice” (200). Both Bernal and Vasunia read the speech against its contemporary fourth-century political and intellectual context and specifically link it to Isocrates’ rivalry with Plato. But Bernal, while admitting that the speech was on one level a rhetorical tour de force, insists that “to be convincing, the speech had to appeal to conventional wisdom” on the cultural indebtedness of Greece to Egypt (BA I, 103). Vasunia places much more emphasis on genre (an area that Bernal was criticized for slighting), arguing that one cannot read Busiris without taking into account the complex nature of its parody that “takes a fixed tradition and reasserts it, though in the guise reversing or altering it” (207). So, contra Bernal, Vasunia’s Isocrates emerges as no unqualified admirer of Busiris and/or Egyptian traditions.

Or, in another example, to Vasunia’s question “Why do both Plato and Isocrates appear so ready to say that Greek philosophers and wise men such as Solon and Pythagoras visited Egypt?” (229), Bernal would respond because they, in fact, visited Egypt (BA I, 108). Not so, says Vasunia, who eschews the historical question (229, 242; cf. 232, 234) and prefers to focus on what these stories say about the “cultural anxieties” of fourth-century Greeks for whom “to discover one’s wisdom along the shores of the Nile is not only to make Egypt a theatre where one may represent oneself to one’s own, but also to betray the anxious symptoms of a lack” (242).

But the difference between the treatments of many of the same texts by the two authors goes much deeper. As befits a book published in a series that “seeks to establish connections between specialized research on Greco-Roman antiquity and broader inquiry in the humanities, arts, and social sciences” (vii), Vasunia applies contemporary post-colonial criticism to ancient literature using a teleological scheme that posits “a relationship between knowledge and power” (11), the “claim of discourse driving Empire” (249). In this view, “European study of non-European cultures has led to colonial hegemony and political control … discourses that seem the most benign can come to have a crucial influence on mechanisms of authority and command” (12). This means that Vasunia reads fourth and fifth century Greek texts on Egypt not simply as reflections of contemporary concerns but as harbingers of future events. For Bernal, myth preserved the long-forgotten tracks of real historical events in the past. But in Vasunia’s post-colonial reading, cultural myths pave the way for real historical events in the future, in this case the fourth-century conquest and subjugation of Egypt by Alexander the Great in the name of Hellenism, an event that, for Vasunia, is “a tangible and material realization” of the politics that informed Greek representations of Egypt in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. (248, cf. 248-49, 287). In this view, no matter how heterogenous these texts on Egypt are, they contain common elements that “recur and intersect across the works of authors,” much like British writings on India from 1600-1800 (9-10). According to Vasunia, “no Greek reference to Egypt in the years before Alexander is innocent of this gross fact…, however sentimental the reference may appear, however distant it may seem from Alexander’s invasion and the subsequent rule by the Ptolemies” (6). While acknowledging the possibility of anachronism and “genuine differences” between the classical Greek world and the age of modern imperialism, Vasunia claims that “taken together, Herodotus, Homer, Aristotle, and other Greeks were a defining part of the ideological background that shaped Alexander’s conquest of Egypt” (12, cf. 32).

The structure of Vasunia’s book parallels its “teleological” thesis. A series of chapters on major prooftexts for his argument — Aeschylus’ Suppliants; Euripides’ Helen; Herodotus Book II; Isocrates Busiris; and passages from Plato’s Phaedrus, Timaeus, and Critias — culminates in a final chapter on Alexander’s conquest and occupation of Egypt. The book also includes a useful appendix of translated fragments from Greek historians on Egypt from Hecataeus (ca. 500 B.C.E.) through 332 B.C.E. and a rich, well chosen bibliography.

Each chapter applies post-colonial theory to specific ancient texts, with varying degrees of success. For example, in Chapter One on “The Tragic Egyptian,” Vasunia argues that Aeschylus’ Suppliants and Euripides’ Helen configure “issues of erotics, desire, and race…in relation to death” (12), in anticipation of Edward Said’s characterization of the western view of the Orient as hypersexual and fecund ( Orientalism, epigraph 33, and discussion 35-36). Egyptian males in the Suppliants and Helen are portrayed as hypersexed suitors pursuing a deadly marriage with the Egyptian Danaids or the Greek Helen in two tragedies that stereotypically identify Egypt with death and depict the aggressive desire of male Egyptians as deadly. By Vasunia’s reading, in the discourse of Athenian tragedy, “the way to preserve the social polity and to prevent ethnic contamination is to make abhorrent the union between these men and women” (74).

There is little to quarrel with in Vasunia’s argument that Athenian drama uses Egyptian men as “vehicles for the exploration and realization of Greek men’s covert desires”(38), but his attempt to distinguish his two Egyptian tragedies from the entire corpus of Athenian tragedy is not entirely persuasive. Vasunia’s tragic Egyptian weddings may be a matter of the ethnic tail wagging the dog of gender, piggybacking on the more universal Greek idea of sex and marriage as fraught with mortal danger, especially for women. As for Egypt as a sign for alterity in tragedy, Vasunia himself points out that of the extant tragedies only the Helen has Egypt as its setting (59 n.68), and in the tragic theater one need look no farther abroad than Thebes for the “Other” city in which Athenian social conflicts and repressed psychosexual desires can be acted out.3 Although apparently sensitive to these problems, Vasunia’s suggested solutions are unsatisfying. For example, Aeschylus’ Suppliants is distinguished from some of the other plays which conflate marriage with death for the female “insofar as it dramatizes in detail the events that lead to a wedding and the married life rather than the experiences of individuals who are already married” (54). What of tragic brides such as Iphigenia and Antigone, to name but a few?

A major strength of Vasunia’s methodology lies in his practice of interrogating Greek texts from a cross-cultural perspective, introducing comparative Egyptian material to present illuminating contrasts between the historical reality of Egypt in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C.E. and the Greek representations of Egypt from the same period. Vasunia does well to remind us again and again that the period of Persian rule that saw the most intense interaction of Greeks with Egypt is for various reasons remarkably absent in the Greek texts (e.g., 7, 244). In more specific examples, the author reminds us that although tragedy forecloses any possibility of a union between Greek and Egyptian, in fact mixed unions between Egyptians and Greeks were occurring in Egyptian towns such as Naucratis (34); a discussion of the political conceptualization of Greek space in Herodotus is offset by an illuminating treatment of the Egyptians’ conceptualization of their own space with the pharaoh’s architectural projects seen not as a Herodotean “transgression and violation” but as an “extension and replication” of natural boundaries (103-109); a section on Egyptian time argues for a more “complicated and interesting” ancient Egyptian approach to their own history than that suggested by Herodotus’ presentation of Egyptian temporality as “flat and static” in contrast to the dynamism of Greek time (126-127).

The same practice produces what is perhaps the most illuminating section of the book, an extended comparison between Greek (Platonic) and Egyptian conceptions of the written word in Chapter IV “Writing Egyptian Writing” (151-182). Here Vasunia shows that although Plato uses the Egyptian story of Theuth ( Phaedrus 274c-275b) to express his own anxieties about writing, in reality, Egyptian notions of orality and writing were radically different from the Platonic view. The Platonic view of language and meaning as distinct entities with the consequent danger of distortions between words and ideas contrasts with the Egyptian notion of “‘direct signification’ where the congruence between signs and things was maintained” (174-75). Subverting another Platonic distinction, he argues, is the Egyptian belief that the spoken word is often an extension of the written word, coterminous with writing, rather than an alternative to it (171). Furthermore, the nature of Egyptian monumental inscriptions subvert the Herodotean identification of writing and autocracy by often co-opting the reader into enacting the role of king and identifying with him. “Thus, where Greek sources point to tyrannical power, the Egyptian inscriptions do not quite correspond to the Greek implications of tyranny… The subjectivity enacted here is neither fully democratic, nor fully autocratic, but it indicates a self-identification on the part of the reader that the Greek sources fail adequately to grasp” (172).

Vasunia’s two chapters on Herodotus’ representation of Egyptian space and time impressively demonstrate this author’s deftness in laying bare the political implications of seemingly neutral abstractions and going beyond the “simple binarism” implicit in notions of self and other. In Vasunia’s fascinating discussion, Herodotus’ narrative with its series of Egyptian rulers who alter the country’s landscape framing space “to a geometrical design” and investing it “with the power of kings” (81) and thereby enslaving its inhabitants is read against the “larger ethnographic differentiation where the despotism and tyranny of barbarian lands stands in contrast to the freedom and openness of many Greek city-states” (77). In a subsequent chapter he argues that Herodotus represents Egyptian temporality as ancient and static so as to offer a contrast to his Athenian readers with the “present-oriented temporality of the Athenian democracy” and thus to construct an implicit contrast between two political systems: democracy and autocracy (112).

Vasunia’s book is brilliant and exciting, but his fidelity to the post-colonial mantra that “Empire follows Art” (11) too often seems excessive. So, for example, Herodotus sets Egypt under a masterful “all-encompassing panoptic gaze” presented in a discourse that serves “to naturalize the space of Egypt by flattening and denuding it” in a landscape “measured, packaged, quantified, stripped of its inhabitants, and lacking any aesthetic flavor” (101-103). Measuring the length and breadth of its space, the authoritative voice of Herodotus dominates the space and time of the country while putting it on display, winning the trust of his reader by quoting Egyptian archives, referring to interviews, invoking sources in a variety of ways, using a “rhetoric of mastery” that sets the author as the authoritative translator and observer of a non-Greek culture for his Greek reader (100-101; cf. 13) and which parallels the mastery over space and time that he ascribes to the pharaohs in his narrative (103, 13). By these stringent standards, almost every act of writing is an act of imperialism and even the most innocent Baedeker, not to speak of Vasunia’s own text, commits a “rhetoric of domination” over its subject. Perhaps the only difference is that most authors will not have an Alexander or Napoleon as yet unborn waiting in the wings to actualize their rhetoric, if indeed writing has as much power as post-colonial critics would impute.

Although Vasunia promises “not to reduce all my observations to the charge of ethnocentrism” (9) of which all ancient texts are guilty, his bottom line can be just that. For example, Isocrates’ Busiris is “a text that seldom troubles to grasp the realities of contemporary Egypt, that treats and handles ethnocentrism as if it were anti-ethnocentrism, that reeks of both condescension and arrogance, that retards rather than advances ethnic understanding, and that ultimately takes for granted the most pernicious of cultural stereotypes” (215). Plato’s use of Egypt as a vehicle for his own beliefs about language is tendentious and ethnocentric (181). Furthermore, Plato, like Hegel, is Eurocentric and his philosophical use of Egypt is a “strategy” for the containment of the older civilization (246). More generally, the Greek texts are faulted for “their failure to arrive at a sympathetic understanding of the otherness of Egyptian culture on its own terms,” as symptomized by “the neglect of Greek intellectuals to learn foreign languages” (182).4 In short, “the Greek treatment of Egypt is both deceptive and self-serving” (244).

Pronouncements such as these leave the reader wondering if Vasunia is perhaps asking too much of these ancient texts, judging them by modern sensibilities. We are not helped by the fact that Vasunia never explicitly lays out how an alternative text could or should read, while writing as if such an alternative were possible in antiquity. Was there a better, more ‘moral’ way for a writer like Herodotus to tell his readers about the Egyptians than to measure, count, and interview Egyptian priests? And if so what was it? Vasunia’s ancient Greeks are imperialists, his ancient Egyptian colonized subjects, long before Alexander set foot on the shores of Egypt.

Indeed, Vasunia’s own account of the motives and actions of Alexander in Egypt seems to undercut his thesis to some extent. It is asking a lot of a reader to accept an argument in which a historical event is anticipated by two hundred years of disparate texts without worrying about the “post hoc propter hoc” fallacy: Alexander conquered many peoples other than the Egyptians. Pace Vasunia, it is extraordinarily difficult to make a persuasive case for the extent to which Alexander’s invasion of Egypt was driven by his exposure to the Greek discourse on Egypt. In Alexander’s case, in fact, western Asia, the site of his hero Achilles’ exploits and of the more recent Persian Wars, seems, if anywhere, a more likely site for the intersection of literature and empire. Alexander’s detour to the South in the midst of his Persian campaign can be explained either by strategic reasons (Peter Green) or ideological motives (Vasunia) or both. His conquest of the country is a fact. But even Vasunia’s account of Alexander’s actions in Egypt ranges over the familiar terrain of the sensitivity and respect shown by Alexander to native Egyptian traditions (266), his foundation of a heterogeneous Alexandria, and his intellectual curiosity engendered by centuries of Greek speculation about the source of the Nile and the causes of its annual flooding. Surely, if the impetus for this conquest was Greek discourse on Egypt, this same discourse must be given its due in the conqueror’s remarkably sympathetic brand of imperialism in Egypt and his respectful treatment of the Egyptians. And so we are left with the question of how “pernicious” or “devastating” Greek discourse on Egypt actually was.

As for style, again recalling Bernal, Vasunia’s closely argued book goes down like a dense chocolate cake: so rich in ideas as to cause indigestion unless taken in small monitored portions, but certainly tempting. On occasion, the author gets carried away by his own rhetoric to the detriment of his argument and to the distress of his reader.5 In summary, Vasunia’s post-colonial theoretical engine drives a book that is at the same time exciting, brilliant, ideologically determined, and (sometimes) just plain wrongheaded.

Notes

1. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Vol. I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985 (New Brunswick, New Jersey 1987).

2. Edith Hall, “When is a Myth not a Myth? Bernal’s Ancient Model,” Arethusa 25.1 (1992) 181-201.

3. Froma I. Zeitlin, “Thebes: Theater of Self and Society in Athenian Drama,” 130-167 in Nothing to Do with Dionysus? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, edited by J. J. Winkler and F. I. Zeitlin (Princeton 1990).

4. On one exception, see Ken Mayer, “Themistocles, Plutarch, and the Voice of the Other,” 297-304 in Plutarch y la Historia. Actas del V. Simposio Espangnol sobre Plutarch (Zaragoza 1997).

5. For example, in a discussion of Herodotus’ use of symmetry and inversion Vasunia writes: “While this approach [‘global binarism’] has some explanatory power, it is not enough to say that Herodotus’ spatializing discourse works to principles of symmetry and inversion. Interpreting Herodotus’ text in this way is useful to the degree that it lets us see some of his structuring technique but such an interpretation would inevitably lead us to a totalizing reading that would subsume all of the text within a dyad and would contravene an analysis the purpose of which is to examine the constitutive elements of a spatializing discourse. Without entering into the intentional fallacy, we can also state that in attributing this system to Herodotus’ text, we are coming close to repeating a rhetorical and thematic signification constructed by the author himself, and hence that we are subject to the manipulation of the text. Our notion that Herodotus uses a system of symmetry and inversion may be itself the mechanical elaboration of a controlling Herodotean trope. If the text does not begin to deconstruct at this point, at least the complications associated with these statements can easily be multiplied, and impel us into deep aporia” (98).

Source: https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2002/2002.08.32/

Molly Myerowitz Levine, Professor, Department of Classics, Howard University

I have not read Vasunia’s book, but from what I read in this review I agree with the criticisms of Pr. Levine. 

It seems that Vasunia goes too far with his post-colonial agenda and his interpretation of the ancient Greek texts is anachronistic and unsympathetic, as he sees the Greeks and their literature just as the ancestors of modern Western colonialism and imperialism. 

I remind here that the Greco-Egyptian interactions before Alexander were far more complex that a relation of progressive colonization of Egypt by the Greeks: the Saite Egypt was an imperial state which used Greeks mercenaries and merchants for the pursuit of its interests, Greeks already conquered by the Persians played a role in the Persian conquest of Egypt, Egyptian navy and troops participated in Xerxes’ invasion of Greece, Egyptian and Greeks fought together as allies during the Egyptian anti-Persian revolt of 460-454 BCE, Greek mercenaries and alliances played an important role in the defense of Egypt from the Persians during the period of the 30th- 28th dynasties (404-343 BCE). This is the historical and political context of most of the Greek literary production on Egypt in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, not anything similar to the first phases of the British colonialism in India. I remind also that Alexander’s victories and conquests were surprising events and it would be totally wrong to see all the Greek relations to Egypt during the different phases of Late Period as simple preliminaries of Alexander’s conquest of Egypt.

More particularly concerning Herodotus, not only Herodotean Classicists, but also Egyptologists specialized in Late Period Egypt have showed that Herodotus’ engagement and interaction with Egypt and Egyptian culture are genuine and serious, not ethnocentric distortions and exercises in intellectual colonization of a foreign people.

[maximuswolf]

2024 was one of the worst years for American video game releases that I can think of at least in recent memory. That being said 2025 is looking like one of the best years for us in a long time (barring any delays)

2024 was one of the worst years for American video game releases that I can think of, at least in recent memory. That being said, 2025 is looking like one of the best years for us in a long time (barring any delays) This was an absolutely dire year for American video games, and as an American myself, I was quite disappointed. Animal Well, Another Crab's Treasure, and Pacific Drive were good indie games, and I've heard great things about Hades II, but that game is in early access still. With the exception of maybe COD: BO6 (I've heard it's decent), the AA and AAA side of the spectrum was an absolute disaster, mostly because of a LACK of releases in general. But it didn't help that the few releases we got were the likes of: Life is Strange: Double Exposure, typical sports slop (Madden, NBA2K, etc), and of course, most famously, Concord. So as you can see, really rough year for American releases. Meanwhile, Japan had another incredible year, especially for those who enjoy JRPGs in particular. Europe also had a solid year overall. With all of that said and done, 2025 is looking like the strongest year for American video game releases maybe ever? Of course, not all these games will turn out to be giga bangers, but I'm willing to bet that quite a few will. And like I said earlier, barring any delays to 2026, this is what 2025 for American video games is looking like. DOOM: The Dark Ages - id Software (Texas)Ghost of Yōtei - Sucker Punch Productions (Washington)Metroid Prime 4: Beyond - Retro Studios (Texas)Avowed - Obsidian Entertainment (California)Grand Theft Auto VI - Now I'm cheating a little with this one. Rockstar North is the main studio for GTA games, and they're based in Scotland, but Rockstar San Diego is heavily involved as well, so we're AT LEAST claiming half of this game. Judas - Ghost Story Games (Massachusetts) - This is Ken Levine's (BioShock and System Shock 2) gameSubnautica 2 - Unknown Worlds Entertainment (California)Hades II 1.0 - Supergiant Games (California)Mafia: The Old Country - Hangar 13 (California)Exodus - Archetype Entertainment (Texas) - Matthew McConaughey's game with former Mass Effect devs.Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra - Skydance New Media (California) - Amy Hening writing again is niceClockwork Revolution - InXile Entertainment (California) - Not confirmed, but I'd be very surprised if it didn't release in 2025.Borderlands 4 - Gearbox Software (Texas) - I'll be real, I don't have a lot of confidence in this game2XKO - Riot Games (California)Civilization VII - Firaxis Games (Maryland)Hyper Light Breaker - Heart Machine (California) - early accessAnd that's just what has been announced so far. This next part is just speculation:Druckmann's new IP at Naughty Dog - most likely a 2026 releaseCory Barlog's new IP at Sony Santa Monica - most likely a 2026 release as wellBluepoint's new IP gameBend Studio's next game (probably a new IP as well)Cloud Chamber's BioShock game?Mobius Digital's (Outer Wilds) next game? Expecting a reveal at the very leastGiant Sparrow's (What Remains of Edith Finch) next game?Anyways, let me know if I missed anything for 2025. Speculation is nice too, but I think I covered all of the big ones. Submitted November 23, 2024 at 04:15PM by KearLoL https://ift.tt/rUvKQWt via /r/gaming

[aliteraryprincess]

January 2023 Wrap Up

I feel like this was a weird month. It went both too slow and too fast at the same time. I could have gone for another week or two of break. I completely blew my exams by freaking out in the middle and have to retake at the end of February. But at least my new class is going well.  

Books Read: 5

This was a really weak reading month for me quantity wise. I started rereading Jane Eyre right at the beginning of the month, and I’m still not done with it...so yeah, that pretty much sums it up. But I gave the first book of the year 5 stars, which is always great. And the quality of what I read all month was good. No duds here, although A Sunless Heart is kind of weird. Starred titles are audiobooks and ones marked with ® are rereads.

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett - 5 stars

A Sunless Heart by Edith Johnstone - 3.5 stars

Scenes of Clerical Life by George Eliot - 4 stars

Fairest by Gail Carson Levine - 4 stars ®

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn - 4 stars *

On Tumblr:

It is mostly lists here. Can you tell how much I don’t want to do work? I did try to start a book photo challenge, but I gave up one day in. I want to get back to taking photos, but I just don’t really have time right now.

December Wrap Up

Cat Photography: Pippin Says No Work

aliteraryprincess’ Classics Shelf

aliteraryprincess’ Fantasy Shelf

aliteraryprincess’ Fairy Tales and Retellings Shelf

aliteraryprincess’ General Fiction Shelf

On the Blog:

Hey look! This section is back! I’m going to try really hard to get back to posting reviews this year. 

Review: Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett

On YouTube:

And there’s plenty here, as usual. I’ve got all kinds of end of the year wrap up stuff, the first video of the George Eliot Project, and the first Fairy Tale Friday of the New Year.

The Evolution of a Reader Tag

December Wrap Up - 9 books!

Currently Reading 1/9/23

Top Books of 2022

2022 End of the Year Reading Stats 

Underrated Victorian Reads #5

The George Eliot Project: Scenes of Clerical Life

Fairy Tale Friday: Fairest by Gail Carson Levine

February TBR: FebRegency, ARCs, and More!

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"WHALEN SQUAD TIP TRAPS 4 AND $100,000 GEM LOOT," New York Daily News. August 27, 1929. Page 3 & 4. --- Thug Gives Clew to Barry In Mansion Burglary --- By JOHN MARTIN JEWELRY valued at $100,000, which police are sure is almost all the loot stolen in a spectacular speedboat and airplane robbery at the Beverly Farms estate of Mr. and Mrs. Sydney E. Hutchinson, was recovered after a fierce struggle between three detectives and four colored men yesterday in a barber shop at 2397 7th ave, near West 140th st.

The jewelry included a rope of 138 matched and graduated pearls exactly like that reported stolen from the Hatchinsons, the robbery of whose home was charted from the sky and executed by motorboat from the shore of their palatial Massachusetts summer estate.

The other pieces are five brace lets, two hairpins, two diamond studded wrist watches, three stick- two pearl studs and a blue enamel wrist watch. They also tally with the Hutchinson descriptions of the stolen gems,

Points to Arthur Barry. Police Commissioner Whalen said the tip which led to the arrests was the first valuable piere of work to come from his department's new secret service squad, and hinted broadly that the information pointed suspicion at Arthur Barry, spectacular jewel thief, who escaped with three other convicts after leading the Auburn prison break a month ago.

Mrs. Hutchinson, the former Edith L. Stotesbury, and her husband, who is connected with the Drexel and Morgan banking houses in Philadelphia and New York, are on their way to Europe.

The recovered jewelry will be examined today by Mrs. Natalie Tyson, daughter of the Hutchinsons, who will be accompanied here by Police Chief John F. Welch of Beverly Farms. Both will scrutinize the four colored prisoners in the morning lineup to see if they can recognize them.

The prisoners said they were Baron Baucaire, 33, of 5 Wellington st., Boston: James Salley, 30, of 146 West 138th st.; William Smith, 35, of 208 West 149th st., and Thomas Wright, 30, of 131 West 149th st. Baucaire and Salley were held as possessors of stolen goods and the other two, barbers, as material witnesses.

Detectives Levine, Monahan and Kirwin of Inspector Mulrooney's staff entered a rear room of the shop at 2 p. m. They said Baucaire tossed the pearls into a telephone directory and Salley dropped a handkerchief package containing the rest of the gems behind a chair.

Baucaire drew a pistol and backed toward a window. Monahan advanced steadily. Levine watched Salley and Kirwin felled Baucaire with a blackjack blow.

Taken to headquarters, Baucaire insisted a man named Young gave him the gems and the pistol, asking him to dispose of them in New York and telling him to use the weapon unhesitatingly if police- man approached him. The first hint of the Barry angle came when Whalen had Baucaire shown a picture of the escaped convict.

The prisoner nodded, "That looks like the man, but he told me his name was Young."

The Hutchinsons reported theft of $114,000 in jewelry. The recovered loot failed to include two diamond earrings and a gold mesh bag, which they had valued at slightly less than $14,000, but every other piece was recovered. Search of the homes of the three New York prisoners failed to locate the earrings and bag, the detectives said.

(Other picture on page 1)

[silvestromedia]

SAINTS OF THE DAY FOR June 08

Bl. Pacificus of Cerano. Franciscan friar and renowned preacher. Pacificus Ramota was a native of Cerano, Novara, Italy, and entered the Franciscans in 1445. He served as a missionary in northern Italy and worked for the reform of the Church, fulfilling a task given to him by Pope Sixtus IV to bring reform to the Church in Sardinia. The pope also asked him to preach a crusade against the Ottoman Turks who had recently captured Constantinople and were threatening the Mediterranean. Especially respected for his knowledge of moral theology, Pacificus authored the Summa Pacifica, which was widely read by theologians of the time. 1424-1482 A.D. He died at Sassari, Sardinia, on June 4, 1482, and his cult was confirmed in 1745

St. Bron, 511 A.D. Bishop and disciple of St. Patrick. Bron was the bishop of Cassel-lrra, near Sligo, Ireland. He continued St. Patrick's missionary efforts and introduced literary and artistic standards in Irish monastic life.

St. William of York. Bishop. William of York was the son of Count Herbert, treasurer to Henry I. His mother Emma was the half-sister of King William. Young William became treasurer of the church of York at an early age and was elected archbishop of York in 1140.

ST. MEDARD, BISHOP OF NOYON St Medard, the son of conquering Franks, lived in Gaul in the 6th century. He was one of the most famous bishops of his day. Some of his miracles in favour of thieves who had robbed him may have inspired story of Bishop Myriel in the novel Les Misérables. June 8

St. Edgar the Peaceful, 975 A.D. English king and patron of St. Dunstan, who served as his counselor. England underwent a religious revival in his reign, and he is venerated at Glastonbury. However, his daughter, St. Edith of Wilton, was borne by one of two religious women with whom he had an affair.

St. Levan, 6th century. Celtic saint sometimes listed as Levin or Selyr. He went to Cornwall, England, as a missionary and is revered there.

St. Muirchu, 7th century. Irish confessor. He is noted for writing the lives of St. Brigid and Patrick. In some lists he is called Maccutinus.

[abwwia]

Elaine de Kooning, Portrait of Jack Greenbaum, 1959, oil on canvas, 62 7⁄8 x 39 1⁄2 in. (159.7 x 100.4 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Edith S. and Arthur J. Levin, 2005.5.15