#some of the lyrics go along with ren's character but not the whole context

[oneroomjestershow]

I did a redraw of a drawing I never posted from january I’ll take that one to the grave but you can have this one 

Also I finally was able to play day 2 I love how he’s manipulating all 5 basic human senses to make us like him Iwant to suck him dry

[misscrawfords]

11, 12, 16

Sorry for the delay in answering @cinquespotted and thank you for asking! :) Been a manic couple of days and I needed to think about non-fiction books about classics because that’s not so easy to answer when I haven’t been in academia in the subject for almost ten years. (Yikes…)

11. recommend a piece of non-fiction about the classical world

I was thinking about this on and off for a couple of days and then the answer hit me. Adam Nicholson’s The Mighty Dead. I’m not sure that “non-fiction” is quite the right way to describe this utterly brilliant book. It’s a lyrical, imaginative, semi-fictional investigation of Homer’s influence and power, as simultaneously oblique and direct, beautifully written and πολυτροπος as one of Homer’s heroes. 

I also pulled out my undergraduate dissertation bibliography which was the last time I read classical scholarship seriously and I remember being blown away by some of the things on it. (Unlike many students, I absolutely adored writing my dissertation - I was very lucky.) Here are a few of the academic books I read which I recall enjoying even at the distance of 9 years:

-  Chew, Kathryn. “The representation of violence in the Greek novels and martyr accounts”-  Frye, Northrop. The Secular Scripture: A study of the structure of romance (not classical per se but brilliant and influential - I read more Frye for my masters and I’m a big, big fan)-  Konstan, David. Sexual Symmetry-  Loraux, Nicole. Tragic ways to kill a woman-  MacAlister, Suzanne. Dreams and Suicides: The Greek novel from Antiquity to the Byzantine Empire

Yep, my dissertation was basically about sex and death. (What else is fiction about?) No, I didn’t do it on purpose…

12. who is your favourite poet? why?

(Oh how nice, this meme was created by someone writing British English. How delightfully unusual!)

Am I allowed to cheat and give two - one Greek and one Roman? Good! :P

On the Greek side, I have to go with Homer. I mean, I honestly feel he (he? As if we know!) might be my favourite author. Or at least sit up there alongside Austen. I guess at the moment I’m in more of a Homer mood than an Austen mood. Polite tea drinking and elegant sniping in a ball room really isn’t cutting it for me at the moment. (YES I KNOW THERE IS MORE TO AUSTEN THAN THAT. SHE’S MY FAVOURITE AUTHOR AND I’VE WRITTEN A DAMN MASTERS DISSERTATION ON HER. I’m just having a reaction against that kind of writing atm. I don’t know why. I don’t know what to do about it. I feel sad. But that’s another post.)

HOMER

I mean, where does one start? I’ve always loved The Odyssey from reading Book 6 for Greek GCSE and tittering over Odysseus covering his naked manhood with a fig leaf (lines inexplicably missed out from the Bristol Classical Press’ edition for fear of offending the sensibilities of school children, clearly not realising that by missing them out there is no indication that Odysseus isn’t stark naked in from of Nausicaa the entire scene lololololol). I did a final year paper involving reading the whole poem in Greek (spoiler: I failed, but I read about 2/3rds of it missing out the many books of recognition in Ithaca and it was a wonderful experience reading 100s of lines of Homer and getting a feel for the vocabulary and the rhythm of it all. I wish I had been a more dedicated student and had actually completed the whole thing.) It was my favourite paper. Professor Simon Goldhill (who looks and sounds like Zeus) opening the lecture series by booming, “The Odyssey is all about how to be a MAN”. ανδρα μοι εννεπε. First line of the poem. I get shivers thinking about it. Odysseus - his character. WHAT A GUY. (I don’t mean to say you have to like him or approve of him - that’s not what appreciating fiction is about, you clodpoles, but you have to admit he’s an amazing, amazing character and concept.) We actually had Professor Edith Hall come to my school today and she gave a talk on Odysseus as a hero and ngl I actually almost teared up at one moment. I just can’t believe such a great character exists and over 2000 years later, he still speaks to us and we can trace SO MUCH in Western culture back to these texts. Actually, while I was nursing a raging crush on Odysseus (I was 20 okay), it was Penelope who was the revelation to me in that paper. Did Penelope know her husband was back before the recognition scene? This had never occurred to me before and I was plunged into debates on the stability of the text and characterisation and feminism and narratology. I mean, it was just amazing! And whatever nitty gritty you might go into with it, I was just struck by this wonderful, admittedly overly romantic idea, that Penelope was absolutely Odysseus’ equal. That in this ancient epic, we had a woman who bested a man at his own game, that she was playing him - and he loved it. These two tricksters, separated for too long, finally getting their happy ending. And I know it’s not about that. But it also is. Emotionally, that’s what I got. And it made me so, so happy. Because, honestly, I don’t have a problem studying works written by, for and about men if they’re good, but there are SO FEW opportunities studying classics (at least traditionally; the approach is changing now which is great) to grapple with amazing female characters or figures - and here I had Homer’s hero and Homer’s heroine. I mean, there are many other things I love about the Odyssey but this is already long enough.

I always joked about the fact that I managed to get a classics degree from Cambridge without having ever studied the Iliad. (Ikr, it’s crazy!) And youthful, hubristic me was okay with that. I was an Odyssey girl through and through. I’d read the Iliad and it was all battles and death and the catalogue of ships. YOU FOOL. So the first time I really had to deal with the Iliad was when I found myself teaching it to A Level Classical Civilisation. And it was an absolute revelation. I’m teaching it for the third time at the moment and it’s not getting old. Every time I see something different, every time the students find something new, every time I cry quietly in class when we are reading. The places vary but the moments that are guaranteed to set me off are Achilles’ grief over Patroclus, him putting on his armour and his final unbending towards Priam. Why the armour? I’m not entirely sure. I think it’s something to do with this sense of inevitability of the approach of the end, of imminent climax (somehow more significant than the climax itself). It’s like how the lighting of the beacons in LotR is such a powerful scene. It’s not that the thing itself is particularly full of pathos but because of everything it signifies. I can’t altogether explain it but it always really affects me. When my uncle died the other year, I was reading the death of Patroclus with my class at that time and my mum came to visit. I didn’t know how to talk to her or talk about my uncle’s death and we had this absolutely awful walk around a country park in the rain (I am never going to be able to go back there for the memories it triggers) but somehow the only way I could articulate something of what I felt was by clinically and factually describing Achilles’ anguish and explaining to my mother how the ancient world mourned its dead and what Patroclus had meant to Achilles and what blinding grief and rage would drive him to do. And she gripped my hand and we both wept, silent tears, and we walked on in the rain talking about the Iliad. I’m actually crying again, writing this, right now. I am not sure there is ANYTHING in literature more powerful than Achilles’s rage and anguish.

If Odysseus is the hero of romance and comedy, a clever hero whose very wiliness makes my heart sing and my academic brain bounce up and down looking for mythic parallels, Achilles does something else altogether. I’ve been thinking about him a lot recently - partly because I’m teaching the poem and once again we’ve got to Book 16 and Achilles’ tragedy is becoming the focus of the remainder of the poem (if it wasn’t before) so it’s literally my job to think about his character - but also in the context of my recent obsession with SW, Reylo and Kylo Ren’s Episode 9 possibilities. I’m not trying to be trivial here but it saddens me SO MUCH that people have the nerve to police interest in that character, one of the most fascinating and complex to grace the screens of a fantasy blockbuster series in - well, honestly, I can’t think of another one. What a treat we have. Nobody has a problem loving Achilles’ character and weeping over him (and making soft pastel shipping graphics of him and Patroclus…) but he was objectively speaking an awful person in many ways. A violent, unpredictable, psychopathic overgrown adolescent who holds an awful grudge. But of course, that isn’t the full story and it’s not the purpose of this post to educate the internet on the nuances of Achilles’ character and his profound tragedy. I’ve got emotional enough, but honestly, we NEED Achilles. We need that larger-than-life expression of all our deepest fears and regrets and violence and destruction - and also wit, compassion, sense of justice and deep love and loyalty. I think someone once said that everyone should read the Iliad at least once in their life. Whether they did or not, it’s true: everyone should.

Okay, so I was also going to talk about how much I love Ovid too but that would be literally going from the sacred to the profane, the sublime to the ridiculous and I have spent way too long on this already. So, yeah, I really love Ovid as well.

16. Cicero - love him or loathe him?

I unironically love Cicero. 

Okay, so I started along this journey from the worst of reasons. The first guy I ever liked in high school was obsessed with Cicero. At the time, I’d never read anything by him, so I decided to like him because liking the same things as your crush is an A+ way of getting him to notice you and like you back. (Spoiler: it failed.) Along the way, I got really inspired by Cicero’s wife Terentia. My first internet handles were Terentia. (I WONDER IF HE KNEW I HAD A CRUSH. lol he did. it was awful. I cringe.) Anyway, Terentia was fabulously wealthy and responsible for financing Cicero’s political career, married twice more after Cicero’s death, including to the historian Suetonius, and died aged 103. What a BAMF.

So first off, I love Cicero’s Latin. He’s my favourite Latin prose author to translate. Even if his speeches are sometimes on the dull side (we had De Imperio as an AS set text a couple of years ago and it was such a snooze-fest), the actual style of writing is so lucid and balanced and satisfying I can forgive him the content. I love all the rhetorical devices and how you can still see them at work in (good) political speeches today. I just get tremendous pleasure from translating him. It annoys me no end that the prose unseen author at A Level at the moment is Livy. I have no patience for Livy’s Latin; it doesn’t thrill me at all.

But I also kind of like Cicero the man. He lived at one of the most fascinating periods of history and although you can’t altogether trust his bias, he was a really important figure in that history and documented so much of it. I wish we had more sources to sit along side as I think he definitely puffs himself up, but nevertheless he’s invaluable. I even quite like his arrogance. He’s the ultimate self-made, intellectual man in Rome and I think he has reason to be proud of what he achieved. He must have been formidable to listen to.

Thank you for letting me ramble on about classics and literature like this. I miss writing on tumblr and not just reblogging pretty things.

Ask me about classics (or anything else obviously)