Theodora Elucubrare

There is very little new to say about online self-presentation, but there's nothing new under the sun either, so whatever. I'm thinking about my tone specifically -- I try, at my best, for lyrical breezy: long, loosely connected sentences with, hopefully, a light humor amid the complaints, that can bloom into bigger things. Each post is a Journey from wherever I started to wherever the grammar of the sentence and the process of writing took me. This post probably doesn't exactly have a Point, but it is interesting to see how this style and tone have evolved over the years -- 2017 is definitely almost but not quite there; and I definitely fall out of the bouncy complaints into real ones when I'm miserable, and the style itself is much too self-pitying, self-aggrandizing, and melodramatic. The resolution is, therefore, to stay bouncy even when doing that self-pity.

I was off work for illness yesterday (about which there is more to be said, but mostly along the miserable tightrope of not genuinely wanting a serious illness, but wanting there to be something tangibly wrong so that something can be done about it, instead of a general miasma of feeling generally physically awful settling on and around me) and R --- n had to be at work at 6 am, so we missed our morning exercise, but when he got home he cajoled me into going to the gym, and it was, I hate to report, wonderful, though I'm worried about i) pushing myself too hard because I know what I used to be able to do; ii) him pushing himself too hard to try to keep up with me; and iii) that I'm not doing enough because it feels too easy;

but since it is 60 degrees Fahrenheit here, and the pool is right there, I went in after the workout, and the pool is outdoor, unheated, and very lightly, if at all, chlorinated, so even though it's tamed water it had some of that feeling of breaking ice, a crispness throughout your head, that you get when you've jumped into a very cold lake and broken the surface;

and I still haven't made a lasting truce with my body, but for a moment it was all right.

This is the first non-crosspost I've made here since March 2011, and seven years is a long time, but more has changed than I possibly could have imagined. In March 2011, I was a junior in college writing Iliad fanfic in ENG 209: Gore and Glory (and then getting called out for it by my rugby teammate, who was sitting next to me). I had no idea where I was going besides "not Classics grad school." I wanted to stay in NYC forever, if only for the public transit. I had vague ideas that I wanted to do a translation for my thesis, but I was still thinking about the Homeric Hymns (I had yet to show up with my initial translation in Professor Ford's office, only for him to tell me that everyone had translated the Homeric Hymns, which sent me off on a mad dash to find something else, leading to excavating the Orphic Hymns from a dusty corner of Classics).

2012 - 2014 was pretty miserable -- I still had no plan in June 2012, or December 2012. I did a semester or two of non-credit classes so I could have enough credits for a year of miserable Latin teaching grad school. After getting into a classroom with actual children, I realized that that would never work out, especially with New York State's guidelines for teaching Latin, which are terrible. I got my first office job in August 2014, and getting paid was nice, but everything else was miserable -- the organization didn't do much, so I had nothing to do, but the President's wife didn't want to admit that it did nothing, so I had to account for every minute. I got sick for a week and a half, make the hour and a half trip up to work, and was sent home by a coworker, who said "Since neither of you [me and the other person] is reliable, I can't get sick." I moved out of my parents' apartment and into a fourth-floor walk-up closet with four roommates. Towards the end of my time at this job, I had anxiety attacks so bad I couldn't move my hands. I went to Italy for two weeks and then was let go the day I got back, which was, honestly, fine.

I looked for work for three months, found a fairly decent job, had to move out of my apartment (but found one about three times the size for the same rent), liked my job, got tired of my job, was let go after a budget hiccup, looked for work for nine months, with varying intensity, stressed, cried, had lots of migraines, went to the ER, dealt with bureaucracy, and generally felt like hell.

And throughout it all, I worried about ever finding love -- that I was unloveable; that I was incapable of strong feeling; that no one who could fill even two of my many needs existed. I was awkward; I didn't know what people talked about; I couldn't find friends, much less lovers. I fell out of love with New York gradually, but realized towards the end of 2017 -- the promise of the city, I realized, was for other people. People who had the energy to go to the opera on a Tuesday and then work on a Wednesday. People who wanted to go to bars. People who could do more than one thing on any given day. Most of all, people who had money.

In March of 2018, in one of the worst months of my life (I had a migraine every day that month; I was completely unmedicated, and therefore exhausted, depressed, and in pain), I sent a facebook message to the second person I kissed, who I'd met at camp when I was twelve and kissed as a counselor at 18, facebook messaged for a while, and then, after he stopped answering, had thought about on and off over the years. I didn't write about reasons in my journal at the time, and I'm a little mad, because I don't know why. A message from Aphrodite herself, I guess (and hopefully Hera was looking over her shoulder). I didn't really have high hopes -- I thought he wouldn't answer, or that it would be awkward and unpleasant. When he answered, two days after I sent the message, we talked for five hours. I found out he was in Austin and told myself nothing could ever happen.

He visited for the first time on April 21st. We took standing room tickets to what turned out to be Anna Netrebko's first Tosca. I made no romantic overtures. We'd both established that we were single, but nothing else. The next day, after the Met Museum, I asked him onto my bed and, after a while, we kissed. He visited again in May, and then the break from May to late August was agonizing. I started looking at Austin job listings.

And now I live in Texas. I work; I drive; I take care of plants on my patio; I cook; I love. I could never have imagined this in March 2011. It's so much better than anything I could have imagined.

So I was totally writing an Epic Iliad AU, in which Achilles totally disregards what Athena tells him to do and kills Agamemnon in book I. And I guess I took a fairly long break. But anyway, book IV is
( here )

OH MY GOD, y'all, I started a project and didn't abandon it immediately! of course, there is still plenty of time to abandon it yet, but whatever. So.

( Book II )
Book I

I actually just finished a book that I loved unreservedly! or well, I think I had some reserves, but I forget what they were, so that's close enough. The book was Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale, which is about - well, it's about New York, and love, and magic, and winter. I can't summarize, and I'm not even going to try. My point is, everyone should go read it. Also A Kingdom Far and Clear, which is a "kid's book" but whatever, it's gorgeous in prose and presentation.

Blood for a Borgia is quite awful. This awfulness resides mainly in the prose, since the plot, although it starts a little more than halfway through the book, is quite good, and there are no egregious mistakes in characterization. (Although Giovanni Sforza goes from limp-wristed to killing Giovanni Borgia pretty quickly.) So yeah, quotes:

“The heavy dews of passion drowned all else in her as she thrilled to him.” From, what else, a sex scene. A sex scene that starts the book and in which Giovanni Borgia tells his lover all about contemporary politics.

“That’s the trouble with Italy. There’s no national army.” Man, that is possibly the most anachronistic sentence I have ever read. It’s like “And then Caesar disposed of the assassins with his laser gun.”

“He was fabulously wealthy, ambitious, well-connected, powerful…and now he was dead.” Because really. That sentence happened.

“You daren’t trust yourself. You live the life of a zombi.” Did they even know about zombies in renaissance Italy? Or does zombi mean something else that Google and I know nothing of?

“There’s enough circumstantial evidence against him.” Evidently renaissance Italian justice systems worked exactly the same as 20th century American ones.

"Amazed, he confronted her, surprise in every feature of his face."

Also, pet peeve alert! Italian thrown in to "make it more authentic" or something. As in "Diavolo! I must now say some stilted exposition!"

And Iago Lanuto is referred to as Giovanni Borgia's "evil genius" more times than you can shake a lamb's tail at. Further "ugh": Iago Lanuto is not a historical character. Real subtle there, Mr. Gaunt.

I also disapprove of Lucrezia showing up very briefly and being characterized as a silly child. Of course. Because I like Lucrezia as a schemer, because it's cool.

I'd been eying "German Literary Fairy Tales" for a while. It's always interesting to see attempts to write fairy tales, because they hardly ever work. A while ago, I read Goethe's attempt, simply called "The Fairy Tale,"* which is beautiful and strange, but fails as a fairy tale because it's too complicated. It's part of the nature of fairy tales that there are strange things, but that not everything is strange, and very little is symbolic. In Goethe's fairy tale nearly everything is fantastic: the ferryman can't accept gold as a fee, but only living things; the old woman can't carry living things, as they appear heavy to her, but stones are light.

The earlier tales are similar to Goethe's. Novalis' Klinsohr's Tale is evidently a response to the Goethe, but is not nearly as well translated, so it seems weaker. A common theme is the need to reject the worlds show in the stories. In "The New Melusine," the hero marries an elf princess** and puts on her magic ring, which makes him minuscule like her, but grows tired of his life as an elf prince, saws off the magic ring with a file, and goes back to his life as a poor layabout. In several of the stories the hero is presented with a choice between a supernatural woman and a good peasant girl. The supernatural woman is invariably the wrong choice.

Two stories stand out: Theodor Storm's "Hinzelmeier: A Thoughtful Story" and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's "Tale of the 672nd Night." In the first, a young man grows up with apparently ageless parents. He discovers the secret of their eternal youth: his mother is a Rose Maiden, and his father has fallen in love with her and found her, which grants him her immortality. There are certain men who are destined to be Rose Lords, and fall in love with the Rose Maidens, if they can find them. If he doesn't, both he and the Rose Maiden are doomed. Hinzelmeier, distracted by the World and the promise of the Philosopher's Stone meets his Rose twice but cannot keep her. Not only is the premise original, the prose, even in translation, is lovely, and the conclusion sorrowful: Hinzelmeier has failed and has lost his grace forever.

The second story is remarkable not for its plot, since nothing much happens, but for Hofmannsthal's creation of atmosphere. The theme of isolation, too, is apparent, as it often is in his work. The main character of the story, a merchant's son, sees a beautiful servant girl, but her beauty "fills him with longing but not desire" - he is not truly part of the world. At the end he is killed by accident by a horse, and as he is dying he hates everything: there is no revelation.***

This, like many of the stories, is not really a fairy tale. The term is used because the authors certainly wouldn't have thought of themselves as writing speculative fiction, even had the term existed.

--
*While trying to find the text online, which it no longer seems to be, I have found this, which involves Roscrusians. No but really.
**If "The New Melusine" were a current fantasy story, it would be universally panned. So the elves were among the first creations of God, but they tried to take over the world, so God created dragons to fight them. But dragons were accursed, so He created giants to fight the dragons. The giants tried to take over the world too, so He created good knights to fight them and live in harmony with the elves.
***Both stories I enjoyed are beautiful failures.

Because I'm a sucker for anything set before 1500 and written before 1990, I read Miranda Seymour's The Goddess, which is about Helen of Troy. It was kind of a letdown: I was picturing awesomely bad, and it gave me mediocre. Also I have realized that I probably shouldn't read anything with Homeric characters because I will probably nitpick it TO DEATH.

The main problem was that her characterization was all over the place. It was really hard to tell if Seymour knew that her main characters were kind of unpleasant people or not, which is always annoying. Like, Paris sleeps with everyone (and so does Helen) and by everyone I mean everyone. For Paris it's Penthesilea, for Helen Odysseus. And neither of those makes much sense, especially Odysseus. I MEAN. This is not the place to go into My Ideal Odysseus (ok, it's basically Homer's minus the infidelity), but I think it's a big deal that he turned down Helen.* And I'm pretty sure that the deal with Penthesilea is that, well, she doesn't really have a point, but whatever. Not sleeping with Paris.

So anyway, she sort of reinvents Paris as this great warrior, in the face of all Homeric characterization. Remember that time* when Paris destroyed Menelaus in a duel and Menelaus had to be saved by Aphrodite? I don't either, because exactly the opposite happened. Also evidently Paris is the first to think of using archery from horseback, which I am pretty sure would be difficult with no stirrups. Also remember when Helen gets sick of Paris and doesn't want to sleep with him? Yeah, that doesn't happen.

Which brings us to oddities in the storyline. It starts out with Helen's childhood, and a poor man's Renault/Graves female vs male cult. Seymour can't seem to decided between Helen being basically nice but inhumanly beautiful or actually a bad person. She may or may not have gotten Castor and Pollux killed by encouraging them to go out on a raid (but really Menelaus killed them. or something). Skipping the oath Odysseus makes everyone take to go to war if Helen is ever kidnapped, which you might think would be kind of important, Helen marries Menelaus but he humiliates her and is really upset when she turns out to be barren and then he sleeps with a slave girl and Helen is miserable.

And then Paris comes and, you know, is kind of a douche (actually we get a taste of his douchitude when he's growing up and then when he actually goes to Troy. And I really can't tell if she knows he's a douche or not.) and Takes Her Away From All This. So they go to Troy and chill there for a while. The start of the war isn't actually in Homer so I don't really care, but then she decides to condense the ten years of the war into about two, which bothered me in the movie and bothers me now. And she skips Diomedes and Odysseus' night raid, which is quite important to the fall of Troy. And Helen doesn't fall out of love with Paris.

I know I'm harping on that a bit, but it's a fairly important part of her Homeric character that she feels bad about going (Many men have been slain for the sake of bitch-face me) and that she doesn't love Paris anymore.

Also I really hate her Hector and Andromache. Actually I just hate her characters in general. To really follow Homeric characterization, you'd have to have everyone be basically good: Hector is especially good, Agamemnon sometimes less than good. But Homer doesn't do villains (except Thersites) or just nasty people, which Seymour does a lot of.*

In any case, Helen helps Odysseus come up with the Trojan Horse idea, when she meets him disguised as a beggar (and then sleeps with him). This episode, if not the conceiving of the Horse, is purely Homeric and show a thing that happens very often: Seymour mixing good Homeric events and weird things that didn't happen. So then Helen goes home with Menelaus, his slave girl kills him, Helen gets exiled and then hanged as an offering to the Goddess by her old childhood friend. Really.

The end is basically a whirlwind tour through all the myths about Helen's return: Odysseus and Menelaus make up the Helen in Egypt story to save face, the Helen Dendritis thing is her being sacrificed by the friend.

So I didn't hate it, but it wasn't very good at all, and not even entertainingly bad. But it did make me think about characterization in Homeric novels. You, the generic Bronze Age listener, wouldn't raise your hand, in the circle around the fire, listening to the bard, and say "Excuse me, honored bard, but last week we had a guy here who insisted that Odysseus was faithful to Penelope. And clearly he is righter than you." So why do we hold modern writers, who are essentially carrying on the bardic tradition in written form, to higher standards? Except that Paris' unmanliness probably would have been constant.*

Indulging a bit here, I've always been Team Menelaus at least a little bit, and I don't know why. But really, is there anything wrong with her liking him? Menelaus is not a bad guy in Homer, really. He's a typical warrior, but he doesn't do anything actively douchey, unlike pretty much anything else.

IN SUM: I don't know if I'd recommend it. Maybe if you had free time and wanted to take my copy off my hands.*

---
*Actually quite a bit of what I'm complaining about isn't Homeric and I'm not sure of the sources for it (it was in d'Aulaire's!) Like, did you know that the thing about Thetis dipping Achilles in the Styx was a 1st century AD thing? I did not.
*Iliad 3, 1-37
*Especially women, which is a whole other story. Look, I understand your point that all the women hate Helen for her beauty, but it's still kind of awful that none of your women have characters outside Helen or their husbands.
*Seymour has him fighting with a bow, and being praised for it. People. The Greeks thought that bow-fighting was unmanly for, like, ever.
*This is me steadfastly not mentioning that kind of embarrassing and pointless scene in which Chinese people and Nubians show up to be Trojan allies. Yeah, I dunno either.

I'm going to justify this by saying that I need something to read while I'm on the bike, but really that's a lie. Anyway, I read "The Sword of Attila," whose tagline is "He feared no man, no god, and no nation - and now Rome itself would know his wrath." And it's pretty much as melodramatic as that makes it seem. Nonetheless, by the end I was really non-ironically into it.

There were problems, yes: I wish he had better female characters. Honoria is a hilariously terrible person in history - she proposes to Attila because her brother imprisoned her!* And so you could and probably should do a lot more with her than having her be defined by sleeping with/wanting to sleep with people. Aetius' wife, while not important to the story historically, could be fleshed out in a novel, and, well, I forget her name. I think it's Priscilla. Also there's a developmentally delayed man who can barely manage one word at a time, and of course he sacrifices himself heroically for our hero.

But Our Hero is pretty damn heroic (it really should have been called "The Story of Aetius' Awesome or something. I am not good at names, but the point is it's less about Attila and more about Aetius.). And likable, or maybe that's just because he's my type, to a tee. I mean, he's 1. fiercely loyal to a doomed cause 2. he's a great man who is surrounded and subordinate to lesser men 3. he's lean and dark-haired. And he goes and learns Hunnic fighting! and one of the Huns has a life-debt to him! In short, Aetius is awesome and makes the book. Attila, tbh, is kind of boring, although there is a pretty awesome scene at the end in which he begs Aetius to kill him after being defeated at Châlons.

Even the prose wasn't too bad. Not great, and with a certain tendency to purple when it was aiming for lyrical, but not awful, the way too many historical novels are.

So as a whole, I'd recommend it, if you're looking for a quick read and like awesome Roman generals.
__
*NB: Facts may well be drawn from the Huns Age of Empires II campaign.**
**fun story about that campaign: there's one scenario where you get gold for destroying minor settlements. I always ran out and ended up having to attack Byzantium.*** So Byzantium totally got destroyed by the Huns in my alternate history.
***Attacking Byzantium is a pain. I can see why it didn't fall till 1453.