reading the preface to Timothy gantz' Early Greek Myth and I need to roll this up and smoke it and/or pileverize it so I can snort a line. Will type out some quotes later but essentially he's saying what I keep saying here: we are so used to mythological handbooks presenting the myths as set in stone (albeit with a presumed built in flexibility based on a limited number of deviating versions) that it is now necessary to uncompile the myths back into their successive iterations. and he says it SO COMPREHENSIVELY

one of my favorite ways to recommend the bartimaeus sequence to people is "have you ever wished harry potter was actually about british imperialism? did you ever think to yourself 'no, if british people had magic, they'd be way more evil'? boy do i have a book series for you". because it's literally true. i love these books. read the bartimaeus sequence now.

the devil's historians: how modern extremists abuse the medieval past, kaufman and sturtevant

It's kind of incredible just how much the Country House Murder Mystery genre is, at its roots, a reaction to WWI and the social change that sprang from it.

go on

So I've been healing up from surgery, meaning I've been catching up on my TBR pile, and my three great loves are a) middle grade anything, b) SF/F with good worldbuilding and characterization, c) murder mysteries without too much grit or grime.

In the pursuit of c), I've been playing Ace Attorney, but I've also been reading whatever Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers I can grab off Project Gutenberg. Since it's exclusively the ones in the public domain, it's their oldest stuff- pre 1924.

And the thing about all of these 20s murder mysteries is that they're incredibly haunted by The Great War, in the same way that most mysteries from the 2000s are haunted by the War on Terror or many mysteries coming out now are Haunted by COVID.

Lord Peter Wimsey has screaming dissociative PTSD flashbacks from the trenches. In Murder on the Links, Poirot is a displaced person- Belgium isn't a safe place to be an aging police inspector at the moment- the narrator has been discharged with an injury, and one of the main suspects is working as an army nurse.

And like... you can pull a couple threads through here. But if we're talking about the stereotypical Country House Murder Mystery- the two big ones are a) the end of the Old Order, and b) you always find the body and know the cause of death.

A) is pretty obvious- the death of a patriarch (or matriarch) is a microcosm of the slow decline of the British nobility. It's a way to give the sense of "Everything Your Worldview Depended On Has Fallen Apart" a face. Every dirty secret we don't speak of has come to light, all at once; every lie that supported The Way Things Are is revealed for what it really is. (Dulce et decorum est, anyone?) The local lord is dead, and no one is going to replace him. The world has irrevocably changed.

B) is something that @bespokeminutiae pointed out to me when I mentioned this- in a country house murder mystery, you always know where the body is, and you always know what happened to it. In a world where a lot of people lost loved ones in some far off place, without getting to see the body or say goodbye? That's a hugely comforting fantasy.

(Incidentally, this is why Knives Out is the best Country House Murder Mystery of the past 25 years- it understands that some themes are inherent to the genre and says something new that still engages with those themes.)

Ooooo, this conversation continues very interestingly with the Japanese literary equivalent -- honkaku-ha (本格派), the "orthodox school" of "classical whodunnits," which by definition followed the rules of detective fiction codified in the west by the Golden Age writers and gained prominence just before, during and after World War 2.

I say during and after because that's when Edogawa Ranpo was active, by far the most famous and prominent Japanese mystery writer of the era. Ranpo started in the 1920s and wrote well into the 50s. He's best known in the west for his recurring detective character, Kogoro Akechi, who's basically the Japanese Sherlock Holmes -- complete with being mostly an urban character who lives and works in and around Tokyo.

Though I'm personally more familiar with Yokomizo Seishi and his Kousuke Kindaichi mysteries, which started in the aftermath of the war and hew very close to the Country House Murder Mysteries, with the twist that said country houses tend to be former samurai estates on tiny isolated islands or in rural mountain villages. Kindaichi himself is also a detective much more in the vein of Dame Agatha, being a young war vet with some odd ticks that make people underestimate him (he has a stutter and always looks frumpy because he scratches his head really hard when he's thinking) but nonetheless solving his cases with keen observation and patient deduction.

And in the same way, you can feel the haunting presence of the war and the dissolution of old social orders. In place of declining British nobility, you have the crumbling remnants of samurai families. There's a nine-year timeskip between Kindaichi's first and second novels, during which he gets drafted and winds up in a POW camp; he stumbles into like the next three cases just trying to bring his dead war buddies' last messages back to their families. And there's this looming specter of westernization, what it means for the old traditions, which should be preserved and if it might not be better to let some of them die.

One thing honkaku-ha introduced to the mix that sets them apart from the western tradition is a tone and aesthetic taken from Japanese horror. Where western mysteries can be familiar and almost comforting enough to earn the label 'cozy,' honkaku-ha are often stark and cold, with murders defined by their violence or grotesque stagings and the stories themselves seeped in elements of supernatural or erotic overtones (Edogawa in particular had a fascinating friendship with an anthropologist known for his research on the history of homosexuality in Japan). The two best-known Kindaichi novels, The Inugami Curse and Village of the Eight Graves, toe the line between classical whodunnits and gothic horror.

It's a very interesting contrast, given that this (honkaku-ha) is very much a genre that's always been in part about opening a line of conversation with the western tradition, to see how the threads of influence get carried over.

Part of the problem is that a few historians in the 70s and 80s argued that romantic friendship was seen as normative and was completely socially acceptable. Since then historians have done in-depth research showing that romantic friendship was only semi-socially acceptable and was seen as sexually suspicious by some people. But every time someone suggests romantic friendship might be part of queer history they're told "that's just the way people spoke back then" by someone who read a Tumblr post based on a Blogspot post based on the Wikipedia page that was based on a couple of articles from the 1970s.

Emma Donoghue does a good job of explaining the nuances of romantic friendship in Passions Between Women (tho I do think the chapter on female husbands has a lot of room for improvement). She gives a good summery of what I'm talking about here:

Views on romantic friendship varied from person-to-person and even one person could hold seemly contradictory options. Donoghue explains:

Donoghue also wrote the article ‘Random Shafts of Malice’: The Outings of Anne Damer which deals with the rumors of sapphism that surrounded Anne Damer and her romantic friendships.

Another book I have to recommend is Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America by Rachel Hope Cleves that covers the romantic friendship/marriage of Charity Bryant & Sylvia Drake. Cleves does a good job of explaining a lot of the nuances of romantic friendships semi-social acceptability:

She also highlights how some romantic friendships did induce sex:

thank you! These are exactly the kind of recommendations I was hoping for.

i WISH more people knew about age of bronze, it's literally the 'historically accurate' comprehensive and GAY adaptation of the trojan war all the accuracy warriors are clamoring for

it's a comic series written and drawn entirely by Eric Shanower, started in 1998 with those exact parameters

historically situated in the Mycenaean/Hittite cultures

drawing from nearly every text on the war from Homer to Shakespeare

explicit about the possibility that achilles+patroclus may have been meant as lovers. Shanower is gay himself, and found it important to depict them as such all the way back in 1998.

it can be read here in part or here completely (🏴‍☠️), but i also highly recommend supporting the artist, since this is a multi-decade passion project.

@karkkidoeswriting #this looks so cool!!#i'll need to check it out#one thing that jumbs out to me though is that mycenean dress#like they were in fact having their tits out#like there's frescos where the girlies are covered by more closed neckline#but i've never seen an example where they were wearing an underdress like this#why bring modern ideas of modesty and chastity to history?

that may be because scholars are not entirely sure if there was one! it's hard to interpret dress from only frescoes and statuettes, but especially scholar Bernice Jones is doing her damnedest. IIRC she argues that most of the flouncy dresses we see on frescoes are sacred dress or court dress, and that they were loose skirts over one or several simpler tunics, which were worn for everyday wear. in the same sense, the 'jacket' is also such a tunic. i think she argues for no undergarment, actually!

but check this figure from the shrine of the goddess at mycenae:

and the dancing lady of Knossos may also be wearing an undershirt (unless that is an incredibly simple necklace and bracelet):

and, to be fair to Shanower, he does depict the ladies with their breasts bare here and there! he alternates between the two (either, i think, to indicate an older vs. a younger generation or a sacred setting, as said before)

also paging @dapurinthos who knows a lot more about this than me

can i also recommend this paper by elena giusti about carthage in the aeneid as a heterotopia!

I found out about a 2022 translation of the Metamorphoses that I have not read yet (a crime), it's by Stephanie McCarter. Some reviews say it should "come with a trigger warning" and I think that's the best way to advertise a translation of Ovid.

Oh, she gets him.

Review to “Glorious Exploits” by Ferdia Lennon

Thucydides for size.

This has to be the best book that I’ve read in several years, or the one who scratches the greatest number of itches among various interests. It begins as a comedy of war, drawing on Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War and Plutarch’s accounts of Athenian prisoners of war who survived the aftermath of the failed Sicilian expedition by reciting lines from Euripides but also—in more recent memory—recreates the emotional weight of episodes described by survivors of 20th century wars. The darkness is viewed, at the start, obliquely, but if the reader does not see it, it is because they choose not to, because it is always present.

As time passes, and the Athenians in the quarry continue to starve, the option will be taken away from them. It is a lot of fun, and I think a certain kind of reader needs to be tricked this way into acknowledging certain realities. You laugh along with one character, an unemployed potter helping his friend to stage a play, while another, right next to him, is experiencing the horrors of starvation—and two minutes ago he witnessed his loved one clubbed to death by a man who lost his son to the invading army. They are experiencing, in simultaneous, two completely different stories. The reader holds these contradictions within themselves for a great part of the story.

Another episode, from close to beginning of the book, as not to spoil the tale: a drunken evening at the pub, described with great accuracy to those settings where such things as pubs exist. An insecure man negs a woman who happens to be a slave, captured in war.

It is effective at what it does, and I commend the author for finishing it, for not giving up—I listened to an interview with him where he said that it took him seven years, on and off. It was worth it not only for the recognition he received for his efforts but because it is a contribution to the human culture. More and more we need to find ways for people to face certain topics that they would shelter themselves from, now when they are most important, even something as basic as recognising the humanity of others. It is a well-researched story set in Classical Greece, but it could not be successful if it weren’t also actual. I have seen some criticisms about how you cannot joke about some of the topics covered in the book, but perhaps it is not for those people, who already understand what they refer to. They can move on to more serious matters, but there are others who understand only through jokes, through lightness, or they feel threatened and cease to pay attention.

I’ll not ruin the ending, but it was the piece that completed the puzzle, in more than one way. I laughed, I cried, I cared a lot. And it made me want to reread The History of the Peloponnesian War.

just read a really excellent article by Dr. Rachel Schine that really gets to the core of my issues with the Global Middle Ages (which I know I have articulated [very poorly] on here before!) and I think more people should also read it (and there are more articles on the idea of the Global Middle Ages in this journal issue as well!):

except from schrodinger "what is life" (1944)

But it may be asked: Are there really no other endurable structures except molecules? Does not a gold coin, for example, buried in a tomb for a couple of thousand years, preserved the traits of the portrait stamped on it? It is true that the coin consist of an enormous number of atoms, but surely we are in this case not inquired to attribute the mere preservation of shape to the statistics of large numbers. The same remark applies to a neatly developed batch of crystals we find embedded in a rock, where it must have been for geological periods without changing.

That leads us to the second point I want to elucidate. The cases of a molecule, a solid, a crystal, are not really different. In the light of present knowledge they are virtually the same. . . .

The reason for this is that the atoms forming a molecule, whether there be few or many of them, are united by forces of exactly the same nature as the numerous atoms which build up a true solid, a crystal. The molecule presents the same solidity of structure as a crystal. Remember that it is precisely this solidity on which we draw to account for the permanence of the gene!

Title: Weil da war etwas im Wasser Author: Luca Kieser First published: 2023 Dates read: 27.07. – 09.08.2024 Category: first time read, own book, German literature, literary fiction Rating: 3.5/5 The book in five words or less: fascinating with a weird ending

My thoughts:

Weil da war etwas im Wasser – the title roughly translates to ‘Because there was something in the water’ – has one of the most unique narrative perspectives I’ve read in a long while: The novel is primarily told from the perspective of the arms of a giant deep-sea squid. Swimming along the bottom of the ocean somewhere in the Antarctic, the squid encounters a deep-sea cable and, inspired by the unexpected encounter, the arms start spinning a tale of many voices and many strands. Part family saga, part climate change novel, Weil da war etwas im Wasser equally touches on large-scale global connections as well as on personal histories, family ties, and localized stories. And in between, the occasional reflection about monstrosity and the nature of human interaction with the environment shines through to give the novel a reflective, slightly more philosophical touch.  

What I found fascinating about the novel was not just its unique narrative structure – in addition to the voices of the squid’s many arms, the book also includes a diary, a family tree, the occasional footnote, in-text references that invite the reader to jump between different parts of the text, and an autofictional portion at the end – I also liked the way Kieser connects global ecological phenomena like the impact of climate change on krill, giant squids and the Antarctic environment to his characters’ interconnected personal stories and family history. In fact, I was willing to go very far with this experimental, literary book and was able to see how most of the disparate parts fit together to make a narrative whole – until the last, autofictional part (about the author’s struggle with writing and, of all things, his experience getting circumcised) lost me. Were it not for that last bit, the purpose of which eludes me, I’d have given the novel four or even five stars. I’d still recommend the novel, albeit with the caveat that it is best read by readers who really enjoy experimental literary fiction.

Read if you like: giant squids, experimental novels, fragmentary narration, climate change fiction

need to read more of this genre (petrofiction)

found this book in open access: Oil Fictions: World Literature and Our Contemporary Petrosphere (2021) by Stacey Balkan and Swaralipi Nandi on jstor

augh i was trying to write a post articulating why I'm so interested in Heiner Müller and Peter Weiss at the moment, but it was all long-winded and ill-phrased and awful

short version: Weiss and Müller were devoted Marxists writing in a world where the class revolution had already happened, but its potential for remaking the world had been utterly destroyed by Stalinism. Instead of justice and equality, they had gotten brutal government repression once again. So Müller conducts, in place of a plan for a new world, a "dialogue with the dead," while in his plays Weiss observes (in Marat/Sade, in Trotsky in Exile, in Holderlin) the failures of various revolutions. It's the constant conflict of Weiss and Müller's convictions with the unignorable reality of what those convictions birthed in other hands.