A change of pace: Alcman and "One Direction"

English: Alcman, Poem in hexameters (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 I was in Toronto this weekend, where I went to the pantomime "Snow White".  At one point the handsome prince and all the little forest animals gather around Snow White, who is standing on a tree stump saying "oh I'm really nothing very special, why would anyone want to look at me?"  The prince and animals responded with very good production number of  of One Direction's " What Makes You Beautiful". 

I had never really listened to the lyrics before, and I was amazed, on being forced to listen this time (while gagging a little to be honest) when I realised the parallels between the "virtuous young woman" performance of gender described in "What Makes You Beautiful" and that enacted in  Alcman's "Hagesichora" hymn. In both, what makes a young woman beautiful is is that "you're beautiful because you don't know you're beautiful" - the line is from One Direction, but Alcman would be completely on board.

The entire text of the Alcman hymn, in an old-fashioned translation, can be found here: http://www.theoi.com/Text/LyraGraeca1B.html . I have cut and pasted a sample stanza here: 

 See you not first that the courser is of Enetic blood, and secondly that the tresses that bloom upon my cousin Hagesichora¹⁰ are like the purest gold? and as for her silvern face, how shall I put it you in express words? Such is Hagesichora; and yet she whose beauty shall run second not unto hers but unto Agido’s, shall run as courser Colaxaean to pure Ibenian-bred; for as we bear along her robe to Orthia, these our Doves¹¹ rise to fight for us¹² amid the ambrosial night not as those heavenly Doves but brighter, aye even as Sirius himself.

Eva Stehle, in Performance and Gender in Ancient Greece: Nondramatic Poetry in Its Setting (Princeton, 1997), argues that Alcman's hymn will have been sung by a chorus of young women, possibly at a wedding, and that it will have been used as an occasion for a public demonstration of the appropriate performance of their gender. The chorus of young women praises the beauty of first young one woman and then another, apparently also members of the chorus. However, the chorus never praises its own beauty. The chorus never says "I am beautiful", or "We are beautiful". Instead, it directs the gaze of the viewer to other young women. 

By directing the gaze of the young men in the audience to the beauty of the young women in the chorus, the singers direct the audience's thoughts appropriately towards beauty - their own included - sexuality, and marriage. However, the chorus never owns or acknowledges its own beauty. Each young woman in the chorus acknowledges the beauty of the other members of the chorus, while remaining modestly and charmingly unaware of her own.  The chorus makes a gift of its beauty to the community, but never tries to wield the power of its beauty and fertility for itself. This is the appropriate performance of gender for unmarried young women in Sparta, argues Stehle: they are supposed to be beautiful, and they are supposed to be modestly unaware of it.  The chorus is directing the audience's attention to both aspects of this performance.

"What Makes You Beautiful" is thus an exact parallel.  The young woman addressed in the song is apparently beautiful, but she is beautiful precisely because she doesn't know it; she doesn't own it, she doesn't use it for herself, she does not wield the power of her own beauty. If she did know she was beautiful, she would no longer be attractive.  It is precisely her modesty, her insecurity, the way she looks at the ground instead of looking any male in the eye – these are the things that make her beautiful.  A sample stanza:

Baby you light up my world like nobody else,
The way that you flip your hair gets me overwhelmed,
But when you smile at the ground it ain't hard to tell,
You don't know,
Oh oh,
You don't know you're beautiful,
If only you saw what I can see,
You'll understand why I want you so desperately,
Right now I'm looking at you and I can't believe,
You don't know,
Oh oh,
You don't know you're beautiful,
Oh oh,
That's what makes you beautiful

So c-come on,
You got it wrong,
To prove I'm right,
I put it in a song,
I don't know why,
You're being shy,
And turn away when I look into your eye eye eyes,

(Full lyrics here: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/onedirection/whatmakesyoubeautiful.html )

 The ideal performance of gender in a young woman of Sparta in the eighth century BC, or in the object of adoration for the singers of "What Makes You Beautiful" 2800 years later,  is the same: to be beautiful but unaware of it; to have the power to make men desire, but never to consciously wield that power.   

It's a tricky line to walk, the razor edge of having beauty, even knowing what beauty is, but never seeing it in yourself; because as soon as you know you have it, you are no longer a desirable girl, because you are no longer "innocent".   You might be a desirable woman, but that is a very different thing, more dangerous, more culpable,  more likely to attract anger and blame. 

The only truly safe, utterly non-blameworthy way to  wield the power of being an attractive female in public in ancient Sparta or in 21st-century North America, to  reap the rewards of your beauty without being blamed for inappropriate sexuality, is to perform the difficult maneuver of being beautiful while apparently being unaware of that beauty. 

At the same time, the ideal performance of gender in a young woman in either culture will attract male attention towards the beauty - and modesty - of which she is apparently unaware. The performance is wasted if the male audience misses it, and just carries on obliviously thinking of other things, football perhaps, or homework, or some book they just read.  

So the ideal performance of gender in a young woman directs male attention to her beauty and her modesty alike. Point out that your friends are beautiful, just to get the male audience's mind on the subject. Walk into a room and flip your hair, and smile, but at the ground – because if you actually looked a man in the eye, it would be clear that you knew the effect you were having. It would be clear that you were actually trying to have that effect.  And then you'd be a bitch, and not beautiful at all.

The cognitive dissonance this mandatory performance of gender imposes on the billions of young women trained to think that beauty is essential, but that believing you don't have it yourself is also essential, is - I remark as an aside - naturally frequently catastrophic.  But it wasn't until I actually had to listen to the lyrics of "What Makes You Beautiful" that I realized not only that we had heard all this before, but how long we had been hearing it for.

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The research day

I was not going to do this, but just this once:

Scheduled:
an entire free day with no scheduled interruptions! I can get some work done at last!

Actual events of the day
9:00 am - 9:45 am phone call & conversation with family member
10:00-10:05 am  Pet clinic calls re: cat test results.
10:30 am - 10:40 am Vet from pet clinic calls with options re: cat treatment.  None really palatable, all very expensive except option where cat dies in pain.
11:00-11:15 am Perimeter drain cleaners show up; prices outrageous; negotiation not possible; leave, perimeter drains uncleaned
11:30 am roofer calls to schedule repair
12:00-12:15 pm drugstore calls re: cat medication, for some reason requires all my biographical data
12:15-1:15 pm answering urgent email.  Then distracted into answering less urgent email.
1:30 pm son home from school (PD day) and suggests that he is hungry now. Is there lunch?
1:45 pm phone rings AGAIN. Car-related.
2:15 pm realize I'm missing guest lecture at 2:30.
2:30 pm drug store phones again. Apparently cat's heart medication is urgent.  Must go and pick it up NOW NOW NOW.
3:05  back home; can finally start work ... but the phone rings again; I don't answer, but waste time worrying that it might have been important ...
3:30 pm children's piano lesson ... It's time to go for a walk anyway.
4:30-6:00 pm ferry child to Aikido class, wait in parking lot with laptop answering email, ferry child home.

And that is it for the research day.

Solution:
Work in the library, or unplug the phone.

Patroclus' aristeia, not

Ulysses (with a pilos) and Greek warriors around the body of Patroclus. Detail of a silver oinochoe dedicated ,by Q. Domitius Tutus, made in Italy, first half of the 1st century AD. From the Berthouville treasure. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Homer now gives us 200 lines of Greeks slaughtering Trojans.  First every Greek leader kills his own Trojan, a kind of bring-your-own-(dead)-Trojan buffet; then Patroclus starts slaughtering them wholesale.  We get descriptions of how each one died as long as they're being killed by different Greek chieftains, but when Patroclus steps in we just get a list of names of the Trojans he slaughters.  Oswald gives us nothing but a list of 21 names; we aren't told who killed each one and she doesn't differentiate between the ones killed by other Greeks and the list of those killed by Patroclus.  The list ends with the name of Sarpedon's charioteer, Thrasymelos, which in Homer is preceded by the lengthy discussion between Zeus and Hera about the coming death of Zeus' son Sarpedon, which Zeus would like to avoid (and which is important because he is Zeus' son).

The importance of the slaughter in Homer is that the tide of battle has now turned back, and the Greeks are winning again; and that Patroclus may be primarily important as Achilles' close friend and companion, but he is a formidable warrior in his own right.  Since he's going to die soon he needs to be given weight and importance of his own, and this aggregation of deaths gives him that.  Even the Trojans killed by the other Greeks redound to Patroclus' credit because they occur after his arming scene and because his appearance has heartened the Greeks to go back on the attack.  Oswald elides the foreshadowing of the death of Sarpedon, which gives weight to all the deaths, and to the death of Thrasymelos, because here as elsewhere she lets individual deaths stand on their own.

After this list Oswald gives us this simile:

Like hawk wings cut through a sheet of starlings
Like wing-scissors open and close
Through a billow of jackdaws

This comes from a simile that actually shows up fairly close to this scene in Homer.  After Patroclus kills Sarpedon, a Trojan kills a Greek (whom we've never heard of before) over his body, and Patroclus, enraged at his sudden new BFF's death, returns to the Sarpedon's corpse:

"And he went straight through the fore-fighters like a hawk
swiftly, who terrifies the jackdaws and starlings;
so you, horse-driving Patroklos, drove off the Lykians and Trojans,
and your heart was angered for your companion."

I initially thought that Oswald was using the simile exactly the same way, and even about the same person (Patroclus), but actually not quite.  In Homer, the hawk is the subject.  In Oswald, the hawk doesn't appear; only the hawk wings, the hawk's effect, like scissors, cutting through a sheet of starlings, a billow of jackdaws.  Homer's hawk is Patroclus; Oswald's hawk is death, impersonal; the starlings and jackdaws are the living beings here.

Pyraikhmes and Paeonian bison (?)

English: Picture 47 of the Ambrosian Iliad, Achilles sacrificing to Zeus. Français : Image 47 de lIliade ambrosienne, Achille dédiant un sacrifice à Zeus. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Prolonged absence during which I discovered I have arthritis in one hip and moped about it. However, I have bought an expensive chair that makes my hip hurt less, so, back to work.

So: death of Pyraikhmes. (I've worked through a few others since I last posted, but today was Pyraikhmes.) He's important, in the Iliad, because his is the first death after the Greeks are actually chased back to the ships - apparently with very little loss of life, since about a dozen Trojans die for every Greek. Antilochus gets another Trojan, just before the Greeks retreat with the Trojans in headlong pursuit. The Trojans actually manage to set fire to a ship. And at this point, Patroclus persuades Achilles to let him suit up in Achilles' armour and chase off the Trojans. Achilles sacrifices (in vain) to Zeus for Patroclus' safety. Pyraikhmes is the first of the many Trojans Patroclus kills in his subsequent aristeia, culminating, of course, in his own death.

None of this context matters to Oswald; we don't know which side Pyraikhmes is on or that his death is made significant, in Homer, by the fact that Patroclus is the one who kills him. Here's Homer:

"(Patroklos) hit Pyraikhmes who had led his Paeonian horsemen from the Amydon and the broad waters of the river Axios; the spear struck him on the right shoulder, and with a groan he fell backwards in the dust; on this his men were thrown into confusion, for by killing their leader, who was the finest warrior among them, Patroklos struck panic into them all." (Perseus translation.)

Now here's Oswald:

The River Axius has the silverest sweetest water
It flows through Paeonia
Where there are bison in the hills
And men make curved bows from their horns
To get there you have to go miles over mountains
Some of his men might make it
But not Puraichmes

Some of this she got from the Catalog, where Pyraikhmes and the Paionians are again described, with the addition of the 'crooked bows" (ἀγκυλότοξος) they use and the beauty of the water in the Axios river. I was distracted however by the bison. Homer does not, as far as I can find, mention any bison or mountains anywhere. However, an increasingly obsessed search eventually brought me to Aristotle's History of Animals, which tells me

Aristotle, History of Animals,630a20

Ὁ δὲ βόνασοϛ γίνεται μὲν ἐν τῇ Παοιονία ἐν τῷ ὄρει τῷ Μεσσαπίῳ, δ'ὁρίζει τὴν Παοιονικὴν και τὴν Μαιδικὴν χώραν, καλοῦι δ'αὐτὸν οἱ Παίονεσ μόναπον.". "The 'βόνασος' (bison) lives in Paionia on Mt. Messapion, which borders the lands of Paionia and Media, and the Paionians call it a "monapos".

So as far as I can tell, Oswald takes the 'crooked bows" from the Catalog, adds them to the bison mentioned in Aristotle, and throws in the mountain as well, in a casual display of naked erudition. Pyraikhmes' men get a mention (actually not many of them are going to make it).

A puzzling thing: she then uses the most famous simile in the Iliad, the one where Achilles is chasing Hector around the walls of Troy:

Like a man running in a dream
Can never approach a man escaping
Who can never escape a man approaching (Oswald p. 58)

But here, it's about how Puraichmes is never going to make it home.  But why use it here?  It leaves Puraichmes, and all the other warriors, and us, trapped in the limbo of constant combat, in which no one, including Puraichmes, will ever make it home.   Perhaps that's the point. And also, of course, to increase the significance and magnitude of Puraichmes' death by attaching such a famous simile to it.

In breaking things down into such small bits I am missing such overarching patterns as Oswald's poem has.  But I'll continue doing this for now; I don't have that much farther to go with it; and then go back, and see if I notice larger patterns.

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Myth on the Map

Fresco on canvas mounted on board (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Spent my productive time today looking over Myth on the Map.  I see that two months ago I was wildly optimistic about getting onto a new author: Homer, perhaps, or Pausanias, this summer.  But it is now the end of the summer, and I have spent all the grant money, and we still aren't finished Apollodorus. I don't believe we will ever finish Apollodorus, so there's no point even beginning to wonder what author we should do next. This depresses me.

On the other hand mapping Apollodorus is not such a bad project.  I am unlikely to get any more money from the university for this project, but at least Apollodorus on the Map will be a useful website.

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Dolops, and whirlwinds

English: Menelaus (Ancient Greek: Μενέλαος) was a king of Sparta, the husband of Helen, and a central figure in the Trojan War. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A particularly dense passage today.  In Homer, Dolops tries to kill Meges, remains hopeful of victory even after his spear bounces off Meges' armour and Meges slices off his helmet crest (or possibly yanks off the whole helmet), but is killed by Menelaus, who gets around him and rams a spear through him from behind.  Oswald renders this as Dolops not believing he could die even after his spear fails, even after he loses his helmet:

"It was not until the beak of death
Pushed out through his own chest
That he recognized the wings of darkness".

She follows this with a short simile: 

"Like when god unwinds his whirlwind
A single cloud moves into the middle sky "

which, like most weather similes, took awhile to locate; but it seems to be the beginning & end of a simile from book 16, where Patroclus has routed the Trojan army and the cloud of dust whirling up from their chaotic retreat is like a cloud sent by Zeus when he's sending a storm.  There is  a double shift here from Homer to Oswald.

First,  the single cloud from Zeus heralding a storm = the 'beak of death' heralding Dolops' own death (the "wings of darkness").

But using a simile from the route of the Trojans in this passage, where they're still winning, reminds us of their coming defeat; so the spear through his chest heralds Dolops' death to him, as a single cloud augurs a storm; but Dolops' death, in turn, is the single cloud for us, that augurs the whirlwind of the coming Trojan rout.

Then spent the afternoon, or some of it, contemplating sacrificial virgins.  We have decided to write the easy version of the paper - that is, the chunk that will be the easiest to write, about S1 Buffy - and see if we can find a journal that wants it.

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three balls in the air

Jacques-Louis David - Homer Reciting his Verses to the Greeks - WGA06120 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

First, Myth on the Map.  Spent an hour today in conversation trying to disentangle when we should, and when we shouldn't, indicate group membership in the xml coding.  I don't think like a computer programmer at all and this made my head hurt.

Second, sacrificial virgins.  Agreed that we would go over our notes and meet on Tuesday and decide if we actually want to write this paper, since we both have things we are supposed to be doing and will get more credit for doing. But this would be fun. But.

Third, Oswald p. 56, on the deaths of 2 Greeks and 2 Trojans, in a list  (though she doesn't identify them by group affiliation, which was particularly striking to me as I'd just spent the morning thinking about groups in Homer; in Homer, the group is the whole point; in Oswald, each individual death is the whole point).  She then has a simile which she's pulled from Iliad 12, the battle at the walls where the Trojans and Greeks are flinging boulders at each other:

"As the flakes that fall thick upon a winter's day, when Zeus is minded to snow and to display these his arrows to humankind - he lulls the wind to rest, and snows hour after hour till he has buried the tops of the high mountains, the headlands that jut into the sea, the grassy plains, and the tilled fields of men; the snow lies deep upon the forelands, and havens of the gray sea, but the waves as they come rolling in stay it that it can come no further, though all else is wrapped as with a mantle so heavy are the heavens with snow - even thus thickly did the stones fall on one side and on the other, some thrown at the Trojans, and some by the Trojans at the Achaeans; and the whole wall was in an uproar." 

(Perseus website translation).

Oswald's translation is much prettier, and repurposes, this time from active to passive.  In Homer, the stones thrown by the Greeks and Trojans at each other fall as thickly as snow in a blizzard.  In Oswald, after another list of bodies, it's the deaths; the bodies falling so thickly and fast that they obscure the landscape, the trees, the fields, the harbours and beaches, and are obliterated in the sea.

And it has indeed occurred to me that I would make much faster progress on any one project if I had only one project.

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Home Again

English: Aerial view of the village of Passchendaele (north is to the right of the photo) before and after the Third Battle of Ypres, 1917. Français : Vue aerienne du village de Passendale, avant et après la troisième bataille d'Ypres, en 1917. Le nord est à droite sur les photos. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A CWGC cemetery from the First World War: Tyne Cot in the Ypres Salient (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

THE THIRD BATTLE OF YPRES The Battle of Pilckem Ridge : A British 18 pounder field gun battery taking up new positions close to a communication trench near Boesinghe, 31 July 1917. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Map of the Third Battle of Ypres (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

After a month away, I'm back in Victoria and have finally unpacked and got back to my desk.  Today, Kaletor, Lykophron and Kleitos have all been killed, "it goes on and on" as Oswald remarks, partly because the list of dead soldiers in the Iliad is so bloody long, but partly because those are a sequence of vengeance-deaths.  Ajax kills Kaletor; Hector, enraged at the death of his cousin (N.B. we've never been told that Hector had a cousin called Kaletor until this instant), tries to kill Ajax, misses, and nails Lykophron; Ajax, enraged that his good friend of the family Lykophron who lived with Ajax' family because he'd killed someone back home and whom Ajax honoured like his own father (and we've never been told any of that before either), calls up Teucer to avenge the death.  Teucer sends out a hail of arrows but misses Hector and gets Kleitos, who is just riding up into the thick of the battle to help Hector out.  "It goes on and on".

Oswald skips all the made-up-this-instant retconning Homer inserts to give these deaths some emotional resonance.  First Kaletor, then Lykophron, then Kleitos.  They don't, in Oswald, need some made-up reason for someone important (Ajax, Teucer, Hector) to care about them for their deaths to matter.  Their deaths already matter.

While we were in Belgium went to Ypres and Passchendaele, and the German and Tyne Cot World War 1 cemeteries.  I stood at Ypres, where young men had died by the thousands, mired to the waist in a bog of mud, and blood, and corpses, and ordinance, and mustard gas, and poison, and rain; and knew that I was certainly standing over bodies, or parts of bodies, of soldiers whose corpses had never been found. I thought about the Iliad, where at least the dead, or most of the dead, had names.

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Slayage Day 2

Another day at Slayage, at which we gave our "Sacrificial Virgins" paper, a day early, when I realised this morning that I was going to be on a bus for the airport when our session began tomorrow.  (I'd misread the program).  Fortunately they could fit us into another session at short notice.  Some good questions on inversion, and one excellent point on how the massive plotting mess in the second season of Dollhouse, when Boyd was suddenly and inexplicably retconned (impossibly) into the Big Bad, it was  on the model of the sacrificial virgin (Echo) being sacrificed by her father/protector, which might have been why Joss thought of it, since he likes that pattern (and the pattern of the corruption of mentor figures, perhaps because they always represent authority, thus corporations, thus evil badness, in the Whedonverse).  Though in this particular case that pattern just did not work.

Excellent papers on humour in BtVS vs "Everyone Loves Raymond", "Runaway Heroines" in romance, Buffy and Twilight (BtVS comes off pretty well by comparison with Twilight, in this as in every single other possible comparison - Buffy runs off and is held sternly to account by her friends and family for being selfish and unkind, and her friends and family get on with their lives while she's gone.  Bella runs off and is wildly self-destructive and self-endangering, and the entire damn town runs out to find and save her, and eventually as a result of her spectacular self-destructive emotional blackmail she gets - every single thing she has ever wanted.  So by all means try this at home, girls!)  

Also excellent papers on racism in Hollywood generally, even in St. Joss, and on parenting in the Whedonverse (where Boyd came up again, this time as someone whose model of parenting failed to change from 'fathering' to 'mothering').  I still think the real problem with the Boyd arc is that it was a mistake in the first place, but am intrigued that some readers are trying valiantly to explain it.  There is a lot of interest in Dollhouse generally at this conference; many good papers, and a lot of engaged conversation.  I think perhaps it's been long enough since it ended that we're willing to engage with all of the things that were good about it, and there were a lot, rather than trying to blot the whole thing out of memory because of the catastrophic plot defects in the second season.  Or perhaps that's just me. Nobody has produced a "Dollhouse" collection of papers but it is clearly time someone did.

  And then we all watched Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog, and sang along, and then watched the Singalong Commentary, which I had never heard before and it is phenomenal.  I shall use Joss' song in the commentary ("Heartbroken") to begin my film course next year.  

Well, possibly.  I could hardly live up to that level of cool for the rest of the course, so perhaps best not to raise their expectations.

Off to England tomorrow, where I will, I am sure, work on Oswald every day.   

Slayage conference

I'm in Vancouver at the Slayage conference. This is the first conference I've ever been to that included a singalong. we ought to include that in our programs.  Many good papers; I especially enjoyed a philosophical one on identity in Dollhouse.  There was also an excellent paper in the same session,by Curry and Velasquez, on how the audience is encouraged to construct Echo as a coherent identity in Dollhouse long before she has her "composite moment" in ep. 12 of season 1, by various framing techniques known in poetry, notably

• things being in the same poem are automatically accepted as belonging together; the reader then tries to figure out how
• presented with separate events / things/ elements the reader will construct a narrative and try to 'tell a story' from them, and link them that way
• material associations - similarities in sound, meter and visuals - will encourage associations in the mind of the reader; they called these "material" because they occur below the level of linguistic meaning.

This made me think about the construction of all character in episodic TV, or indeed in fiction; the author is always encouraging the reader to create a coherent persona for their characters, by inserting very carefully calibrated moments, scenes, and uses of language from which the reader / viewer can construct what will feel like a coherent character.  But the construction is the reader's, not the author's, though the author will have done everything they can to encourage the reader to do that work.  However the author IS assisted by the fact that we are either hard-wired or heavily trained to create coherent character out of disparate hints, in the same way that we are hard-wired (or heavily socialized) to see faces in (for example) clouds, piles of rocks, pictures of pine trees ... so if the hints of coherent character are planted, we will do our best to find them and put them together.  

Of course the job of the writers was particularly tricky in Dollhouse because they had to simultaneously plant the hints of a coherent identity AND construct several completely disparate imprint characters, AND encourage us to believe that there couldn't possibly be a coherent identity underneath because Echo's core identity had been wiped.

That was such an interesting series philosophically; it's a real shame the second season plot arc really didn't work, because that has discouraged people (me at least) from thinking seriously about the series as a work of art.

admin day

Uzbekistan Airways Boarding Pass (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I finally finished the paperwork for the conference participants who wanted travel reimbursements.  If I can just offer some advice to anyone applying for a travel reimbursement:

• If you are sending in several different kinds of receipt, a cover note with a list of the receipts, what they're for, and the amount, will make the bookkeeping much easier for whoever's doing the paperwork.  I kept finding receipts I missed the first, second, and third times I went through the stacks of papers, and then I'd have to recalculate everything.
• Thanks for the boarding passes, really.  But I also need to know what the ticket COST. Send the invoice too.
• if you're sending in scans of boarding passes or what have you by email, send everything in the same email.  One email with a boarding pass, and then another one a few days later from a different account with an invoice, and then another one a week and a half after that saying that you forgot all about your hotel bill, also you had to take a cab to the airport, is understandable; who keeps all their receipts in one place?  Naturally you keep finding things and better to send them late than not at all.  But it does not make the paperwork any easier for the grant holder.
• please: an address to which you would like your check to be sent. Please.

Emailing people and asking for information they had omitted to send me slowed the process down a good deal too.  And this kind of work - collating many different bits of paper from many different sources and organizing them, and then having to re-organize them for the auditors - is very much not my favourite thing.  And it took, even once I stopped dragging my feet, days and days to do.  Everyone else I know who's had to do this says "Oh, I just got the secretary to do it."  How do you get a secretary to do it?   

Anyway.  This is, really, and I mean it, the last time I'm organizing a conference.  I've done it 3 times and I think that is sufficient.  I've done my bit for the discipline.  But if it weren't for all the bloody bookkeeping afterwards and grant-writing beforehand I wouldn't mind doing it again.  That's the worst part of it, by far.  If I were just setting up a venue and a schedule and organizing a lunch, I could do that over a weekend. 

Leaving for Slayage tomorrow, and then for Europe, and Toronto, with the family.  I have not begun to pack, or think about  packing, even. 

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more sacrificial virgins

A vestal virgin, detail of an engraving by Sir Frederic Leighton, created Lord Leighton, the first British artist to be given a title. (around 1880) The artist died in 1896. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We've finished the sacrificial virgins paper, I'm nearly finished the paperwork from a conference I ran 3 months ago, and I'm due at a conference this weekend.  Then away for a month travelling.

We've cut out about 2/3 of the paper; all the most interesting stuff, because we need to establish the ground first, which I am so over by now, and we've only got 20 minutes.  I'm looking forward to writing the article that will be based on the paper. Whedon uses sacrificial virgins over and over and over, in various forms.  By the time he got to "Cabin in the Woods" I would have said he had done everything he could with it.    (Apparently i was wrong.)    We could write a whole article just on Drusilla.

Several problems arose while thinking it through.  Here's one: how do you identify a "sacrificial virgin"?  By comparing a character to a similar character in Greek tragedy?  Well sure, but what made you pick that character in Greek tragedy?  Why didn't you pick some other character, in some other genre?  One tends to assume one's fixed points, as Catherine Brown points out (I've been listening to her podcast on comparative literature), but in fact there are no fixed points; the reason you decided to compare X and Y is because you had already compared X and Y and decided you could talk about it.

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a week of Sacrificial Virgins

James Murray, editor and philologist (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Spent the week putting in a little work every day collaborating with Lauren on our paper on Sacrificial Virgins in the Whedonverse, of which we now have a complete draft, approximately twice as long as anything we'd actually be presenting; so stage two, cutting it down to size and adding pictures, is next week.

We're comparing sacrifice of virgins in Greek tragedy to the same persistent trope in the Whedonverse.( Or do we mean motif?  And what is the difference?  Must check my Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (1), which I just downloaded (2)(3)(4)...)


I am running into a problem with our basic premise.  Sacrifice of virgins is a motif that shows up absolutely everywhere.  Andromeda for a start.  Every fairytale where the knight saves the princess from the monster-of-the-week.  I've just checked the Stith-Thompson searchable online index (http://storysearch.symbolicstudies.org/ ) and there are 318 motifs involving "princesses"; 159 involving "maidens"; 98 involving "virgins" (and another 95 involving the Virgin Mary).  Most of these aren't about virgin sacrifice, but the prevalence of stories about virgins/maidens/(always virgin) princesses demonstrates the persistent fascination Western culture has always had with the post-pubescent pre-marital phase of the female life cycle.  Sacrifice of women in that phase is always represented as particularly powerful in several ways (both magically or religiously efficacious, and emotionally wrenching), because of the supreme value of the victim, sacrificed at her moment of greatest desirability and perceived worth to the community.

a productive day that doesn't feel like it

English: Fallow And Productive The nearer field is left to grass whilst maize is growing in the further field. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We wrote another 1000 words for the Sacrificial Virgins paper, and I got two students set up to work on the Myth on the Map project, but somehow it still doesn't feel like a productive day.  I don't seem to be able to do three projects at once, let alone finish the administrative work I still have hanging over me from the spring.  And Oswald is getting pushed to the back, and I don't want to start yet another project and then not finish it; I have about 15 of those half-done and lying fallow about my hard drive already.  Must fix this.  But I'm not writing any more to-do lists, because they just make me feel guilty.

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Myth on the Map

English: Map of Homeric Greece with English labels Česky: Mapa homérského Řecka s anglickými popisky (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Organizational day for the website project, "Myth on the Map".  I have enough money to get a functioning website up with 2 works mapped, Apollodorus and the Catalog of Ships. Question: should I then map the rest of the Iliad, or map a test book of Pausanias?  If so, which book?  Not sure yet.  Would link to the project but it doesn't appear to be working yet. The plan is, at any rate, to finish Apollodorus and the Catalog by the end of the summer, and have a map which, when one searches for stuff, finds it and displays it.

Tweaked the outline for the "sacrificial virgins" conference paper, and resolved another Oswald simile: a list of five (dead) Greeks, followed by the simile of the eagle attacking the geese by the river.  In Homer, it's about Hector, who's the eagle.  In Oswald, the geese are named but the eagle is not; the attacker is impersonal; the war.

THE WAR! RAHR! (Source)

(Okay, so I am foolishly reminded of Loki, leaping from the upper level upon Thor. "There is only - THE WAR! RAHR!" The only truly awful line in the Avengers...)

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