data tidying

Similes (Photo credit: teotwawki)

Spent an hour tagging all of the various Homeric texts Oswald has used so as to have a sortable list of them.  This doesn't work quite as well as I had hoped, but oh well.  It is so easy to waste days, weeks, months fiddling with one's table of data instead of, you know, actually writing anything, because it's so much easier to tweak some tags and figure out how to print it out just so and should I put the texts that are similes in a different font, or the same font?  Or should I double-tag them "similes" too?  Is there some way to print that out?  Hey, wouldn't it be interesting to put this in, like, a graph, and show where she's getting all the texts from - oh I know, it would be even better to have TWO graphs, one for the similes and one for the death scenes, and show what order she's putting them in in the poem, and the death scenes  are linear but the similes are from all over the place, or wait, are they?  maybe I could have ANOTHER graph that shows the narrative order of the similes by book, and then ... or maybe I could, you know, actually write something.

So, why don't I pause and make a few general comments now (of the sort that I may back up with charts! And tables!  But not now):  So far the deaths are coming from (so far) books 5 through 8.  She's skipped a couple, well actually only one I think (Eioneus, beginning of Bk 7); but except that one, all the named deaths in those books are in "Memorial", and in the order given by Homer.  She sometimes gives the name of the parents of the dead, sometimes not, but if the mother's name is given she always records it.  She often doesn't bother to give the name of the killer, where in Homer that's usually the whole point (since the death is part of someone's aristeia.)

The similes on the other hand are drawn from all over the shop, and I have not looked for an order yet; interesting if there is one.  The similes are all drawn from "famous scenes" - battle over the body of Patroclus; the battle at the ships; the weaving-woman simile that everyone knows - and she always repurposes them, by attaching them to unknowns, and often by reversing the subject and object, or otherwise targeting them differently.  But she isn't making up any similes out of whole cloth; they're all Homeric too, so far.

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