I read the Lattimore. Yes, so fucking good. I re-read every 5 years or so.
I never read it since I had to for a class. If Achilles is so great, how come the tendon named after him sucks so bad?
Achilles is an asshole. That's part of why it's so great.
I'm stuck on "spleen to mankind"...what are we supposed to understand about spleens? Immune systems? one of the humors?
Black bile, the humour associated with melancholy, was believed to be secreted by the spleen.
7: I find this confusing. It seems to me the whole venting your spleen, splenetic is about anger not melancholy.
Really, it comes from the gallbladder.
Anyway, it turns out you don't need your spleen to live, but you do need anger, so anger can't come from the spleen. That's just science.
2: You know what sucks the most? Being remembered for my only weakness. Why can't it be Achilles' biceps? They were magnificent!
Or your asshole. It was huge.
Stop hectoring the poor guy, Mossy.
ooh: time for the greatest epitaph:
Not Pope, but his contemporary Arbuthnot
Here continueth to rot
The body of FRANCIS CHARTRES;
Who, with an INFLEXIBLE CONSTANCY and IMITABLE UNIFORMITY of life, PERSISTED,
In spite of AGE and INFIRMITIES,
In the practice of EVERY HUMAN VICE
Excepting PRODIGALITY and HYPOCRISY:
His insatiable AVARICE exempted him from the first,
His matchless IMPUDENCE from the second.
Nor was he more singular in the undeviating pravity of his manners, than successful in accumulating WEALTH:
For, without TRADE or PROFESSION,
Without TRUST of PUBLICK MONEY,
And without BRIBE-WORTHY SERVICE,
He acquired, or more properly created,
A MINISTERIAL ESTATE.
He was the only person of his time
Who could CHEAT without the mask of HONESTY,
Retain his primeval MEANNESS when Possessed of TEN THOUSAND a year;
And, having daily deserved the GIBBET for what he did,
Was at last condemned to it for what he could not do.
O indignant reader!
Think not his life useless to mankind!
PROVIDENCE connived at his execrable designs,
To give to after-ages a conspicuous PROOF and EXAMPLE
Of how small estimation is EXORBITANT WEALTH in the sight of GOD, by bestowing it on the most UNWORTHY of ALL MORTALS
Wikipedia is very weak on Charteris, but the sting of the lines about "condemned to the gibbet" is that he was sentenced to hang for raping a servant girl, but pardoned, so the accusation is one of impotence as well as all his other deficiencies. cf the pee tape, I suppose.
I think the definition of rape they used back then was too narrow.
Okay, I couldn't figure out what "And much he hated all, but most the best" meant until I looked up the source:
Thersites only clamour'd in the throng,
Loquacious, loud, and turbulent of tongue:
Awed by no shame, by no respect controll'd,
In scandal busy, in reproaches bold:
With witty malice studious to defame;
Scorn all his joy, and laughter all his aim:
But chief he gloried with licentious style
To lash the great, and monarchs to revile.
His figure such as might his soul proclaim;
One eye was blinking, and one leg was lame:
His mountain-shoulders half his breast o'erspread,
Thin hairs bestrew'd his long mis-shapen head.
Spleen to mankind his envious heart possess'd,
And much he hated all, but most the best:
Ulysses or Achilles still his theme;
But royal scandal his delight supreme.
8 is a good point. "Splenetique" in French means afflicted by constant sadness, but in English (since at least Shakespeare) it's associated more with intemperate rage; we say "choleric" as well as "splenetic" for this, but choler is the humour of yellow bile and associated with the gall bladder, not the spleen.
It is not wrong to associate "black bile"/melancholy with the spleen. Black bile in humoral medicine doesn't mean bile in the sense we understand it, a secretion channelled into the intestine; it means the black deposit at the bottom of separated blood; in fact, this is clotted red blood cells. And guess what the spleen is full of, when you cut it open? Dark red blood cells.
Baudelaire of course thought no proper French equivalent existed for the English "spleen", and loved it so much he used it in multiple titles: Le Spleen de Paris, Spleen et Ideal.
Contemporary English for Thersites would be "manspleening."
I found a copy of Pope's translation of the Iliad when I was a teenager and attempted to read it. I got pretty far but it put me off Pope for life.
A more histologically accurate term for someone who persists in being gloomy all the time would be not "melancholic" but "clot".
Given 23, if Achilles is an asshole, then would it be most accurate to describe Achilles as 'bumbaclot?'
Theresites should be the patron saint of blogging, but as for Charteris, I see one of his victims planned to start the Colonel Charteris' Head pub with the hush money he paid out:
As in, this business is the price of his head.
I'm imagining a version of Inside Out but with various organs instead of the cute little people.
You know what sucks the most? Being remembered for my only weakness.
That's not the only thing. Also your shield, your wrath and your inability to catch up to tortoises.
Baudelaire of course thought no proper French equivalent existed for the English "spleen", and loved it so much he used it in multiple titles: Le Spleen de Paris, Spleen et Ideal.
And it looks like others kept up that borrowing, including Victor Hugo:
Oui, j'ai le spleen, compliqué de mélancolie, avec la nostalgie, plus l'hypocondrie, et je bisque, et je rage, et je bâille, et je m'ennuie, et je m'assomme, et je m'embête!
Thanks for 15. And thanks to Ogged, actually, for changing the tone with this post.
We went to see "The Favourite" last night; a film notionally about Queen Anne, and I spent most of it in fits of (i hope) silent giggles and embarrassment at the grotesque anachronism of the script. This wasn't just the language, dreadful though that was -- the Queen says "brilliant" in her opening lines, and later "OK" -- a woman storms down a deserted corridor saying "Fuck, fuck, fuck!" as if she had fallen out of Four Weddings and a funeral. It was the whole thought world: the beliefs and suppositions that animated people then were wholly absent. There was no religion, no sense of honour, and no sense of the importance of clan or party; no sense of the majesty of the Queen, who was played with a needy entitlement that reminded me of Prince Charles; no sense whatever of the strangeness of the past.
It was very well acted, in wonderful costumes and beautiful settings, but it was an entirely contemporary romcom or office intrigue done in fancy dress. In some ways it was the worst film I've ever seen.
I know, Shakespeare is not a really good guide to the politics of mediaeval Scotland or Denmark. But this wasn't written by fucking Shakespeare.
...embarrassment at the grotesque anachronism of the script
That was fully intentional. I mean there was breakdancing.
no sense whatever of the strangeness of the past.
Did I mention the breakdancing?
I loved it. Admittedly Lanthimos is a bit of an acquired taste. Did you see/like Dogtooth or The Lobster?
Courtly breakdancing! I found it hilarious.
32: I had the same reaction to The Social Network, which to my knowledge is almost pure fiction, whereas with Steve Jobs, having read the Isaacson biography, I felt the film was reasonably accurate, and most of the artistic liberties justified.
32. Possibly closer to the reality of Anne's court than you think. Have I described before the game of "Selling a bargain", that was all the rage there. The point was to make somebody ask a question to which the answer was "My arse."
e.g.
Lady in Waiting runs into the room, yelling "Oh! It is white and follows me!"
Innocent Bystander: "What does?"
Lady in Waiting: "My arse!"
(Cue Queen and Courtiers ROTFLtheirAO)
This was the culture The Spectator was trying to amend.
Anyway, I thought Kapur's "Elizabeth" was fantastic and I don't care that it had nothing to do with the reality.
Just watched it and I can confirm, "First Reformed" is fantastic.
Just watched Mandy and if you like crazy psychedelic weirdness and Nicolas Cage it's just great (and I like both).
How are you, Barry? Exorbitant liquor aside.
I'm doing ok. I'm saving my booze allotment for weekend movie watching.
Meh. If you're watching movies again I guess you're fine. Washington Square 1997, watch?
Haven't seen it but it's supposed to be good and Agnieszka Holland is a good director.
Coincidentally, I reminded myself how to pronounce that name not even a day ago.
love love looooooved the favourite, very much endorse 33, 34 (!) and 36, suspect NW you were just going to a different movie than the one actually on offer. still chortle on a regular basis re: the are you here as a rogue or gentleman exchange, super well done physical humor. hi barry! and everyone else! starting to suspect i may actually regain something like workable lungs some day in the foreseeable future which would be AWESOME.
"First Reformed "was my favorite movie of 2018.
I enjoyed "The Favourite" very much. I don't think it had any pretense of being historically accurate.
"Mandy"? I enjoyed Nicholas Cage, and the Manson-like villain was good, but maybe I just don't really like that kind of movie. Instead of going "Awesome!" at the chainsaw duel, I thought, "This is stupid!". Also the soundtrack -- weird eerie music/sounds can be effective in small doses, but when it just goes on and on it gives me a headache.
I'm really confused and bothered by how many people liked First Reformed. I thought it was a truly terrible movie, honestly one of the worst movies I've ever seen... It's starts out quite promising, the setting is really great, and about the first third is pretty good. But it just completely goes off the rails in a way that is kind of boring, makes no sense, and which is perhaps one of the worst examples ever in a movie of the trope that women's lives and suffering are only meaningful when they lead to men having a spiritual epiphany, which inevitably is that salvation is fucking a hot much younger woman.
(I will give it that the pepto-bourbon scene is one of the most viscerally memorable visual moments I've experienced in the theater.)
What I really want is the version of this film that would have been made by Richard Linklater. Same setting, same characters, but the movie is just a series of counseling sessions where they talk a lot and nothing actually happens.
It does sound painfully worthy. Speaking Hawke, have I mentioned how good Good Kill is? It's good, despite unraveling a bit at the end. The best GWOT movie I've seen.
By contrast, my favorite film of the year is Paddington II. But I'm not sure even Paddington can break through the extreme cynicism of you reprobates.
The Favourite was delightful. I haven't seen Eighth Grade or BlacKKKlansman, or Buster Scruggs, all of which I'm likely to like when I see them. We'll probably see Beale Street this weekend. I also haven't seen Roma.
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As a boy, he was sold to another family for the purpose of marrying one of the family's daughters. Although there is no record of his married life, it apparently was not a happy one.|>
Also let me pitch you my fan fiction: The Favourite but instead of Emma Stone's character arriving to shake things up, instead Emily Blunt as Mary Poppins arrives to be Queen Anne's new nanny. The rest of the plot of the movie is almost exactly the same.
I preemptively hate Beale Street based on its trailer and am unlikely to be persuaded by contrary testimony. Also Glass opens soon.
47: That's an interesting perspective -- but I don't remember any fucking or salvation in First Reformed. Maybe when the screen went black?
Eighth Grade -- I guess I'm not qualified to judge it. Was it really realistic that she seemed to have no girl friends at all?
BlacKKKlansman -- I would have like it a lot better if it didn't have one scene. But the final montage did hit me like a punch in the gut.
I hate Oscar bait. And most other things. But especially Oscar bait.
55 Good because I'm here for all the hate on Green Book
Was there already a Shoplifters thread? I went in with fairly high expectations on Saturday and was not disappointed. And then yesterday I found myself dragged into a situation with many unfortunate parallels to the film. Sigh.
My parents, right-thinking but not Extremely Online like me, raved about Green Book as well as Three Billboard, whereas I heard so much negative that I stayed away from both and as a result there is unfortunately very little room for discussion between us on the subject.
In Soviet Russia, billboard threes YOU!
I'm watching "Solo." I'm hoping it's not too arty.
There's a character named Moloch, so I'm thinking it's going to be very subtle.
This is just a train robbery from a western.
Because the coaxial cable will destabilize if they don't fly fast.
The one Droid should have been voiced by the actress from Maude.
I'm glad they didn't castrate Chewbacca.
Maybe this but if not sticking to the plan in where the Wookie life debt happens.
Glover is pretty good. The guy playing Solo is starting to grate.
You know they're going to make it because of the music.
Droid should have been voiced by the actress from Maude.
Bea Arthur? I have some bad news for you Moby...
How could I not remember Bea Arthur?
And now for some romantic awkwardness.
Was one of those other Wookies Chewbacca's kid or something?
57 Shoplifters was excellent. One of last year's best films. (I think I mentioned it in another thread.)
Is Woody going to come back and save things at the last minute, just like Han does in early middle age?
It's think the guy from Cold Play is the bad guy.
Honestly, the one where they all invaded the planet and died was better.
If Chewbacca and Woody ran into Norm and Sam, this would be the best movie ever.
That's a good way to end a soliloquy.
I want more 36 in my life.
"It is white and follows me!"
"What does?"
"Ron Howard!"
"It is white and follows me!"
"What does?"
"Privilege!"
whereas with Steve Jobs, having read the Isaacson biography, I felt the film was reasonably accurate, and most of the artistic liberties justified.
That movie seemed like bullshit, but at least structured differently than the flashback style of The Power and the Glory/Citizen Kane that they seemed to be going for. And the acting was really good.
Oops. I don't know why I wrote "they". I meant Fincher/Social Network was going for the style of other American films about tycoons and business.
Social Network struck me as bullshit because it was fiction pretending to be dramatized reality. With Jobs I thought the dramatization was reasonably faithful to reality. Both are intrinsically bullshit in that no-one talks like a Sorkin character, but with Jobs it didn't stick in my craw. I agree both are well acted.
Biopics are my least favorite genre. I've seen neither the Social Network nor Jobs and I don't intend to.
Shoplifters is lovely. (Alas, NMM to Kiki Kirin.)
Has anyone seen Colette yet? I've been really looking forward to it - I've loved her writing since I was about 19 - but if it superimposes 21st-century personae onto the characters too clunkily I'd rather give it a miss.
My daughter talked me into reading Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters, which turns out to be Cliff Notes for the Odyssey.
100 A number of reasons and there are exceptions. I particularly don't like biopics of people I have a living historical memory of or those who have died recently enough that I have some kind of historical impression of them which is close to that (e.g. Winston Churchill), those definitely have the feeling of falsifying history to me. This is especially the case with people I admire or whose work I like (like the Johnny Cash biopic with Joaquin Phoenix) but also applies across the board to those I don't or those I even despise (e.g. Dick Cheney). I find them glib, simplifying, predictable (beyond just knowing their life story). Also since one of the things I like about a lot of film is the way it gives you an empathetic glimpse of people's lives that these films purport to show you the 'truth' about a historical figures life already gets my guard up, I resist them instinctually.
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In the Zhanda and Husa valleys, the staples were rice, tobacco, and a little opium.|>
I don't think I agree with that use of "staples."
Possibly that's why you put it there. In which case, I agree.
107 I can think of a few exceptions but then those are generally masterpieces like Raging Bull or Ed Wood.
And I think those transcend the pat formulaic constraints of the biopic.
Huh, I loved The Favourite. For me anyway, the film created a universe I found completely delightful to dwell in. Sure, it's not historically accurate (as mentioned, there's fucking badass courtly breakdancing), because the point isn't to be historically accurate. The point is to hang out in this created world and watch the fireworks.
Two other movies that, for me, successfully created immersive worlds like this: Moonlight and The Florida Project.
Full disclosure: I haven't been drinking very much, and I drank two large beers during The Favourite. So it's possible my warm fuzzy feelings had some chemical assistance.
Which is good, since he shouldn't drink while breastfeeding.
The crying is coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE.
So grab the stroller and go for a walk.
I also tend to hate biopics, but I watch a fair number of movies that are about business and/or politics, and a lot of those are biopics.* Usually not so recent, though, and more the kind of thing I watch for historical interest, not fully expecting to enjoy them as movies.
* My uncharitable theory is that filmmakers aren't confident they can make interesting movies with these settings, so they fall back on biopics because they can lean heavily on whatever they think is universal about individual lives. "This isn't really about running the company, it's about a marriage" or whatever.
As long as we're on the topic of film Reverse Shot*'s annual 11 Offenses of the year is, as usual, deliciously great.
*One of my favorite sites for film criticism.
They're outraged by Chappaquiddick.
And who wouldn't be. Expecting someone to put that on a poster is just immoral.
I thought Tyrel was a Blade Runner prequel.
Reverse Shot has Winter's Bone on the worst list for 2010 and The Social Network on the best list. The one-paragraph reviews in the year-end summaries, at least the ones I actually finished, are very well-written.
I like the Offenses list even for movies I really liked. And their best of the year reviews are really great.
Wait. If Darth Maul died when when Darth Vader was still a small boy and Maul was alive during the Solo years, then even if Solo happened right before Phantom Menace, there had to be enough years before Star Wars for Natalie Portman watch a small child grow to adulthood, have sex with him as soon as he's legal, and have a baby that grows to being a kind of whiny adult. That's like 30 years, so Han must have been like 50 in Star Wars. And that's a minimum.
I guess it makes sense of Leia to have daddy issues.
I figured someone must have delved into these timelines in excessive detail, and I was not wrong. The key corrective to 124 appears to be that the cartoons established Darth Maul survived his apparent death in Menace, so Solo presumably built on that.
The linked article's timeline puts Solo 7 years after Sith and 12 years before A New Hope - although that level precision requires some dubious sources.
Of course, that still leaves the big issue of why Han talked like Jedi and the Force were laughable myths when they had been powerful parts of the galactic order in his own lifetime. But that's been an issue since Menace.
I like my solution better. "Darth Maul didn't die" is cheating.
This is the dude who was cut right through the torso and dropped down an infinite hole?
As I've gotten older, following out-of-movie storylines has come to seem like following news of offseason transactions in sports: I just want to watch the movies/games.
It's as if you don't even want to give free viral marketing to enormous multinational corporations.
I just want my movies where people can move objects with their minds and travel at faster than the died of light to respect the bounds of plausibility.
I think your phone is trying to say that no-one can just keep breaking screens without consequences.
have sex with him as soon as he's legal,
Are the statutory rape laws of Naboo also covered in the cartoons? That's edgy.
Naboo rhymes with taboo for a reason.
Ooh that lets me tell my funny story from ninth grade. We were studying cultures and folkways/more/taboo. On the test it said which of these describes incest. A junior who was a teacher aid was helping proctor the test, and someone asked him if incest was a typo and the junior didn't know what it was and said Oh that's supposed to be spelled incense. So the student answered folkway and was very mad when it was marked wrong and demanded an explanation from the teacher which was quite amusing (basically it was Sorry that the proctor was a moron.)
That's a good reminder that anybody who is substitute teaching in middle school or high school should probably just go ahead and explain incest to the class.
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This accommodation was prefaced by terrific violence.|>
I'm not going to click through or anything, just taking a minute to be that guy with respect to the length of a year in a place where the sun doesn't take 356 revolutions to go all the way around.
Don't worry. We won't discriminate.
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Who knew that the "propitious shrub" alone, sown without art, would burst through the barbaric miasma?|>
126.last: if the last three years have taught us anything, it's that most people don't observe, think, or understand much about politics at the highest level. Han was busy barely surviving. Doubly true if you accept the hypothesis that most Star Wars people are illiterate.
Katharine Webber, (15:42):
I think maybe these days novel readers have lost the ability to read a novel about characters, or a main character particularly, with whom they do not want to identify. I think a lot of people now decide if a novel is good or bad on the basis of whether they can identify with the main character [...]Discuss.
144: Hasty generalization. Deriving a general principle from anecdata. Kids on her lawn.
144, 146 Case in point: Flashman
147: Point for or against 144?
I'm not sure if I've been insulted
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Some kind of what can only be a guardian spirit has just fucking saved me from making a complete fool of myself in a weeks time. I am going on a holiday with two other women & three men, including the object of my massive crush whom I understood until today to be single. Through a stroke of luck or something I bumped into him today in circumstances where I realized yes he is actually going out with someone. Fuck me, I was all set to be brave and flirt with him more obviously. I'm grateful to have found out but just right now actually devastated at the bonfire of my hopes. I really let this one run unchecked inside my head. It was my little mental escape from my job that I have come to hate and from all my other bullshit as well. Oh god am I going to have to go on Tinder?
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Some kind of what can only be a guardian spirit has just fucking saved me from making a complete fool of myself in a weeks time. I am going on a holiday with two other women & three men, including the object of my massive crush whom I understood until today to be single. Through a stroke of luck or something I bumped into him today in circumstances where I realized yes he is actually going out with someone. Fuck me, I was all set to be brave and flirt with him more obviously. I'm grateful to have found out but just right now actually devastated at the bonfire of my hopes. I really let this one run unchecked inside my head. It was my little mental escape from my job that I have come to hate and from all my other bullshit as well. Oh god am I going to have to go on Tinder?
My brother went on Tinder and found a wife. That is the woman who would later become his wife, not somebody else's.
Also thank you blog guardian spirit for fixing ID breach
Also poets I feel right now you have been lying to me. Galway Kinnell, I have been waiting not just for now but for bloody years to no avail. Kim Addonizio, joy is not fucking coming.
Also, it sounds like he's going on vacation without her, so there's probably a reason.
144: Writers certainly do kvetch about readers taking it as erroneous or Problematic when protagonists or viewpoint characters act badly. No idea how representative that is though.
If feel that this comic is on topic one way or another.
Oh that misled me too but there is a good reason she can't go.
151: Have you tried tinder before? I did a few years ago and was not into it and too self-deprecating and very unhappy about it and then again this fall when I was apparently still more constrained than most in my self-description but my experiences on the app were all good even though for the first time I was open to matching with men. It's not necessarily the worst thing in the world and it turns out that tying yourself into impossible knots basically is. I'm sorry you're stuck there now and I hope you get out. I think you're amazing and the men in your circle are missing out!
Thanks for the kind words. I haven't actually tried tinder, I have a profile on okcupid which I set up years ago and revisited lately but I've never had much luck with it. I hate the whole CV/job application aspect of internet dating and also think I am more judgemental. But I'll have to do something to break my thoughts out of a dead end.
There are just very few single men in my circle and this was somebody whose brain/personality were more appealing than I would have even been daring to hope for. At least I know this other relationship although it seems to be new in terms of being public among their friends has likely been on the cards for a long time, they've ben friends for years.