you brought it on yourself miss twiddle

From Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 5.11.34:

Some people distinguish analogy from similarity; we consider it a subset of this trope. For "as one is to ten, so is ten to one hundred" is certainly based on similarity, and "a bad citizen is just like an enemy." Although these things often go too far, too, as for example: "if it is shameful for the mistress of the house to have intercourse with a slave, then it is shameful for the master to have intercourse with a slave girl."

The other thing I've been reading today (well, apart from 2.5 pages of a really tedious German article about the origins of "the garment of vanity" (lit: "the chiton of empty glory") (it's the last piece of clothing/passions philosophers remove, in case you were wondering)) is a book of short stories and poetry of John M. Ford: he likes his sci-fi/modernized antiquity, and I do too! The poetry I am not so into, with a few exceptions. The couplets about various topics in physics are very nice. An excerpt:


open/oscillating universe
So will it stop, or not? The answer tells
Much less about the stars than of ourselves.

Planck epoch
One flash when gravity was consummate--
No era spans less time, or greater weight.

quantum leap
The particle is here, and then is there --
But never in between. How does it dare?


I also like the "Sf Clichés: A sonnet cycle" (there's a reason Lois McMaster Bujold is almost the limit of my interest in sci-fi, and that reason can be succinctly summed as "space feudalism!"):

1: Galactic Empires
One would not think that Empire could survive
As starships Roman cavalry displace;
The politics of Space must needs derive
From Einstein's time, Planck's heat and Riemann's space.
Yet "history repeats," some (heedless) say,
Analogies persist, however crude,
And democratic notions all give way
To fealty and service, fief and feud.
The Empire will not die, as mortals must,
The purple of their robes is colorfast;
Their golden age untouched by moth or rust,
And liberties, it seems cannot outlast
The paper image of a narrow Rome
Bestrode by cardboard Caesars dressed in chrome.

I should make this a proper post, and not just a quasi-list sort of thing; lists are so much less effort. The two projects for this month off are supposed to be reading (some) Herodotus and practicing enough to make a good tape and get into a good summer festival. The giant Greek Lexicon, slightly less giant Greek Grammar, similarly-sized Commentary to Herodotus Vol. 1, and small Oxford Herodotus Vol. 1 are sitting on the floor. And they haven't been opened yet.

Instead, I've been reading other things: Sunshine, Catherine Asaro, and Tristia. I liked Sunshine a lot: it reminded me that Robin McKinley is a good author. I had been put off, for some reason, by Door in the Hedge, and had sort of been ignoring her. But Sunshine (which the library somewhat bizarrely shelves in Adult Fiction) was lots of fun: good characters, interesting alternate universe, un-obvious (at least to me) narrative trajectory… It also demonstrated the observation I have been formulating about vampire fiction: if the vampires are subject to some traditional handicap (i.e. sunlight, crosses, silver, running water, compulsive counting, etc.), the novel will likely be good. If they are not, it will probably be crummy. If I lived in Thursday Next's world, I might be able to get it named after me: Ricardienne's Axiom of Vampiric Representation

I picked up the first couple of Catherine Asaro novels because they looked like they might be Bujold-ish sci-fi, or maybe Elizabeth Moon-ish (i.e. Space Opera in the Galactic Fleet sort of thing, which sees to be the only kind of Sci-fi I read). I'm about one and a half in, and well, obviously I kept going and probably will keep going. I'm not sure how I feel about them. Looking at her dates, Asaro is clearly influenced by Bujold (and probably by Moon, too); and it also reminds me very strongly of the juvenile-fiction Firebird books that existentialgoat introduced me to, but without the strong religious subtext. I am finding them a little disturbing. There was a discussion on Sheroes once about the early Vorkosigan novels as borderline-horror in some scenes, and I think it's much more so in Asaro's books. Really horrific things happen without the characters being able to face them with a sense of "but we can change this and fix what is bad" (as in Bujold) or "this is an anomaly and is not the way things normally happen, but only when the Militant(ly insane) Patriarchy gets in charge for a moment" (as in Elizabeth Moon). Also, most of the main characters are part-computer, which is a little weird (and only gets weirder as the obligatory romance starts to heat up).

I think I like the Tristia because Ovid is so whiney in them: it's cold, he's lonely, life is horrible, the barbarians might attack, it's cold, it's in the middle of nowhere, he wants to go home, ktl., as they say. I start to feel a kindredness with him, because I like to whine, and I don't like leaving home. (The degenerating scale of hardship might legitimately continue from 'Odysseus to Ovid' to 'Ovid to me' I think.) At the same time, I'm sort of surprised that any critical source I look at (admittedly, not a terribly broad or recent number) takes him completely seriously. I don't want to deny the awfulness of his position, to be 'relegated' to the furthest away end of nowhere and be made to stay there for the rest of one's life. I think I can imagine being so desperate and willing to say anything in order to get the sentence lifted as to write five books of whines and abject pleas. On the other hand, poetry! Figured speech! Ovid, for crying out loud! It may have been appealing to a certain generation of editors to imagine that he was completely contrite over those nasty trifles of his youth, or that his desire to come home and depression suppressed any literary consideration but "will this make Augustus relent?". I just don't think that covers it at all. What did it for me was actually not the Ovid-Augustus relationship, but the Ovid-wife one. I was getting cranky at how self-centered the elegy on his departure was: why does he think he should be the center of his wife and household's universe when he clearly has other things on his mind besides them? Why does he deserve all of this adulation?* But then, he compares himself Theseus! He seems to be citing Theseus/Perithoos, but in the context, it's impossible not to think of Theseus/Ariadne.** And now the 'dutiful wife dutifully mourning her husband's misfortune' scenario is a little bit skewed, because we're also thinking about Ovid as the betrayer and not the victim anymore. And furthermore, all of the praise of Augustus is so over the top that it must be at least a little ironic: it's impossible to imagine Ovid writing it sincerely, and hard to imagine, if he was faking it, Augustus, assuming he even read the thing, taking it to be sincere. When he writes that "the worst punishment is to have displeased you," this is just not true false, and contradicted by statements in the poem elsewhere. Besides, sincerity or even the impression sincerity to an intelligent reader, was not exactly the literary goal of the time. And you know? Exile may have sucked, but if Ovid retained his amazing metricization and versification skills, is it that likely that he would have lost the ability to write figuratively? Q., as they say, E.D. and I'm going to bed.



*Because he's a Roman male, yes, I know.

**Also, this is the poet who had written Letters from Mythological Women to the Men who Screwed them Over, which did include Ariadne to Theseus, I believe.