Tag: Latin

Laugh, Laugh

Sometimes, all you can do is laugh.

I wasn’t sure I was going to write here today when I first got up; I overslept, for one, and then was thinking more along the lines of just getting under my blanket in my easy chair and spending the entire day reading and ignoring everything going on in the world outside my bubble–where I suspect I’ll be spending an awful lot of time either for the next four years…or for the rest of my life. It’s thirty degrees here at the moment, and now we’re apparently expecting anywhere from three to six inches of snow (!!!!!) over the next few days, including sleet. It could get really bad here with the snow and ice and cold, and now they are saying we might have to stay home for two to three days! There’s been no word from work, of course–so I will have to get up at six tomorrow morning anyway to find out if they’ve closed the office or not. I love my job I love my job I love my job.1

Yesterday was pretty unremarkable, really. I ran out to make groceries and while it was sunny and nice, whenever the wind blew it felt miserably cold, the kind that goes right through you to the bone. That’s the kind of cold we get here, a wet cold, and that’s why I hate the cold weather here so much (when I can’t just stay cozy and warm at home and underneath blankets); it feels so much colder than it actually gets here. I really do have to write a snow-day Scotty book, don’t I? We watched a terrible thriller called Project Power, primarily because it starred Joseph Gordon-Levitt, whom I love, and it was both set and filmed here. It was entertaining enough (as with anything filmed in New Orleans, the geography was hysterically funny–how does one ride a bike from the West Bank to uptown and then to Jazzland in New Orleans East?), but then we moved on to The Jetty, a crime drama about a cold case and a connection to a current one starring Jenna Coleman that is actually quite excellent, and examines age of consent v. maturity, which is stunningly well done. Highly recommended; we have one episode left which we will probably get to later on today and then we’ll start another.

I’ve pretty much blown off everything this weekend for the most part, and have little productivity to show for it, which means that today I need to try to get as caught up as possible before Paul gets up and comes down to join me in the living room this afternoon. I still need to write up my thoughts on Ode to Billy Joe, I have several things I need to be writing, and need to be done, so I think I won’t be turning on the television this morning or this afternoon and instead parking in either my chair to read or at my desk to be writing. When I finish this I am going to go read, and then most likely to shower and get back to work here at my desk,

I was very pleased to see that Jayden Daniels and the Commanders (sounds like a 60’s vocal band, doesn’t it?) won their playoff game (my condolences, Detroit Lions fans) and what a mark he’s making in the NFL! I told Paul yesterday, “ten years ago if someone would have told us that two of the greatest NFL quarterbacks of all time would be LSU graduates and Heisman Trophy winners, we would have laughed in their face.” It’s true. During the Les Miles era the LSU offense often sputtered and misfired, with talent being wasted on both sides of the ball; the defense was great but the offense could never be depended upon. Since Joe Burrow arrived in 2018, that has changed completely and flip-flopped; now we have a defense we can’t count on, but an impressive offense. I think LSU is going to be very good next year, and might be one of the few bright spots of the year in this household, for sure.

I am really enjoying Farrah Rochon’s Bemused, which will be fun to write about when I finish reading. I think Hercules is one of the more underrated Disney animated films, and my favorite part of the movie was the muses (and I live in the neighborhood of the muses, too)–so this book is absolutely perfect for me. I always loved ancient Greece when I was a child, and was an even bigger fan of the mythology. (Funny how it’s always Greek myths rather than the Roman versions, even as we call him Hercules–which is the Latin; in the Greek it’s Heracles.) I’ve also always wanted to write about a Greek myth, revised and updated and modernized, or even not; I’ve always wanted to tell the story of the Trojan War from the perspective of Cassandra on the walls of Troy as her city burned. I love Madeline Miller’s reinterpretation of myth in The Song of Achilles and Circe, but she does it so well I can’t imagine being anything other than a very pale carbon imitation. (Does anyone remember carbon paper? Is it even used or made anymore?)

But if I don’t buckle down and start writing, I don’t know that I can actually go ahead and call myself a writer anymore.

And on that note, I am going to make another cup of coffee and head into the living room with Bemused. Have a lovely Martin Luther King Jr holiday, everyone, and I’ll give a snow report update tomorrow morning, either from here on a remote day or from the office.

  1. Okay, to be fair, I just checked my email and they will decide this afternoon whether we’ll be working “remotely” or not tomorrow. My apologies to upper management. ↩︎

I Hear You Knocking

I really wish I had discovered how marvelous audiobooks are for long drives years ago. My God, listening to audiobook rather than music makes the drive so much more enjoyable; sure, I do zone out every once in a while when I am driving and listening–I always go off on some kind of mental tangent at some point or another when I am highway driving for a long time, which means I sometimes have to rewind because I missed something–but my old fears of audiobooks in the car (I would get so involved in the story I’d stop paying attention to the driving, or the driving would require so much attention I wouldn’t be able to listen to the book anymore) also proved to be for naught. The drive is still the worst part of the trip (other than the not-being-able-to-sleep thing), but audiobooks have dramatically improved the entire experience so much that I almost don’t mind the drive anymore….almost.

I also wish I’d started reading Carol Goodman a lot earlier. I don’t recall how or why I first discovered her work, but I am a big fan and I was delighted, after reading (and enjoying the hell out of) The Lake of Dead Languages recently to go ahead and download The Night Villa for the trip.

It may just be my favorite Goodman to date.

When the first call came that morning I was with a student, so I didn’t answer it.

“Don’t worry,” I told Agnes Hancock, one of my most promising classics majors, “the machine will get it.”

But it stopped after the third ring.

“I guess whoever was calling changed his mind,” Agnes said, relacing her fingers to conceal the ragged cuticle on her right thumb. She’d been gnawing on it when I found her waiting outside my door–ten minutes early for my eight o’clock office hours. Most of my students were sound asleep at this hour, which was why I held my office hours so early: to discourage all but the most zealous. Agnes was definitely a zealot. She was on a scholarship, for one thing, and had to maintain a high average, but Agnes was also one of those rare students who seemed to have a genuine passion for the material. She’d gone to a high school with a rigorous Latin program and gotten the highest score on the national Latin exam in the state. Not shabby for a state as big as Texas. She wasn’t just good at declensions, though she had the ability to translate a line of ancient poetry and turn it into poetry again, and the agility of mind to compare the myths from one culture to those of another. She could have a successful academic career in classics or comparative literature. The only problem was that her personal life was often chaotic–a result, I suspected, of her looks.

So far, the majority of the Goodman novels I’ve read all have to do with private schools and usually involve a Classics professor; just as in The Lake of Dead Languages, our main character in The Night Villa is a professor of Latin, who can actually sight-read (translate as she reads), but unlike the others, (set in Ne England) when The Night Villa opens we realize our main character is actually a professor at the University of Texas and lives in Austin. The others also were more Gothic in nature; brooding old buildings that used to be family mansions, now converted into schools and dormitories, slightly older heroines with dark secrets in their past that come back to haunt their present, the “woman in danger” trope replayed and revamped beautifully, with poetic writing and vivid settings you can see in your head (had Goodman published back in the 1970s and 80s, I guarantee all the books would have a young woman with long hair and long nightgown running away from a creepy mansion with a light on in one window). Our main character is Sophie Chase, a young woman teaching at UT with a sad backstory–orphaned young, raised by her grandparents and her aunt (M’Lou); she also had a long term relationship with a young man named Eli that ended up badly after she lost their baby in a tragic fall and he became involved with a mysterious, cult-like group. The opening of the book is a lot more violent and in-your-face than what I’ve become accustomed to with Goodman’s work; Sophie and some other professors are interviewing students for a possible internship with an archaeological dig going on in Herculaneum (a city which suffered the same fate as Pompeii and by the same volcanic eruption, but didn’t the press Pompeii did). During Agnes’ interview a troubled young man she used to date comes into the interview room with a gun and starts shooting–Sophie is shot in the chest and loses a part of her lung, but she ends up going on the trip to Italy as one of the other professors who was supposed to go was killed by the gunman. They are being hosted on the island of Capri in the bay of Naples by a billionaire software designer with an interest in archaeology. He has built his own villa on the island as a replica of the villa they are excavating in Herculaneum, the Villa della Norte, the Night Villa. A discovery of some papyrus scrolls in the ruins that reveal some information about an ancient slave girl from the time also has intrigued Sophie, which is part of the reason she has agreed to go–as well as wanting to get away from Austin for a while. (Sophie wrote her dissertation on the slave girl; this discovery offers to give her more insight and information about the girl for the book she is writing.)

The book is, if you’ll pardon my language, fucking amazing. Not only do we have Sophie dealing with the aftermath of a massive emotional and physical trauma (getting shot and losing part of your lung is a serious fucking trauma), but also the fallout from the end of her relationship many years earlier; a kind of feeling of responsibility for Agnes and how she is dealing with the guilt and trauma of the boyfriend going nuts and on a shooting spree (it ended with him shooting himself); and of course the mystery of the scrolls. The scrolls also give a beautiful insight into life in ancient Herculaneum and in the Roman Empire and also tell a story about the slave girl. It’s an exceptionally good novel, literate and smart and complex and multi-layered; and I haven’t even covered everything in the story here. Sophie is strong and likable and vulnerable; she makes for a great heroine, and she also has so much empathy for other people you can’t help rooting for her.

The book, set mostly on Capri, reminded me a lot–in a good way–of Mary Stewart’s This Rough Magic with its Corfu island setting; Goodman is also exceptional about setting and place. I could see the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius; the ruins of the city buried by the eruption; and I also love how she weaved mythology and the ancient mysteries as an integral foundation of the story. I would even go so far as to say Goodman is the modern equivalent of Mary Stewart–which is high praise indeed.