arysteia | Entries tagged with words of wisdom

In honour of Day 11 of

14valentines. Today's subject is voting. There's an essay on the subject here.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.
Winston Churchill

This, on the other hand, is more like it...

( There is a special place in hell for women who do not help other women. )

In honour of Day 10 of

14valentines. Today's subject is the peace movement. There's an essay on the subject here.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.
Winston Churchill

I pity the man who today seriously quoted any of these comments about women though...

( You can always rely on a society of equals taking it out on the women. )

In honour of Day 1 of

14valentines. Today's subject is body image. There's a great essay on the subject here. This post has little to do with body image per se, except possibly for how my love of this sort of food led to a love/hate relationship with my own body.

I'm offering up a recipe I learned from my grandmother, an amazing woman who left her home at twenty and raised ten children in a country on the other side of the world. This recipe is a bitterly kept secret, so if any of you are in fact little old ladies of the Wellington Greek community, I must ask you to avert your eyes. Otherwise, have at. To be honest, I don't know why it's a secret, it's incredibly simple. The trick lies in the laborious beating of the mayonnaise. I once balked at doing it with a food processor, and my grandmother snapped, in her inimitable fashion, "I used to do it with a fork! While your grandfather was off playing with bitches!" Nothing I could say to that.

Anyway, here's the recipe, and the story that goes with it, a story about language and identity. Enjoy.

( Salade de Boeuf/Salata de Bef/Russian Salad/Rossiki Salata. A favourite dish by any other name would taste as good? )

Five questions from

bloodquartz.

1. What is your honest, no holds barred opinion of the NZ government today?

I'm happy with our government. They've brought in social policy I care about -- Civil Unions, the Relationship Property Act (the cases where partners missed out used to make me cry at Law School), the decriminalisation of prostitution (not that I'm in favour of prostitution, but it always bugged me that men utilising the services of a prostitute were in the clear, but women offering said services were for the high jump), subsidy of the arts; and they've stood firm on foreign affairs that are important -- accepting refugees, our nuclear free policy, refusing to go to Iraq. Those are the two things I care about most. Economic policy? Meh. Though I prefer social spending to tax cuts, so thumbs up there too.

2. Who are 5 fictional characters you most wish you could have a conversation with?

Dean Winchester. Not so I can jump his bones -- get your minds out of the gutter -- but because I'd like to talk to him about being an older sibling in an uprooted family. Boy needs some good advice from someone who's been there. Then I'd feed him pie. Many and sundry homemade pies. Then I'd jump his bones. Lex Luthor. Ditto. I'd like to grab him when he was twenty-one, give him a good shake, then tell him about how to be honest but not a doormat. Rodney McKay. I'd like to give him a damn good talking to about the soft sciences. I fear the shouting and name calling and the sheer amount of eau d'ego in the air (mine rises also when social science is under attack) might lead to a concomitant surge of lust. Erm... Fox Mulder. For old times' sake. And to see if five years' additional mulling it over has made the fucking conspiracy make any more sense. Oooh! And Robin Hood. My first and longest lasting love. Seriously, from like two to seventeen.

3. What's one change you most want to see in the world?

To see America get the government it deserves. Honestly. I mean no disrespect. I love America. I love Americans. In my eight state odyssey I adored everyone and everything. The worst thing that ever happened was someone snapped at me for walking on the wrong side of the footpath in Chicago. All I ask in return is that that government have a modicum more respect for the rest of us.

4. What's your perspective on fanworks and artists' rights?

If you deprive an artist of revenue they were legitimately entitled to, that's theft. With the caveat that I do download television programmes I'm fannish about from the States/Canada/the UK. How do I justify it? Because I could wait a lifetime for them to surface in NZ, and when they do they're barely guaranteed a slot. And then I buy the damn dvds anyway, so I do pay for the show. The only losers are local tv channels which lose advertising revenue, and as far as I'm concerned that's a boycott against their offensive practices.

Re fanfic et al... Once you loose a beast into the public domain, the gloves are off. I can do what I want with it. When I was a student and freezing to death one winter, I got down all the books I hated out of the wardrobe and burned them in the fireplace. And part of me shuddered, because I couldn't help thinking of Berlin, but part insisted it was bad taste I was punishing. And the majority just revelled in being warm. I wrote my own Robin Hood book when I was six. We acted out the A-Team in the playground when I was eight. I went to a Doctor Who convention when I was fifteen and we filmed a new adventure. Reading and writing fanfic is my adult engagement with the text. If Aeschylus can call his tragedies "slices from the great banquet of Homer" then I'm in good company. Fanartists are the mythologisers of the new millenium. And mythology belongs to the people.

5. What are five quotes that just resound with your personal worldview and why?

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Voltaire. It's not the First Amendment for nothing. Or as Alan Shore put it, "Speech is free, you hack."

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." Martin Luther King. Take a damn stand. If something's wrong, say so.

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke. I'm all for active intervention. Within clearly prescribed parameters.

"Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die." I confess, I'm a bit of a hedonist at home. Apparently a conflation: "To eat, and to drink, and to be merry." Ecclesiastes VIII 15; "Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die." Isaiah XXII 13; and "Eat, drink, and make love, for all the rest is not worth that [a snap of the fingers]." Sardanapalus.

"I hate him as I hate the gates of hell, that man who says one thing while holding in his heart another." Homer, Iliad IX. I had to get one classics quote in. And I have a special dislike of hypocrisy.

I've been working like a mad thing at my new apartment. Stripping wallpaper, shampooing carpets, jiffing down appliances, painting cupboards... I am so incredibly exhausted I fall straight into bed as soon as I get home (mindset change needed here -- I mean the old place), and maybe I can stay awake for an episode of something, but usually I fall asleep in the middle of it.

I suspect the secret of my new diet is that it breaks your will, numbs your tastebuds, and destroys your appetite. If I ever see another bowl of tomato or pepper soup I will scream. I've barely eaten for days and don't feel remotely hungry, just bored. So incredibly bored. I've realised 98% of my love affair with food is about entertainment, not sustenance. I cook as one of my main hobbies, I also eat as a hobby. I've lost six kilos though (thirteen pounds!) so I'll stick with it.

Also. I answered five questions from

musesfool here. I loved reading the various answers she gave to different people too. If you would like to ask me five questions, or alternately would like me to ask you five questions, have at. Either leave your questions in comments, or leave me a pithy one liner you think sums you up and I'll get to work on yours.

Okay. I accept that the dominant slash pairing that came out of Troy was Hector/Paris. I do, I really do. It's not my bag, but if it's yours that's fine by me. Honestly. I judge noone's fun. Have at, with my blessing.

But you *can't* say your fandom is the Iliad, or that that's where you got your source material from. It isn't. You didn't. I'd be prepared to stake most of what I own that you haven't read it. And if you have, be honest. That isn't where you got your pornalicious idea about gorgeous guys in tie-dyed blue outfits fucking in the sun from.

I also accept that millions more people saw Alexander than have read Arrian. I accept that hot boys are hot boys and you don't have to be a geek like me and study them for nine years to find them so. Feel free, my friends.

But horrendous as the film was, I think it still came across that Alexander and Hephaistion loved each other. A story where Alexander gets off on humiliating Hephaistion in public can not be excused on the grounds that you don't have time to do research. And you can't just shriek "It's an AU" if someone calls you on it. Not if the canon you identified in you summary was "Historical". Um, no. Just no.

I adore multi-canon fandoms. It goes all the way back to my first true love, Robin Hood. I love just about every incarnation. I have almost every book ever written in English (acquired at great inconvenience and expense), and several in French, one in Greek, even one in Russian. For the record, my favourite screen interpretation is Robin of Sherwood - the Michael Praed years of course, not Jason Connery - but I have all the videos and dvds too. I enjoy them all in their own strange way. From Patrick Bergin to Kevin Costner to Richard Greene to Errol Flynn to Carey Elwes...

I love Smallville. I love Superman - the Movie. I love Lois and Clark. I never saw Superboy because it didn't play in New Zealand, but if it suddenly started in the middle of the night I'd give it a go. I'm not really looking forward to the new film, but hell, I'll give it a chance too. I loved the comics when I was a kid. They were my older cousin's, so I think they were Silver Age. I occasionally look at the current ones...

What's my point?

I think if you write fanfic, by which I mean anything that derives from something else, you have to identify your source correctly. If you've only ever seen Smallville, don't say you're writing DC, because you're not. If you've only seen Troy, just say so. It's not a crime. If you've only seen Alexander, for god's sake don't say you're writing Historical fic.

As the cliche goes, don't try to be an apple, or an orange. Be the best banana you can be.

I adore those karmic chi love things where you've just finished explaining something to someone in real life and suddenly it's a meme on lj...

So because I've explained it twice in the last three days,

My journal is called _____ because _____.
My subtitle is _____ because _____.
My friends page is called _____ because _____.
My default icon is_____ because _____.
And, just for the hell of it: My username is ____ because _____.

My whole journal theme plays on the nexus between my two favourite things, the two things I talk about most here. Namely Classics/Ancient Greek and Smallville. I studied Greek for my undergrad degree, Classics postgrad, and my specialties were imperialism and Alexander on the history side, the Iliad and the concept of the hero on the literature side. When Lex Luthor sashayed onto my screen it was lust at first sight, but it became love the second a classical analogy was uttered. My experience in (and passionate devotion to) the influence of the Achilles paradigm on Alexander and the reading of a historical/literary/mythological Alexander made the Alexander riff on Lex far far too compelling for me to resist. My Honours dissertation was on the degeneration in portrayal of character, rather than degeneration of character of Odysseus between epic and tragedy, so that fit my perception of Lex well too.

So, then, my journal is called Locus Classicus because I love the idea of the one seminal example of something - the quote or artifact that best typifies what you're trying to describe/explain. This is where I revel in the idea of Smallville at its best being epic poetry. I also like the more literal (mis)translation that this is just a place where Classics goes on.

My subtitle is "I'm just interested in men who ruled the world before they were thirty" because... Well I am. And that was the greatest moment ever for me and my personal version of fangirl madness.

My friends page is called "The Scholiasts" because I was always intrigued by the way that comments/commentary/criticism scrawled on the ancient page became part of the text in subsequent copyings. That's the way I see lj at its best - all our posts and comments become one rich fannish tapestry.

My default icon is Lex in lavender (the way I'll always think of him) looking vaguely annoyed, and bearing the legend "Vex". It's a play on Lex and my own shortened name Vic, most obviously, but also the fact that if I were Lex I'd be hard pressed not to walk round Smallville in a perpetual ill humour. Also, probably, a subliminal play on the menis, or wrath, of Achilles, which gets the Iliad going, Alexander's legendary temper, and the fact that I see the final explosion of Lex's epic rage rather than Clark's more childish fits of pique being what kicks us into the stuff of legend. Whatever provokes it.

Finally, my username is arysteia because I couldn't get aristeia when I first set up the corresponding yahoo account. I've come to truly love it spelt with a y however, and the corresponding extra personalising that goes with it. I find it hard to use the i when I need to in academic writing now. For those of you who haven't studied Greek, or aren't into heroic poetry, aristeia is the noun from aristos meaning best. In epic poetry, an aristeia is the scene where an individual warrior or hero has his greatest moment. Think Patroklos when he's in Achilles' armour, saving the Greek army. It's more than just a literal, egotistical best, or even particularly attached to the adjective good, however, rather it's the moment when the hero is most himself. Most everything that makes us love him. So I guess I thought a journal was an appropriate place for me to be my most me. My most fannish me, anyway, if not my deepest, most personal, me. And, of course, a place to wax endlessly lyrical about Alexander, Hephaistion, Lex, Clark, Achilles, Patroklos, and anyone else who catches my fancy at *their* best.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: The White Stripes - Seven Nation Army

Armistice Day, Remembrance Day, Veterans' Day.

Known by different names in different countries, November 11 is not observed as a holiday in New Zealand, though its significance is known to many. We mourn our dead, and commemorate their sacrifices, on April 25, Anzac Day. The ANZACs (the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) landed on the beaches at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915, and over the course of the next nine months sustained massive casualties. Rightly or wrongly, the campaign, a debacle by any standards, is remembered in New Zealand as the last hurrah of the colonial cannon fodder concept - namely that New Zealand troops were deliberately and callously sent to the most dangerous positions by British officers. Anzac Day, then, bears an additional significance as the birth of an independent, individual New Zealand, and our spiritual break with Mother England.

This year, however, was different. November 11 saw the fulfillment of a ninety year old dream as the remains of an unidentified New Zealand soldier killed at the Somme were exhumed from the Commonwealth Cemetery in France, and repatriated to Wellington to be buried in a new tomb at the National War Memorial. Just as Anzac Day now commemorates all wars New Zealand has fought, so this man will represent all New Zealand's dead and missing.

An eerie silence descended on the capital as the cortege passed from Parliament to the new Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, accompanied by a military honour guard and a Maori war party. The interment ceremony was beautiful, and the new tomb is too, its black marble simplicity more reminiscent of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington than the baroque splendour of the Cenotaph which previously served as locus for the tens of thousands of New Zealanders buried overseas.

New Zealand lost more soldiers, per capita, in both World Wars than any other country. Eighteen thousand in WWI, for example, out of a population of less than a million. That would be the equivalent of seven million in America today. I weep just thinking about it. These days our army focuses on peace keeping operations, but it still deserves its reputation for bravery, honour, and good humour. I'm proud to wear my red poppy today.

For non-Commonwealth citizens, November 5 is when we celebrate the Gunpowder Plot. Well, obviously we're celebrating the fact that the plot was thwarted, not the fact that some guy (heh!) tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament. But I'm sure I'm not the only one who's sorta kinda on poor Mr Fawkes' side. Our MPs could *do* with a bit of a bollocking.

When I was a kid, I distinctly remember being taught that Parliament was all that was great and good, democracy yadda yadda, and Guy Fawkes and friends were evil ne'er-do-wells who wanted to kill the King, God Save 'Im.

Then I grew up and studied History, and learned that Fawkes and friends were disenfranchised Catholics, able neither to practise their religion, nor vote. And that he was racked, thumb-screwed, and otherwise tortured into confessing and recanting, before being hung, drawn and quartered. Now that's a horse of a different colour...

Naturally, most people don't have a clue what they're actually doing, other than lighting fires and blowing shit up. On the one day of the year that they're legally allowed to. And the Fire Department hates it, because dozens of morons manage to set their own or their neighbours' houses on fire, and the SPCA hates it, because there's always some monster who thinks it's funny to strap explosives to animals...

And I feel disconcerted all of a sudden, and wish I hadn't agreed to go to the fireworks display. Because I'm having a sudden visceral memory of a Guy Fawkes party I went to as a kid, barely out of kindergarten, where the adults lit the most enormous bonfire in the back yard, and actually burned the guy on it. And noone does that anymore, admittedly, probably due to fire regulations, but that's how you used to celebrate Guy Fawkes. Stuff a set of old clothes with straw, stick a head on top, and burn him on a pyre. And oh my god, this is the most stream of consciousness post I've ever made, because I was just fooling around at first, but now I'm upset.

We stood around and symbolically reenacted burning someone at the stake? And parents took their kids? That is the most warped thing I can imagine. Does the fact that noone knows what they're doing make it better or worse? And how the hell did it take me this long to click?

I'm sorely tempted to delete this post now, but it seems like a cop-out. I think I have to vindicate Guy's protest, and leave it up.

Out to dinner with my sekrit gay boyfriend:

Me: My problem is I have a ratio of eight tops to ten bottoms in my wardrobe.
Craig: Mine is there's a ratio of eight bottoms to ten tops at Pound [Wellington's top gay bar].

Current Mood: smirktastic


There's far too little love in this world to quibble when we find it

...and continue as you mean to go on.
And what an inauspicious beginning - that's one of my favourite quotes, and I've completely forgotten who said it. Oh well. I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear my trousers rolled... Now that, I can tell you, is T.S. Eliot. And I really am feeling old at the moment, though perhaps twenty-six, pushing twenty-seven is a little early to be contemplating a zimmer frame. My tendency to ramble is getting worse though, so without further ado...