The Farmstead

Term starts in less than a month (I'm actually looking forward to it, but I need to keep the reading-momentum up these last few weeks because there's still quite a lot to do) and one of my papers is on these four Neo-Latin authors, so today I was reading Poliziano's Silvae - a collection of four poems that (I think) he supposedly used as introductions to his lessons on Latin and Greek literature.

The longest, Nutricia, kind of has me scratching my head, because it doesn't really "serve as a general introduction to the study of ancient and modern poetry" (as Wikipedia would sensibly have it). Instead it seems to be basically 800 lines of SQUEE about Spig and Spog and Oh Do You Remember When and Lucan was cool (but not as good as Virgil)... Because when you squee about Classics, it's all relevant and good!

Not that that isn't exactly how it should be, but it's an interesting insight into how to make fanboying/girling be accepted as srs bsns - apparently we all just need to leave it 1500-odd years (or a lot fewer, considering Dante does get a look-in), then write our squee in hexameters! They'll even put it on uni syllabuses (though, to be fair, it won't be a very popular option...).

So the Arctic Monkeys have a gig next week. They could have announced the date the tickets would have gone on sale (maybe with a mailing-list pre-sale) and cackled as they broke the internet into tiny pieces. But, instead, they sent out a link to a form where everyone could sign up for the chance to purchase a couple of tickets (with very stringent anti-reselling terms and conditions). I signed up, which took me a couple of seconds, and now I have a shiny, shiny email in my inbox with a code to go and buy a couple of tickets any time between now and Sunday night. SQUEE!!

Oh, effortlessness, how I love you... Why on earth everyone doesn't do this, I don't know. As far as I'm concerned, if something's going to be a lottery anyway, you might as well make the lottery bit explicit and not waste everybody's time.

In other news, I have a vague urge to write Greek tragedy fanfic. Post-Trachiniae Hyllus/Iole, to be precise, because, dude, that's messed up.

Had a good afternoon in London today, with both the satisfaction of finding something I'd wanted for a while and of finding something shiny I'd never thought about before. They were both, strangely, that weird mustardy/orangey/yellowy "gold" colour. It turns out the 80s fever currently afflicting fashion everywhere has affected me with a taste for sportswear, because, building on my ownership of trainers for the first time in years, I now have a very nice vintage Adidas track jacket (Made in Yugoslavia, apparently): the sort of jacket I've been wanting for ages (don't judge me!). I also found some rather amazing shoes in the Topshop sale, which are, er, high-heel peep-toe platforms made out of rubber/plastic... They're amazing!!

In the past my shopping trips have been compared to hikes (though I resent this - wandering down Oxford Street from Bond Street to Tottenham Court Road and then on to Covent Garden is a perfectly sensible way to shop), so it's perhaps not surprising that I made a detour to the British Museum en route (<3 free museum entry). Yet I have a rather odd relationship with the British Museum, because I am what is probably known as a Bad Classicist: I have very little time for pots and sculptures of most descriptions (there are exceptions, obviously, like the Warren Cup, which is actually fascinating - unlike the Wiki article I link to, which I'm not entirely happy with, but comment if you care and I'll ramble), and even less for the Rah Rah, Up With Athens Greece, Down With Rome attitude that gets everywhere and means that I'm not sure Rome has a single dedicated room in the whole place.

But, and this is a big but, there is one room in the British Museum that fills me with utter glee, and is completely worth skipping past all the smelly tourists and their cameras. That room is Room 69: Greek and Roman Life.

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