“So the Iliad is not in fact the story of the Trojan War, but of one short episode within its ten-year length. After Homer, the work was divided into twenty-four books. Books 2 and 23 of the Iliad cover a period of only three days; the first and last books extend the whole action to a few weeks. Such expansiveness seem to make Wagner feel terse; yet Matthew Arnold, poet and critic, famously described Homer as ’eminently rapid’. This is true in two senses. Although the grand narrative unfolds across an immense distance, the battle scenes are multiplicity of small incidents; there is no lingering. The speeches too are fast and forceful; the longest of them, Achilles’ explosion in Book 9, is furious in its pace….” – Classical Literature, Richard Jenkyns, 2016.
Tag: 2016
Happy Indie Author Day 2016!
To celebrate, why not share some indie love by promoting an indie book or author? Or, you could read an indie book!
We suggest (cough, cough) THE AUTOMATION. It’s free to read in its entirety on Goodreads.
#BLAThoughtOfTheDay – I only started watching Animal Kingdom because I thought Matt Smith was in it based on this picture
I need to get my eyes checked, because that is not Matt Smith. That is Sean Hatosy at an odd angle. So, thanks, EW for making this weird for me. Maybe I’ll actually read your article next time.
[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name – singular) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, goodreads, and Vulcan’s shit list.]
Tweets of the Week: Birdhouse
#BLAThoughtOfTheDay – Will this adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book be just as speciest?
Katharine Trendacosta at io9 writes:
And, of course, we have The Jungle Book itself. The Jungle Book is just as drenched with racism and colonialism as anything else Kipling wrote on the subject. The thread running throughout the stories is that Mowgli is superior to the animals that raised him by virtue of being man, not beast. That’s a neat parallel to Britain and India. There’s a fun little story in The Second Jungle Book about a superstitious Indian village that worships a horrible old crocodile, only for a British man to blow it to pieces. Because they are more rational, you see.
I’m not saying that Kipling should be censored, but I am saying that he cannot be presented without context. There are messages in The Jungle Book that are very hard to remove. Hell, Disney managed to add to the problems in the 1960s when it added a character called King Louie, who is widely seen as a racist caricature of black people. (Kipling’s book has monkeys, which are the worst of the animal lot, being incapable of having government and only able to mimic others without a decent culture of their own.)
[Via]
Stupid, sad, silly humans.
[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name – singular) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, goodreads, and Vulcan’s shit list.]