6 posts tagged “rome”
Wow, I have no idea how I am ever, ever, ever going to get my qual to even twenty pages, much less thirty (which was my original goal). Right now, I've got about six pages, and I've used all the research I've done so far, pretty much. The funny thing is, Ellen thought I'd done a lot of research, and that I had plenty to go on. Guess not.
Let's do the "Wow, I'm screwed" dance!
Oh well. As long as I have, say, fifteen pages to turn in to Ellen, I think she'll be able to give me good advice on what to expand upon. And I can refer a lot more to the Latin, which will both strengthen my argument and add words. I just am frustrated, because I am fitting a lot of ideas into a short paper -- but I'm not sure if I'm being admirably concise, or ridiculously dense.
so, uh, someone stop me, but i've signed up for nanowrimo and i want to write a story about magic in the early empire.
I KNOW, I KNOW.
goddamn i'm a geek.
since i figured out that i can keep my computer this year, or at least for a while (observed my habits, found out that i really don't need to use it as a laptop that much, so if battery function continues to go downhill, i'm not even too worried about replacing the battery immediately) and therefore don't need to save all my discretionary income for the next million years, i decided that i'm going to invest in buying fabrics that clodia actually would have worn. or at least reasonable fascimiles thereof.
the gold silk habotai on the left is going to be clodia's palla (the shawl roman women wore over their heads). the teal linen will probably be her tunica. i'm going to wait to make her stola, which will be both a harder garment to make and a more expensive garment (undyed wool in a suitable weight is difficult to find and expensive! i may give in and get dyed, which is still somewhat historically accurate, especially for a woman as rich as clodia). the colors are pretty reasonable for the period, although the dyeing would not have been as even, as far as i know...
this still leaves the questions of hair, jewelry and shoes. jewelry can be taken care of with a little judicious borrowing from friends and possibly attacking the late '80s jewelry sections of thrift shops. shoes, while they would have been cloth, are doable with ballet flats -- or just regular shoes; no one will be looking anyway. hair is more difficult, since i don't have any. ideally, i would have enough that i could buy and dress a partial wig to look like crown braiding and up-front curls or similar. however, i'm not going to waste money on a nice full wig when my hair is this short and i intend to grow it longer. so that will have to wait -- not that i have money for it anyway; it'd end up waiting either way.
i'm pretty excited about this. i'm going to hand sow it, and i've got plenty of time, and a good-at-things seamstress friend to help if i get stuck, plus they're easy things to make. yay!
the classics profs are hilarious.
"if you have a naked man lying next to someone's wife, they're not playing uno." - ellen
"that's what young roman men are after -- they're only after one thing -- praise, fame and advancement!" - nigel
"if you're roman, being funny is a bit like being a prostitute" - nigel
"we may be poor, diseased and starving, but we're roman poor, diseased and starving, and we can throw you to be killed by wild animals if we damn well want to!" - ellen
ellen: you. how old are you?
student: 25.
ellen: okay, imagine ten years from now being married to a thirteen year old girl. imagine that! i mean - what do you think?
student: ...god willing...
ellen: .........!!!
as for myself, in my qual, i'm addressing this thesis: in the catilinarian orations, cicero constructs the body as a microcosm of the state through his sexual invective. this principle carries through to the "pro caelio," in which he attacks publius clodius pulcher through his sister clodia by using their relationship as a metaphor for clodius' negative effect on roman politics. the famous "slip" cicero made in that speech regarding clodia and clodius' relationship -- "her husband, oops! i mean her brother, i always make that mistake" -- is the central issue here.
in any case, i'm addressing a point both of cicero's philosophy and his rhetoric, and these things can only be properly understood within the context of his time and position (he walked the line between the optimates and the populares, ultimately trying to find the best way to preserve the dying republic).
the more i read about the late republic the more frightened i become. our nation is in that same period, the period of decline just as it appears to have reached the height of its power. i hope we produce a cicero, so that at least in future, we have someone's correspondence and their life to follow. unfortunately, in this digital age, i doubt that much will be left for people two thousand years from now to understand the details of our political machinations.
almost finished with my paper, "Greek Temptresses and Philhellenes in Plautus's The Bacchides." working titles: "How Greece is Fucking Rome with an Intellectual Strap-on," and "Greece Vs. Rome Oil Wrestling Cage Match," and "Greece, Rome, and the Metaphorical Vagina Dentata of the Bacchanalia."
it's pretty funny because just about the entire rest of the class is also here in the ircs, working on their papers. oh avenue q, you are so true. "sitting in the computer lab / 3 am before the final paper is due / cursing yourself cause you didn't start sooner / and seeing the rest of the class there too," yeah.
it's scary cause this is the last & only paper for that class before the qual. eek! that's scary.
in other news, our water got turned off last night because the plumbers are dumb and forgetful. it's fun to not have water for fourteen hours. not. on the plus side they were very apologetic, and maybe they'll work faster now that they've let us down in about a million ways. maybe.
