on #BurningItDown

When you were young you bought your dream house. It was an old, sprawling victorian. It needed work, but you loved the neighborhood and really thought you could restore it
Every summer, every break, on weeknights and weekends: you sanded, painted, watched videos about tiling, tried to find original molding for the trim. You made your life into fixing that house
You replaced the roof, updated the windows, tried to keep the original wood siding. The house was an endless pit of resources but you always loved it. You raised your children there. The house became part of who you were
But over the years you couldn't deny the cracks in the walls and the ceilings that didn't go away with paint and filler. The foundation was broken, build in sandy, treacherous soil
You need to have the house raised up, the foundation completely replaced, and then, maybe it will be ok: but the soil...
And the neighborhood isn't what you thought it was. You never quite got along with the neighbors and all the other houses around are suffering something similar
Your friends say sell the house to someone else, let them deal with the problems. All you can think of is yourself, looking at the house, dreaming of maybe one day making it right
Some of the young people and new buyers see the truth: it might be better to gut it and completely renovate, for those who like the style. Others want to tear it down and build something new
How you want to change the house is shaped by living in it and feeling welcome, by nostalgia and the memory of a dream never achieved.

People outside can see it for what it is.
that's classics.

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More from @sentantiq

16 Feb
To riff on Tolstoy as one does: All happy classics departments resemble one another, but every unhappy department is unhappy in its own way

#classicstwitter
.@kataplexis and @lpoldybloom train our gaze to a small liberal arts school where they teach, to move the discourse from elite institutions and PhD programs

rfkclassics.blogspot.com/2021/02/changi…
This is a different call from early weeks' claims that classics is qualitatively different outside the US and that recent years' problems are primarily (*anglo)-American
Read 7 tweets
19 Jan
This report's reductive, revisionist, and racist idolatry is exactly why I come down so hard on approaches to the humanities that use similar strategies even if they adjust the content and make it "centrist" or "apolitical"
The construction of the past is always political. Claiming otherwise is political.

sententiaeantiquae.com/2021/01/11/sav…
Hoo, boy! This cacata carta makes all sorts of squishy claims about founding fathers feeling bad about slavery, equates progressivism with relativism (on a walk towards fascism and communism) and claims that the only
"authentic education" includes "moral education" (41)
Read 31 tweets
1 Oct 20
.@PeterGainsford @theo_nash @ProfThibodeau

Friends, I have been following the janko discussion and as a homerist with some interest in traditional and formulaic language, I just wanted to add my two cents. Sorry to butt in! But...you know...

#JankyHomer
I have not taken Janko’s methods or his results seriously for decades because (1) it is based on deeply problematic premises and (2) the dataset will never be sufficient

#JankyHomer 2
For (1) his method and model assumes (a) a static and (b) hierarchical relationship between texts that (c) does not entertain multiple performance traditions development different levels of fixity over time

#JankyHomer 3
Read 10 tweets
17 Sep 20
Breaking, from Hades:

Agamemnon, in a press conference today, declared the start of a 1266 BCE Commission to combat the #fakenews Helen and Clytenmestra apologists and the #AntiArgive lies of the Iliad which shows the Trojans as human beings
IN particular, the Peloponnesian death lord was eager to combat anti-Greek and pro-women propaganda, claiming that Helen wasn't all to blame or that people shouldn't sacrifice their daughters.
Agamemnon continued by telling the assembled ghosts that liberal Marxists like Homer and Euripides had been corrupting the youth for too long and that they needed real patriotic education to rid their fatherlands of their epidemics of sympathy, pity, and human understanding
Read 4 tweets
4 Sep 20
Homer provides few universal rights for human beings, but one that emerges in the Iliad is the expectation of proper burial, lamentation, and memorial.

The γέρας…θανόντων (Geras thanontôn).

Literally, something like the "honor prize of the dead"

#ALoserCausedAPlague
γέρας (geras) is charged in the Iliad. The whole conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles starts when Agamemnon deprives Achilles of Briseis, his γέρας (geras), which is a token of the honor (timê) he has in his community.

#ALoserCausedAPlague
But as Achilles finds out, physical tokens are essentially meaningless when you're going to die anyway.

He insists "let us mourn Patroklos, for that is the geras of the dead" (Πάτροκλον κλαίωμεν· ὃ γὰρ γέρας ἐστὶ θανόντων) at the beginning of book 23.

#ALoserCausedAPlague
Read 7 tweets
25 Aug 20
Theseus on #RNC night 2

“Fuck mortal thought, where will it stop?
What boundary will there be for boldness and daring?
If it grows like a tumor during a man’s life
And whoever comes next is even more insanely criminal
Than the guy who came before,
....then the gods
Will have to made a second earth to hold
All the unjust and wicked people”

#Euripides #Hippolytus
φεῦ τῆς βροτείας—ποῖ προβήσεται;—φρενός.
τί τέρμα τόλμης καὶ θράσους γενήσεται;
εἰ γὰρ κατ᾿ ἀνδρὸς βίοτον ἐξογκώσεται,
Read 4 tweets

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