between the rock and the cold, cold sea

Quoted from GER Lloyd, 2003, In the Grip of Disease: studies in the Greek imagination:

"[Herodotus] recounts the fate of Pheretime who had punished the people of Barce for the murder of Arcesilaus by cutting off the breasts of the women and impaling the men on stakes round the city wall... Pheretime herself comes to a sticky end: she dies a horrible death, 'her body seething with worms while she was still alive'."

Pheretime, also known as Pheretima, was a Cyrenaean queen. She has a genus of earthworms named after her. (Although as matociquala said, the worms of which Herodotus speaks are more likely to be maggots.)

Can we all say ick?

Books 2010: 133

nonfiction

133. Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Oxford UP, New York and London, 2009. Edited with introduction and notes by Tone Brekke and Jon Mee.

Mary Wollstonecraft had an interesting life and an interesting turn of phrase. These letters, written for publication, manifest both her prejudices and her convictions in a manner that, while original, is also very much of its time. Wollstonecraft believes in progress.

She also has a fine eye for landscape, but also a convinced superiority as concerns society in the Scandinavian countries she passes through. The last few letters take a jaundiced, though most likely accurate, view of commerce.

An interesting piece of work. The appendices provide contemporary responses, among other things.

---

I am, it must be confessed, disinclined to work tonight. Well, I've been disinclined all day, to tell the truth. Perhaps instead of perusing the Timaeus I will shelve books instead.

My present project - the thesis - requires that I read all those Greco-Roman classics which I have til now successfully avoided. (This is sometimes a great pleasure, and more often a vast pain in the unmentionables.) In addition to reading specific blokes like Galen and Hippokrates (and getting a reasonable selection of the Galenic works is remarkably awkward, actually). And my personal inclinations are pushing me towards thinking about reading as widely as possible - maybe Chinese, Indian, Arabic sources in translation? - to look at how other societies may have conceptualised healing and access to the gods.

This is awkward, god knows, because material from contemporary or slightly later societies isn't available in translation half as readily as most of the Greco-Roman stuff - and considering that there's a whole bunch of Greco-Roman stuff (not the famous lads, but some of the lesser or later - i.e. Late Antique - fellows) aren't available in any translation later than the 1920s, this is not a minor issue.

Oh, well. I suppose I must count my blessings, and not my eggs.

Books 2010: 128

nonfiction

128. G.E.R. Lloyd, In the Grip of Disease: Studies in the Greek Imagination. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003.

Lloyd has a long and distinguished career behind him in investigating Greek science, medicine, and philosophy. In recent years he has published a number of works which compare and contrast ancient Chinese science, medicine, and thought with their Greek equivalents, and in many ways his work focuses on the history of thought as much or more as on the history of actions.

In the Grip of Disease highlights this preference in his research interests. Like most books on Greek antiquity, it is heavily weighted towards the early period, with only one chapter (not counting the epilogue) dealing with developments after Aristotle.

The book is divided into nine parts. "Anthropological Perspectives," an introduction to ways of conceptualising how disease was involved with the Greek imagination; "Archaic Literature and Masters of Truth," which starts off with Homer; "Secularisation and Sacralisation," which discusses the concurrent rise of both "sacred" and "natural" ways of thinking through disease; "Tragedy," which is a brief survey of disease in the Attic tragedians (and by no means as lucid and detailed as Mitchell-Boyask's monograph, which I have already mentioned on this lj); "The Historians," which mainly concerns itself with Herodotos's and Thucydides's orientation to disease; "Plato," which is all Plato, all the time, with particular attention to the teleology of the Timaeus; "Aristotle," for which likewise but with Aristotle; and "After Aristotle: Or Did Anything Change?" which mentions Aelius Aristides but in general does not deliver any particularly new or detailed contribution. The concluding "Epilogue" reflects briefly on attitudes to sickness both ancient and modern, and how the rhetoric of disease is employed.

At the end of each chapeter, the relevent texts are given in both the original Greek and in translation. That's a useful learning tool, but it must have been a copyright nightmare.

Scholarly reviews are available here and here. My conclusion is that Lloyd has written an unusual and engaging book, which nonetheless does not go as far into detail concerning Greek attitudes to disease and sickness as the topic could stand.

Which is kind of good for me, because it means there's probably still room for my thesis topic to make an original contribution to knowledge. I hope.

"Towards an initial consideration of sickness and healing in Greek antiquity..."

This is where I go blank, you see.

I want to talk about the experience of illness, about how being sick narrows the world, and about how being in pain breaks down the idea of the self as a thing that possesses voice and agency. I want to talk about fear - of sickness, of death - and consciousness of mortality affects how sick humans relate to their immediate household and to healers. I want to understand how this affected ancient Greek attitudes towards healing gods and professional practitioners of medicine.

How there's this process of healing strategies, how people appealed to gods and doctors at the same time, and how healing sanctuaries and medical practitioners shared much of the same images of the healing process. And how, nonetheless, there's an element of tension, not just between healing sanctuaries/professional medicine and your local remedy-person or the guy who says his charms can bring down the moon, but between sanctuaries and doctors - the issue of cautery comes up.

Right now, I don't have the details. I don't even have the critical vocabulary to talk about this - I need to give myself a crash-course on Derrida and Foucault, culture as text and culture as inscribed in the body, if only so I can call them wrong wrong wrongity wrongheads problematic from an informed position. I don't think all postmodernist theory is pointless wank navel-gazing autoeroticism flawed.

I do hate it a lot, though.

But right now, I'm stuck on illness experience, conceptualising the actual experience of being sick in the Greek world. It's surprisingly difficult to access that domain, from the privilege of relative good health and modern medicine. When a chest cold is not expected to be life-threatening, whooping cough all but eradicated, tuberculosis of the spine a shocking rarity, consumption a thing more of our grandparents than ourselves, fever treatable with over-the-counter medications. So how do you conceive of that mortal threat, in antiquity? How did they? And how did they respond?

Those are the questions I really want to answer. And right now I'm still too ignorant.

Books 2010: 125-126


125. Rowena Cory Daniells, The King's Bastard.

It appears to me that there has arisen a specifically Australian tradition of High Fantasy - Trudi Canavan, Jennifer Fallon, Karen Miller - and it is this mode which The King's Bastard, the first book of a trilogy, follows.

Byren is the second son of the king of Rolencia. Minutes younger than his brother the heir, he has no ambitions whatsoever, and is baffled by the tension that begins to grow between them, a tension which is exacerbated after the arrival of a royal cousin (under the bar sinister) at court. Tensions are also evident in the lives of his younger brother, Fyn, who is pledged to a monastery, and his sister Piro, who has no desire to marry for politics. Piro is also hiding a dangerous secret: her talent for "Affinity," an ill-defined sort of magic, much as Byren's disinherited friend Orrade is hiding his (in Rolencia generally reviled) attraction to men.

There are several problems with this book, leaving aside how superficial I find the worldbuilding. (How many people actually look at how complex pre-industrial societies are? Never mind politics in a court of any size.) The worst problem is that Byren is Too Stupid To Live. Given every indication that he should not trust certain persons, he continues to do so. In addition, he is TSTL in other ways.

The second problem is the Random Seer. Random Crazy Seer is random, and pops up all over the place in the first fifty (?) pages, for no apparent reason other than the auctorial convenience of heavy-handed foreshadowing. The third problem is the fact that the treatment of gender made me want to bite someone.

I'm not, in general, well-disposed to High Fantasy unless it's thoughtful about its themes as well as its construction. (There was a time when I was younger when this was not so, but we all change in time.) Much of it seems tired and hackneyed to me, drawing far too uncritically on the shallowly-received tropes of the European middle ages. In Bastard's case, this is compounded by its position as the first part of a trilogy. The setup is insufficiently compelling for the limited amount of payoff available, and while I'm mildly curious about what happens next, I don't have much emotional or intellectual investment in actually finding out.

...Well, that was curmudgeonly of me, wasn't it? *may in fact be annoyed today*


nonfiction


126. Thomas J. Csordas, Body/Meaning/Healing, New York, 2002.

I don't imagine it's Csordas' fault that the jargon-laden language of anthropology gives me a headache. Nonetheless. Diverting as discussions of healing in contemporary Christian Charismatic and Navajo cultures are, I, for one, would have preferred a rather more accesible style of book.

Books 2010: 116-120


116-117. Gail Carriger, Changeless and Blameless.

The first book in this series, Soulless, was shallow, and I found the worldbuilding superficial. In these sequels, the heroine Alexia - now Lady Maccon - grows a little depth, and the curtain is pulled back on the vista of a steampunk late 19th century Europe, complete with secret laboratories underneath milliners' shops, dirigibles, mad scientists, and Egyptian mummies.

Changeless involves metaphysical shenanigans, intrigues, and werewolves in a Scottish castle. Blameless is predicated upon a vast misunderstanding, and involves an extended chase across Europe and a mad-Templar version of a reunified Italy, among other things.

I do not love werewolf romances, although many of my objections can be overcome absent the "new relationship" aspect of romances. The werewolf love interest remains a bit of an arsehole, to be honest. On the other hand, the most enjoyable element of these books, for me, is the comedy element. Witty rejoinders accompany slapstick, and the broad stereotypes are hardly worse than in costume drama. (I've just been watching the BBC's Scarlet Pimpernel, which is somewhat more full of gender-dynamics fail.)

There is no universe in which I can take thses books seriously. But damn, they're good fun.



118. Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired.

I was a little out of it while reading this book, if I'm honest, which is probably not the best state in which to a read cyberpunk-esque balkanised-USA SF thriller novel.

On the other hand, it glitters. It's sharp as knives, prose sparse and lucid, the main characters - Cowboy and Sarah - deftly drawn. It struck me as a novel about hard choices and the myths we build in order to survive. In many ways, this is not a nice novel.

But it is quite brilliant.



119. Sherwood Smith, Coronets and Steel.

I'll say up front that I have very mixed reactions to this book.

Kim Murray's from California, a champion fencer who's come to Europe in order to find her grandmother's - mysterious and little-spoken-of - family. Ghosts, hijinks, mistaken identities and potential romantic entanglements ensue.

The novel opens in Vienna, but swiftly removes to an imaginary European country called Dobrenica. And the thing that broke - that kept breaking - my suspension of disbelief was the geography. This imaginary country presently shares - apparently - a border with Russia and yet fell within the Austro-Hungarian empire before WWI? Romania or Bulgaria I could believe. (Stick a teeny country between Serbia and Bulgaria, and I would have very little problem believing tense neighbourly relations. Particularly with Macedonia [FYROM] and Greece looking on and wondering what their angle is if the wheels come off the crazywagon.) (Although history in that particular neck of the woods also has Ottomans to take into account.) But Russia?

Where Russia and the Hapsburgs used to meet is the Ukraine, Belarus, bits of Poland. You put a teeny country on the eastern side of the Ukraine, and you're going to have to explain to me why it existed as a country up until WWII. And why anyone from the ruling elite survived 1917 and subsequent years-long bloody aftermath of conflict as anything other than an exile.

So. Wandering Russians aside (and they must have been very lost, but I'll stick my fingers in my ears and pretend the historical communists are Tito's, and the present-day Russians... aren't, and make sense of the geopolitics that way, shall I?), and leaving aside Kim's rather clueless assumption that no one who mistakes her for her long-lost cousin will actually hurt her (seriously. Anyone sane who is asked to impersonate a member of the political class who's been missing for months should run away very fast, and not stop running until they're on another continent) and underdeveloped sense of cynicism, this is a reasonably swashbuckling adventure in fancy dress.

I give the internal politics of Dobrenica a pass for being a made-up country. (But, I mean, seriously? Seriously? Hapsburgs and Russians, but no one even mentioned the EU once? [I thought everyone in Europe, inside the eurozone or out of it, bitched about the EU and its meddling. {Except when they bitch about it not meddling.}])

But if you want a Prisoner of Zenda that wears its Regency debt proudly on its sleeve, and throws in ghosts to boot, it's a damn good read.

Not a very conclusive conclusion, but a damn good read.


nonfiction


120. Plato, Gorgias. Translated by Robin Waterfield, Oxford, 1994.

atheilen? What do you think of this one?

Ostensibly - at least initially - a dialogue between Socrates, Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles, on the value of rhetoric, it works its way out towards an argument that only virtue can bring happiness.

Worthwhile for me, as there are a couple of bits regarding doctors and the function of medicine. On the whole, an interesting articulation of two sets of unconventional moralities (though Callicles' is probably even less rare than it is conventional) from ancient Athens. I'm not entirely sure Plato succeeds in sufficiently defining his terms - "happiness" is left, on the whole, rather vague, contra "love" in the Symposium - and the atmosphere of the Gorgias is on the whole rather more earnest and rather less relaxed than Symposium - well, it's a dialogue, not a set of encomiums mixed with a little bit of dialogue.

Also, dear Plato: terrible state of body =//= terrible state of life. I think I'm with Seneca on this one.

But I enjoyed reading it rather more than I expected.

Now that I have the previous post off my chest...

Books 2010: 110-111


110. Cherie Priest, Dreadnought.

Set in the same continuity as Boneshaker, and startlingly different. When nurse Mercy Lynch learns that her estranged father has fallen ill, she sets out to travel across the American continent to see him, through an alt-hist steampunk nightmare of the American Civil War. Now with extra added zombies!

I liked this book a lot, though not as much as I wanted to. Jarringly, Priest - while remaining in Lynch's point of view - sometimes jumps from referring to Lynch as "Mercy" to calling her "the nurse." Not very very often, but often enough to jolt me out of the reading experience. The battle and travel and details of the setting are convincing to me, but because of its structure, the book feels a little off-balance in terms of tension and resolution. And the climactic zombie encounter did not satisfy me sufficiently, as it appeared to end too quickly. I think I was hoping for a book as claustrophic as Boneshaker and got a completely different experience. It's probably not helped by my ambivalent attitude towards people who set out to reconcile with their estranged fathers.

(Personally, I might visit mine if he bothered to tell me he was dying? But only in order to have the satisfaction of telling him to his face that he was a complete and utter shit. And possibly making sure it hurt. Issues. I have them.)

Anyway. It's a good book. And I really liked the battle scenes and Mercy's encounters with other travellers. The black lady with the restaurant franchise, the boy with the club foot, Miss Theodora Clay. They stand out.


non-fiction

111. Robin Mitchell-Boyask, Plague and the Athenian Imagination: Drama, history and the cult of Asclepius, Cambridge, 2008.

I don't have the chops to discuss whether or not this book works. It looks in very technical detail at the fifth century BC tragedies (with a title like that, I was hoping for a diachronic survey, but alas no) which use a nosological vocabulary, and relates them both to the plague at Athens recounted in Thucydides (probably striking first in 430 BC) and to the construction of the Asklepion on the south slope of the acropolis, directly behind the theatre of Dionysos (c. 420 BC).

Table of Contents.

Most useful from my perspective is probably chapter three, "The language of disease in tragedy," which itemises the uses of loimos, plague, and nosos, sickness, in tragic drama. Loimos appears to be a much more fraught word than nosos, which is useful to know. Also useful is the discussion of Euripides' Heracles in chapter eight, which points out that at the end of that play, Theseus tells Heracles he is no longer Heracles, "because he is ill." Which is a statement which bears much thinking about, as an articulation of the effect of illness on the self.

Anyway.

Books 2010: 104


104. Terence, The Comedies, translated by Peter Brown, Oxford, 2006.

P. Terentius Afer is a Latin playwright of the second century BC. Before his early death in 159BC, he wrote six plays that we know of, all of which survive. These are largely adaptations of Greek "New Comedies" by Menander or Apollodorus of Carystus, and retain their Greek setting and - mostly - sensibilities. The introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition informs one that fabulae palliatae ("plays in a Greek cloak") were an established genre in Rome at this time, as opposed to the relatively new togatae.

This edition includes all six of his plays, "The Girl from Andros," "The Mother-in-Law," "The Self-Tormentor," "The Eunuch," "Phormio," and "The Brothers," in the order in which they were originally performed. ("The Mother-in-Law" was performed three times, due to being twice run off the stage.) They are lively and frequently given to wit. For a modern audience, however, the prominence of rape is disturbing. Its prior occurence is central to the plots of "The Mother-in-Law" and "The Brothers," and it happens off-stages (and is recounted in triumphant detail on-stage) in "The Eunuch." The happy ending, of course, is that the girl is a citizen woman and is married off to her rapist. Rape was less of a danger to a woman's social position and reputation in antiquity than seduction: seduction compromised her sophronia, whereas a case of rape cast her as the victim.

Consent is hardly ever portrayed as integral to modern relationships. The ancient world has an even more fucked-up view of consent than we do. But we are speaking of a world where the idea of bodily autonomy, except for males of the citizen class, did not exist. Only a couple of centuries early, Aristotle had formulated the idea of natural slavery (which remained influential right down to the latter part of the 19th century, just in case anyone's forgotten). And Terence makes it very clear that it is only rape of a citizen woman which is objectionable: Chaerea, in "The Eunuch," rapes a citizen woman believing that she is a slave, and it is clear that had she not turned out to be a citizen, no consequences would have attached to his act. As it is, the only consequence which results is his marriage.

The virtue of history is empathy. It is looking at what are often very repellent - or incomprehensible - attitudes, and exerting oneself to understand them. Fascinating as I find the ancient world, it also digusts me. And yet one can appreciate its achievements and fascinating puzzles without condoning its attitudes.

Books 2010: 103

non-fiction

103. R.A. Tomlinson, Epidauros, London, Granada, 1983.

This is a short overview of the sanctuary complex at Epidauros. By short, I mean very short: less than one hundred pages. It is divided into two parts: an "Introduction" (a little more than a third of the book) which sketches and briefly analysises the history of the excavation of the site and the publication of the various excavations, particularly the excavations of P. Kavvadias at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.

The second part is "Monuments" and comprises a description of the archaeological remains, and a - necessarily brief - discussion of their functions where these are disputed. The minutiae of archaeological description is relieved by a selection of plans and black and white photographs. Useful for those interested in Asklepios and Apollo in his local form of Apollo Meleatas, but not exactly riveting otherwise.

---

A book a day. So far. This is progress.

---

It's been a busy week.

You can tell the Irish autumn is gathering in. Bright flashes of sunlight occasionally break through the dark mass of cloud, but for the most part the grey sky is low, the twilight early, and rain spits - persistently and damply - at the most inconvenient moments.

Today, I attended my first postgraduate "Information Session," in which a very pleasant Director of Teaching and Learning (Postgraduate) explained The Rules. One is required not to exceed two years in the pursuit of an M.Litt, and four in the pursuit of a PhD. There are reporting requirements, and things to do. Depending on how things fall out this year - I had some very fruitful thinking time, for half an hour beforehand - I may need to talk to my supervisor about transferring to the PhD register next year. We'll see.

I have a timetable for my beginners' Classical Greek, which is good. I've also just taken my shiny new library borrowing privileges for a spin. I'm happier about this than any reasonable person should be.

And I've joined the college kayak club. matociquala, I blame you and your fabulous roomie for introducing me to this sport. I couldn't just walk past the stand.

Add this to climbing, karate, running, and getting enough Italian to read Il santuario di Aesclepius a Lebena -

Alas, in order to get everything done that I want to get done, and still be able to a)read a little fiction, and b)pretend I still mean to write fictions, I'm going to have to give up watching television and DVDs. No Criminal Minds, no Castle, no nothing. Not until I've written my first 8,000 word chapter, which will hopefully happen within twelve months.

Fruitful thoughts which I have had include the need to find or create a database of mentions of doctors and healing/healing deities in the non-medical texts, if I want to get a good grip on the social context. Anyone have any recommendations for free database software?