Nerdiness and Disney!

Furious that Chris Nolan would disregard historical accuracy in adapting The Odyssey by making a "movie" with "cameras" instead of memorizing the entire story and then going on a nationwide tour to sing it to us while tripping on ergotized barley]

(source) its so funny how actual Greek and Homeric scholars are talking about this movie vs the fact that people on tumblr are acting like Nolan personally dug up Homer's actual bones and pissed on them

And frankly, I think in this the year of our lord 2026, we can raise the bar higher than “All publicity about Homer is good publicity.” For one, I think we should also ask whether engagement with Homer, or with any aspect of antiquity, is well thought out and well crafted, or at least has some interest in the original beyond the surface—which as I note in my review linked above, I don’t think this is. And trust me, I know that Classics is kinda desperate for engagement right now and some professors are probably trying not to piss in anyone’s cornflakes lest we lose potential students. But when guys like Christopher Nolan (not one of Martin’s fellow classicists, but one of his fellow old white men with cultural capital) just use antiquity to bemoan the broad decline of civilization, I think we should question that. The film’s political resonances are weird and, to my mind at least, parrot a lot of conservative rhetoric. Nolan’s changes to the text are key to that; they are not neutral and have narrative and political implications. Regardless of whether or not he meant it to come off that way, I think it’s worth talking about, especially given the ways that classical antiquity, as supposed paragon of ~Western Civilization~, is utilized on the political right.

and I think there are a variety of reasons for this — the Odyssey especially seems to have a really strong transhistorical resonance as an adventure story (plus the hook of “man really wants to go home to his wife and his house,” which is admittedly universal), and pop culture in the last few decades has really amplified the prominence of Greek mythology in ways that have obviously helped the Iliad’s visibility. but there are also ways in which I feel like the Aeneid has very particular resonances at our historical moment - e.g. as a refugee narrative, as a comment on imperialism, etc — and so it’s kind of fascinating to me that familiarity with it seems to have dropped to the point that few of my students know anything about it before taking a Roman Civ class, when even in the mid-20th century I imagine the Aeneid may well have been more familiar to your average non-specialist than the Iliad

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from @dustseasons on instagram .

im always saying this

fantastic. i love it. i posted this after my wife said it yesterday and as i was doing it i was like "this can't be an original thought. as soon as i hit post someone's going to say 'you stole this from a tweet from 2014' and i'll say 'no, i stole it from my beautiful wife.'"

Look at my birthday cake...

been reading cicero's rant about words being given obscene meanings and i don't think i've ever seen a latin sentence that made me burst into such immediate and violent laughter before