Aerin > Recent Status Updates

Three things to bear in mind when you’re drinking a lot: do not drink cheap wine; do not drink undiluted wine; do not eat snacks during a drinking session. When you’ve had enough to drink, do not go to bed without vomiting as much as you can. When you have vomited enough, have a quick bath and rest. [That’s five.]”

Wise(?) words from Mnesitheus.

There are two days on which a woman pleases most: the day when someone marries her and he carries her into his house, and the day when her husband carries out her dead body. -Hipponax

Har har. I’ve heard the same sentiment expressed in modern times, except it was about owning a boat.

This is a lot of fun, but it should have been edited down. For instance, there’s a section called “Rabies and Tetanus” which is one sentence long and just states that those diseases were common in Rome. Ok? Not sure how that’s a “weird and wonderful story”; it’s not even quoting an ancient author. This kind of non sequitur is all over the place in this book. Makes for a bumpy reading experience.

I remember buying a mass-market paperback of this at the drugstore in the mid-90s when I was around 13 or 14. I thought the cover looked cool and the title intrigued me (I had recently seen the Foucault Pendulum at the Smithsonian on a family trip to DC). I never got more than 50 pages into it, and reading it now, I’m surprised I got even that far. I’m adoring it this time, but… yeah. It’s dense.

Whoa whoa whoa, I was not expecting these stories to be so gorgeous. I haven’t read Liu before, just his translation of The Three-Body Problem, which I found (as the kids would say) very mid. (Do the kids still say that?)

The first two stories here reminded me of Ursula K Le Guin and Ted Chiang, with maybe a little dash of Calvino. That’s high praise.

The peony should be dug up at night, for, if a man does it in day-time and is observed by a woodpecker while he is gathering the fruit, he risks the loss of his eyesight; and, if he is cutting the root at the time, he gets a prolapsed anus.

The more you know.

False advertising. This has nothing to do with mythology, modern or otherwise. It’s just pop culture criticism of the type you might get from any YouTube video essay. And though the book is less than ten years old, this kind of thing ages fast. Does anyone need any more hot takes on Twilight, 50 Shades, superheroes, zombies? I know I didn’t.

Like a neon sign, our digestive system is a long, curvaceous tube full of gases that breathe fire, is not a sentence I needed to read this early in the morning. Or ever.

I always find it delightful when older books rave about new technologies we now take utterly for granted. Here, it’s word processors. How quickly they let you type! How thoroughly you can make your mistakes vanish! How find-replace allows you to magically alter names and places throughout the text! How you can password-protect your writing so nobody else can read it! The occult powers of the UNDO button!

A hundred pages in, and we’ve made it to 12 minutes post-launch of the initial ICBM. No bombs have hit yet. Human civilization is already doomed, and the only ones who know it are deep underground in military bunkers, shitting their pants while everyone else goes about their morning. The president has 6 minutes to decide if and how to counterattack. He has ultimate and unchecked authority.

Cool. Cool, cool, cool.

This is turning out to be fun, in an absurdly gruesome sort of way.

First-person, present-tense. That doesn’t bode well.

Death leaned over Helen and whispered in her ear. Menelaus could not quite make out what he said but his mind was full of dead suns, ancient cities made of ice, cold still things, quiet and thoughtful, on the edge of slipping into nothing. Of falling forever. Death drew her up out of bed and pulled her face into his chest and the dream faded.

- “Death and the King”

This is a nice little dessert after finally finishing the original. The stories are short, and strange, splitting off from and refracting and reinterpreting the familiar events, characters, and themes in ways that are always thoughtful, often revelatory. Beautifully written, too.

Odysseus,
seeing his father worn by age and burdened
by desperate, heartfelt sorrow, stopped beneath
a towering pear tree, weeping. Then he wondered
whether to kiss his father, twine around him,
and tell him that he had come home again,
and everything that happened on the way—
or question him. He thought it best to start
by testing him with teasing and abuse.

Odysseus really is an asshole sometimes.

Odysseus ripped off his rags. Now naked,
he leapt upon the threshold with his bow
and quiverfull of arrows, which he tipped
out in a rush before his feet, and spoke.

“Playtime is over. I will shoot again,
towards another mark no man has hit.
Apollo, may I manage it!”

Aww yeah, Ancient Greek action movie time!

It is curious how appropriate some people’s names are. Gallus means cock, and Asinus means donkey, and Asinius Gallus was the most utter little donkey-cock for his boastfulness and stupidity that one could find in a month’s tour of Italy.

Finally giving this one some attention. I am very much here for Claudius’s rambling digressions, pedantry, droll observations, and self-aggrandizement poorly masquerading as humility. These books are all about the voice and the characters - there’s not much of a driving plot other than: he’s the Emperor now and he does stuff.

Christian charity was never intended to solve the problem of poverty. Social inequality was absolutely necessary: the poor needed alms from the rich to survive; the rich needed the poor to save their souls. And the Church itself needed the poor as well. Poor labourers, who stayed poor, were absolutely essential to the business model.

Odysseus is proof that real men aren’t ashamed to cry. Frequently, copiously, at the slightest provocation. Multiple times a day. Full-on, ceaseless wailing. Are… are you okay there, buddy? Do you need a hug?

Finally getting to the good part; I just don’t find the first several books of Telemachus moping around all that interesting.

Fun fact: when I lived in Sicily, I lived on the “collina dei ciclopi” (cyclops hill), where Polyphemus allegedly had his cave, and our apartment had a view of the “isole ciclopi” (cyclopean isles), the giant rocks/small islands he chucked into the water after the fleeing Odysseus.

Mary Roach is my very favorite author to take in via audiobook. Always absorbing, always hilarious, always weird as hell.

Among fifth-century Gallic bishops, Eucherius of Lyon was particularly famous for his asceticism; he took 1,740 litres of wine and 66 kilograms of cheese with him to his Lent retreat at the monastery of Île-Barbe.

Bien évidemment, demander à un Français de se passer de vin et de fromage serait absurde!

Human beings, Adina faxes, rip their addresses off old magazines when they donate them to hair salons. This is how criminals find their victims: They search stacks of People magazines. If they find one where the address has been left on, they think: What a fool. I will go to her house and murder her.

”But what is one for?” she insists.

“One what?” her mother says. “Man?”

“Husband. Boyfriend. People want them so much but I can’t understand what they’re supposed to do. They take so much energy.”

Dominic says Bruce Springsteen’s music is about hiding who you are, donning a disguise, making deals with women named Mary near the river, always living in the unlit part of town.

“It’s a queer metaphor,” he says.

It is 1999 and Americans are obsessed with the situational comedy about six rich white people living in this city. Adina doesn’t understand why the show is funny; the characters struggle so baldly underneath their meaninglessness, desperate to preserve the cordoned-off theater of their absurd lives… Chandler, meant to be the funniest character, delivers his lines with black-hole eyes. No human can thrive.

When you are alone, you are in the right place to watch sadness approach like storm clouds over an open field. You can sit in a chair and get ready for it. As it moves through you, you can reach out your hands and feel every edge. When it passes and you can drink coffee again you even miss it because it has been loyal to you like a boyfriend.

Human beings, Adina faxes, did not think their lives were challenging enough so they invented roller coasters. A roller coaster is a series of problems on a steel track. Upon encountering real problems, human beings compare their lives to riding a roller coaster, even though they invented roller coasters to be fun things to do on their days off.

I love how the gods are portrayed in Homer as petty, meddling gossips. Just sitting around Olympus, chatting over cups of ambrosia, like “So what are we gonna do about this Odysseus situation? Is Poseidon ever gonna give him a break, or what?”