Greetings, fellow readers! Freedom from academic reading is nigh, and with the summer comes my return to my job at the bookstore, where I can borrow any book I want from work for free--such bliss! I have several titles I cannot wait to read, including:
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, which I have dipped into on and off over the past two weeks or so. It's about a group of post-apocalyptic traveling Shakespeare actors, so of course, it's right up my alley. I'm not very far into it, but I find the characters' arguments about whether to perform comedies or tragedies when everyone's dropping dead from the superflu particularly prescient. So much of the discourse in English and humanities circles right now centers on the utility of these disciplines in a world where concrete production is often prized over abstract reasoning. The traveling players are literally enacting the current Great Struggle of my field right now, and I'm excited to see where they go with it. Of course, I'm also looking forward to picking apart all the Shakespeare references.
The Invasion of the Tearling by Erika Johansen. This is the much-anticipated sequel to The Queen of the Tearling, a fantasy novel which I discovered at work last summer and loved. This is one of those books which cries out to be made into a series, and when the new installment comes, it'll be like Christmas in July.
City of Thieves by David Benioff. I found this book randomly on Goodreads (yes, I redownloaded the app, after much internal conflict), and it seems like the perfect way to continue my Russian literature kick. By the way, if any of you have good Russian lit recommendations, do let me know. It's mostly new terrain for me, aside from obvious titles like Anna Karenina, etc.
Also, if you want to follow me on Goodreads and share your recs that way, you can do so here.
The Complete Tales by Edgar Allan Poe. This one is slightly work-related, since it's very likely I'll be writing my senior thesis on Poe this spring. Still, I've been a fan of his stories ever since "The Tell-Tale Heart" scared the bejeezus out of me at the ripe old age of eight. It's going to be fun to go back and reread some old favorites, as well as discover new ones, and if I get any good thesis ideas, well, you won't hear any complaints!
This last one isn't really a reading book per se, but The Essential New York Times Cookbook edited by the incomparable Amanda Hesser has recently joined the literary tomes on my shelves. I picked it up for $5 at the Friends of the Library booksale this weekend, and it's chock full of so many good things to cook, I don't know where to start! I'm moving out of the dorms and into an apartment this year, so I'll finally be able to do some real cooking, and summer is the perfect time to practice.
Until next time,
Anna
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Monday, April 20, 2015
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
Pure Imagination: A New Look at Seneca's "Thyestes"
Greetings, fellow readers! This week in my Latin literature class, we've been reading a play by Seneca called "Thyestes." It's a story about two brothers, Atreus and Thyestes, who both desire the same throne. Atreus also wants to get revenge on Thyestes because Thyestes had an affair with Atreus's wife, so he devises a plan to enact the worst possible vengeance: he invites his brother to a banquet where the main dish is the cooked bodies of Thyestes's own sons.
Pretty messed up, right? In the original myth, this is only one gruesome episode of many caused by an old family curse: you may know of Tantalus, one of the more famous members of the house of Atreus, who was condemned to eternal hunger and thirst in the underworld, all while delicious fruit and water lay within his sight, but not his reach. (Fun fact: he's also where we get our word tantalize from.)
What really interested me is the fact that Seneca was writing this during the reign of Nero, the infamous emperor who supposedly fiddled while Rome burned. (As it turns out, that's probably an anachronism, but we won't get into that now.) Seneca himself was Nero's childhood tutor, and later lived through some of the worst atrocities of Nero's reign before his exile and eventual suicide.
Seneca was also known for being a Stoic philosopher, or one who accepts what happens to them as the inexorable will of the gods. Stoics were known for their impassive, emotionless attitude towards misfortune, their praise of intellectual virtue, and their belief in retreat from society to lead a life of the mind.
So why does Seneca, the sage old Stoic, write a play about the will to power and this toxic family feud? Perhaps it's because of what he saw around him every day: the ruling family of imperial Rome at the time was not exactly known for being mentally sound, nor were the majority of them good leaders. Nero himself bankrupted the state to fund public entertainments and theatrics, and he took advantage of those who lost their homes in the Great Fire by claiming their land to build his palatial Golden House.
"Thyestes" raises a lot of questions about what constitutes the right to rule, and whether any one person can truly claim such a right, especially if the ruler is not mentally sound. We've been talking a lot in this class about whether the Roman emperors became corrupt because they were bad to begin with, or whether their unmitigated power had a degenerative effect on their sense of right and wrong. In the historical cases, I'm inclined to say it was a combination of both, and so it is in "Thyestes."
There is something fundamentally rotten at the heart of this story, and Atreus himself knows it. As he explains his murderous plans to his servant in the opening scenes, he declares "Evil is not avenged, it is outdone." Likewise, he refers to the banquet he will serve his brother as so monstrous it will dampen even Tantalus's insatiable appetite.
In addition to reading the play, we also watched excerpts from various stage adaptations. My favorite was the Barnard/Columbia student production, which set the play in a Wonka-esque space tinged with elements of a horror movie. In this production, both Atreus and Thyestes look like grotesque carnival clowns, Thyestes's children are nothing more than wooden puppets, and the entire set looks eerily like the scribbles of a deranged four-year-old. Spooky music from the "Wonka" movie soundtrack echoes throughout, signifying to the audience that a world of pure imagination might not be as delightful as it sounds.
While Atreus comes up with the evil plan, Thyestes still chooses to eat the children. All protestations about the Fates aside, I suspect this is what Seneca was trying to work through: the guilt of being not the evil mastermind of a plan, but of being a willing accomplice who never tried to stand up to Nero and his excesses. In the Barnard/Columbia adaptation, there is little to no difference between Atreus and Thyestes; likewise, there are no guiltless characters, except perhaps the children. However, the children are puppets, not people, which renders their innocence or guilt irrelevant.
The play mirrors the Wonka story because there is no clear hero or villian: Wonka and Slugworth (or Thyestes and Atreus) are two sides of the same manipulative coin, continuously proving that nothing is sacred, even--perhaps especially--within families.
Until next time,
Anna
Pretty messed up, right? In the original myth, this is only one gruesome episode of many caused by an old family curse: you may know of Tantalus, one of the more famous members of the house of Atreus, who was condemned to eternal hunger and thirst in the underworld, all while delicious fruit and water lay within his sight, but not his reach. (Fun fact: he's also where we get our word tantalize from.)
What really interested me is the fact that Seneca was writing this during the reign of Nero, the infamous emperor who supposedly fiddled while Rome burned. (As it turns out, that's probably an anachronism, but we won't get into that now.) Seneca himself was Nero's childhood tutor, and later lived through some of the worst atrocities of Nero's reign before his exile and eventual suicide.
Seneca was also known for being a Stoic philosopher, or one who accepts what happens to them as the inexorable will of the gods. Stoics were known for their impassive, emotionless attitude towards misfortune, their praise of intellectual virtue, and their belief in retreat from society to lead a life of the mind.
So why does Seneca, the sage old Stoic, write a play about the will to power and this toxic family feud? Perhaps it's because of what he saw around him every day: the ruling family of imperial Rome at the time was not exactly known for being mentally sound, nor were the majority of them good leaders. Nero himself bankrupted the state to fund public entertainments and theatrics, and he took advantage of those who lost their homes in the Great Fire by claiming their land to build his palatial Golden House.
"Thyestes" raises a lot of questions about what constitutes the right to rule, and whether any one person can truly claim such a right, especially if the ruler is not mentally sound. We've been talking a lot in this class about whether the Roman emperors became corrupt because they were bad to begin with, or whether their unmitigated power had a degenerative effect on their sense of right and wrong. In the historical cases, I'm inclined to say it was a combination of both, and so it is in "Thyestes."
There is something fundamentally rotten at the heart of this story, and Atreus himself knows it. As he explains his murderous plans to his servant in the opening scenes, he declares "Evil is not avenged, it is outdone." Likewise, he refers to the banquet he will serve his brother as so monstrous it will dampen even Tantalus's insatiable appetite.
In addition to reading the play, we also watched excerpts from various stage adaptations. My favorite was the Barnard/Columbia student production, which set the play in a Wonka-esque space tinged with elements of a horror movie. In this production, both Atreus and Thyestes look like grotesque carnival clowns, Thyestes's children are nothing more than wooden puppets, and the entire set looks eerily like the scribbles of a deranged four-year-old. Spooky music from the "Wonka" movie soundtrack echoes throughout, signifying to the audience that a world of pure imagination might not be as delightful as it sounds.
While Atreus comes up with the evil plan, Thyestes still chooses to eat the children. All protestations about the Fates aside, I suspect this is what Seneca was trying to work through: the guilt of being not the evil mastermind of a plan, but of being a willing accomplice who never tried to stand up to Nero and his excesses. In the Barnard/Columbia adaptation, there is little to no difference between Atreus and Thyestes; likewise, there are no guiltless characters, except perhaps the children. However, the children are puppets, not people, which renders their innocence or guilt irrelevant.
The play mirrors the Wonka story because there is no clear hero or villian: Wonka and Slugworth (or Thyestes and Atreus) are two sides of the same manipulative coin, continuously proving that nothing is sacred, even--perhaps especially--within families.
Until next time,
Anna
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