Settare > Recent Status Updates

Butler dear, I didn’t know you were capable of writing for a lay audience too. I hope this gives me fewer headaches than Gender Trouble

Really good insights on Medusa, Jocasta, Helen, and the Amazons. I’m enjoying the audiobook but I also can’t annotate anything to refer back to which is frustrating, but I brought that upon myself.

Read this a few years ago but was dumb and didn’t write a review, and now I don’t remember it well enough and that annoys me, so I guess we go for a re-read (or a listen)

Oh my. On page 13 and I am already floored. I have a suspicion this will become one of my all time favourites.

Chapter on Hestia/Vesta was pretty good though, even though the author admitted material on her is a lot more scarce than other Gods. I liked the insight that Hestia seems to have been the only woman to not only reject a bunch of male Gods without facing consequences, but she also refused to have anything to do with love / Aphrodite and managed to stay in her good graces too.

Chapter on Artemis was kind of chaotic, the narrative wasn’t connected enough. Chapter on Demeter was insightful but it was mostly about her in relation to the kidnapping of her daughter, as if Demeter never really had anything else going on for her beyond her role as a mother. I enjoyed the insight that she’s one of the few who managed to stand their ground against Zeus and Hades.

The chapter on Hera was a lot better. I usually hate Hera in ancient myth (especially in Ovid), but Haynes does a good job of putting it into perspective that it was easier to blame her than Zeus when people were recounting the stories. The pop-culture references are still hit or miss for me. I do like her random "I'm only saying this to see if my editor will cut it out" comments, I'd do that too if I was writing.

so far not as good as Haynes' other book (Pandora's Jar), too many pop culture references that my gen-z ass doesn't understand. Still an enjoyable listen for pottery sessions though.

I hate and I love. Why, you might ask.
I don’t know. But I feel it happening and I hurt. (Catullus)

Reading this is so soothing.

“These are complicated scenarios: you can receive some benefits by adapting yourself to a system that is, at another level, compromising your capacity to inhabit a world on more equal terms. I think for many women, becoming willing to participate in sexist culture is a compromise, even if it is not registered as such, because we have been taught [..] that being unwilling to participate can be dangerous.”

New Textbook. After all that messed-up shit that went down in my first term of grad school, I'm finally here with a fresh start. New supervisor, new lab, new research that I'm excited about, and more aware than ever about serious issues of sexism, racism and bullying in academia. But I'm super excited about this new research. I love biochemistry, and my textbook has a dragon like hybrid on the cover :)

newbie grad student mode: I can't even find time outside the lab to do work-related essential reading, so I have to add my textbook on GR for motivation.

newbie grad student mode: I can't even find time outside the lab to do work-related essential reading, so I have to add my textbook on GR for motivation.

I've been in a stress-induced reading slump lately (hence the inactivity on GR) and for good reason, but I want to drag myself out of it before it's too late. Do you have any suggestions for something to read on a long, tiring, stressful, almost 40-hour plane trip? Realistically, I know I won't actually read anything (I'll just sit and drown in random thoughts) but it's nice to have options in mind.

So many dramatic proposal failures. Never thought I'd recall famous TV shows when reading a Woolf novel but this one has strong Downton Abbey vibes. :)))))))

*1920*
Woolf's critics and friends: why don't you write a normal novel, a love story perhaps, like Austen and any other decent female author?

Woolf: *writes about a woman who earns her own living, works for the Suffrage Office, and, guess what, her fate at the end of the book is NOT to get married and settle down.*

Typical Virginia. Love it.

“Surely she could learn Persian,’ broke in a thin, elderly gentleman. ‘Is there no man of letters in Manchester with whom she could read Persian?”
-
“There is the University,’ said the thin gentleman who had previously insisted upon the existence of people knowing Persian.”

What IS it with Woolf and Persian? In all her books people mention some old scholar who knows Persian. Was it a 'thing' among literary elites?

“To
Vanessa Bell
But, looking for a phrase,
I found none to stand,
Beside your name.”

That's quite something, coming from Virginia, who seems to have had a phrase to describe anything and everything in the most epic way. Dedications are always so interesting, I love lingering on them for some time.

“He had never realised before that underneath every action, underneath the life of every day, pain lies, quiescent, but ready to devour; he seemed to be able to see suffering, as if it were a fire, curling up over the edges of all action, eating away the lives of men & women. He would never believe in the stability of life, or forget what depths of pain lie beneath small happiness and feelings of content and safety.”

Virginia nooooo what did you do :(((
(Is it normal that whatever Woolf novel I read, becomes an instant favorite?)

“That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led to another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm, this quiet, this certainty, and it was this process that people called living.”

It's like reading the Metamorphosis has turned into a "How to read and deal with rape and sexual violence in myth, classical antiquity (and more generally in fiction)" project for me. Here are some more interesting opinion pieces: Ovid's Afterlife and The Brutality of Ovid

“It was all very real, very big, very impersonal, and after a moment or two she began to raise her first finger and to let it fall on the arm of her chair so as to bring back to herself some consciousness of her own existence. She was next overcome by the unspeakable queerness of the fact that she should be sitting in an arm-chair, in the morning, in the middle of the world.”

Goodreads has stopped showing me notifications since a few days ago. I don't know why, I haven't changed any of my settings. Has anyone had this problem before? What can I do?

Wtf are Clarissa and Richard Dalloway doing here? I wasn't expecting them at all, but it's a nice surprise anyway. (I'm behaving as if I'm talking about two real people showing up at my door, not recurring characters in a book)

Here's another article about how to deal with reading Ovid and about rape. Putting it here for my own future reference but it's a pretty good article if anyone's also interested.