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Thursday, November 6th, 2003
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11:32a
I feel like Vergil hammering out his one line a day. Admittedly, it took him the whole day to create one line of genius, and it takes me about a minute to create, well, one line. It's brilliance or lack of it is not really mine to assess. Yesterday I managed: And what was he? Just a school teacher with chalk on his fingers for 'Phoenix', and then I felt guilty and went back to Literature and Religion at Rome which is tres tres interesting, and actual work!
I'm getting a lot further with planning the imagery, which I guess is just as valuable. I'm just too busy, supposedly, with actual MA work stuff to concentrate on it properly. I need to just be able to pick up a pencil and write whenever I want, which right now isn't feasible because of needing to be up and awake every day and going to Leeds three times a week. The discipline is nice, being quite unlike me(!), but I like a certain amount of freedom of routine. That's why I'm sure I should not be working in an office! However, I've got what my friend from Leeds, Bernice, calls, 'the fear' about Leeds work at the moment. Professor Levene scares me a little because he's one of these academics who honestly expects you to have read everything in the library. He sent a message to the Graduate Seminar yesterday expressing his 'diappointment' that so few of the postgrads had turned up to the talk on Xerxes that happened last Thursday. Now, firstly, Thursday is one of my days off, and, once a fortnight, the day before I meet with Prof. Levene for my Roman Religion module. I can either do his reading assignment or go to Leeds. Not both. Secondly, the talk was being given by one of the postgrads from Durham. Hah! Am I going to go all the way to Leeds to see a reminder of Durham? No, I'm not! So Dr. Sullivan advised us that perhaps it would be diplomatic to go to the one taking place today, but I'm sorry, it's not going to happen. Some of us work (Bernice, Katherine) and quite a lot of us don't live in Leeds (Katherine, Nick, me) I'm absolutely not suggesting that we shouldn't be interested in things outside of our own research, but that research should certainly come first. I think he'd be more annoyed with me if I hadn't done any of his reading but had gone to the paper than if it was the other way round.
Anyway. The Graduate Seminar yesterday was pretty cool - about Mezentius in the Aeneid, on eof my favourite characters. when I was revising the passages he's in on the train I had another dissertation idea - the interplay between the characters of Mezentius and Aeneas, and Lindsey's talk kept on giving me ideas. I don't know whether it's something she's working on or what - I kinda hope not because it's something I'd like to do!
So she was presenting the case for M. being both a monstrous and sympathetc character. Now this is quite easy to do. M. is a tyrant (which presses all kinds of alarm buttons in the Roman mind, because it's associated with kings, which was a big Roman hate) and a despiser of the gods (in Latin contemptor divum), another big no-no, and a set-up for regarding M. as a perfect foil to Aeneas, whose epithet is pius (not unlike our word pious but with a much more complicated resonance - it doesn't just mean piety). However, when Aeneas kills M.'s son Lausus, who was protecting M. from Aeneas, M. suddenly becomes very sympathetic, mourning his son and feeling guilty and wishing that he had died instead. He goes to Aeneas knwing he's going to die in the single combat that follows, and, a bit like Hector in the Iliad, begs that Aeneas give him proper burial, but keep him safe from his own people who chucked him out, coz he's a tyrant. It's all very interesting (to me anyway!) and just set me thinking how much I hadn't considered before.
In other news, my pulled muscle seems better, but I'm worried that sitting around here all day will make it seize up or something!
current mood:  curious
current music: Wee Free Men::Terry Pratchett, read by Tony Robinson (comment on this)
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