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300 Spartans, Ancient Greece, Assassin's Creed, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Churchillian, Ernle Bradford, Fallout 4, Greece, Herodotus, history, Hot Gates, Leonidas, Michael Fassbender, myth, Overly Sarcastic Productions, Persia, Persian Wars, Plataea, Salamis, Thermopylae, Thermopylae: The Battle for the West, Xerxes
It probably has something to do with Assassin’s Creed, though in fact, it might actually have something to do with YouTube.
Part of my job is working regularly in the Local History room at the public library I work 
at, and this entails a lot of time that is, simply put isolation. The room very rarely receives visitors, and if it does many of them rarely require much assistance. In fact, many people simply enter the room, grab some books off the shelf, and spend a few minutes or a few hours doing their research in relative quiet. This is fine for me as I usually have somewhere around eight or ten tasks to perform that usually involve excel spreadsheets or the electronic card catalog. And if I’m not doing that then I’m typically re-shelving books and microfilm boxes. What this amounts to is long periods of isolation that would be ungodly boring were it not for YouTube.
I resisted as long as I could, but I’ve observed as of late that most of my internet time is watching videos on YouTube, but because I’m a nerd I don’t YouTube (is that a verb? Fuck it, I’m making it one, someone call OED) like most people probably do, so I wind up finding channels and videos about ancient Greeks, the Ottoman Empire, Medieval Weaponry, or TED 
Talks. While this has lead me to some excellent books that I’ll hopefully have time one day to review, it’s also lead me to arguably my favorite channel on the internet, which has, in turn, rekindled a deep passion for history: Overly Sarcastic Productions.
It’s a young man and woman (everybody is starting to feel young to me, or at least younger than me) named Red and Blue who in turn make video “lectures” about history, the classics of literature, the various tropes of narrative arcs, and every now and then historical accuracy reviews of video games (I’m still waiting for Assassin’s Creed II, one day, one day). It’s fair to say I’ve become fairly obsessed with this channel, having watched several of the videos multiple times, and I don’t apologize for this because it has, in turn, lead me to pick up books and at the end of the day as long as reading is taking place is that really so 
bad?
I finished 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West, having pretty much devoured the book in under a week. And in my mania to hop into another classic book I observed the stack of history books in my office and found one that has a bit of an embarrassing history for me. Thermopylae: The Battle for the West by Ernle Bradford, is a book I had literally started and stopped five different times. I don’t like stopping books, it feels like a cop-out to me, but I have embraced the philosophy that if you’re not enjoying something you should stop doing it. When it comes to a book I’ve started and stopped multiple times, however, there’s a bit of ego there. The book was beating me, and damn it I wanted to win this time, and I wanted to learn about a battle I’d seen and read so much about, but only ever in quasi-mythic terms.
I grabbed my paperback copy with the Hoplite flanked on both sides by spears and set to work, finishing it in about a week and a half. I beat the damn book, and the satisfaction was only slightly better than the book itself.
Bradford’s book is pretty dated having been published in the year 1980. The writing style itself is not terrible, in fact, often Bradford demonstrates his ability as a historian and author by being able to craft a functional and interesting narrative as he lays out the facts of the Greco-Persian war while trying to steadily establish the larger cultural lesson of such a conflict. There were beautiful sentences in this book that actually left me laughing, smiling, and reaching for my mechanical pencil so that I could underline them later either for this inevitable review or else so that I could simply go back later and read them. Bradford is a great writer, but he’s not always a great historian in this book.
For starters, his book has no real list of sources apart from a very simple bibliography in the back filled with a few “up-to-date” sources and many works of classical antiquity. There’s also the issue that Bradford only has a few actual chapters dedicated to the Battle of Thermopylae, and I know I sound whiny and pedantic as I write this but titles really do matter. A title is a way to communicate goals, themes, and purpose behind the text and I expected going into this book a focus on the Battle itself. Instead, Bradford attempts to cover the entire war covering Thermopylae, but also the battles of Salamis, Artemisium, and Platea. This isn’t bad, but when I finished Thermopylae and discovered I had another 100 pages to read I was confused and slightly annoyed. Granted, Bradford does say at the start in Preface that he wanted to balance the text with a larger narrative of the Persians as well Greeks but it just worked on me. 
And finally, two more things needs be said. The first is that Bradford uses the adjective “Churchillian” twice in this book and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing he also employs the deplorable adjective “oriental” to describe the Persians and other Asian society and peoples. I understand that the man was living in a different time with a different set of cultural mores, and it’s a bad policy to judge someone with a contemporary hindsight and set of values, but it just became a bit galling when the man is using the word to describe the quality of an unashamed imperialist and then using a now racially insensitive term to describe Middle Easterners.
It just, it just started to make me groan.
Though I suppose at this point my reader is probably wondering what the ultimate significance of this book actually is or why I’m bothering with it.
Like I said before in the 1453 review I want to just start reviewing history books period, but also to see whether or not they still have a lasting cultural value, which, if my regular 
reader has been paying attention, has ultimately been the goal of this blog since day one. Thermopylae is a book which attempts to narrate one of the most mythic battles in all of human history, and that estimation is not too bold. Even if a person knows nothing of ancient Greece or classical history, they probably at least know the general story of the “300 Spartans.” Much like a fairy tale, the origins of Superman, or the plot line of Footloose, Western civilization has digested the story of King Leonidas and his men and it has become the kind of mass knowledge that “everybody just knows.” Bradford then tries in his book to balance the story then, by narrating not just about King Leonidas and his men, but also about King Xerxes, Themistocles, and the alliance of Greek city-states that eventually repelled the Persians and brought about a kind of national consciousness to the cities of Greece.
Looking at one passage, Bradford is able to demonstrate Xerxes ability as a strategist as well as describe the powerful players of this conflict
Xerxes and his advisors knew that, if it was intolerable to send heralds to Sparta, it was equally pointless to send them to Athens. The essential core of Greece which had to be destroyed was composed of these two small, even so dissimilar, city-states. The one was the military muscle of Greece and the other provided by far the greater part of its Naval Arm. Many of the other Greeks had already “medised’, as the term was: they had, that is to say, shown their willingness to co-operate with the Persians. This was hardly surprising, since to many an intelligent citizen, whether of an Aegean island, or of a city on the mainland, it must have seemed more than clear that, even if all the Greeks were united(which was far from true), they would stand no chance against the massive army and navy that was coming against them out of the East. (32).
Bradford’s writing can be a bit clunky in this passage, but it’s important to see how he is setting up his final assessment of what the lasting significance of this war would be. The end-results of the conflict with Persia created a lasting sense of identity among the 
Greeks. It might be difficult for a contemporary reader to understand this conflict since we are so used to the concept of nationalism and national identity, but ancient Greece was largely a collection of city-states: independent towns that acted, in essence, as their own county and nation. Because of this, conflict between cities such as Thebes, Athens, Sparta, and Corinth wasn’t entirely unheard of, and was, actually, pretty damn common-place. To a citizen of the United States, this probably is not that unheard of. Being from Texas I tend to recognize that there really isn’t anything like a Texan. The manners and customs of my state wouldn’t hold water in New York, nor would they hold in Oregan, Hawaii, or Delaware. Each of these states tends to, whether they realize it or not, have their own sort of regional identity which is eventually assumed by the larger national collective.
But now I’m starting to sound painfully academic so let me shoot straight.
Bradford is attempting to demonstrate to his reader how the threat from Persia was not just a threat to a collection of individual city-states, it ultimately threatened the entire Greek identity which thus allowed for the recognition by these cities that they might just be one people after all.
He says in a later passage, noting the difficulty faced by the leader of the Greek defense Themistocles:
Part of Themistocles strategy was inevitably dictated by the very natural Athenian suspicion that the Spartans might let them down, might rely on the defense of the Isthmus, might (for whatever given reason) procrastinate and turn up late—as they had done at Marathon. If the worst came to the worst, the Spartans might come to the conclusion that they could stay secure in the Peloponnese. They and the other allies had to be convinced that, on this occasion, it was all or nothing for every state which had declared to hold their ground against the might of the invader. For the 
first time in their history, the Greeks had to co-operate with one another. In only one respect did the Athenians have an advantage over the Spartans. If Attica fell and Athens was overrun, they would—even if worsted in a sea battle—still have some ships left. The survivors could ‘do a Dunkirk’ and (after collecting women and children from Troezen), they could abandon Greece, sail south and then west across the Ionian Sea, and plant a new colony in Sicily or Italy. The Spartans, with their small fleet, were condemned to fight on the land—with no escape. (90).
Alright, I’ll admit it, I only included the latter part of that quote to point out that Bradford was clearly once again falling back upon his English conservatism (or perhaps romanticism?) but in my defense that “Dunkirk” reference was too easy to pass up, and Dunkirk was, for the record a really amazing movie.
At this point though my reader is probably ready to object. So what? So what if the ancient Greeks hated each other and it took a potential invader from Asia to unite them? I work a crappy retail gig at Target and I only get so many hours in the day to play video games and watch Game of Thrones. What relevance does this war, or this old and possibly outdated book have to my life?
This is a fair point, and as usual, I don’t have an immediate rebuttal to it. Reading a book about the 5th century Persian Wars is something you really, really have to want to do and the sad fact is many people simply don’t. They’d rather do their jobs and then enjoy their free time watching arguably great fantasy series on HBO and/or playing Fallout 4 (seriously how great is Liberty Prime? #advictorium, #fucktheinstitute). This decision is not something I’m faulting anyone for. I work a full-time gig and by the end of the day, I don’t always feel like writing, in fact often I putter away my time watching YouTube and straightening books in my office before it’s time for bed.
What I would say to my reader, is that while this book may not have any sort of immediate relevance, great history is about observing the trends of humanity in the past and finding some sort of lesson from it. While Bradford’s book has become dated, he is enormously successful in demonstrating to his reader the significance of Xerxes effort to expand his borders into Europe and the effect this had on the Greek population who had, up to that time, seen each other as separate peoples rather than an ethnic or political
people overall.
As Bradford points out in an early passage in the book:
The invasion of Greece made the turbulent, brilliant people of this mountainous and largely inhospitable land aware that they shared one thing in common: a believe in the individual human being’s right to dissent, to think his own way, and not to acknowledge any man as a ‘monarch of all I survey’. (23).
There is a great wealth of information in Thermopylae: The Battle for the West that I haven’t, and like any great history book Bradford packs his pages with small anecdotes and facts that will hopefully encourage his reader to continue reading. Whether it’s the implication that King Leonidas might have arranged for the murder of a relative who could have inherited the throne, the one Spartan who returned to his home city to be cast as a coward, or the burning and destruction of the Acropolis in Athens, this book contains a wealth of fascinating historical information, but listing them all out would only be pedantic and I’m sure my reader would like me to wrap up so they can get back to playing Fallout (fun fact the Science Bobblehead is located in Vault 75, which is also the place where you help Cait complete part of her character arc, which is great, but then she judges you if you ever take Jet in front of her again).
Bradford’s book is very much of its time (again the “Churchillian” adjective just makes me laugh every time) but I still believe there is a great amount of relevance to it, and not just because I spent a week and a half reading it and I want to make sure it wasn’t wasted time. History is about finding and creating narratives from the events of the past, and so even the most poorly constructed histories are efforts to find meaning. Bradford found a tremendous meaning in the Battle of Thermopylae, and the rest of the Persian Wars.
It was a conflict in which a group of disjointed people found a collective whole in themselves that hadn’t existed before. This isn’t to say that there was thereafter no more conflict in Greece, in fact, it’s fair and accurate to say that the history of Greece pretty much is just conflict among themselves until Roman occupation and even after that. But for a moment the Greeks found an advantage in unity and overcoming their idiosyncrasies for the greater good of their society and way of life, and damn it, I think that’s inspiring. The best examples of humanity are when people work together to create something great and find inspiration in their ideas and exchanges. Thermopylae was a chance for a band of Greeks to work together to help the larger armies of the country fight the future battles that would inevitably lead to the defeat of Xerxes and his army.
And Bradford has a quote in his preface that really says it best:
The last stand of King Leonidas and the Spartans was told as a golden story in my youth. Since then it would seem to have been downgraded, perhaps because their military outlook and stubborn courage have made them unattractive to a hedonistic society. Without courage, Man is nothing. Without the Battle of Thermopylae, that pass held against all odds, there would never have followed Artemisium, Salamis, and Platea. Distasteful though it may have been to later historians, preoccupied with Athens, it was very largely the generalship of the Spartan Pausanias that made victory of Platea possible. (14).
Bradford’s sentiments here, at least in my estimation, haven’t changed all that much. 
The 300 Spartans is a story that is told regularly in schools now almost as a kind of myth/fact. It’s a story that has become increasingly relevant to contemporary society because it’s become a sort of fairy-tale about the might of individual courage and integrity. People see in the story of the Hot Gates a life-lesson about holding true to one’s principles and not allowing “outside” influence to sway one from your original stance. This in itself demonstrates the lasting importance of books like Thermopylae: The Battle for the West because it allows us to ask the question how we see the conflicts of the past and how we construct meaning from them.
The only point I’ll say about this is that I feel Bradford was definitely not a soothsayer because he believes the Spartans have been “downgraded” because the Spartan warriors were “unattractive.” Clearly, the man never saw Zack Snyder coming down the pike because those leather panties have inspired legions of memes and erections that aren’t going away any-time soon.
Athens might have had an incredible tactician leading them at the battle of Salamis, but they didn’t have Michael Fassbender wearing just a leather speedo and a smile.
*Writer’s Note*
All quotes cited from Thermopylae: The Battle for the West were quoted from the paperback Da Capo edition.
**Writer’s Note**
In case you haven’t noticed I used one or two images from the new Assassin’s Creed Odyssey in this review. My wife bought it for me for Christmas and I don’t think I’m anywhere near finishing my golden idol of her. This game is the fucking SHIT dude. I’ve met Euripedes, Perikles, Alcibades, Sokrates. I’ve scaled the Parthenon, statues of Zeus, Temples of Apollo. I’ve played as motherfucking, god-damn Leonidas and…Well, I am a happy man.
Oh yeah, I forgot, YOU GET TO MEET GODDAMN HERODOTUS!!!!
***Writer’s Note***
I wrote something similar in the description section of my YouTube-Podcast for this book, but I thought I would repeat it here. I know that I write a spirited defense of Bradford here, but, honestly, I really don’t think that this book is good history and that’s largely because Bradford only has a bibliography and not a very substantial one at that. This book, while a pretty approachable and enjoyable read, just doesn’t use enough sources and doesn’t cite the sources that are used properly enough to be considered a “good” history. Bradford’s book is sentiment and mythologization, and while these are not necessarily weaknesses as a narrative, they do hurt it as a functional historial text.
The man wrote a good book, but he needed at least two or three flipping footnotes.
looking for (usually something by Rick Riordan, though Diary of a Wimpy Kid makes a close fucking second place). I love working with the 3D Printer and explaining it to children, parents, and even regular adults that are just fascinated with it. I love making displays for authors like Truman Capote, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, and of course William Shakespeare. But best of all I love my job because my co-workers are like a family to me and everyday I’m working for the library I feel like I’m home.
name is Xavier, he wears a bow-tie, and he’s fabulous. This llama material isn’t just a lead-in however, because along with communicating regularly with the llama department, I’m also occasionally collaborating with them, and during one of the many numerous conversations I had with Brenda it eventually came out that I’ve never read all of Shakespeare’s plays, but I’ve always wanted to.
To him I’ll build an altar and a church, and offer lukewarm blood of new-born babes.” 
that Hamnet Shakespeare, the only son of William Shakespeare, died in 1596 at the age of eleven years old.
Night’s Dream King Oberon and Queen Titania are speaking with Dream, asking him why he commissioned the place from Shakespeare in the first place.
greater than his “One does not simply…” meme. It’s also for this reason that I decided to go against my original impulse when approaching my review of Book II of The Lord of the Rings.
exactly help that my best friend Kevin and I spent literally an entire year arguing with a friend of ours about the proper way to pronounce Balrog (he was obsessed with calling it Balronko). Now obviously the fight scene I’m describing was in the second film The Two Towers, but even when I had watched The Fellowship of the Ring with my Dad on that rented VHS tape I had never seen anything like the Balrog in any movie. It was a creature that seemed like it should have been in a medieval passion play rather than a feature film, but I became enthralled.
provides the reader with an explanation:
spellbound, or else that they are witnessing something incredible.
appearance of this creature has it’s own implications for each character. For Legolas, being an Elf, the appearance of the Balrog would something of a nightmare because the elves would surely remember through records and oral tradition what kind of a monster the Balrog would be. Gimli being a dwarf who has just observed the desecration of his race’s hall and temple by orcs is already emotional, but the appearance of the Balrog is proof that his people’s greed brought about the reawakening of this creature. If the dwarves had not been greedy and dug so deep into the earth his cousin Balin might still be alive along with the rest of the people of Moria. Gandalf’s reaction is unique because it has been steadily established that Gandalf’s role in Middle Earth is something beyond most people’s comprehension and that he is being guided by some supernatural entity, order, or compulsion.
showed that these characters are participating with a history and a culture. And this reaction reveals a depth in the universe.
or absent in them, and I’ll hopefully get into this more when I get to the character Gollum, but for now it’s important to observe Gandalf standing against the Balrog because it becomes more than just a wizard fighting a fire-demon. For Tolkien this small moment is a summation of his entire creative philosophy about the nature of good and evil.
Then the echoes died as suddenly as a flame blown out by a dark wind, and the enemy advanced again. (321).
Computer programmers, hardware specialists, table-top game developers, video game designers, and even authors themselves have been inspired by the “Old Professor” and have taken this inspiration and created products and arts that have inspired the next generation of innovators. While Tolkien himself tended to be harsh to this fan base during his lifetime, going so far as to call them the “deplorable cultus,” the generation of stoners and dreamers took a great work and made it something important to the culture and zeitgeist, and thus I return to my foolishness.
LEGOs I did eventually return to it. My regular reader may dimly remember that I began an audio-lecture series sponsored by Barnes & Noble titled Of Sorcerer’s and Men. This series, which was masterfully delivered by the professor Michael D.C. Drout, was incredible and reminded me of everything that I originally loved about The Lord of the Rings.
possible to write about those book in parts, tackling an entire 1000 page novel with one review is like trying to eat The Old 96er from The Great Outdoors. Those who try will wind up crying like John Candy before wrenching the whole thing back up. Fortunately for me Tolkien broke his series into six “books” letting each larger book contained of two small books themselves. The Fellowship then consists of Books 1 and 2 and it seems far healthier to tackle the series that way than attempting one large reflection.
talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
frequently noted was how the strength of the series was not so much because the hobbits were symbolic of any religious or spiritual significance, but because they were decent common folk.
concerned far more with their families, whether their neighbors are a decent sort of people, whether they have enough to eat, and whether or not they are attending parties.
they could get them). They were hospitable and delighted in parties, and in presents, which they gave away freely and eagerly accepted. (2).
love to sit and discuss some of the fantastic elements that make this book so impressive, and I do intend to. The conflict is that fantastic elements by themselves don’t provide much opportunity for reflection. One of the consistent charges against the Triology is that the books have no relevance to average people. Part of this is the unfortunate, lingering elitism that plagues the fantasy genres which is absolute bullshit. But the other charge, that it’s style doesn’t fit the age in which it was written feels a little more fair. Most of the non-hobbit characters speak like they were taken from epics of
‘I don’t know what has come over you, Gandalf,” he said. ‘You have never been like this before. What is it all about? It is mine isn’t it? I found it, and Gollum would have killed me, if I hadn’t kept it. I’m not a thief, whatever he said.’
important to recognize that Jackson did this scene right and because he did this passage stood out to me. But looking past the film, this scene in one in a long series of moments that Gandalf offers that hint at his true “nature” or “form.” Gandalf is, if I can move into the neck-beard nerd territory, something called a Maiar, a being who precede most of the “time” of Middle Earth, and actually proceeded the making of the world. I won’t bore the reader with the complex mythos of Tolkien’s world (that’s for when I review the Silmarillion) but this background info provides the context of what makes Gandalf important in the first book.
real relevance for the reader. The concept of “deep time” was one that began during the Victorian era when geologists began to argue that the world is actually older than we once thought. Where before the world was only a few thousand years old (according to sources like The Bible), by looking at the actual layers of sediment in the earth, and discovering fossils or organisms long exitinct, human beings were able to determine that our time on this earth was only relatively recent and that we were merely one example in a long lifetime of the planet.
world of Hobbiton is one that the reader can certainly recognize because it’s a world that directly mirrors our own. There’s neighborhoods of people who worry about parties and gardens and harvests. There’s sheriffs and mail-men and pubs where people gather to
It’s not secret to the reader that I have started working at the Tyler Public Library, and in fact it’s getting close on being one year in total working there. Already the staff have welcomed me into the odd little family and some have even noted that it wouldn’t be any fun at the library if I ever left. I honestly don’t believe that at all, but it’s nice feeling like you belong somewhere. Apart from the wonderful social environment that’s steadily building up my sense-of-self day-by-day, working at the library is also a chance to check out enormous stacks of books. There isn’t a day I’ve worked where I haven’t come home with at least one book, and even on days when I return three or four I’m sure to leave with five more. Sometimes these books are ones I’ve simply checked out, other times it’s one that I have bought in the ongoing library sale.
Like many people of my generation I was coming into puberty about the time the Harry Potter series were being published, but in 2001 my world changed when The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was released. Hastings was still around at the time, and so video rentals, a.k.a. VHS rentals were still a viable means of seeing films. My dad checked the movie out and actually had to convince me that the movie was worth my time. I remember groaning and sighing, and in fact while watching the film I bemoaned the time length of the movie right before the battle at Amon Hen.
I’d like to say that this meant reading the trilogy, The Hobbit again, and then the numerous companion mythologies and etymologies that Tolkien had spent a lifetime working on, but in fact I largely just consumed the movies and met my best friend Kevin who did nothing but talk about the films which was fine with me.
Maps and charts were constructed, characters were created, and an evil villain was established. Kevin and I had created an entire universe which was obviously nothing more than a Tolkien reboot.
merit to the series and the universe. He argued that rather than just an allegory about war and industry and World War II, The Lord of the Rings was a book about language and the decency of common people.
I’ll hold against Bloom is that he doesn’t even try to critique Tolkien in any kind of meaningful way and even he acknowledges it citing a passage “pretty much at random” (54). The small two page critique that Bloom offers reveals a great apathy on the man’s part and so the conviction of his criticism is weak.
seemed to offer the same. Anyone who has never heard of this author has cheated themselves for Le Guin, much like George R.R. Martin, manages to be a kind of successor to Tolkien in terms of building the Fantasy and Science fiction genre into the power house that it is. For my own part I prefer LeGuin as an essayist and in her contribution to the collection, The Staring Eye, she manages to convey the lasting importance of Tolkien’s work.
destruction if used in ignorance, or at the wrong time time. One must be ready; one must be strong enough. (44).
such a thing an impasse, while the native English is ‘dead-end’. ‘Cul-de-sac’ is a silly phrase and it is the Baggin’s Family credit that they will not use it. (10).
it by misreading him. For, like all great artists, he escapes ideology by being too quick for its nets, too complex for its grand simplicities, too fantastic for its rationality, too real for its generalizations. They will no more keep Tolkien labeled and pickled in a bottle than they will Beowulf, or the Elder Edda, or The Odyssey. (46).
The critics continue to this day to dismiss Tolkien, and while there is some artistic elitism in this behavior, my assessment is that most of the critics of Tolkien are simply caught up in the tradition of theoretical framework.
something about arthropods that I’ve always found fascinating.
wax and honey. In fact, bees have inspired almost every level of society from politics, architecture, sexuality, food, agriculture, and economics. The bee has always been with mankind as a source of inspiration and so The Hive is an attempt to understand how that inspiration has worked and what ideas have developed from that inspiration.
Wilson is able to name a concept, explain what it is, offer a quote which provides an examination of the idea, place it in contemporary perspective, and then offer the significance of the idea to humanity all while managing to write a paragraph that isn’t boring. Almost every paragraph of The Hive manages this same feat. And if it isn’t clear at this point that leaves me insanely jealous as a writer, but extraordinarily satisfied as a reader.
might say that the hive echoed in the feudal structure of medieval Europe, in which there were those who worked, those who fought, and those who prayed—all of them sinners with an allotted role in God’s order which must not be questioned. In addition, medieval writers about animals were more unselfconsciously fanciful than their ancient counterparts. They were apt to see animals as hieroglyphs sent by God with moral lessons inside them for men. The whole world was composed of hidden messages, and everything held together as part of a single Creation. […] Everything meant something. (24).
running gag. Rather than worry about my developing mantra though I look at the quote I just provided and this statement feels perfectly relevant. If there is a message of The Hive it’s almost certainly that human beings are always looking around at their reality and trying to find some kind of self-reflective meaning in it. Whether it was the trees, lightning, flowers, mountains, or even something as minuscule as bees, humans observe their reality as something separate but at the same time as something that can inform them about their personal self and place in the universe.
late renaissance and early Reformation period looked to the lack of political center and named it as such largely out of elitism. You can thank Petrarch mostly because he thought the period was not as “pretty” or “bright” as the classical ages. It’s important to note that because the Roman empire was crumbling internally at the time, and let’s be honest crumbling is a polite word for the steady festering that the empire suffered from, it became difficult for scholars to establish knowledge that could be widely, or as easily distributed.
observations represent a real scientific method, and while his findings were off by several crucial details, the man was working with the best means he had available. There was nothing wrong in Virgil’s conclusions ultimately because he did begin the study, and much like Charles Darwin his writings would be, not abandoned completely, just corrected over time. Humans beings need original observations in order to build real knowledge and establish actual facts about the world around them. What’s important about Virgil’s observations is that they became accepted partly because of his direct observations, but more importantly because they reaffirmed the political and social philosophy of his world and the world beyond it.
whatever grace and dignity as a profession that it does. The beekeeper is not a man in my eyes, but a timeless being who is aiding the community by collecting the honey. And it’s important to note that this image is not unique for even a man like Lev Tolstoy thought as much.
‘a living, separate creature endowed with wings of its own’. Similarly, men should be able to escape their current toils because each is ‘a living being endowed with the faculty of entering into the Christian conception of life’. (269-70).
for something to actually happen. Dr. Sloan was always happy to talk and one of our favorite topics was Mark Twain. She had a TIME magazine tacked to her wall with Twain’s face on the cover (a copy that I actually now own thanks to her) and we’d often point back to Twain and talk about his writing, his life, or his odd eccentricities. At some point during the talk the idea of Twain as an atheist came out and we both agreed Twain probably wasn’t one.
and more on a graphic novel I had read about that time which included, of all things, a sympathetic figure of Satan.
but because it was the kind of passage one reads and then immediately feels a kind of reawakening. I’m not trying to be dramatic as I write that out, this passage really stunned me because it was like seeing someone completely new for the first time while also recognizing that what they were saying is completely true. Humanity has, since the infancy of the species, looked for a way to outsource responsibility for errors and sins while at the same time looking constantly inward for signs of weakness. In ancient times it was customary for villages to send goats out into the wildness after performing a ceremony that would contain the “sins and offenses against the gods” into the animal before sending it out into the wild. This, for the record, is how the term “scape-goat” came enter the lexicon, and it also eventually explains the character of Satan.
with Satan allowing early church fathers the appropriation of the god for their own purposes. Reflecting on this connection, and re-reading Season of Mists I thought back to Gaiman’s Norse Mythology and looked up the brief character intro:
onto Satan himself really ought to look in a mirror. What missing, or most troubling, about the image of Satan is the fact that the man is having his story told by others, rather than having his own opportunity to speak, and this cartoonization, this caricature reveals the larger issue which is that human beings need someone else to be held accountable for their actions. Rather assume personal responsibility for fucking up, human beings created this supernatural being which would explain horrors and atrocities. Why would a man gamble away his money and then beat his wife half to death? It could be that he suffers from some inner self-loathing due to an addiction and so he strikes his wife, or it could be a demon who wears red suits and tricks him into gambling. Why would anyone follow a dictator who eventually leads a massive genocide against a denomination of a reigion. It could be
simple fear, or desire for there to be stability in government so they can return to real life, or else it could be a demon with long horns. Why would a woman cheat on her husband with multiple men rather than remaining faithful to him? It could be that she’s looking for something sexually that he is unable or unwilling to provide her, or perhaps she’s looking for some kind of emotional comfort that she’s not getting at home. Or, it could be a strange imp that plays fiddle against subpar country music singers.
Stranger.
right, who were laughing. I just remember that family laughing because most of the rest of the theater were white people who gave me nasty looks as I was walked out of the theater. I just couldn’t help it. There’s something about watching a group of white men complain about not being able to see through their hoods that’s just pathetic and hilarious.
I suppose I understand. There’s a lot of dialogue which surrounds the film Django Unchained and a lot of it has to do with history.
appearance on the “Fuck Tarantino” program, and people on Facebook got into really nasty arguments about who’s allowed to use the word “nigger” and when and in what context and then someone said “reverse racism” and everybody who liked their brain left the room before that bullshit polluted their frontal lobes. And when the issue of Slavery and historical accuracy was thrown down, I like most people tuned out. Not because there wasn’t an argument to be made, but because I had already assured myself that this interpretation was the best reason to enjoy the film. I enjoy Tarantino movies period and will regularly defend the man’s work. But since I’ve seen the film around ten times since it came out I’ve realized more and more than this argument can only go so far. Tarantino movies tend to be hyperbolic in terms of violence and persona and sometimes plot structure, and within the film there is another, and I’d argue far more interesting, analysis that few people really discussed.
In the course of these struggles the hero frequently forms a bond with another man—sometimes his rival, more often a comrade—a bond that is more important than any relationship he has with a woman and is frequently tinged with homoeroticism. There is very little free expression of the emotions. The hero is a man of few words who expresses himself through physical action—usually fighting. And when death occurs it is never at home in bed but always sudden death, usually murder. (38-9).
-tale, myth, of Siegfried. Fairy-tales, much like myth, are stories that are purposefully hyperbolic in order to explain phenomena in the world. Zeus and Thor are non-scientific means explain lightning, and likewise the story of Siegfried is designed to explain the absurd state of being in love. One of the best examples of the fairy-tale is George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm which, when it first published, had the subtitle of “A Modern Fairy Tale.” In Animal Farm Orwell was using the structure of the fairy tale to tell a modern story about the terrors of Stalinism, but also of political corruption in general.
enough to me to actually hear them read and speak in public, but every person attending these events were going to receive a free signed copy of their most recent books with a purchase of a ticket. So probably not actually free, but it feels free. I have no one but myself to blame for this missed chance, and since I already suffer from undiagnosed depression and give myself a pretty hard time I needed something to lift my spirits.
Eitri. It was one of the treasures of the gods. If Thor hit anything with it, that thing would be destroyed. If he threw the hammer at something, the hammer would never miss its target, and would always flay back through the air and return to his hand. He could shrink the hammer down and hide it inside his shirt, and he could make it grow again. It was a perfect hammer in all things except one: it was slightly too short in the handle, which meant that Thor had to swing it one handed.
winter nights perhaps, under the glow of the northern lights, or sitting outside the small hours, awake in the unending lights, or sitting outside in the small hours, awake in the unending daylight or midsummer, with an audience of people who wanted to know what else Thor did, and what the rainbow was, and how to live their lives, and where bad poetry comes from. (14-15).
assurance of bliss. It is a gave and solemn place, over which hangs the threat of an inevitable doom. The gods know a day will come when they will be destroyed. (443)
“It is me,” says Balder. “It is me long ago, before I died, when I was of the Aesir.”
