viktorling - Tumblr blog

viktorling · 16 hours

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When you go, your footprints will fill with grass. Moss shall cover your tombstone, and as the sun rises, green shall spread over all, in all its shades and hues. This verdigris will overtake your swords and your coins and your battlements and, try as you might, all you hold dear will succumb to it. Your skin, your bones. Your virtue - The Green Knight 2021

Portrait of Dev Patel in his role as Gawain in The Green Knight. Acrylic paint and embroidery floss on Cotton. 17 inches diameter.

#the green knight #embroidery

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viktorling · 24 hours

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someone said we had more fun in childhood because we didnt have any past memories to linger on and it has stuck with me ever since

#louise gluck #on memory #memory as punishment fr

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viktorling · 24 hours

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Throwback to when I took painkillers and woke up with Photoshop open on my computer to this image I had made

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viktorling · 24 hours

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Akihiro Higuchi aka 樋口明宏 (Japanese, b. 1969, Tokyo, Japan) - 1: Mitate-Urushi (K0218), 2018 2: Hana (H0418), 2018 3: Mai-Tanzen (M0718), 2018 4: Mai (M1218), 2018 5: No Title 6: Hana (H0218), 2018 7: Collection-Dress (D0118), 2018 8: Hana (H0818), 2018 9: Mitate-Urushi (K0118), 2018, Insects, Urushi, Gold, Silver.

#art #<aes3

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viktorling · 24 hours

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"Don't use Libby because it costs libraries too much, pirate instead" is such a weird, anti-patron, anti-author take that somehow manages to also be anti-library, in my professional librarian-ass opinion.

It's well documented that pirating books negatively affects authors directly* in a way that pirating movies or TV shows doesn't affect actors or writers, so I will likely always be anti-book piracy unless there's absolutely, positively no other option (i.e. the book simply doesn't exist outside of online archives at all, or in a particular language).

Also, yeah, Libby and Hoopla licenses are really expensive, but libraries buy them SO THAT PATRONS CAN USE THEM. If you're gonna be pissed at anybody about this shitty state of affairs, be pissed at publishing companies and continue to use Libby or Hoopla at your library so we can continue to justify having it to our funding bodies.

One of the best ways to support your library having services you like is to USE THOSE SERVICES. Yes, even if they are expensive.

*Yes, this is a blog post, but it's a blog post filled with links to news articles. If you can click one link, you can click another.

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viktorling · 1 day

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In the dark, the deer mistook my headlights for stars

#i will die you will die we will die #oh this is glorious #art #artists on tumblr

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viktorling · 1 day

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ok i wrote an entire essay on this for class but i keep thinking about it and i really need to get off my chest how utterly devastating it is that antigone truly is doomed by the narrative.

a lot of academics look at her story as an example of athenian literature which opposes the normative gender ideology of their society because antigone is a woman inserting herself into a political sphere with no conventional place for women, especially as it was often held in athenian society that obedience to men was a feminine virtue, which antigone directly subverts by not only standing against creon but doing so publicly.

but, antigone's actions were driven by her will to adhere to the social norm of surviving women in a family performing funerary rites for the deceased men. this isn't really touched upon in sophocles from what i remember, but antigone isn't just determined to complete polynices' funerary rites because he's her brother—the completion of these rites was a position normally held by women of a family, and the responsibilities of daughters to their families wasn't considered extinguished by marriage or any such thing, so even if antigone had been married to haimon by this point the responsibility still would have fallen to her—but she would have felt a duty imposed by the societal norms placed upon women to honour polynices. this therefore obviously creates a conflict — on one hand (μὲν) society expects her to honour her brother's funerary rights, but on the other hand (δὲ) if she does so she's not only publicly disobeying a male authority figure but in a way which threatens to prevent her from marrying and preserving her family line, which was also considered a daughter's responsibility.

in choosing to disobey creon, antigone has been rendered useless as a bride in his eyes, because this rejection of the status quo has resulted in her trespass of the societal boundaries of her gender and she's therefore no longer considered able to serve the expectations of women, so creon declares that she's to die. but if she hadn't disobeyed him, socially she's still failed to uphold the familial responsibilities demanded of her following the normative gender ideology, and so even if no one would have spoken up directly about it because she's followed creon's command, either by wilful perception or subconscious judgment she likely would have been seen as a traitor to her family on some level regardless.

what this means is that not only is antigone truly doomed by the narrative, where her choices render her a servant to social expectations of women whether she outright defies authority or unwillingly defies her womanly responsibilities, but that her entire narrative is ingrained with the very gender ideology that dooms her to begin with.

#doomed by the narrative #antigone #greek theatre #classics

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viktorling · 1 day

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Lit Hub has posted an article with the names, photos and biographies of the Palestinian poets and writers killed by the IOF since the beginning of October. May we remember them, their names & their poems 🍉🕊🍓🪁

"Since October 7, Israel has killed at least thirteen Palestinian poets and writers in Gaza.

If we think of ourselves as a global literary community, then these people were our fellow travelers, our peers.

They—just like the more than 66 Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza in the line of duty; just like every one of the more than 21,000 innocent people massacred in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel over the past 75 days—deserve to be remembered."

#palestine

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viktorling · 1 day

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The sick reality is that many of the renowned academics and writers among Gaza's thousands of martyrs will, in twenty years time, be quoted and memorialised by the same universities and institutions that have denigrated them and enabled their slaughter.

#free palestine

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viktorling · 1 day

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Hey June! I was wondering, what medias/books would you recommend for a person wanting to get into the ancient greek classics? The Iliad/Odyssey/Aeneid stories fascinate me, but as there are so many versions and translations and retellings, I don't really know where to start. How did you get into them?

hey anon! I feel mildly underqualified to answer this as I actually haven’t read the Iliad or Odyssey or all of the Aeneid but I will do my best (i’m working on it! promise! iliad is up next and i’m gonna read it and i’m gonna go crazyinsane)

firstly you should totally read the original texts. remember that they aren’t The One True Story, they’re just written-down versions of wobbly cultural stories that change from person to person. and you don’t have to read them before reading retellings or adaptation but it’s good to read them fairly close together. just read what you wanna read. the bit of the Aeneid I read was translated by Robert Fagles, and I’ve heard Emily Wilson’s Odyssey is good. my friend Theo @fifthlydoyoudream recommends E. V. Rieu’s Argonautica translation, if you wanna read that. poetry in translation has decent translations of most plays i’ve tried to find, and that’s nice because it’s online and super accessible.

the way I first got into the greek classics was reading Anne Carson’s An Oresteia, which is Agamemnon, Elektra, and Orestes. it’s a really great intro because Anne Carson’s translations are just fantastic & it’s one play from each of the three big greek tragedy-writers & it’s a pretty well-contained story so you don’t need much context - you could read Iphigenia at Aulis first but that’s not really necessary. (confusingly there is also The Oresteia, which is different). if you can find an Anne Carson translation of a play you should totally read that one. that’s my rule of thumb. I always recommend Antigone too - it’s also fairly self-contained and it makes me crazyinsane. Anne Carson has two translations, they’re both good - Antigonick is better if you have a little context beforehand in my opinion. also Oedipus the King/Oedipus Rex is good.

tbh what i recommend is just following characters or stories that you like and seeing where that gets you. like i’m having a pretty intense house of atreus moment atm but i still barely know who penelope is because i haven’t read the odyssey. who is penthesilea? still do not know. but don’t get overwhelmed by the amount of stuff out there!! it can be a little scary but wikipedia is your friend and also you do not have to know everything.

and some adaptations/retellings:

Lavinia by Ursula K. le Guin is an adaptation/retelling of the Aeneid from Lavinia’s point of view and it is very very good.

Luis Alfaro’s Greek Trilogy are play adaptations of Oedipus Rex, Elektra, and Medea set in modern-day LA with a Latino cast and it is so fucking good it makes me want to bite glass and explode. you can find oedipus el rey by googling but the other ones might be a bit more annoying to find

Iphigenia and the Furies (on Taurian Land) by Ho Ka Kei is a good deconstruction of the colonialist nature of Iphigenia among the Taurians, and it is also absurdly hilarious, so I recommend. I read it before I read the play it adapts and I was fine but it is good to have context.

i’m having an iphigenia moment anyway i also recommend Iphigenia at Zero by Lisa Schlesinger if you get into iphigenia’s story.

I’m like 15 pages in to Cassandra by Christa Wolf and I am thoroughly enjoying it so far

Antigone directed by Sophie Deraspe is a great French Canadian adaptation of Antigone in the modern day I really like it

and who would i be if i didn’t recommend max @goose-books‘s godsong, aka the aeneid (among other things) with lesbians

also. note on adaptation - a lot of adaptations i have read flatten the morality of these plays into good and bad. i think that’s dumb. let them be shitty, adaptations!

ok thats all good luck brave soldier o7

#greek theatre #classics #reading list

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viktorling · 1 day

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The thing about "Antigone" as a name is that it actually does just look sick in English. It looks like "anti gone" like... Not gone. Something the ancient greek could've never possibly accounted for but it just Looks Cool In English. Although it's not pronounced that way, in fact the greek pronoun is further away- it's more like "adi yohni" (hard y). The actual Greek meaning is also sick if you peel back a bunch of layers though

"Anti" is an interesting word, because in English we just think of it as a prefix that's counter to something. But in Greek it literally means "across." If you're sitting across someone, or if you're giving directions and wanna say what's across the street... That's "anti"

So in Greek, it can mean "opposite of" but also "next to." It's both "different" and "alike" depending on context.

"Goni" means parent. Coming from the same place as "Genesis" meaning birth or creation, or "Generation" meaning people born around the same time period. In Greek you even see it in the word for "to become" or "to happen" and all it's variants

So Antigone as a name is often said to mean "worthy of one's parents" and while that's the sentiment behind the name, if you took it more literally, it can mean both "very similar to one's parent; positioned next to one's parent" or "very different from one's parent; positioned opposite of one's parent" but you could also supplement "parent" with "creation" or "circumstances of one's birth"

#antigone #linguistics #greek tragedy

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viktorling · 1 day

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Shakespeare’s Tragedies as The Good Place Quotes

Hamlet