Rewatching #Clue for at least the 50th time in the last 25 years, since Martin Mull just died. One thing I didn’t realize until just now, because I’ve been reading #SecretCity, is that Mr. Green’s problem of being a closeted gay man who worked for the State Department was actually very accurate for the time, since this is set in 1954. Haven’t gotten there in the book yet, but it seems unlikely that the purges completely died with McCarthy‘s career.
The return of long-lost Sumero-Akkadian heritage and modern disorders: rediscovering Gilgamesh, Victorian tension, and aftermath
“The rediscovery of the Mesopotamian epic complicated centuries-old and on-going debates about time and history: The major archaeologists of the period utilized it to return the field to its earliest arguments and better understand what time and history meant at the end of the nineteenth century, the Historians, Hebraists, and Biblicists began to question the originality of the Bible and verify its reliability, and figures specialized in literature and/or the arts got access to the primary sources of prehistory to update existing literature or create new fictional arts.”
Olmsted, The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler
“Kathryn Olmsted’s work provides a timely and incisive analysis of four American and two British press lords, united in their isolationism, appeasement towards fascism, and proclivity to use their media apparatus and larger-than-life personalities to forcefully promote their politics.”
Olmsted, The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler
“Kathryn Olmsted’s work provides a timely and incisive analysis of four American and two British press lords, united in their isolationism, appeasement towards fascism, and proclivity to use their media apparatus and larger-than-life personalities to forcefully promote their politics.”
“Where do national myths originate? They do not emerge by happenstance. Rather their creation and spread are an exercise of power. Influential historical actors, from antebellum slaveholders to the moguls of Hollywood and those Slotkin calls the ‘political classes’, have attempted to develop and disseminate broadly acceptable myths to serve their own interests.”
“Gerardus Mercator is perhaps well-known for all the wrong reasons. His last name evokes the infamous Mercator projection, which depicts the world in a distorted way. The projection has been criticized for putting Europe at the center of the world and favoring the northern hemisphere by making countries there appear bigger than they are in reality.”
I’m on a bit of a western euro classics kick these days. I have a two-volume set of The Greek Myths from The Folio Society that I got 23ish years ago and never read, though I did read that Daulaires Greek Myths book when I was a kid. But in between the books I’m reading and documentaries I’m watching about Rome, I think I might read some Greek originals.
Maybe put some Polybius on tap next to Marcus Aurelius.