random threads from my last long babble
To keep from getting too out of control, I decided to place some wilder tangents from my last entry into a new one:
- Some cultures recognize different color boundaries than we do. [1 2 2a 2c! 3] One of the pet examples is that the same color-word is used in the Iliad for Helen's hair and unripe growing wheat, which would be a yellow+green though not yellow-green, and another color word is used for the angry sea, wine, and blood, which must be some kind of blue+red+black, at least. (So, if you looked at source 1, you'll see that it's a little wrong - there are more than 4 color-words in Homer's work. But there's still interesting stuff there.)
But then I thought, what if the Iliad is like Anime? Anime is filled people who don't look Japanese at all (who don't look human at all, but white people tend to think of them as looking more white than Japanese, which is sometimes silly), and who have like, magenta and blue hair on a regular basis. What if Helen really had green hair? (In Iliad-Anime-land) I think Achilles' mother, who was a goddess, has silver hair, but I may be making that up.
People are described in the Iliad and Odyssey as having blond and brown and red hair, so Western thought has assumed that the ethnicity of Greece has changed since Ancient times to the more Mediterranean look of today. And certainly when we make a movie like Satyricon, we people it with blond-haried, blue-eyed babes. Peter wondered if this was all the moderns' fault, like having a white Jesus because Christianity became centered in Europe, but I think it was definitely the Greeks' fault too, if this is indeed an error. After all, they describe goddesses binding sandals to their shining white feet, and these various hair colors, which are generally unproblematic, except for the yellow+green-haired Helen. - Macbeth is totally awesome. I think what inspired me to rewrite Macbeth using lines from other plays is that there's so much there, but people treat it like a joke play. It's the shortest of the Big Four, which makes people think it's simple, but instead I think it's simply the tightest and most intricate. And it might seem paradoxical to show how perfect Macbeth is byu "improving" it with lines from other plays, but shut up man! Shut up! I was a 15-year-old artistic genius. I was drawing with negative space. But anyway, I think a microcosm of the failure to adequately interpret Macbeth can be found in the uniformly flat interpretations of the "is this a dagger?" speech. It's usually just interpreted as a simple "scared-crazy" speech, but there are so many dynamic things going on there. I see him pacing back and forth, changing his mind over and over again, as in "And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,/ Which was not so before" to "There's no such thing/ It is the bloody business which informs / Thus to mine eyes". Oh man, it's such a cool speech, but all the "poor players" just "mouth it", to again employ Hamlet to deconstruct Macbeth.
- Some of Elijah Muhammed's views were just ridiculous. I literally barked in laughter when I read this:Mr. Elijah Muhammed taught us that a tall man married to a too-short woman, or vice-versa, they looked odd, not matched. And he taught that a wife's ideal age was half the man's age, plus seven. [233]
For those of you not in the know, that's also what Hugh Hefner said was the ideal age for a man's girlfriend/mistress. But what makes sense for Hef, does not make sense for Muh. Because whereas you'd be expected to change mistresses quite frequently, your wife would just get further and further from being half your age plus seven as you got older. Suppose, for example, that you both got married when you were 14. By the time you're twenty-eight, she's half your age plus TWO TIMES seven! Gasp! :) Peter ask who came up with that algorithm first, and I don't know. Google attributes it both to Plato and to the Koran [1 2]. I don't remember it in what I've read of either the Koran or Plato, but hell, my memory is faulty.
eta: I searched the Symposium, the Republic, and the Laws on Perseus, but I didn't find this formula. The closesr I found was Laws VI.785b, which says that (in the imaginary place Plato is creating), the women should be married between 16 and 20, and the men between 30 and 35, which doesn't work out to "half plus seven" at all; the ages for the women should be 22-24.5 or so. But I have to admit that "half plus seven" does sound like a Plato thing to say, him being all big on the numerology and crap.