Jo ~ Thought Couture

Today’s anti-brain rot accomplishments:

🎹 90 minutes piano practice, focusing on Grieg’s “Notturno” and relearning Joplin’s “Swipesy Cakewalk”

🏺 30 minutes Latin study, mostly grammar drills

📚 15 pages of Mary Beard’s SPQR

How have you reclaimed your brain today?

#classics #booksky

Maybe an actual penguin would've done a better job 🤷‍♀️

Movie poster for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

I desperately want this to be good, in the hope that it inspires even one moviegoer to read the epic who might not have otherwise. My concern is that Hollywood will Marvel-ify Odysseus and do away with the subtleties of character…but I remain open minded 🏺

#booksky #filmsky #classics

Yes this is the post with which I’m choosing to return to this app. Completely forgot it existed 😅

PSA: You can give yourself tendinitis from knitting 2 fast 2 furious. Ask me how I know 😂

They use the Bassae frieze as a framing device, which is informative in its own right while providing a solid foundation for discussing language, architecture, academics, and culture. The best Very Short Introduction I’ve read so far! (Pictured below is a section of the Bassae frieze.)

Beard and Henderson do a fantastic job of outlining the importance of classics and its influence throughout history. Their writing is super approachable, free of jargon, and is clearly written with a new classics reader in mind. (3/4)

This year, I’m trying to work my way through the Western canon starting from the top. Given that I’m most familiar with 20th century lit, I needed a primer on ancient classics to accompany my odyssey (😉), and this one was perfect. (2/4)

Reviewing Every Book I Read #1: Classics: A Very Short Introduction by Mary Beard and John Henderson

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Nonfiction, 145 pages, published 2000 🏺

#booksky #bookreview #classiclit #classics

I’m reading Volume II now and it’s genuinely a bit anxiety-inducing. But I still can’t wait for III and IV 😅

This is high art

T.S Eliot, “The Wasteland”—the poem that opened my third eye and made me a modernist (though I can’t say I agree about April) 💜

#poetrysky #poetry #classiclit

Dear prudence headling: help! My husband enjoys sailing naked and drinking beers with gay men

Penelope in the Odyssey

Reposting so I remember to look into this—I read Wilson’s Iliad translation last year and fell in love with it! Had no idea there were videos of her performing 🏺

Glad to have come across this just as I’ve been thinking recently that I’d like to read more about nuns. Definitely checking it out!

P.S. The yarn is Knit Picks Stroll in Hollyberry and Dogwood Heather.

Hand-knit socks on a colorful floral background. The socks are dark red and pink, and feature a vertical vine pattern.

Behold, my latest finished object: the Trailing Daisy socks by Tiina Kuu! 🌼

One of my knitting goals this year is to improve my stranded colorwork, and I think I’ve finally found my ideal tension.

I highly recommend this pattern btw! It’s free on Ravelry 🧶 #knitsky

Painting detail featuring the head and shoulders of a white woman facing left with head turned to look outwards, she wears a turban style hat and a blue dress

"My illustrious lordship, I'll show you what a woman can do."
-Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653)
Italian artist
#InternationalWomensDay

That’s pretty much exactly my experience thus far—I’m having fun, but the emotional resonance is lacking for me. And I too am not a huge Odysseus fan 😅

#currentlyreading Homer’s Odyssey, translated by Robert Fagles

Despite being familiar with the most iconic scenes of the epic (sirens, cyclops, Scylla, oh my), it’s much different from what I was expecting!

To my surprise, I think I prefer the Iliad 🏺 #classicsbluesky #booksky

I’ve finally figured out what this app feels like to me:

A college seminar, in which all of my classmates are so smart and cool that I’m too intimidated to say anything because I believe I’m neither smart nor cool.

App-induced imposter syndrome 🥲

Painting featuring two standing white female figures, to the right, holding a sword in the act of beheading a white male figure who lies centrally on a bed, all in a dark room

Judith Slaying Holofernes (1614–20) by Artemisia Gentileschi, considered one of the most accomplished of all Italian Baroque painters #WomensArt

Saul Bellow’s Spectacular Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech on How Art and Literature Ennoble the Human Spirit “It may be more difficult to reach the whirling mind of a modern reader but it is possible to cut through the noise and reach the quiet zone. In the quiet zone we may find that he is devoutly…

"Only art penetrates... the seeming realities of this world. There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive."

This is such a wonderful read:

If you see this, quote with flowers from your gallery. 🪻

Terror, Tenderness, and the Paradoxes of Human Nature: How a Marmoset Saved Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Lives from the Nazis The most discomposing thing about people capable of monstrous acts is that they too enjoy art, they too read to their children, they too can be moved to tears by music. The dissident poet Joseph Br…

Virginia Woolf - BOTD
www.themarginalian.org/2023/08/16/v...)
💙📚 #LiteratureSky

If you’re open to poetry, I always recommend anything by Mary Oliver. Her unending wonder of nature and faith in humanity reaffirms my own 🥰

introduce yourself with
one book 📕
one film 🎬
one album 💿
one show 📺

#booksky 💙📚

need a name for that feeling that strikes in the early evening when you're just oh fuck. oh christ why aren't i trying to become a successful streamer. why haven't i made a movie. why haven't i had a novel published. i dont think its anxiety or comparison stress its a new thing i made up

Fact truly is stranger than fiction.

After years of prioritizing Romantic and modern music, I’ve finally hit my Bach phase—I suddenly need to play all the Bach. Starting by revisiting the lovely Invention no.4 in d minor! 🎹 #classicalmusic