Lauren Murphy

This is a wonderful project and I am so glad to be a part of it. I look forward to seeing my entry about Scylla alongside the work of so many other passionate classicists.

This is exciting news (and I'm a part of it!).

You guys, I was teaching the Aeneid today, and I mentioned how Vergil used condere as the verb for planting the sword in Turnus' chest and how the verb was used for founding a city in book one. One of my students then wrote in the chat eSTABlished. I am dead 💀. #classicsbluesky

Yay! Found it. It was R. M. Cook. It's usually him.

Someone, at some time, said something about ancient vases being too primitive for collectors during the Early Modern period. Don't mind me while I spend the next few days fixated on it.

A Modest Proposal Babygro A Modest Proposal is widely held to be one of the greatest examples of sustained irony in the history of the English language. Much of its shock value derives from the fact that the first portion of t...

You'd have to be *very* careful about who you gifted it to, but whoever came up with the idea of putting the frontispiece of Swift's Modest Proposal on a babygro was having a *day*.

I'm shopping for a baby gift but even though the mother is awesome, I don't want to risk offending. I love this though.

If you're poor, you probably have more of your stability coming from your social capital than your monetary capital. If you "just move," you throw a lot of it away.

'Despite frequent remonstrations, Persephone never accepted that she could not photocopy a whole book in one go".

This observation aside, I helped run a session on time management for PhD students last week. A quick summary thread of the big discussion points, in case others might find them useful: 1/

🗃️The JWH has been migrating from that other site to this one. Could you please give us a boost here (and there) to move our followers to this more pleasant place? Thank you!

Image of an email from a student asking if sources "from the late 1900s" are acceptable.

I will never recover from this student email.

*waves from Melbourne* Everyone here got derailed by varying degrees, but those in my cohort are starting to stagger past the finish line. I hope to join them eventually. Anyone who managed to start and finish during that time, well, that's amazing. Hats off, etc.

"quite wrong"

quote that reads: Art for Jean de Berry was not a means of sublimating his otherwise inexpressible sexual feelings. It would be quite wrong to imagine Jean having a private orgy of objects, feeling the flesh of the parchment page, fingering the bony relic, jiggling his joyaux until he arrived at jouissance.

See if you can avoid thinking about it. Sometimes research is... uncomfortable.

You can't write without a cat. This is just a fact. Even if you don't think you like cats or don't think you have a writing cat you actually do. It's out there, watching, waiting, stalking. It will find you. It can't be bargained with, t can't be reasoned with and it absolutely will not stop.

gimme yule
gimme fire
don me now with gay attire

Snapshot of a text from an old book that read: Antiquities, or Remnants of History, are, as was said, tamquam Tabula Naufragij, when industrious persons by an exact and scrupulous diligence and observation, out of Monumets, Names, Wordes, Proverbes, Traditions, Private Recordes, and Evidences, Fragments of stories, Passages of Books, that concerne not storie, and the like, do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of times. In these kindes on unperfect Histories I doe assigne no deficience, for they are tanquam imperfecte Milla, and therefore any deficience in them is but their nature. As for the Corruptios and Mothes of HIstorie, which are Epitomes, the use of them deserveth to be banisht, as all men of sound judgement have confessed, as those that have fretted and corroded the found bodies of many excellent Histories, and wrought them into base and unprofitable dregges.

Francis Bacon, 1605. Epitomes are bad, detailed study of the relics of history is good.

In very, very late realisations: I've been researching the antique vases owned by Niccolo de Niccoli and saw a note that he tilted the writing when he made copies from ancient texts. When printers used it, it became 'italics'. I never connected that with being Italian because I am an idiot.

One day I will back on my post history here and this stupid thing will be behind me. One day.

In today's thesis gripe, it took me five hours to find the original texts for quotes I had in translation from secondary sources. They were all from the sixteenth century: two in Latin and one in Italian. My word count has actually gone down but perhaps someone will appreciate the original words? :(

Pointing Donald Sutherland with Duo from duolingo overlain really badly.

Me. *Misses one day of duolingo.*

We could both be wrong, but if two people came to the same conclusion using slightly different evidence, well, perhaps there is something to it.

I do approach things from a different angle because we were both making that connection for different reasons. It's not a huge, huge thing, but it was nice to be the first person to discover something.

The greatest story ever told

Boo to the French scholar who independently made the same discovery and attribution as me, only in 1996. Off to correct that section in my thesis now. Sigh. It serves me right for feeling smug when I worked it out last year.

Okay, now I know why so many people are talking about skydiving Christian babies on bsky.

Some of my research process involves cursing long-dead scholars who have footnotes like 'so-and-so informed me that he read about this super interesting thing that happened' and then there is nothing about the text they saw it in, who wrote it, where is it, how do I find it? I am a tired scholar.

I'm old, I will happily write beautiful essays under exam conditions. Put a computer in front of me and I start looking for a distraction. My ability to write lovely cursive in an exam is an obsolete skill and was pretty irrelevant when I was young too. I do like nice pens though.