you brought it on yourself miss twiddle

So I started Pierce Brown'a Red Rising -- basically, it's as if Brown read the Hunger Games and thought, "you know what this needs? More gritty manly realism and more angsty chosen-one manpain. Let me take care of that." Our hero is a young, hardworking everyman "Red" (ie low-caste) in a hardscrabble mining colony in District 12 on Mars in a future that uses classical names for everything; when his beloved wife is executed for a simple act of defiance, he falls in with The Rebellion and learns that Everything The Government Tells Us Is a Lie: Mars has been terraformed for centuries, and while his people labor in slavery beneath the surface, the ruling elites of the Capitol the Gold caste lead lives of absurd excess.

Where I am right now, our hero is undergoing a process of having his body remade into that of a Gold so that he can infiltrate the Hunger Games the academy where the sons and daughters of the elite fight it out in brutal game of survival of the fittest in order to determine who dies and who goes on the be the next generation of Ruthlessly Evil Overlords of Mars. Okay, yes, it's terrible, and I am really annoyed that the whole plot is motivated by manpain over the Death Of My Beloved, My Angel, The Gentle Light of My Life Whose Beauty and Inner Strength Made Life Worth Living. But (a) the writing isn't awful and (b) I have an obligation to read all the terrible faux-Rome sff.

Anyway, there was this paragraph:

“My body is not all that changes. Before I sleep, I drink a tonic laden with processing enhancers and speed-listen to The Colors, The Iliad, Ulysses, Metamorphosis, the Theban plays, The Draconic Labels, Anabasis, and restricted works like The Count of Monte Cristo, Lord of the Flies, Lady Casterly’s Penance, 1984, and The Great Gatsby. I wake knowing three thousand years of literature and legal code and history.” (ch. 12)

So...a mix of "classics" and made-up "future classics", but I don't get the narrative that they are trying to tell -- apart from the fact that, uh, I guess the only books that survived into the future were the contents of an American high school English classroom? This kind of passage seems like a great place to briefly tell a narrative what this future-evil-privileged society values and fears. Apart from the fact that I don't trust the author enough to be sure that when he says "Ulysses" he means James Joyce and not the Odyssey (ditto for Metamorphosis: Kafka's Die Verwandlung or Ovid's Metamorphoses?), I don't really get what this set of texts is supposed to do: the Iliad and Anabasis makes a certain kind of sense as classics for a military elite; I suspect that (the?) Metamorphoses(?) is a nod to the transformations that the elite of this society undergo to become superhuman (but...I'm pretty sure that either Ovid's or Kafka's would be on the "restricted" list as far as messages about metamorphosis and society and the fate of the human when s/he is forcibly transformed by (unjust) power structures. Ditto Sophocles. For fuck's sake. Have any of these people read the Antigone?). The Odyssey is probably there because this is all about our hero's love for his wife.

However, I think that overall, these are pretty terrible lists to represent a ruthless, power-hungry, corrupt class of Rome-emulating rulers. Where the fuck is Thucydides? Where's Machiavelli? Where's Ayn Rand? HOW CAN YOU HAVE REALPOLITIK WITHOUT THUCYDIDES? (and where's Tacitus? How can you have imperial Rome without Tacitus. YOU CAN'T.) Where's Lucan? I bet this society would love Lucan. And, of course, let's not even ask why this is completely euro-centric reading list.

I also think that one could be cleverer with the whole "restricted reading" list, although it hangs together a bit (themes of dystopia, Hobbesian excess, and revenge). I mean, 1984, Lord of the Flies...can you be more cliched? Put some real protest writing or anti-injustice writing on there. Make a more explicit allusion to your antecedent of the Hunger Games (wouldn't that be clever?) Or put the Aeneid (!!!!!). When I write a trashy ya dystopia novel about a futuristic oligarchy that models itself on Rome, remind me to throw in an aside about how the Aeneid is a deeply subversive and restricted text because of Vergil's problematization of empire and ambivalence about power. We'll call it The Revenge of the Harvard School.

Vergil quote on the 9/11 memorial is the line about glorifying the deaths of rash passionate young men who launch a brutal sneak attack and get killed in the process.

So, angevin2's post about Middleton inspired me to start reading The Phoenix. I wish I had known that there was a whole genre of 'disguised-ruler' plays when I was in middle school and making do with Arabian Nights and Measure for Measure…

And then I started to think, wouldn't a disguised-ruler story about Augustus be awesome? I sort of think that there must be one somewhere, and it seems like something sort of familiar, but googling didn't turn up any references.

I started reading the Eclogues today, finally. I find immediately that Virgil writing pastoral Augustan poetry is much more palatable that Horace writing same. It's so interesting that the First Eclogue is a dialogue and that it's a dialogue about benefiting vs. not from Augustus in power. On the one hand, how obvious is that? On the other hand, there are really two things (at least) going on. There's the main problem of Meliboeus losing his land, while Tityrus has managed to hang on to his by the favor of the God, and there's the issue of Meliboeus having bad luck anyway: ewes yeaning (I just learned this word) their lambs onto rocks and generally not doing well. And the "god" who controls that kind of luck, and maybe the other kind, too, to a certain extent, is Rome (vs. Mantua). M. asks who this amazing new god is,* and T. starts rambling about Rome, and talking about how whenever he used to sacrifice lambs and cheese to Mantua, he never had any luck and wasn't even free. Only later it turns out that the real god is the youth who heard his petition. It's paradoxical: abandoning your native territory and your allegiances to it, and being subsumed into the dominant city is what makes you free and successful -- and still in possession of your native territory.

The opposition is also not smoothed away at all between the fortunes of T. and M. I hesitate to say, "Virgil is pointing out a serious/fundamental injustice/problem with the Augustan regime/project" but I am sort of inclined that way. T. has a nifty adynata about how the Parthians will trade places (geography again!) with the Germans before his faith in his new god will waver, but then M. points out that those Italians like him bereft of their patrimony will be wandering to Africa and Scythia and Crete and Britain: suddenly the adynata seems rather more dynata.

Thirdly, since I am getting lonely and slightly depressive and maudlin, this is such a freaking sad poem. I think that Meliboeus' last speech is one of my favorite bits of speech from anywhere. The so-careful and perfect description of his his fairly meager farm, matching the work he has put into his land, the despair that he has lost it all, even though it wasn't doing very well anyway, and that for him the pastoral life is going to end. I don't read the end as any kind of permanent good: T. offers a night of rest and meal, but probably only to set him on his way. And then the sun is setting, and everything is ending. (Okay, so it's probably time for me to go to bed, then, if this is how I'm going to be.)

*Incidentally, there's a 3rd century Christian conversion poem more or less based on this, except that the god who will help you out of all of your agricultural problems is the Christian god.)