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Book #5 – Theogony by Hesiod, trans. by Norman O. Brown

A re-read on my part.  I’m reading Jack Holland’s Misogyny which begins the history of the prejudice with Pandora.  I seemed to have mis-remembered the whole Pandora episode despite several Classics classes in college, so I plucked my edition of Theogony from the shelf for a quick refresher.

Impressions: More boring than I remembered it.  I’m probably munging it together with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which I recall as being a bit sexier.  Due to Brown’s introduction, I do have a greater respect for the difficulties of plucking what is the original text from what was added in by later writers.  Hesiod’s Works and Days might be an interesting read too.  I also forget just how whacked classical myths are.  For example.  From the standpoint of a writer building a world and the cultures within that world, I tend to try and make everything sensible, to make myths that make sense to a modern reader’s sensibility.  And those myths come out sounding false, because classical myths are based in a mindset that is pretty alien to me (to most people).  Getting into such a mindset is difficult.

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Taking work up to the mall today.  I’d like to get the galley done today.