Will be very disappointed if @themountaingoats.bsky.social does not do a concept album about this magnificent fella

Btw, turns out the robots are *very* good at making up Homeric scholia from thin air, immediately folding the second you ask them to defend the authenticity of their forgeries lol

Gotta get you to publish that senior thesis, man!

That was the part that seems off: he tried to to deny it until he couldn’t. Also noticeable that he wasn’t “borrowing” Tosca or Butterfly, but lower tier Puccini. Rent didn’t have these issues with the Puccini family, but that was obviously much more overt allusion, like Homer in Vergil vel sim.

Another thing about him: he stole his most famous riff (music of the night) from Puccini’s La Fanciula Del West and settled with the Puccini family out of court. I’m as Kristevan as they come wrt intertextuality, but this one is tough to defend

Do yourself a favor and read this obituary for Ozzy O by @themountaingoats.bsky.social, who has consistently returned to Ozzy as a subject of his own art.

💯

Lucretius->Shakespeare->Milton->Haydn’s Creation->Walt Whitman->Darnielle-> The Kuiper Belt

Talk about a pedigree!

Just finished up a deep dive on Lucretius reception for a forthcoming digital encyclopedia, which naturally culminates with John Darnielle and NASA @themountaingoats.bsky.social

Probably the most “Darnielle-coded” thing I’ve seen you say here for a good bit; now I’m genuinely wracking my brain for any reference to a samovar in the discography, and, coming up blank, am disappointed by this fact

This is just basic hero cult praxis: bring your mola to the deity

The biggest tell here is that Wagner lifted seven notes from the finale of the Reformation Symphony and put them into Wotan’s mouth when he asks Freia to “bring our youth back to us” in Rheingold. I think the kids call this fangirling; the social anthropologists call it cultural appropriation.

The thing on that, as Gurnemanz will tell you, is that you get stuck in a zone where Space becomes Time, and Time Space. But, JD, if ever the Panasonic Muse called out to you!

The dude just operates in the stratosphere; it’s not fair

A great example (if anyone needed one) of why Kendrick is the best active poet: in “TV off” he rhymes prophetic/cosmetics/aesthetics/plyometric/highest metric with “just made it sweet; you could die, I bet it”, using half-rhyme and content to imply what should have been there: “diabetic”

A new enantiornithine (Aves: Ornithothoraces) from the Lower Cretaceous Xiagou Formation with unusually short pubes We describe a partial skeleton of an enantiornithine from the Changma locality of the Lower Cretaceous Xiagou Formation in northwestern China. The spe…

Official publication of the 120 million year-old bird I helped name. Introducing …novavis pubisculata

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

RIP, Nikki G. How are we to navigate this world without her voice?

🎶There goes Mr. Asshole! There goes Mr. Bitch🎶

Same!

This will spawn a whole new generic discourse akin to figuring out what a Satyr play is

Cf. Athenaeus’ assessment of Aeschylean tragedy, generated 2 centuries or so after the Odyssey, as “slices from the banquet of Homer”

Earlier, we know from the fifth century the “lionness on the cheese grater” joke from Lysistrata (and see Wilamowitz’ lengthy comment on that one) and Aristotle’s observations in HA 8. Would be interesting to triangulate all this with what bioarch can tell us

Suggestive that the word “leo” doesn’t really occur in Latin texts with frequency until the 1st century BCE; a few times in Plautus. There’s a fascinating proof in Lucretius (that must preserve some earlier Epicurean content) that Lions hate chickens because the chicken atoms hurt the Lion’s eyes

@flintdibble.bsky.social has your answer

There goes my hope as a person living in Florida that we would be rid of DeSantis when his term ends in 2026

JD, you know your assignment, man

Remember that lost Senecan treatise De Vespertilione?

screenshot of an email from Sharon James to me encouraging me to make bolder assertions and to have confidence in my voice in an article on Ovid in the Me Too era

I am devastated by the news that Sharon James passed away yesterday. Her invitation to me to write a paper on Ovid in the #MeToo era set me on the path that I'm on today, and her confidence in my voice, seen in the email below, has been invaluable to me as a scholar and a person. Requiescat in pace.

Application Info:

Tenure-earning Hellenist at USF (where I work):