Saint Charles, Illinois

Kapsai region, Lithuania

I finished my Rome book and have now begun one about Pompeii. I’m 65 pages in and I already love it: yes, it covers the volcano, but most of the book is about “this is what the town and daily life of it would have been like, actually.” Fascinating stuff. Things I’ve learned so far:

- The streets in Pompeii have sidewalks sometimes a meter higher than the road, with stepping stones to hop across as “crosswalks.” I’d seen some photos before. The book points out that, duh, Pompeii had no underground drainage, was built on a fairly steep incline, and the roads were more or less drainage systems and water channels in the rain.

- Unlike today, where “dining out” is expensive and considered wasteful on a budget, most people in Pompeii straight up didn’t have kitchens. You had to eat out if you were poor; only the wealthy could afford to eat at home.

- Most importantly, and I can’t believe in all the pop culture of Pompeii this had never clicked for me: Pompeii had a population between 6-35,000 people. Perhaps 2,000 died in the volcano. Contemporary sources talk about the bay being full of fleeing ships. Most people got the hell out when the eruption started. The number who died are still a lot, and it’s still gruesome and morbid, but it’s not “an entire town and everyone in it.” This also makes it difficult for archeologists, apparently (and logically): those who remained weren’t acting “normally,” they were sheltering or fleeing a volcano. One famous example is a wealthy woman covered in jewelry found in the bedroom in the glaridator barracks. Scandal! She must have been having an affair and had it immortalized in ash! The book points out that 17 other people and several dogs were also crowded in that one small room: far more likely, they were all trying to shelter together. Another example: Houses are weirdly devoid of furniture, and archeologists find objects in odd places. (Gardening supplies in a formal dining room, for example.) But then you remember that there were several hours of people evacuating, packing their belongings, loading up carts and getting out… maybe the gardening supplies were brought to the dining room to be packed and abandoned, instead of some deeper esoteric meaning. The book argues that this all makes it much harder to get an accurate read on normal life in a Roman town, because while Pompeii is a brilliant snapshot, it’s actually a snapshot of a town undergoing major evacuation and disaster, not an average day.

- Oh, another great one. Outside of a random laundry place in Pompeii, someone painted a mural with two scenes. One of them referenced Virgil’s Aeneid. Underneath that scene, someone graffiti’d a reference to a famous line from that play, except tweaked it to be about laundry. This is really cool, the book points out, because it implies that a) literacy and education was high enough that one could paint a reference and have it recognized, and b) that someone else could recognize it and make a dumb play on words about it and c) the whole thing, again, means that there’s a certain amount of literacy and familiarity with “Roman pop culture” even among fairly normal people at the time.

A loaf of bread made in the first century AD, which was discovered at Pompeii, preserved for centuries in the volcanic ashes of Mount Vesuvius. The markings visible on the top are made from a Roman bread stamp, which bakeries were required to use in order to mark the source of the loaves, and to prevent fraud. (via Ridiculously Interesting)

Gold ring with jasper frog, Egypt, 600-30 BC

https://museum-of-artifacts.blogspot.com/?m=1 https://www.instagram.com/p/CaGJhR7ILTV/?utm_medium=tumblr

“I definitely didn’t want to root [Corpse Bride] in a specific place, and wasn’t really interested in what real ethnic origins of the tale were, because the thing that got me was the fable aspect of it”⁹.

Jewish legends are, well, legendary. They are filled with mystery, magic, fascinating creatures, wild adventures, and dazzling heroes. But if you ask most people, even most Jews, they may be largely unfamiliar with Jewish folktales outside of the Bible or Fiddler on the Roof. That is until you unravel the way in which Jewish folklore has been commodified and removed from its Jewish roots in order to be suitable for a non-Jewish audience.

This phenomenon is not new and not singular to Jews–not in the slightest. Cultural stories, and so much more, are routinely co-opted and commodified, erasing the culture, religion, and heritage of the original storytellers in order to make the story palatable for audiences outside of the original group. Sometimes so egregiously or viciously that it is largely unrecognizable to those who aren’t intimately familiar enough to spot it.

One such story is, allegedly, The Corpse Bride.

However, Tim Burton would convince you that the story he heard of (allegedly from within Lilith’s Cave) isn’t actually Jewish–in fact, he doesn't even know the origin. In their 2018 YouTube video, Jewish Erasure in Tim Burton Films, channel The Princess and the Scrivener plays a clip of Burton stating, “Joe had heard a little story, like a paragraph, which was an excerpt from an old fable–I don’t even know from what country it came, my recollection is that it didn’t have a specific place of origin. [I] Wasn't really interested in what the real ethnic origins of the tale were, because the thing that got me was the fable aspect of it”⁹.

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Thinking about the werewolf from the hate mail Lemgo council pharmacist David Welman (1595 - 1669) got after being accused of being a werewolf

Are you polish?

nope

Holy shit, can you imagine if mediaeval monks had figured out flipbooks?

@ask-blogger-miss-prussia

I made arrows and a quiver for the con tomorrow. The cosplay is almost done! I'll post more pictures as I continue.