The Dangerous Existence of Madame Lee

I just haven't had a lot to report lately, to be honest, though I've been cooking most of this week (I did a rainbow vegetable stir-fry on Tuesday, and tonight I made turkey kielbasa with sweet cooked purple cabbage. Tomorrow, we dine on chicken enchiladas. (For those of you who might be interested, there's a food blog, though I'll continue to talk about things I cook here.)

Finally finished The Great Sea by David Abulafia. I will almost always buy history sight unseen, on the grounds that it's history and therefore must be good, but this was really interesting; it's a history of the Mediterranean and the cultural, politial, and economic interactions that took place around it. The ancient world stuff wasn't unfamiliar to me, though I admit Magna Graecia hasn't been my study, but a lot of the later chapters were eye-opening - I knew Russia really, really wanted a warm-water port (sometimes with disastrous results), but I didn't know there had been shenanigans as far south as the Mediterranean. Anyway, I'm glad I bought it and plan to mine the bibliography indefinitely.

Also, somebody stop me before I obsess again. The good news is that there doesn't seem to be a lot of source material in English.

Somehow, I managed to churn out a bit of story before I fell asleep last night. This is on The Project I Don't Like, Why Am I Writing It, but I figure if I plow ahead I could turn it into a project I like better.

And, you know, that's really it, other than the we've-stopped-the-overtime-for-now thing. (I'm not holding my breath, though!)

"Ground-breaking" is the secret code word for "everybody has retrod this ground at least a thousand times before and I have nothing new to add here, just some stupid ramblings while I'm waiting to head up to Bloomington". It's Columbus Day and most of the courthouses are closed, if you're wondering why I'm not at work. It's possible that the office could call with something for me, but they're not likely to, and if they don't call by noon they're not liable to.

So I was thinking about the ancient world, which happens from time to time, and somehow I got onto Alexandria, and then I was thinking how breathtakingly ignorant I am of the ancient Near East. (Actually, the more I learn about anything, the more ignorant I realize I am.) Part of that is that I'm not terribly interested in Egypt, Persia, Babylon, etc. for their own sakes; I feel like I should know something about them so that I can be aware of what the Greeks and Romans were contending with when they came into those areas. ("Greeks" may be a misnomer. The Hellenistic world was secretly Macedonian.) And then I followed this line of thought for a while, and remembered various pseudohistorical claims I'd read that Greek philosophy was ganked from Egyptian, which can't be true because most of Greek philosophy (or at least Greek political philosophy) is about how best to live in a polis, or about the ideal polis. These, frankly, are not Egyptian concepts, since Egypt was what we'd call an absolute monarchy from its beginnings right up to the Roman conquest. It's sort of difficult to philosophize about a concept that doesn't exist in your cultural frame of reference.

And then I sort of started thinking about Christian Jacq again, and the idea in his novels that Pharaoh did have a responsibility to the country. To me, as a product of the late twentieth/early twenty-first century in a democratic society, with all that that entails, that's not a foreign concept, given that a large part of American political theory is that leaders have a responsibility to their people. But I wonder if the ancients would have had that concept at all, or would have understood it the same way; in the democratic poleis of Greece, I think it might have been similar (not so sure about Sparta). Given that the concept of ma'at was such a big part of Egyptian religious thought and culture, some idea of responsibility and reciprocity may well have existed, though I doubt it would have been the same as ours.

Hmm. Must geek on this some more.