This Means Noth­ing To Me

I have been in Austria for a week and a half now for teach­ing work. I meant to update last week, but some brutal 7.30 am start times, heavy snow, a lot of plan­ning to do outside the classroom, and a diet of pure stodge in a small town with few dining options (and even fewer options for veget­ari­ans) tired me out. It feels strange to be in small-town Austria, where not much tends to happen, while polit­ic­al turmoil with dire consequences for many vulner­able people goes on around the world.

Odds and Ends

Here’s some nice things I’ve found lately. Start­ing with this stop-motion cook­ing video by PES Studi­os.

Penguin Little Black Clas­sics

I bought some of these tiny 80th anniversary Penguin books the other day. Each book is around 50 pages long, and has short stor­ies, poems or extracts from writers from around the world. The perfect size to keep in a bag for spare moment read­ing. There are 80 differ­ent ones to choose from, and each one costs a bargain 80p. In pick­ing the books, I went for authors I had never heard of, or writers like Cavafy I’d heard of but never checked out. Hope­fully I’ll discov­er some­thing I really like. The full list of titles can be seen here.

Published
Categorised as Books

Bacchae prints for sale

I still have a couple of these 22×25 cm /​ 8.5×9.5″ riso­graph prints based on the Bacchae by Euri­pedes left.

The text says “ἔμαρψα τόνδ᾽ ἄνευ βρόχων λέοντος ἀγροτέρου νέον ἶνιν ὡς ὁρᾶν πάρα.” which means “I caught this young lion by myself, without a trap”. Pentheus’ moth­er, having run off into the woods with Dionysus to be a maen­ad, kills her son in a frenzy because she thinks he’s a lion, and then parades his head around the stage boast­ing about the lion she’s killed. That old plot cliché.

Receive new posts via email. Your data will be kept private.