12 posts tagged “history”

Oh yeah, TMBG, "I am Impressed!" One of the best videos I've seen in ages. And with two of my favorite subjects! Robots! Romans! Wooohooo!

Show us a snippet of something you're writing.

Cena Apicius is a working title for a historical fiction novel about the life of Marcus Gavius Apicius, a wealthy Roman noble who lived in the early first century. Very little is known about him save for snippets of information left behind in works by Seneca, Tacitus, Pliny the Elder and others. He was famous for the lavish feasts he threw for his fellow Romans, and even for Emperor Tiberius. I became interested in the story when reading food memoirs and books about food history. As a big foodie myself, I found myself drawn to the strange story of Apicius, who could be considered the world’s first known gourmand. The oldest known cookbook was named after him.

Copyrighted, draft form, definitely has errors, subject to change, be cut, etc… Here is a Snippet:

In this section, set three years after Thrasius was purchased as a slave by Marcus Gavius Apicius, Thrasius takes Apicata, Apicius’ daughter to the market to say goodbye to a friendly merchant. The family is readying for a move from Baiae to a third villa in Rome. This was one of my bits where the characters took over.

A Roman Market

Prokopton was a merchant who specialized in everything non-edible. Whatever you needed, he always seemed to have on hand or if not, would be able to readily procure. Over the last two years, Thrasius purchased cooking utensils, everyday pottery, silver serving platters and even furniture from Prokopton. Apicata loved the big bear of a man. He always had small toys or knick-knacks to share with Apicata, who he called “little bird.”

That day he gave Apicata her own tiny wind-up bird that walked, a gift that shocked Thrasius and also brought a tear to his eye. The merchant clearly held a soft-spot for the little girl–the bird was most likely quite costly. Due to their rareness, wind-ups were not for children–they were entertainment pieces meant for the adult table and could often sell for many thousand denarii.

“Prokopton, are you sure about that gift?”

The merchant nodded, his plump cheeks reddening a little. “It was my wife’s. I have no children to pass it on to. Please remind her of me when she grows. I will be sad not to see her every week.”

Thrasius left Apicata briefly with Prokopton as he went across the way to say his goodbyes to a few of the other merchants he frequented. The market was still coming to life and not all the wares were on display. Each stall in the large two-storied building was in a varied state of preparation. In the central atrium, a young slave girl sorted baskets of flowers into pretty arrangements. He said his goodbyes, some of them tearful on the part of the shopkeepers. He would miss the market of Baiae, busy and varied but not so big that he did not know most of the people who worked there. Rome would not be so comfortable.

On his return back to Prokopton’s stall, Thrasius found himself walking behind a small cluster of drunken nobles, not an unusual sight in Baiae in the summer. It was likely the three men and two women had been up all night in wine-infused orgiastic bliss, and were now looking to find an open popina to serve up breakfast.

His ears perked up when he realized that the tallest man was talking about Apicata. “Look at that sweet little girl,” he said, pointing down the street to where she sat on a bench playing with her bird. Prokopton busied himself stacking up bolts of silk on the shelves next to where she sat. “What I wouldn’t give to break that baby filly! She would tremble beneath me and learn to beg for more!” His friends immediately began laughing, one of them stumbling in his mirth, almost pulling one of the women to the ground. She helped him right himself and the group continued ambling their way toward Prokopton’s stall.

Thrasius wanted to beat the man to a pulp but as a slave, he knew that the consequences for him would be far greater than anything he could do to the noble. Relations with children were not uncommon but such effrontery toward a child of the nobility was beneath any refined Roman. Apicata was clearly not a slave child; her dress and style of hair easily marked her as a member of the upper-class. She was not to be used or given by anyone other than her father. If a slave had made such lecherous comments toward a child of the nobility, he could be put to death. This man wasn’t a slave, though, he was a noble and Thrasius knew that he had no means of recourse against the man.

Thrasius raced ahead to make sure he reached Apicata before the nobles. When he reached the stall, he swooped Apicata up. He took hold of a dark brown shawl that was on a nearby shelf and quickly wrapped Apicata up so that she could not be ogled, nor could she easily see what was happening. He shushed her worried questions and protests that he was crushing her bird.

He breathlessly told Prokopton what had been said. Prokopton, a free man, had far more leeway than he did when it came to protecting the honor of the little girl. Prokopton turned and addressed the group of drunkards, who just arrived stumbling and laughing. At first glance it seemed that the merchant was casually leaning with one hand against the handle of a well-worn axe but Thrasius knew Prokopton was ready to use it if need be.

“I think that it would be best for the lot of you to keep moving,” Prokopton growled.

The noble who first eyed Apicata had one arm draped across the shoulders of his female companion, a prostitute with a chipped tooth and a cockeyed black wig. The man’s green eyes were bleary red and one eyebrow raised as he broke out in a drunken grin when he responded to Prokopton. He was in his early twenties and his silk dining robe, called a synthesis, indicated he was a man of who had no small amount of money.

“We mean no harm, no harm,” he said, the scent of honey wine heavy on his breath. “Is that your lovely daughter? We were remarking on what a pretty little thing she is.”

“I bet you were. Any more remarks and you’ll be apologizing to Marcus Gavius Apicius yourself, on your knees begging for forgiveness for the lecherous insults you bestowed upon his child. You are not presenting your best face today, and I suggest you sober up and stop embarrassing yourself and the people around you.”

The man laughed long and hard, his dark hair blowing gently in the morning breeze as his head tilted back. “Apicius has a daughter! Well well, that’s as much of a surprise as if Juno turned me into a cow. That man owes me a favor and I think I just discovered how he can repay. You are right, it’s best that we be on our way. I will have to pay dear Marcus a visit soon!”

“He’s leaving for Rome. You missed your chance,” Thrasius lashed out, moving to stand in front of Apicata. Even he didn’t casually use Apicius’ praenomen of Marcus. Only Aelia and Popilla had the right to be so intimate. He couldn’t remember ever feeling so angry—angry enough to murder.

“Ahh even better. I’m from Rome! I can look for him at leisure when I return!” At that, he pulled his friends away, chuckling as he left Prokopton and Thrasius standing both bewildered and angry.

“Do you know who that was?” Thrasius asked Prokopton. He put Apicata back on the ground and hugged her tight. She pulled back the shawl and tried bombarding him with questions but he shushed her with a quick finger to her mouth.

Prokopton shook his head. “No, I’ve not seen him around here before. It is as he says, he must be visiting.” He turned to Thrasius then, coming close enough to talk quietly without the girl overhearing. Thrasius stood and Prokopton grasped his shoulders and looked him in the eyes. “You must keep her safe. You must!”

Thrasius nodded, not sure how someone in his station could do much of anything save cook a good meal. “I will try, my friend. I promise.”

Ancient Roman Makeup

One of the best things about writing on the subject of ancient Rome is that I'm in a constant state of learning and research. Today, in learning a bit more about the Roman poet Ovid's life, I discovered that he wrote an early primer to helping women become more beautiful. I've read the Metamorphoses and Amores but was unfamiliar with his Medicamina Faciei Femineae or Women's Facial Cosmetics or sometimes seen as The Art of Beauty.
The fragment we have from this book (link above) is fascinating, offering up three and a half beauty tips for Roman women. The first is a lengthy and messy recipe on how to make your skin whiter. The second recipe on getting rid of pimples would, as we know now, kill you slowly over time. I imagine that many women paid such a high price to be beautiful:

Then make haste and bake pale lupins and windy beans. Of these take six pounds each and grind the whole in the mill. Add thereto white lead and the scum of ruddy nitre and Illyrian iris, which must be kneaded by young and sturdy arms. And when they are duly bruised, an ounce should be the proper weight. If you add the glutinous matter wherewith the Halcyon cements its nest, you will have a certain cure for spots and pimples. As for the dose, one ounce applied in two equal portions is what I prescribe. To bind the mixture and to make it easy of application, add some honey from the honeycombs of Attica.

That pesky lead. Unfortunately, it was a main additive to cosmetics for centuries. Romans used it in many things, including as a sweetener for wine, which is considered by some to be the cause of dementia that affected many Roman emperors.

There is also a recipe to get rid of blackheads and this little tidbit which is fragmented:

I have seen a woman pound up poppies soaked in cold water and rub her cheeks with them. . . .

Wonder what the poppies did? I also wonder why Ovid decided to concern himself so much with beauty concoctions that he would write a book for the ladies to use. Perhaps he was a little bit entrepreneurial?

We're back! Quebec was a blast and seeing Greg and meeting Masa was wonderful. Here are a few pics from the trip!

We HIGHLY recommend going to Toast if you ever go up to Quebec City. Wow, what an incredible meal we had there. The atmosphere was magical, the food was delish and the owner was very charming. If you are a foodie, mark that for visitation!

We did so much walking, thankfully, as we ate pretty richly and drank quite well! But really, a good time was had by all this weekend!

Sister Necklace

well, it's not mine too but it's the woman across the street's birthday. I just heard her children yelling, "Happy Birthday Momma! Happy Birthday Momma!" as she drove up and got out of the car. Cute!

And it's one of my co-worker's birthdays.

But most importantly, my little sister, Misty, is celebrating her birthday. I got her this gorgeous gold-dipped hummingbird necklace from one of my new favorite jewelry sites, Dogeared.

Some other interesting people are celebrating or would have celebrated today:

Sir James Barrie (Peter Pan)
Howard Carter (discovered Tutankhamun's tomb)
Billy Joel (will give you a heart-attack ack ack ack ack)
John Ashcroft (key man in rescinding many U.S. rights)

Apparently it's also Euro Day.

And in 1950, science fiction author, L.Ron.Hubbard, first printed Dianetics, much to the delight of celebrities and alien lovers everywhere!

You learn something new, every day, huh? Including on someone else's birthday! :)

I've become obsessed with the compilation of my ever-growing Books To Read Before I Die list. I've taken the best of many numerous lists and begun to add in many less obscure texts as suggested from other great book lists. The end result will be massive and quite comprehensive. Currently it's at 361 authors (but I see it growing to over 500), of which there may be multiple works to read. For example, all of the major books by Dickens or all the plays by Christopher Marlowe for example.

This may sound somewhat crazy and perhaps it is, but the good news is that I read like a fiend. I mean, really, like a fiend. 800+ wpm sort of fiendish. I usually read 2-3 300-page paperbacks on plane rides from Boston to California. New Harry Potter book come out? No problem--one day max. I gravitate toward bigger, thicker books because the stories last longer. Joe thinks that this list will only take me 5 years or so. I do think it will take longer than that, considerably longer, probably, mostly because my time to read tends to wax and wane. And also because I'm bound to take swerving breaks from the list to digest the latest Tad Williams novel or to check out Stephen King's son, Joe Hill's, new novel Heart-Shaped Box.

I was going to read my list chronologically, but I think that I may slip into other eras from time-to-time. Months and months on end of the same historical period might drive me crazy (especially as I move toward the 1700s). For the most part, I'll continue reading in order but will supplement with other popular reading or with selections from other parts of the list. Right now, for example, Jack Kerouac's On the Road is the bathroom book of the week.

On my Google spreadsheet, I'm marking if I have read the book in the past, if I own the book, if I have finished recently reading and any other notes, such as works I can only read online (like The Story of Sinhue or the works of James Shirley). I plan on purchasing as many books as I can, probably from used bookstores, but in some cases, I'm finding that may not be possible. James Shirley, for example, has an astonishing lack of print despite his success as a prolific playwright. I'm not going to drop $2,169 for the 1833 edition of his collected works, not unless I win the lottery at some point in the future. I may also explore newer translations of particular works, such as Seamus Heaney's Beowulf, which I will also note.

Once I get the list better in order, I'll publish it for others to see. I can't believe I would be the only crazy person to do something like this.

I'm currently reading The Upanishads which I find to be more accessible than the Rig Veda. The Rig Veda is hard to comprehend in many places or lapses into too much description about ritual (how to sacrifice horses for example). I find the Upanishads (I'm reading 12 of the 108) to be more of a spiritual journey, a discussion about how to find enlightenment, joy and to experience god as a part of the self. The Upanishads contain the first mention of yoga--a practice to finding "inner-union." The Penguin Classics version contains a really wonderful introduction by Juan Mascaro comparing the tone and feeling of many classic poets to the sense of spirituality that the Upanishads brings forth. The essay describes how the sentiments echoed within the book are similar to that of the Bible and other works (such as Shakespeare and the English Romantic poets) that Westerners are familiar with. In reading the slim volume, I find myself wishing that my mom (who is a bit of a Bible freak) would be open to reading it. The back of this book says, " The Upanishads represent for the Hindu approximately what the New Testament represents for the Christian." I think that even more so, in some ways, this book encapsulates what I think that true spirituality should represent in all people, regardless of religion. The book talks about self-knowledge and finding joy and God within. I find it to be not only a beautiful peace of literature but a true guidebook to becoming a better person.

I ran across The Great Books List and decided that it was perfect for what I've been wanting to do in furthering my literary knowledge. One of my goals on 43Things has been to create a list of 100 must-read books then read them. I'm

Read Away!

What I liked about this list was the idea of working through the books chronologically. It also contains many books from other cultures that I might not have considered before--like Sun-Tzu's Art of War or the Niebelunglied from an unknown Austrian writer. There are a whole slew of writings from eastern cultures that I have heard about but wouldn't necessarily considered reading. It's a huge hole in my knowledge. In fact, the whole list is comprised of books that have been influential across cultures and that's what really drew me in. My personal list contains little non-fiction or philosophy, instead holding books that everyone seems to have read but somehow, despite my massive absorption of books and literature, I seemed to have missed, like Jack Kerouac's On the Road or Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.  I still want to read those books but I think that if anything I'll add them into the chain as I go through the Great Books List.

Mostly I like the idea of moving through the ages, being immersed in the literature of those times and working my way forward. That is the most exciting history lesson I can imagine. Plus, I'll be opening myself up to many books I might not have considered, like the Koran (portions of the Old Testament are also on the list as is the Tao Te Ching and the Teachings of the Buddha). That in turn will help broaden my overall understanding of the world, something that all too many people fail to do in their lives.

If I've read the book previously, I'm going to re-read the book to keep it in context of the time that I'm reading in. I'm interested in how the books may have influenced other books as well as the culture of the people who read them. In cases where I can, I plan to pick up annotated versions in order to learn more.

The other thing I've decided is that I want to own all these books. So I've ordered the first 13 books from Powells and they should be arriving soon.
 

1. Unknown, Sumer, ca. 2000 BCE. The Epic of Gilgamesh.
2. Unknown, Egypt, ca. 1000 BCE. Egyptian Book of the Dead.
3. Homer, Greece, ca. 800 BCE. The Iliad, The Odyssey.    (already own)
   
4. Hesiod, Greece, ca. 700 BCE. Theogony.
5. Unknown, Israel, ca. 800-200 BCE.Genesis, Exodus, Isaiah, Job.
6. Unknown, India, ca. 800 BCE. The Rig Veda.
7. Unknown, India, ca. 600 BCE. The Upanishads.
8. Confucius, China, 551-479 BCE. The Analects.
9. Lao Tzu, China, ca. 550 BCE. The Tao Te Ching.
10. Sappho, Greece, ca. 600 BCE. Hymn to Aphrodite.  (already own in Anne Carson's If Not Winter, her translations of Sappho)
    
11. Aeschylus, Greece, 525-455 BCE. Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides.
12. Sophocles, Greece, 496-406 BCE. Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone.
13. Herodotus, Greece, 484-425 BCE. The Histories.

First the writing:

So I created another Vox blog for my NANOWRIMO project. I wanted a place to discuss the trials and joys of writing, the process.

Then the food:

The blog has a nifty food design which makes sense because the book is a wild tale about a sous-chef who is an apprentice to the most famous celebrity chef in the world who discovers (and inherits) the talisman that made him so famous. It's a book about food history, an unlikely love affair (actually a few of those), about writing a cookbook, of

Cooking the old-fashioned way

(One wicked cool thing about all this is that if my book is published and wildly famous I will automatically have a follow up project--a full companion cookbook). Oh yes, you can tell I'm in marketing for a living, huh?

Then the stupidity:

In creating this second blog I was futzing with the settings and accidentally input the same email for the NANO blog that I did for this one. I didn't think I saved it but Web 2.0 was more intuitive than me and of course, that's what happened. Which in turn, rendered the account login for this blog null and void. ACK! FREAK OUT! Well I did late last night when I realized my error. I get irrationally anxious when things I care about become out of my control and well, I couldn't access this blog and with as much energy as I have put into it in the last two months I was rather frustrated. Sooo I dropped a line to the Vox feedback and went to bed and dreamt about a freakish dark  (but super cool  and absolutely massive) library that had an endless central stairwell and evil people and creatures lurking in the stacks.

Then the coolness of the Vox crew:

As soon as someone rolled into wherever the Vox people do their stuff they reverted my logins back to what they previously were. It was right away in the AM Pacific time, which was better than I expected, especially for a free beta product. I happened to be trying to log in again and found that I had access. Oddly though, they never contacted me to confirm that is what they did, but I assume it's because they could see I was able to access the site again or they received my followup feedback thank you note. Woohooo able to Vox again! Little pleasures, I swear. It's funny, I've had a website since 1994 and been blogging since 2000 but I've not been as into it as I am with Vox. I really love the social aspect...the conversations that occur, easy integration of media, as well as the ease of discovery of new and interesting things.

So check out shiningstar.vox.com if you are interested in writing, cooking or food. And if you are doing NANOWRIMO let me know your name and I'll add you to my buddy list!

The latest in the pile...

Feast: A History of Grand Eating

Roy Strong

Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

Nathaniel Philbrick

Of course I've started them both, even though I haven't made it through all the others. I wish I had more time, sigh.

Mayflower is a serious eye-opener. In just the first few pages he reveals all sorts of things about this part of our history of which I was unaware (like how we used to ship Native Americans to the Caribbean as slaves during King Philips War)--and I actually know a lot about Pilgrims since I've looked into the history of my ancestor, John Billington.  Fascinating read so far.

Feast is equally wonderful. It's a history of food and eating through the ages. I'm still reading about the Greek and Roman conviviums which were lush massive feasts (and often were quite over-the-top, shocking and sometimes orgiastic). Did you know that they used to always mix water with their wine? Joe says this was because the wine was so sweet and strong. The Greeks would often infuse their wine with garlic (blech!). At the conviviums wealthy Patricians really put on big shows with the food, including elaborate pastries filled with birds that would fly out when you opened them (4 and 20 blackbirds anyone?). They also used to eat stuffed dormice. Yum?