Neat (yeah, suck it, it is neat) piece in the Journal on how the move to digitize literary works of antiquity has resulted in a number of new discoveries, including lost gospels, an alternate version of Medea in which the main character does not kill her children, and what is believed to be an attempt to reboot the Oedipus franchise by explaining that the Theban king and his wife Jocasta are "just cousins." (I may have made one of these things up.) Anyway, fascinating stuff.
Friday, May 8, 2009
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Neophron (the Nora Ephron of his time) made the false assumption (based on the focus-grouping to his target market of pankration-moms) that Medea could be more widely received if seen as more child-friendly.
There is no justice: Today, out of more than 120 plays by Sophocles, only seven survive. Yet Neil LaBute is still cranking his shit out.
Tyler Perry has rebooted Medea several times recently, hasn't he?
On weekends they're working on some early Rod Stewart tunes.
I like the ending of Seneca's Medea best, where she throws the dead kids at Jason from her chariot, instead of taking them with her.
There are great number of Web archives and blogs doing great work these days. Y'all probably know UbuWeb... there's also the Prelinger Archive
http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger
Yale's Beinecke Library
http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger
this guy
http://ajourneyroundmyskull.blogspot.com/
All sorts places to find things.
My favorite version of Medea is Billy Joel's, where he just gets drunk and passes out in a field somewhere.
Never-before-seen manuscripts? Were they written by blind people and never read again?
So if that Benedictine monk in the story dies under suspicious circumstances we'll know they found Book II of the Poetics.