Moral Panic: Thucydides on the Plague of Athens (427 B.C.)

Mad Max?

Ancient Greek style.


:thisisglp:

It didn't just take a plague. Look at the riots in Corcyra (sp?). Thucydides was a beautiful writer.

Brilliant man.


I love reading the ancient historians

Periodic sentences are really gorgeous, but a bitch to translate. Proust, for example, really screwed me up on whether to use a colon or a semicolon. Then I found out that this was because he was French.

I took many years of French, but I am still not fluent or literate in it.





Quel domage!

I took German. Funny thing is it's a lot like Greek, with the smashing words together bit. English is still my favorite, though. I vacillate between Italo Calvino and Joyce for favorite authors. Schizoid/Bi-Polar isn't just a state of mind, it's a sense of style.

Except for his short stories, Joyce just loses me.


Haven't read that much of Calvino. What is your favorite of his?

:madmax:

Invisible Cities. I actually hate Joyce's short stories. That's why I brought up schizoid. I like simple, beautiful works, and then those that are really 'busy.' Who is your favorite author?

That would still be Shakespeare. But I have many others.


My tastes are pretty eclectic.


I find myself reading more history than "literature" (fiction and poetry) in recent years.


I went to graduate school for literature, but history has become my love.

It all depends on the situation. My toilet book used to be Fowler's English Usage. I felt regular by comparison. I liked Gibbon, but to really hold my attention the work has to connect to other topics, rather than trying to hew a straight line for a thesis like so many do, so it's a rare thing for me to like a historical work, or to trust one enough to dive in, because they're usually a haul. Have you read any Edward T. Hall?

Another really good one, which might be up your alley is "The Medieval Machine." That was my favorite history-like work for a really long time, although it might be out of print now.

Not familiar.

Can you recommend a title?

,,,, A 2017 study[14] found that personal space preferences with respect to strangers ranged between more than 120 cm in Romania, Hungary and Saudi Arabia, and less than 90 cm in Argentina, Peru, Ukraine and Bulgaria.

The cultural practices of the United States show considerable similarities to those in northern and central European regions, such as Germany, Scandinavia, and the United Kingdom.
Greeting rituals tend to be the same in Europe and in the United States, consisting of minimal body contact—often confined to a simple handshake.
The main cultural difference in proxemics is that residents of the United States like to keep more open space between themselves and their conversation partners (roughly 4 feet (1.2 m) compared to 2 to 3 feet (0.6–0.9 m) in Europe).[15]
European cultural history has seen a change in personal space since Roman times, along with the boundaries of public and private space. This topic has been explored in A History of Private Life (2001), under the general editorship of Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby.[16]
On the other hand, those living in densely populated places likely have lower expectations of personal space.
Residents of India or Japan tend to have a smaller personal space than those in the Mongolian steppe, both in regard to home and individual spaces.
Different expectations of personal space can lead to difficulties in intercultural communication.[5]

Hall notes that different culture types maintain different standards of personal space. Realizing and recognizing these cultural differences improves cross-cultural understanding, and helps eliminate discomfort people may feel if the interpersonal distance is too large ("stand-offish") or too small (intrusive).....

[link to en.wikipedia.org (secure)]

"(perceived distance is manipulated in the case of instructional videoconferencing, using technological tricks such as angling the frame and adjusting the zoom)" -unique opportunity to study this kind of thing right now, or experiment, or implement