on hindsight, there are things one does best not to engage in before massive greek midterms:

1) arguments with von on points of orthography
2) comparison of ancient greek and chinese military tactics
3) penelope fitzgerald novels
4) pineapple tarts
5) discovering the new delia's collection is out
6) composing retorts on "rituals"
7) online personality tests
8) sleep

if ever you wish to know how much space a nine-book set of the little house books take up, all you need is to get hold of a 12-pack diet coke carton. that was what my laura ingalls wilders came in today, 9 individually wrapped brown paper packages a perfect fit where cans used to be. so now i'm standing in a pile of brown paper hugging 9 yellow books delighted but stricken as to where to put them. my 2nd shelf is my children's literature/frivolous shelf, with boxed sets of narnia, time quartet, nesbits, thurbers, and rather fully packed. by moving out dorothy parker, collected saki, a spare copy of many waters, 2 riddle collections, a 6-book pocket-size honglourmeng, and 2 older editions of plum creek and big woods to a higher shelf, i made room. promptly hit very hard on the shin by a hardcover fitzgerald from the top shelf, and nursing a bruise. do you remember that issac rosenburg poem? "death could drop from the dark as easily as song / but song only dropped"? in this room, books are always dropping in the dark, and one of these days i'm sure that death will drop together with the books too.

kovacs paraphrasing ovid:

on jupiter and apollo calling after their fleeing loves: "i am a great god, not just any old government-issue god!"

and on juno's suspicions of whether io be cow or not: "who was that cow i saw you with last night?" - "that was no cow, that was my concubine."

okay enough.