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eve_primeAfter visiting Arnold and buying D. some books for his birthday (two about wizards!), I drove to Crest Drive school on the outskirts of town and went on a walk along a couple of country roads, past some forest-bordered meadows and at least one small farm, and then back into a residential neighborhood to get a nice view of the north side of Blanton Heights.
Meadow with roadside daisies; small farm at Eugene's southern edge; north side of Blanton Heights: 
Then during David's nap, I started reading Jhereg, nearly finished Muir in Alaska, finished Lefkowitz, and made progress in The Ulysses Voyage, which is a great pleasure. The merit of the Lefkowitz book, Greek Gods, Human Lives, is its review of all the main textual sources about the roles of the gods: Hesiod, Homer, the dramas, the Argonautica, the Aeneid, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Apuleius's Golden Ass. The analyses didn't seem particularly deep, though. Her main conclusion is that the value of these gods to the Greeks was to show reality clearly, that justice cannot be counted on, and that even the most worthy of the heroes had difficult lives and could not avoid making mistakes. I suppose the point would be that it's easier to accept setbacks and unhappiness if one understands that this is common to all humanity, which the myths illustrate. Actually, this reminds me of a point made in a chapter I recently read about the psychological value of narratives, which said that one value of news coverage of even the most unfortunate situations is to give the reader the pleasure of knowing their life is, by contrast, better.
Meadow with roadside daisies; small farm at Eugene's southern edge; north side of Blanton Heights:
Then during David's nap, I started reading Jhereg, nearly finished Muir in Alaska, finished Lefkowitz, and made progress in The Ulysses Voyage, which is a great pleasure. The merit of the Lefkowitz book, Greek Gods, Human Lives, is its review of all the main textual sources about the roles of the gods: Hesiod, Homer, the dramas, the Argonautica, the Aeneid, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Apuleius's Golden Ass. The analyses didn't seem particularly deep, though. Her main conclusion is that the value of these gods to the Greeks was to show reality clearly, that justice cannot be counted on, and that even the most worthy of the heroes had difficult lives and could not avoid making mistakes. I suppose the point would be that it's easier to accept setbacks and unhappiness if one understands that this is common to all humanity, which the myths illustrate. Actually, this reminds me of a point made in a chapter I recently read about the psychological value of narratives, which said that one value of news coverage of even the most unfortunate situations is to give the reader the pleasure of knowing their life is, by contrast, better.