14 Comments
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Soph's avatar

For what it's worth, you're really growing on me as a writer! I love this more academic approach to Greek Mythology.

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cosi’s odyssey's avatar

That is worth a great deal, thank you so much! 💛

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Lissa Johnston's avatar

I love a good origin story. Was completely clueless about this Zeuxis dude. Thank you!

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cosi’s odyssey's avatar

You’re so welcome! I wasn’t super familiar with this dude or the story until I started researching for this newsletter - it’s such an interesting/lesser known bit of ancient/art history 🎨

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Isabella Nesheiwat's avatar

this was INCREDIBLE cosi!!! 🏛️🏛️

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cosi’s odyssey's avatar

I’m so glad!!!! 🥹🥹🏺

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malee's avatar

I will be including chimerical in my own list of adjectives now

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cosi’s odyssey's avatar

This makes me so happy

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Venus Aphrodite's avatar

Fire breathing: practical, effective, scorches the patriarchy ✅️

(Don't mind me, just taking some notes!)

This essay made think about that song, "the doll people" by sofia isella. Great read ❤️‍🔥

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cosi’s odyssey's avatar

I’m so glad you enjoyed!! I also really feel like we don’t talk about the Chimera enough 🐉

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Ken Wilson's avatar

Thanks for reacquainting me with this story. On the one hand, we could say it symbolizes so many men's selfish unwillingness to settle for one woman. On the other hand, rather than slicing, dicing, and discarding these five women, I would say the sculptor immortalizes elements of each.

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Demetri Dourambeis's avatar

Hmm 🤔 sounds like Hera getting up to her tricks again, raising the challenge to Athena and Aphrodite using the hapless Zeuxis as bait. Isn't that how the whole shizzle started with the trial of Paris? Look how that turned out — chimeralogically disastrous!

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Arsim's avatar

Mimesis could also applied to how we train AI. Use all the human knowledge to create approximation that gets facts wrong.

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Ruth McKimmie's avatar

Oh mimesis, mimetic - I so recognise your struggle with the term, & terminology (aka jargon, ie ‘jargon’ in its sense as specialist language - so now I’m down my own rabbit hole on the slipperiness of words - and a thought that perhaps words themselves are mimetic - and like Zeuxis, because it’s so hard to get quite the exact meaning to express the idea we have in mind that we (ie humans) keep creating new words from other words - chopping them up and adding to them and borrowing bits words from all over the place - (just look at the origin of the word jargon itself) so that’s maybe what human creativity is - and I had no idea that this is where this comment would go when I started writing it! But mimesis was one of those words which drove me nuts, along with Reception, as in Reception studies, and that’s exactly where I’m now doing my PhD! But thank you for another entertaining informative and thought-provoking newsletter!

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