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HELICON

About Helicon

...In the beginning...

... I had a site at Pomona College. Then I graduated. Knowing that Pomona would delete my account, I signed up for an account at GeoCities, and made my home in the Athens neighborhood. This was back before GeoCities became one of the trashiest sites on the internet.

Armed with my new GeoCities account, I set out to establish my online-presence. As my site resided in the Athens neighborhood, I decided to give my site a classical, Greek name. My first thought was Hyperion; the Keats poem(s), Dan Simmons' novels, and the novel-in-letters by Höderlin were inspirations for the name. Alas, there were too many Hyperions out there, at least too many for my taste. So, I named my site Tartarus, after part of the Underworld. Then, in the spring of my first year of Graduate School (1998), I rewrote my site and renamed it Helicon.

Helicon, as well as being a large tuba, is a mountain in Greece where Apollo could often be found; furthermore, it was also frequented by the Muses, and as my site had a liberal-arts slant to it, I felt this title appropriate. As I am a graduate student in German literature, I deal with the Greek-fetish that developed in literature and culture. In particular, this includes figures such as Goethe, Schiller and Nietzsche, which led me (naturally?) to a reference to the sun-god Apollo.

As time went on, though, I felt the name Helicon, while it did describe my site well, after a fashion, had little to no meaning for the majority of my visitors, so I decided to redo my site once again. What would become of Helicon? Since I had already devoted a small part of Helicon to (Greek) mythology, I decided to rename that section "Helicon" and make it a separate site within my great-webbased-empire.

That brings us to the present; Helicon is a small site devoted to Greek mythology and related topics. As I find the time, it will develop. I hesitate to use the word "evolve" as I do not know what sort of development it (Helicon) will undergo.

In terms of HTML, I have "modernized" my code; gone are <font> tags. Gone are as many horrid marks of GeoCities as possible -- alas, their little ad-craplet remains. Helicon consists of a number of pages, one of which is devoted to links to outside sites. The main page also contains a link back to my "main" page overall.

Please contact me if you have questions, concerns or comments.