Procrastination in the desert

via Wikimedia Commons

If you sometimes want to roll your eyes at yet another story on computer use as a threat to productivity, check out this piece on early medieval acedia. I'm pretty sure the desert fathers weren't on Facebook... Pin It

"A cultural language ... in dialogue with the idea of antiquity"

If you haven't already, check out Mary Beard's "Do the Classics Have a Future?" over at the New York Review of Books.

A taste:

The truth is that the classics are by definition in decline; even in what we now call the “Renaissance,” the humanists were not celebrating the “rebirth” of the classics; rather like Harrison’s “trackers,” they were for the most part engaged in a desperate last-ditch attempt to save the fleeting and fragile traces of the classics from oblivion. There has been no generation since at least the second century AD that has imagined that it was fostering the classical tradition better than its predecessors. But there is of course an up-side here. The sense of imminent loss, the perennial fear that we might just be on the verge of losing the classics entirely, is one very important thing that gives them—whether in professional study or creative reengagement—the energy and edginess that I think they still have.

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Happy Holidays

via Wikimedia Commons

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hill and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm. 

      - Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Snow-Storm  Pin It

Ancient men had it sort of rough, too

This evening I'm intrigued by the Discovery News article on medieval knights with PTSD:

Tales from that era include all sorts of gruesome details, Kaeuper said. Many tell of warriors vomiting blood or holding their entrails in with their hands. One mentions a Castilian knight who gets a crossbolt stuck up his nose in his first fight. Another tells of a fighter getting slashed by a sword through his mouth. Again and again, there are references to bad food, uncomfortable conditions and relentless fighting.

Elizabeth Chadwick's novels cover this really well, especially The Champion, which deals with the surprisingly crummy lives of tournament knights, those who live off tournament earnings instead of inherited wealth. There is also her wonderful A Place Beyond Courage, which tells the story of John Marshal, who had half his face melted off by a burning lead roof and then walked 25 miles before receiving any medical treatment.

I had similar thoughts to this article the last time I watched the Rome episode "Pharsalus." Pullo and Vorenus are about to set themselves adrift on a raft made of the bodies of their dead comrades. Meanwhile, the female characters (who undoubtedly have their own tribulations) trade verbal barbs:

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Kevin Young's Ardency

The Boston Globe review of Ardency hooked me with its first line, "a good epic poem is hard to find these days." Ardency tells the story of the Amistad slave rebellion. It has three sections, one in the voice of the slaves' interpreter, James Covey, one based on the slaves' letters from prison, one in the voice of the rebel leader Cinque.

As a classicist, I am always a tad suspicious of modern poetry, but I found Ardency a fast, energetic read, with a genuinely American feel. (As a reader it's always nice to want to read a poem slowly, but it's essential, especially with a narrative work, that you're not forced to read it slowly because of preciousness or an overly fragmented style.)

Gabriel, Escalastio, Desiderio - in the seas beneath
the States, names new & Christian fell around you
like the lash. (Ardency lines 1-3) 

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Those darn Furies, always so vengeful

I'm on a (very long) waiting list for Fury at the public library. Today I thought I'd drop by Amazon and check out the reviews. I was quite amused.

Fury is a tale of high school students punished for juvenile misdeeds by the ancient Greek goddesses of vengeance. Some of the reviews complained of uneven pacing and wooden dialogue. Okay, fine. As a longtime fan of Simon Pulse for escapist reading (I devoured Samurai Girl and The Nine Lives of Chloe King) I'm not expecting The Brothers Karamazov.

But there are also repeated complaints that the Furies are too harsh (potentially punishing every transgression with death), illogical and 'favor revenge.' Is this pressure on YA fiction for warm-fuzzy morals a new thing?

I fear that this reflects what my students, just out of high school themselves, expect of mythology. Thus, instead of examining how Greek literature illuminates the human condition in all its breathtaking ugliness and glory, I'm going to have to spend the next semester talking about why the gods are immature. (Akin to talking about why Greek heroes love to fight. They just do. It's what they did.)

May the Fates send me a more imaginative group than that. (Not that I expect them to be 'fair' or anything...)

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Why the Romans Celebrated a Child-Killing Patricide

Io, Saturnalia! Tee

Today is the first day of Saturnalia, the great winter festival of the ancient Roman calendar. On the face of it, it doesn't speak well for the Romans that one of their major holidays celebrated Saturn, a god perhaps best known for eating his own children.

But as with most Greek mythology, it is best to look beyond the borderline-nonsensical surface story to the larger cultural significance. And Saturn, of course, ruled over a golden age that only a dramatically transgressive act (like devouring your own offspring) could bring to an end.

As I look ahead to teaching mythology next year, and as I indulge my various modern-day guilty pleasures (like the BBC's Robin Hood series), I ponder the ridiculousness of many ancient and modern myths. I hope to show my students that they should then ask "Why is this myth ridiculous in this particular way? What does it tell us about the people who created it, believed in it and derived great satisfaction from the different versions of it?"

Io, Saturnalia! Mug 

Previous offerings in the Classics Daily shop:

Latin Zombies ("cerebra, cerebrum...") tee and mug

Cano ("I sing") iPhone and iPod case

Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo ("Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.")

Quod me non destruit, me nutruit ("What does not kill me makes me stronger.")

Epistula enim non erubescit ("A letter does not blush.")

Meles mellis non curat. ("Honey badger don't care")*
Id quod mater tua dixit non est. ("That's not what your mother said")
Quis pater tuus? ("Who's your daddy?")
O tempora! O mores! ("Shame on the age and its principles!")

      Venefica aetatis meae illustratissima sum ("I'm the brightest witch of my age")

*available in several versions

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Medieval art and red-and-green symbolism

via Wikimedia Commons

This BBC video on the origins of the Christmas color scheme is delightful. Stick with it past the mildly tedious bit about Coca-Cola imposing its own colors on Santa Clauss. It's worth it.

I love that the ultimate explanation has to do with the survival of medieval churches. I love pre-Renaissance churches (and Greek and Roman temples, for that matter.) These early churches have a naive and additive quality to their artwork that I find charming. Rather than presenting one designer's vision as many post-medieval churches do, these early churches are presenting a community's vision. Pin It

All of this has happened before ...

...and all of it will happen again.

From the New Statesman blog:

"Linguistic disobedience" might be achieved in many ways: by speaking out of turn, by disrupting syntax and "meaning", and by offering comparisons between disparate things. It might be a case of the poem acting as "witness", a recording of what's normally "unseen", ignored or denied. It can be subtle -- using allusion and slight shifts from convention -- and it can be volatile -- from agitprop to rants.

From Sappho 16 (tr. Anne Carson):

Some men say an army of horse and some men say an army on foot
and some men say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing
on the black earth. But I say it is
    what you love.

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Animal Metamorphosis in Celtic and Classical Myth

via Wikimedia Commons

I just finished the delightful new novel The Scottish Prisoner, which makes extensive use of the Wild Hunt myth. The Wild Hunt is a widespread European myth (although, as Gabaldon points out in the author's note, not a native Celtic one.) It is a spectral group of hunters led by a mythological figure, frequently the Norse god Odin.

I vaguely recalled a story associated with the Wild Hunt about a girl having to pull her fiance out of the procession and hold him while the fairies transform him into a series of animals. I (again, vaguely) thought there might be interesting similarities between this story and the 'courtship' of Peleus and Thetis, in which he compels her to wed him by restraining her while she transforms. Actually reading up on these narratives made everything quite a bit more complicated.

The Wild Hunt story comes from a Scottish ballad called Tam Lin. Everything I told you above is true, except that the fiance is a) a fairy who b) assaults young women traveling through 'his' territory. Not to mention that c) his fiancee is pregnant and d) he's about to be given to the devil as the fairies' 'tithe to hell', a tax paid every seven years.*

His fiancee, Janet, wants to avoid having to marry an older knight she doesn't love just because she is pregnant. She has returned to Tam Lin's forest to obtain an herb that will cause her to miscarry. Tam Lin tells her how to turn him back into a mortal man, explaining that he believes he is about to be given to the devil by his fairy buddies. She does so and weathers the anger of the fairy queen to, presumably, live happily ever after.

Thetis is a minor goddess in the historical period in ancient Greece who may have been much more powerful in prehistoric times. Zeus would like to 'marry' (make baby gods) with her, but fears the prophecy that her son will be more powerful than his father. She is married off to the Greek hero Peleus to neutralize this threat. The sea god Proteus, an expert on metamorphosis, tells him how to overcome Thetis' transformative abilities. She agrees to marry him after he creeps up on her asleep and restrains her through a series of transformations into water, fire and serpents. Apart from his skill at goddess-abducting, Peleus is a rather unremarkable hero, a grandson of Zeus and a companion of Heracles, like most of the generation prior to the Trojan War.

The Peleus and Thetis myth is a distasteful story even by ancient standards. (Although the modern 'love match' was an alien concept, complaints about arranged marriages and the unequal treatment of goddesses are not unknown in Greek literature.) Surprisingly, I found that 'Tam Lin' was far less egalitarian than I remembered. Tam Lin commits serial assaults on woman and only agrees to marry Janet because it's better than an eternity spent in Hell. Janet is motivated less by love than a desire to avoid unwed motherhood or marriage to the "auld grey knight" who revealed her secret.

The differences between the stories come down to one thing: female agency. Neither myth reflects a romantic world, nor one particularly fair to women, but any ancient Greek would have been shocked at the notion of a woman lying in wait for a demigod lover and forcibly restraining him as a way of saving his life (so to speak). There are strong, forceful women (within limits) in Greek literature, but the total impossibility of a myth like Tam Lin reminds us not to look for Wonder Woman in the megaron.


*This is all based on the earliest version, Child 39 A.  The 'tithe to hell' plays an important role in Gabaldon's novel. Pin It

Latin teacher, pigeon benefactor: Carl Wingate

This obituary of a former Jesuit turned married (and apparently quite eccentric) Latin teacher caught my eye. Carl Wingate graduated from Notre Dame with a master's in biology, but spent 30+ years teaching Latin at a high school in Washington state. He translated 'Star Wars' into Latin and wore clothing he painted with religious and movie themed designs.

The first reason his extraordinary life interests me: it's a good example of how Classicists with varied backgrounds can make better teachers and colleagues. Have you been around a group of classicists lately? We can be a bit boring, not to mention neurotic. I understand why -- we've spent over a decade of our lives training for a job that, in many cases, can be taken away at any moment. We are afraid to think about anything besides classics, and sometimes we almost don't remember how to, because it's been so long. So maybe Carl can inspire us to chill a little.

The second reason he interests me is that I enjoy eccentric people and hope they are not a disappearing breed. Vexillum monstruosum tuum volet! (Let your freak flag fly!) Pin It

'Though I loved you well, I wooed you not': Troilus and Cressida's mythological roots

I posted recently about the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troy, the dominant version of the Trojan war myth before the western world rediscovered ancient Greek. An anecdote from the Recuyell inspired Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. 

via Wikimedia Commons

Cressida is someone I've thought about from time to time since that post. She does not appear in the ancient version of the Troy myth; her name is a corrupted version of Chryseis and in some medieval works she is called Briseida (which of course is a corrupted version of Briseis). 

Anyway, medieval audiences could not get enough of her and the love triangle between her, Troilus (a Trojan) and the Greek warrior, Diomedes. She betrays Troilus by starting an affair with Diomedes after being captured by the Greeks. Okay... I'm obviously intrigued by a worldview where a captured woman carries on optional 'affairs' with her captors. (She is, admittedly, a hostage rather than a woman captured in a city-sacking.)

And most of all, what about Helen? Why invent this character when you seemingly have a perfectly good unchaste women available? I'm wondering if it has to do with the medieval notion of the divine right of kings: Helen couldn't play the role of the corrupt woman because, as a queen, she was purer than the rest of the human race. I would love to read about this more (and hopefully I'll remember to do so in about 6 years when I have time ...)

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Curbside Haiku, the new Parthenon?

courtesy of the Safe Streets Fund

As a fan of ancient Greek occasional poetry, I'm interested in modern resurgences of poetry in the public sphere. The New York City DOT is making use of poetry's playful and memorable qualities with their "Curbside Haiku" campaign. The signs are erected along city streets, with artwork based on traditional street signs and a poem dealing with a traffic safety issue. In the best classical tradition, the project aims to use beauty to "engage, edify and inform":

"Curbside Haiku seeks to merge public art with public awareness to infuse a bit of beauty and joy into the public sphere with the images while underscoring the realities of the message with poetry.  I’m aiming to engage, edify and inform and nothing does that better than art."

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Latin Zombies t-shirt and mug

New in the shop: the "Latin zombies" design on a t-shirt and mug. Dead languages and the undead ... I couldn't resist the pun. The design features zombies out for a stroll while declining the plural of cerebrum (Cerebra, cerebrorum ... "brains, brains.")

Previous offerings:

"Io, Saturnalia!" t-shirt and mug

Cano ("I sing") iPhone and iPod case

Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo ("Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.")

Quod me non destruit, me nutruit ("What does not kill me makes me stronger.")

Epistula enim non erubescit ("A letter does not blush.")

Meles mellis non curat. ("Honey badger don't care")*
Id quod mater tua dixit non est. ("That's not what your mother said")
Quis pater tuus? ("Who's your daddy?")
O tempora! O mores! ("Shame on the age and its principles!")

      Venefica aetatis meae illustratissima sum ("I'm the brightest witch of my age")

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Benefits of grad school

via Wikimedia Commons

This recent NYT article (on lawyers’ need for training post-law school) fits in with something I’ve been thinking about: what enduring benefits does grad school confer on humanities profs, beyond a credential required for employment?

Grad school made my Latin and Greek much better, of course; writing a dissertation helped my research skills. But I have to wonder if grad schools go about this in the most useful way, since I've only once taught an author from one of my grad school seminars. I've also found writing a publishable article an absolutely foreign experience, despite having written and defended a dissertation.

Maybe going 'back to the basics' is a common reaction to adversity, but it's been odd how often in the five years since I started my career that I've returned to authors, teaching methods or writing tips I encountered in my undergrad classes. I know grad school must have been more than 8+ years of waiting to mature and practicing translation skills, but I'm finding it hard to identify specifics right now.

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Robin Hood, Canterbury Tales and ... human sacrifice?

I love that Baldrick from Blackadder has had a successful career working with such seemingly dry material as medieval history, but come on, human sacrifice as one of the top five medieval (rather than ancient) superstitions? Really? Pin It

'Oh dear, is that supposed to be the Round Table?'

Pop Classics' review of the King Arthur movie from 2004 made me laugh so hard I cried, especially the references to "Titus f***ing Pullo" and the deficiencies of Keira Knightley's wardrobe. Enjoy! Pin It

Classics and 'Specialness'

via Wikimedia Commons

I read with pleasure Mary Beard's post yesterday on her upcoming lecture "Does Classics Have a Future?" She is considering incorporating The Browning Version into the talk, focusing on the scene where the beleaguered classics teacher, Andrew Crocker-Harris, is given Robert Browning's translation of Aeschylus' Agamemnon as a gift.

This caught my attention for a couple of reasons. One is that my SO showed me the 1994 Albert Finney film just after we had started dating, so it seems to be important to his idea of what the classics are. (I showed him Branagh's Henry V, a movie I can't watch at the moment because of its gratingly idealistic tone. [Look at us! We conquered France because our king is more closely related to the previous king that yours! Hooray!])

Beard's post, and the Browning Version scene, also mesh well with some thoughts I've been pondering about Classics and specialness. As a Gen Xer, I lived through the whole parental/pedagogical experiment with raising self-esteem as an end in itself. So part of why I value Classics is that it shows me both that I'm not special and that it doesn't matter that I'm not. For thousands of years, people have had their hopes dashed, let themselves down and made stupid decisions. (Like killing your brother's kids and serving them at a feast. Or sacrificing your daughter for the sake of a military expedition.)

Am I wild about living in a rather isolated town with less-than-pleasant winters? Of course not. But I understand that economic forces cannot always be overcome by "believing in yourself." And most importantly, studying classics has helped me develop an imaginative and creative life that should be able to transcend temporarily unpleasant circumstances. Pin It

'Recuyell of the Historyes of Troy'

via Wikimedia Commons

I've been reading In Search of the Trojan War by Michael Wood (full review coming soon). Wood has a detailed discussion of the the Troy myth's on medieval literature, noting that most medieval works about are based on something called The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troy. The Iliad and Odyssey were virtually unknown; The Recuyell was the 'Homer' of this period. (It was also the first book printed in English, in 1475.)

I liked the sound of this work; as a dead languages nerd I was especially pleased that its very archaic English has not been updated. I did a little digging on it today (in between trying to get undergraduates interested in Latin personal pronouns -- ugh!). Here is a sample, from the reign of Saturn:

By the moyen of these thynges the renomee of kyng Saturn grewe. And the worlde was that tyme of gold, that is for to saye hyt was moche better and more haboundant in the dayes of mannes lyf and in plente of frutes of the erthe than in ony other tyme after. (Recuyell pp. 16-17)

How sweet would it be to offer an English class on the postclassical reception of the Trojan war? A girl can dream...

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"Io, Saturnalia!" T-Shirt and Mug

New in the Classics Daily shop: a t-shirt celebrating Saturnalia, the Roman holiday that likely influenced the date of Christmas.  It was celebrated from December 17-23 and featured revelry, funny hats and the giving of small gifts. Also available as a mug.

Previous offerings:

Cano ("I sing") iPhone and iPod case

Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo ("Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.")

Quod me non destruit, me nutruit ("What does not kill me makes me stronger.")

Epistula enim non erubescit ("A letter does not blush.")

Meles mellis non curat. ("Honey badger don't care")*
Id quod mater tua dixit non est. ("That's not what your mother said")
Quis pater tuus? ("Who's your daddy?")
O tempora! O mores! ("Shame on the age and its principles!")

      Venefica aetatis meae illustratissima sum ("I'm the brightest witch of my age")


*available in several versions

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What's the matter with Athenaze?

My SO is teaching first year Greek from a text called Athenaze. We have both taught from it before with decent results. This semester it's a nightmare. Students don't learn vocabulary, are clueless about endings, and never do the readings.

I would have said before this semester that Athenaze is a 'good but not great' book. The problem is that there is a fairly small number of Classical Greek textbooks out there (discounting the self-study and reprint-from-the-nineteenth-century options). Hansen and Quinn's chapters are too long, and Mastronarde doesn't have long enough reading passages. 

Athenaze's major problem, I believe, is one that affects all reading-based Latin and Greek textbooks: it has too much faith in its own method. If you believe that students can learn the grammar and vocabulary through reading, you shouldn't be afraid to make the grammar explanations hard to find. Athenaze seems to take the approach that if you make it hard enough to locate an actual explanation of the grammar, the students will say to themselves, "gosh, I guess I should try to figure it out from this nice little story here." 

I kid, of course. I realize the grammar is probably not deliberately hard to find. But the readings getting completely out of control in terms of length does seem to be purposeful. Okay, it is likely that a reading-based approach helps students read Greek more naturally and therefore more quickly. But students are also conditioned (by evaluations, by RateMyProfessors and similar sites) to be constantly on the lookout for 'unfairness.' Readings that are suddenly twice as long as they were a few weeks ago certainly fall under that category.

So, what to do? Someone should revise Chase and Philips (a barebones 1960s textbook that makes up in clarity for what it lacks in reading practice). Or make a separate grammar handbook for Athenaze.

Or students could learn to memorize better. Right.

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'Speed and Quantity of Production'

From "In Praise of Fallow Fields," in the most recent Utne Reader:

"An economy that measures success primarily in terms of speed and quantity of production will eventually become toxic."

Yes. Pin It

'The World of Odysseus'

via Wikimedia Commons

Published in 1965 (rev. ed.), before the footnote revolution, The World of Odysseus is wonderfully clear and straightforward. Of course, some of what it says is (according to modern scholarship) exaggerated or irrelevant. For example, Finley is at pains to argue that the Greeks were not "primitive," and the scholar in me wants to know 1) what does he mean by primitive and 2) what does it matter?

Denial that the Greeks were 'primitive' is often an attempt to place Homeric epic apart and above the then-emergent field of comparative oral traditions. (Basically, the idea that you can learn about archaic Greek epic -- or any traditional epic -- by comparing it with epic traditions from other cultures.) Finley is fair-minded about this, according to his lights. In his appendix "The World of Odysseus Revisited," he argues that the Homeric-length poem recorded by the Slavic bard Avdo Medjedovic is inferior in quality to the Odyssey but that the methodology of oral tradition is still valid (143).

It is a great pleasure to read a book about the Odyssey and about those whose experiences shaped it (rather than a book about the other books about the Odyssey, which is how I would describe many more recent works in this field). The chapters on "Wealth and Labour," and "Household, Kin and Community" deal in a measured way with topics that are frequently underrepresented in classical scholarship. More recent works that covers these topics are often hijacked by trendy subfields, but Finley manages to cover them thoroughly and unemotionally, as far as I can tell. In "Wealth and Labor," his argument that the worst-off person was not a slave but a thes, an unattached person, was particularly cogent and striking (57ff). In "Household, Kin and Community" he vividly describes a world where almost none of a household's business had public relevance unless the head of household chose to make it so. His point is well taken since, with Homer as the foundation of Greek literature, classicists are sometimes tempted to fit 'the world of Odysseus' into the mold of a classical polis.

The World of Odysseus would be an excellent introduction to the background of the Iliad and Odyssey. It is also (as is pretty well apparent in my review) a great refresher for anyone already acquainted with the poems who is worn out by the tendentiousness of much current scholarship.

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"Cano" iPhone Case

New in the Classics Daily shop, an iPhone case that says cano, "I sing." (Also available for the iPod Touch.)

Previous offerings:

Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo ("Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.")

Quod me non destruit, me nutruit ("What does not kill me makes me stronger.")

Epistula enim non erubescit ("A letter does not blush.")

Meles mellis non curat. ("Honey badger don't care")*
Id quod mater tua dixit non est. ("That's not what your mother said")
Quis pater tuus? ("Who's your daddy?")
O tempora! O mores! ("Shame on the age and its principles!")

       Venefica aetatis meae illustratissima sum ("I'm the brightest witch of my age") Pin It

Happy Halloween

Propertius and Cynthia by Vinchon,
via Wikimedia Commons

Sunt aliquid Manes: letum non omnia finit, 

  luridaque euictos effugit umbra rogos.

Cynthia namque meo uisa est incumbere fulcro, 

  murmur ad extremae nuper humata uiae, 

cum mihi somnus ab exsequiis penderet amoris,

  et quererer lecti frigida regna mei. 

There are ghosts: death does not finish everything,

a pale shade flees from the conquered pyre.

For Cynthia I saw leaning over my bed,

Recently buried beside the noise of the outer road,

When sleep hung over me after love's final rites,

And I complained of the cold kingdom of my bed.

-Propertius IV.7

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Hello Greek, I've missed you

I have an article that's almost ready to go (they always are, aren't they?), except for some Greek texts that need to be formatted in some particularly picky and annoying ways. I was reading one over just now, expecting to continue to be bored and annoyed, but instead the sound of the Greek gave me my first bit of Classics-related joy in several days.

I thought, "I've missed you, Greek."

I have thought before that the sense of professional disconnection I sometimes experience relates to spending 90% of my time teaching a language I have little intellectual interest in, namely Latin. That seems harsh, and I tend to speak hyperbolically about these things. I'm happy that Latin has paid my bills for the last half-decade. When I hear something interesting about Latin I think, "oh, that's nice," whereas I love the sound of Greek, its mysterious and fluid sound-changes, and its literature whose original and profoundly situational performance contexts we can often only guess at.

I guess I have Steve Jobs to thank, as corny as that is. I used to spend the entire early morning preparing for my Latin class, and then I read something he said, about if this was the last day of your life, would you want to spend it the way you were planning to do?

And I thought, I'm done neglecting my first and best-loved foreign language in favor of what (right now) pays the bills.

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Does Amazon make books better or worse?

The NYT debated whether their burgeoning publishing arm hurts or helps publishers this morning. It might be simplistic, but I'm more interested in the above question than whether they are helping to drive a possibly-on-the-verge-of-irrelevant industry out of business.

I'm not sure, actually. As a confessed historical fiction addict, I've downloaded a handful of novels self-published on Kindle, and I haven't necessarily been wild about them. I'm more of a fan of established authors like Diana Gabaldon, Philippa Gregory and Elizabeth Chadwick.

But if I read a fabulous book, I certainly wouldn't care who had published it. As Michael Wolf writes:

Traditional publishers, unfortunately, don’t have a relationship with the reader -- or if they do, it’s extremely tenuous. Ask most consumers what publishers their favorite authors are aligned with, and 9 out of 10 couldn’t tell you. If you don’t have a relationship, you can be cut out, and this is what Amazon knows and what writers are learning.

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Stephen Mitchell's Iliad and the college classroom

I enjoyed Maclean.ca's interview with Stephen Mitchell, author of a new and apparently very striking translation of the Iliad. The line he translates using "son of a bitch" has come up frequently in coverage of the volume's release. His explanation in this interview resonated with me:

via Wikimedia Commons

Q: In your translation Achilles responds, “Don’t talk to me of agreements, you son of a bitch,” whereas Fagles’s Achilles says, “Hector, stop! You unforgiveable, you . . . don’t talk to me of pacts.”

A: Here’s my attitude: the English has to be alive. It has to be something that someone could believably say, so it has to be part of a living language. And it has to have the kind of emotional power behind it that I feel when reading the Greek. Here is Achilles expressing his heartbreak and contempt and intense hatred at the enemy who has killed his beloved friend—if it doesn’t have the emotional power behind it, it means nothing. There are only a few expressions in English these days that convey that kind of intense contempt—“son of a bitch” is about as good as it gets.

This is something I'm always very aware of in the classroom. Conveying the emotional power and the liveliness of the classics has an urgency for me that it does not for my older and more secure colleagues. Oftentimes trying to convey this is a great pleasure. Other times, I feel that my lack of traditional professorial gravitas (gender, stuffiness, elbow patches) mean that I have to keep the excitement high all the time, and it's exhausting. A professor who doesn't look like the stereotypical thinker of deep thoughts must therefore be 'cool' and a buddy, right?

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Home internet is back!

My home internet is back, so I look forward to resuming posting. Today I finished a book review (the scholarly kind, not the blogging kind) that I've been meaning to do for a few days. Tomorrow I play. Pin It

"Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet"

A new Classics Daily t-shirt, based on the prayer of St. Augustine: da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo.

Previous shirts/gifts:

Quod me non destruit, me nutruit ("What does not kill me makes me stronger.")

Epistula enim non erubescit ("A letter does not blush.")

Meles mellis non curat. ("Honey badger don't care")*
Id quod mater tua dixit non est. ("That's not what your mother said")
Quis pater tuus? ("Who's your daddy?")
O tempora! O mores! ("Shame on the age and its principles!")
Venefica aetatis meae illustratissima sum ("I'm the brightest witch of my age")

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The Iliad and 'Drive'

While my mom was here my husband and I got to go to the movies (twice! by ourselves!). Moneyball was boring, although I could see how it got its good movie vibes: there was no cheap emotion, and all the scenes advanced the plot. It maybe could have used a little cheap emotion. But I digress.

Drive was haunting. Looking at its Wikipedia entry, I see that it was intended as a modern fairy tale. But what it really reminds me of is Homer's Iliad. Thinking about my novel, I've been trying to imagine marriage relationships in Homeric Greece. Drive recreated in a modern setting that vast divide between men's and women's lives that is especially characteristic of the Iliad.


The scene that epitomizes this, of course, is the elevator sequence, where the Driver kisses Irene for the first and last time, moments before he kills the third passenger in the elevator. He moves her aside, kisses her with his full attention, and then throws himself whole-heartedly into murdering the mob assassin riding the elevator with them.


Throughout the movie, there is emphasis on Irene's separation from the violence and killing. Albert Brooks tells the Driver that if he gives back the money, "the girl is off the map." The violence and killing itself resembles violent incidents in the Iliad: we are given enough background to feel pity, but at the same time the murders are carried out quite dispassionately.


I'm not saying that the movie 'alludes' to the Iliad. It seems to express some kind of man-woman drama similar to that which inspired Homer's poem.



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Can serious poetry be funny?

There was a discussion in the comments at College Misery today about whether Classics teaches you that "there is nothing new under the sun." Many of the commenters endorsed the usefulness and coolness of Classics; a few rightly pointed out that no one discipline has a monopoly on providing perspective.

via Wikimedia Commons

I happened to read that post the same day I made a visit to our campus bookstore, and I think there's one thing Classics could teach us about: mixing genres in poetry. Trolling the clearance section, it's full of biographies of poets and books of modern poetry. I love poetry almost more than anything, and I can still understand why no one wants to buy those books. 

It's because enough of modern poetry consists of elitist navel-gazing that the entire genre gets pegged with that reputation. I hate to focus on any one poet here, because I deeply admire anyone who makes such a (relatively) neglected art their life's focus. But you know the kind of thing I mean. You hear it and think "wait, did I wander into an NPR studio without knowing it?"

Greek and Latin poets could teach the world a lot about making poetry better. For instance, you can make poetry witty, engaging and meditative all at once. Ask Ovid. Or Aristophanes. Or Aristarchus. Or Homer. We are the biggest cultural elitists of all in not allowing serious poetry to be occasionally amusing. Perhaps we fear the mixing of genre and tone as part of 'serious' writing because variety tends to be the key to commercial success, and commercial success is not supposed to coexist with intellectual seriousness.

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Quod me non destruit me nutruit

"What does not kill me makes me stronger." If only that were true while teaching lower-level language classes :)! See a new t-shirt with this saying in the Classics Daily t-shirt shop. Also for men.

Previous shirts/mugs/notecards:

Epistula enim non erubescit ("A letter does not blush.") Meles mellis non curat. ("Honey badger don't care")* Id quod mater tua dixit non est. ("That's not what your mother said") Quis pater tuus? ("Who's your daddy?") O tempora! O mores! ("Shame on the age and its principles!") Venefica aetatis meae illustratissima sum ("I'm the brightest witch of my age") *Available in several versions.

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The humanities enrich your imagination. Does that matter?

This morning I was letting my mind wander while I prepared my Latin 1 lesson. (Since this is a class I could teach, and probably taught better, in my second year of grad school, I need to be distracted in order to take 'preparing' at all seriously). A line from Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown ran through my head:

"She had courage enough but little imagination, or she would not have forgotten joy, whatever the weight on her, and heavy enough it truly was." (p. 136)

For a long time I've wanted to post about how the humanities enriches a person's imagination, but I haven't been able to articulate why I think anyone should care. The McKinley quote points towards a reason we should care. Studying literature and art so that we don't 'forget joy' is not money-driven or utilitarian, but it is also not elitist.

An imagination capable of lifting us up from our frequently crappy circumstances is hard to attain without the experience of immersing ourselves in the Other: another culture, or another person's artistic expression. This is the essence of good humanities education.


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A 'Business Humanities' major

Worst Professor Ever had a great post recently, 'You Gonna Use That?', about the misperceptions people have about humanities degrees. As she wrote in the comments section, "it seems the humanities are targeted as “teaching-only” or “caring about narrow subject only” more than other disciplines."


This reminded me of something I've been thinking about for a while: a 'business humanities' major (or minor). Because really, if you ask a typical college student to volunteer for the kind of pigeonholing touched on in WPO's post, many of them might not be interested in a traditional humanities major. And I can't blame them. So let them get the credential that might help them get a job, and also have them take extra foreign language, art, literature, etc. Then give them a term like 'business humanities' that recognizes their efforts at being well-rounded (something employers are supposed to like).


In some sense it would be just a way of restoring the stricter general ed requirements from an earlier time in higher ed, but so what? Those requirements aren't coming back anytime soon. Let's force fewer people to choose between Truth, Beauty and A Decent Standard of Living After College.



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Should we care about the survival of the humanities?

Until today I had a google alert set up for "the humanities." Today I was looking through about 10 days' worth of alerts and I thought, meh. "The humanities are vital." "The humanities are nice but impractical." 

I make it rule not to be bored on this blog. I might bore others, but I refuse to bore myself :). Teaching undergraduates gives me my fill of squeezing my academic interests into pretty little boxes that offend nobody. (And most importantly, make no one afraid for their grade.) 

I don't study the humanities because I want to impart critical thinking skills and cultural appreciation to college students. I study them because I've always preferred the middle ages and the ancient world to our own. (Okay, maybe not to live in.)

I love the ancient world's immediacy, its handmade quality, its deep thinking (born, I believe of a profound lack of stimulation most of the time, requiring the individual mind to make up the gap). I teach classics at a university less from a desire to develop students' critical thinking, than to invite them to my favorite treehouse. If they find the view from there enlightening, well and good.

So I will still write about the humanities on Classics Daily. But the big abstract arguments about its survival do not need to be repeated here. I don't understand them anyway, since for me poetry and literature are a necessary part of life, not mental broccoli or a fluffy distraction.

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"Are our pearls real? You bet they are."

From a study on the benefits of learning Latin and the classics in high school, by the British nonprofit Friends of Classics:

When the results came in, Jeannie and I could hardly believe our eyes. Let me quote just one from a vast range of statistics. It concerns those who had studied classics to School Cert/O level/GCSE and no further, i.e. those most likely to have had a minimal commitment to it (about 45 per cent of the total). On the usual five-point scale — useless, fairly useless, OK, quite beneficial, very beneficial — those who said classics had benefited or greatly benefited their subsequent quality of life came out at 77 per cent of the total. The results in relation to their influence on work-life and skills were equally impressive. Given that two thirds of the survey respondents were over 50, many of them must have sat those subjects for the last time at least 35 years earlier.

The reasons they gave for their replies were equally revealing: overwhelmingly, they cited firm linguistic grip on English and other languages, verbal sensitivity, the capacity to communicate clearly and concisely, and a broad perspective on the intellectual, political and cultural foundations of our world. Not a bad return, 20, 30, 40, 50 or more years on, from subjects studied up to age 16.

Are our pearls real? You bet they are. 

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Let's hear it for Tyche

via Wikimedia Commons

Tyche, a goddess whose name can mean "happenstance" or "chance," ruled over the destinies of Greek cities. (Her Roman name is Fortuna, but it sounds so much better, because it is less familiar, in Greek.) Her crown, the one worn by the statue at right, represents a city's walls. The Greeks attributed to her all events in a city's history that had no rational explanation: floods, fires and, one hopes, some positive occurrences as well.

Something I find most instructive about the ancient world is how much harsher it was than our own. How much more random, even how much more boring. In the face of terrible disasters with no safety net, the Greeks were comforted by worshipping at the altar of randomness personified.

Reading some of the posts about the academic job market over at College Misery (oh, the memories!) started me thinking about Tyche vs. our straightjacketing sense of personal responsibility. As young academics, we are told that we are natural scholars and will be wonderful teachers. Then we encounter the job market, in which the odds are overwhelmingly against finding a good job. Rather than admitting this, our advisers and many advice books imply that changing some small detail about our applications or publications will of course change our luck. And what's more, we should have thought of this before and basically have no one but ourselves to blame that we have to spend another year on the market.

This is insane. We need to get with the idea that there are things outside our power. Including some of the more random comments on student evaluations. Including whether the topic of a junior scholar's handful of publications fits the handful of tenure track jobs available in his or her field. The Greeks knew it wasn't all up to them.

Let's hear it for Tyche, a divinity whose time has come. Pin It