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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