Classical themes in the 'Fablehaven' series

On a friend's recommendation I've made the Fablehaven books my escapist reading lately. There are five volumes in this YA fantasy series: Fablehaven, Rise of the Evening Star, Grip of the Shadow Plague, Secrets of the Dragon Sanctuary and Keys to the Demon Prison. I'm halfway through the third book. Actually, I've been reading them so quickly I didn't note the title of volume 3 until this moment.

They are set in a preserve for magical creatures, which provides some obvious classical references: minotaurs, satyrs (some of the best characters, actually), centaurs, dryads, naiads. I've just been having a little think about whether there are classical themes as well.

The series as a whole is about the struggle to keep the great demon prison Zzyzx from being opened. It really seems to me like a prison for evil supernatural beings has its roots in Tartarus, where the Titans and others were confined in classical mythology. Sure there are misbehaving entities in Norse mythology, like Loki and Fenrir, but they are not confined together in a specific place (that I am aware of).

The series also features teenagers saving humanity when the adults fail: Seth and Kendra, grandchildren of the Fablehaven caretakers. The husband and I have mocked the Harry Potter books for this many times (while devouring each new book and movie, naturally). I've had some fun comparing Seth to Achilles, the original impulsive teenage hero who learns restraint at a terrible cost. Seth's immunity to magical fear is a bit like the Phthian hero's "heart of iron."

UPDATE: I just started book 4 and there's a charming, personable witch who attracts mortal lovers by trickery. An adventure series that's reminiscent of the Theogony, the Iliad and the Odyssey? I'll take it. Pin It

Books about scholarly writing

Wow, I wish that were a more fun-sounding title. For many of us, research is a large part of what draws us into the profession. Then (for many of us, not all of course) we head out into the world with a less-than-clear idea of how to write a publishable article.


It's not that our ideas aren't good. It's just that, you know, it needs to sound right. There need to be scholarly footnotes. Lots of scholarly footnotes. And (in my experience) it needs to be an idea that meets a certain standard of proof, rather than the sort of fun notions we play around with in seminars or in conversations with friends.


As a big fan of the Academic Job Search Handbook, I am on a hunt for the ideal book on scholarly writing. Some candidates:


Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks
I got this from interlibrary loan in a previous job. I gleaned some helpful things from it, but it's of limited usefulness unless you're in a position to follow their schedule (take an unrevised paper or dissertation chapter and revise it in 12 weeks).


Professors as Writers: a Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing
The only real thing I have against this book is that it sounds like something that would be handed out at new faculty orientation. The first review makes it sound ideal, though: "all of us academics would like to think that someday a muse will descend upon us and infuse us with the capability to write the great work in our field without self-doubt, procrastination, etc. Boice shows empirical evidence that demonstrates these hopes are in vain (which is no big surprise to anyone), but even better, he provides the solution: writing is like physical exercise--the more you do it, the easier and more pleasant it becomes--if you write a little bit every day, even if you think it's pointless, at the end of a six month period, you will have 150 pages of writing to edit." Actually, I'm quite tempted to order it after reading that.


How to Write a Lot: A Guide to Productive Academic Writing
This book came up quite a bit in reviews of other works about writing. From the comments, it seems more on the motivational than specific side. It appears to be especially effective at arguing procrastinators out of their rationalizations. (We've all -- or almost all -- been there). If you're starting from scratch in terms of writing regularly, this book may be for you.


If there are other books that have inspired you as an academic writer, please do share them in the comments.


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Undergrad-friendly Greek drama films?

The Oedipus Rex movie my colleagues
 and I refer to as the "Burger King version".

Of all the great and glorious genres of Greek literature out there, my students seem to have the most trouble connecting with Greek drama. I'm not unsympathetic to their plight: Greek tragedy can seem austere and almost obsessively focused to a reader accustomed to reality TV and Twitter.

So I turn to the internet for a movie version of one of the dramas we are reading this semester. Let's not say a good movie version, so much as a version that won't instantly turn them off.

And I came up with ... nothing. Amazon Instant Video, Youtube, the school library, (Netflix is blocked on classroom computers)... all gave me zip.

The Bacchae? I could buy an 8-minute DVD of the film's conclusion. No thanks. Or I could show Dionysus in '69, an experimental (and 40+ years old) version of the Bacchae that looks as though it were filmed in black-and-white home video. Show that to the class that has trouble remembering that the Theogony is not called the Hymn to Zeus? Not so much.

The delightful Iphigenia is available (for a mere ninety-nine dollars).

So my plea to all of you Greek drama enthusiasts out there: please consider filming some of your stagings of these wonderful plays. Even if you just post them on Youtube, I promise you they will be gratefully received by classics-in-translation instructors everywhere. Pin It

List-making: it's not just for Mycenaeans anymore

Although I found its additive style a little annoying (ironically), I appreciated this article on the history of the list. If nothing else, it has inspired me to stop apologizing for Linear B ("Yes, there was written Greek in the Mycenaean period, but unfortunately it's only lists of supplies and livestock.")

According to Robert Belknap in his book The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing—a study of literary lists, particularly in the work of four American Renaissance authors—lists of sequential signs appeared as early as 3,200 B.C.E. Used as a means of accounting and record keeping, they signified an early form of communication that would evolve into written language. If this is true, then Eco is right: the list is the origin of culture.

List-making is also at the heart of traditional poetry, which often begins with genealogies. I frequently downplay the lists that occur in Homer and Hesiod in an effort to make those authors seem more accessible. I briefly mention the list's importance as a test of the bard's memory and as a way of including various parts of the audience (as with the Catalogue of Ships). But now maybe we will look deeper at how such poetry is in some sense an elaboration on a list (of gods or heroes).

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Ancient Greece and Us

Michael Scott ("The Question of Life in the Ancient World") touches on some of the same themes as Mary Beard's "Do the Classics Have a Future?". A taste:

[M]ost newspaper articles either start or round up their coverage of the modern situation with some expression of nostalgic comparison to the glory days of ancient Greece. But to what exactly are we referring? Just what was life like in ancient Greece?

It's peripheral to his overall point, but I love that he's noticed this tendency of articles on the economic crisis to make token references to ancient Greek. It's particularly irritating to someone like me who relies on Google Alerts for blogging material and has limited interest (and expertise) in modern economics.

I came to grad school really excited about the 'relevance' of classics to the modern world, something that now makes me wince a little bit. Undergraduate programs often flog the relevance idea, understandably, as a way of attracting and keeping students. And of course I deeply believe that the study of antiquity is relevant to modern life. But there's discontinuity as well as continuity, which is why every single article about the economic crisis doesn't need to quote Solon, or refer to Athens as the birthplace of democracy.

Like Beard, Scott discusses the ongoing construction of 'the ancient world' in our minds:

In part because so little was known about the realities of ancient Greece in the 15^th-17^th centuries, the articulation of ancient Greece as an ideal rested upon modern re-imaginings of the pictures conjured up by ancient literature, populated with increasing numbers of pieces of ancient ‘art’ and architecture as they came to light, which were then ‘fitted in’ to that model. 

I spoke to an English class last month that was studying the Iliad, and I could tell it blew their minds a little bit to learn that until relatively recently, the Mycenaean world was regarded as quasi-fictional. Fascinating stuff.

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The 99% (of untranscribed papyri from Oxyrhynchus)

Funerary art from Oxyrhynchus

I've blogged about the Ancient Lives project before. If I had a lot more free time, it would be fun to go there and help decipher papyri. The site gives you a fragment of papyri and a Greek keyboard (there's a note saying "images must not be offloaded", or I would show you). Anyone at all can go to the site and try to match handwritten letters with keyboard letters. You don't even have to know Greek.

The University of Minnesota is working on an algorithm which, if I understand correctly, would help predict whether the transcriptions that come from the Ancient Lives site are accurate. A professor involved in the project says that "we're drowning in our own data." It tickles me that this project takes the thing that usually causes scholars to drown in data -- the internet -- and uses it to sort through an excess of ancient documents. Shockingly, only about 1% of the Oxyrhynchus papyri have been deciphered in the last 100+ years. Who knows what lost masterpieces may lurk in the former wrappings of mummified crocodiles?

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"Delphic Letters" exhibit

This exhibit in Delphi makes me want to go back to Greece so badly (that, and the fact that my Midwestern locale is passing through its dreariest-looking time of year):

In a long room in the museum, the Classical bureau, which is directed by archaeologist Athanasia Psalti, has set up an exhibition of 40 stone steles ranging from the Archaic period to the first years of Christianity, representing just a small part of the many epigraphs discovered during excavations in the area[....]
The epigraphs on display include some of the most important resolutions decided by representatives of the 12 tribes that lived in the surrounding regions during assemblies held in summer and in autumn, the ''Ieromimnones''. 

I thought the title was charming. When I googled "Delphic Letters" to find out more about the pieces on display, I discovered that this phrase was once used to describe any piece of exhortative prose. It makes me wonder what it was like to live in a time when classical allusion were (somewhat) common currency.

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I don't want to hear about your sniffles

I have received numerous emails recently explaining that a student missed class because he/she just didn't feel quite up to it. I'm with Arya Stark's fencing tutor on this one:

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