Where's Egbert Bakker when you need him?

Many weeks ago, before an unscheduled hiatus from blogging, I read Mary Beard's post on defending the traditional lecture. Her main point is that lectures are about "changing minds and attitudes" rather than conveying information. She expands on this point in an anecdotal kind of way appropriate to a blog entry.

Now, I'm in favor of keeping the traditional lecture because it's usually the laziest students who want you to put more stuff online, plus PhDs are screwed over enough without suddenly making it possible for one part-timer to teach thousands of students. And it's still true, even in these degenerate days, that face to face teaching creates an intellectual alchemy that can't be found elsewhere.

If a more formal defense of the traditional lecture is offered, I wonder if classicists who specialize in archaic performance culture could contribute something. After all, they constantly write and think about oral performances and the formation of culture. A 2008 essay by Anna Bonifazi on how performances of the Iliad and Odyssey engaged the audience in a process of "shared visualization" is a perfect example: ? argues that audiences and the poet were familiar with more versions of the Trojan cycle than could be covered in a single performance, and that the performer used certain Greek words beginning with au- to direct the audiences' 'gaze' to particular scenes, characters and episodes. If it could be demonstrated that a similar process takes place in a college lecture hall, it would be a perfect example of how the in-person lecture goes far beyond content delivery.

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'What a Saturnalia it's been!"

As i've written about before, the winter date of Christmas is strongly influenced by the Roman holiday Saturnalia, which occurred on Dec. 17. Saturnalia was celebrated with gift-giving, eating and a "carnival atomsphere that overturned Roman social norms," to quote Wikipedia.

Mary Beard, in the character of a Roman priestess, has a 'look back' at this year's Saturnalia. This is pretty much the lecture style I aspire to in introductory classes :) Read her blog entry about the experience here.

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"Clever choices from the past"

Mary Beard's description of the art outside BBC headquarters:

It's one of those neatly simple ideas that works partly because it is so simple, and because it joins the familiar with the strange, and makes clever choices from the past.

I love this and wanted to make sure I saved it somewhere. It seems to me the second part works equally well as a description of Augustan poetry, or of modern poetry with classical influences (like Anne Carson's). 

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Mary Beard on politicizing Latin

Beard's recent post on Latin as a political straw man is a handy summary of arguments for and against the study of Classics.

(Lots of great stuff in the comments as well -- LOL at the arguments over whether Marx's thesis is boring or not.)

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