Hi, I’m Eush. I’m going to be a Classics grad student for the foreseeable future. Lucian, anyone?
I just wanted to find out how to eat a pomegranate…
slippage
I’VE GOT MORE ON MY PLATE THAN A SPINSTER AT A WEDDING.
It seems that a change for the better often becomes the start of much worse.
Lucian, Verae Historiae, 1.31
It may seem profound, but two sentences later, he says that the teeth of a sea-monster he encounters are bigger than a human phallus, so don’t trust him.
This is the other thing I did on Guy Fawkes Night.
Needless to say, I didn’t win anything.
5 Nov. 07 - South Parks, Oxford
It’s too bad the 4th of July doesn’t involve bonfires like this…
My first (and so far, only) Guy Fawkes Night. Afterwards, we went to a Subway.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Voxtrot - Kid Gloves
Cheer me up, cheer me, up I’m a miserable fuck
Cheer me up, cheer me, up I’m a tireless bore
Cheer me up, cheer me, I’m invisibly stuck all in myself
Yes, I’m a vanity whore
I just wanted to say to you, by way of introductory remarks, that I’m extremely miffed about today’s events and, in my quest to try to make you understand the level of my unhappiness, I’m likely to use an awful lot of what we would call “violent sexual imagery”, and I just wanted to check that neither of you would be terribly offended by that.
It’s time for your weekly dose of Malcolm Tucker.
The Ph.D. Problem
Illustration by Stephen Anderson.
Louis Menand writes:
That it takes longer to get a Ph.D. in the humanities than it does in the social or natural sciences (although those fields also have longer times-to-degree than they once did) seems anomalous, since normally a dissertation in the humanities does not require extensive archival, field, or laboratory work. William Bowen and Neil Rudenstine, in their landmark study In Pursuit of the Ph.D., suggested that one reason for this might be that the paradigms for scholarship in the humanities have become less clear. People are uncertain just what research in the humanities is supposed to constitute, and graduate students therefore spend an inordinate amount of time trying to come up with a novel theoretical twist on canonical texts or an unusual contextualization. Inquiry in the humanities has become quite eclectic without becoming contentious. This makes it a challenge for entering scholars to know where to make their mark.
This is why I am now thinking of law school instead of a Classics Ph.D. Well, that, and the fact that I think I can’t really handle that much more of this stuff. I go through these jags every once in a while, especially with the Latin proficiency exams coming next week.
A certain man came out of a brothel while Cato [the Censor] was going by. When the man started to run away, Cato called him back and praised him [because he was releasing his libido with prostitutes rather than with virgins or married women]. Later, when he had seen him coming quite often out of the same brothel, he said, as the story goes: ‘Young man, I praised you on the assumption that you visited here, not that you lived here.’
Pseudo-Acron on Horace Sat. 1.2.31-32
‘Punning’ is, it is true, an unfortunate description, because it connotes for us a humorous intention, while by the Greeks it was frequently regarded as a means of attaining truth, or as aesthetically valuable in itself.
Excerpts from JD Denniston’s Greek Prose Style, from Laudator Temporis Acti.
Just another reason why reading Greek needs a completely different mindset sometimes.
Beyond the Fringe - ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’
- Peter: Of course, one thing you’ll notice about America, is that they’re a very young country—rather like Ghana in that respect.
- Jon: Of course, they have inherited our two-party system, haven’t they?
- Dudley: How does that work?
- Jon: Well, let me see now. They’ve got the Republican Party, you see, which is the equivalent of our Conservative Party, and then there’s the Democratic Party which is the equivalent of our Conservative Party. And then, of course there are the liberals, in the shape of people like…um…well…
- Dudley: Are the liberals Democrats or Republicans?
- Alan: Yes—as is convenient for them.
