I don’t want to hijack the conversation, but I thought I’d share my experience anyways. I don’t know how to use Read More on Markdown, so if this is TL, DR. Never mind, I figured it out.
One of the outgoing Classics profs is leaving for a career in web design. Advising us as someone who is free from all responsibility, she told us to set up a full bar in one of the shelves in our graduate student workroom, for emergencies, or just for kicks.
I always did like her class.
Q. Grammarians Strunk and White say in their book, The Elements of Style, that you shouldn’t start a sentence with “however” when you mean “nevertheless.” I think this classic advice is unreasonable in modern times. What’s your take?
A. Yes, like so much else in that beloved little book, this rule is now cheerfully disregarded by the best of us.
L’Année philologique is probably the most comprehensive index of scholarship in Classical studies. Until recently, you wouldn’t have known that just by looking at it.
I have always considered L’Année’s layout a personal offense to me, not only as someone just trying to do some research, but also as a human being. The information it provided was incredibly useful, but actually getting to that information was frustrating as all get-out. God help you if you accidentally hit ‘Back’, or close one of the many tabs it would open for you. Plus, there was a gif of gears turning when you were doing your search that looked like it came from 1997. So many things about it bugged me that using it was painful.
But today, I logged on, and lo! L’Année had changed:
Compared to before, it is frickin’ beautiful. It now looks like a website made in this century, and doesn’t send me into fits of rage every time I try to do a search.
(by sophia.volpi, via Classics)
Happy Easter! Here is a black-figure Easter Egg of Ajax preparing for his suicide.
There are days when I don’t think I’m getting much better at this whole ‘Classics’ thing. Today is one of them.
We had our Greek proficiencies today. If that means nothing to you, this is what it is: you get about 20 lines each of three Greek poems/plays, three passages of Greek prose at around half a page each, which you have to translate at sight (but we have a long-ass reading list we’re supposed to be working on during those times we have spare time, which is never, by the way), and you get three hours to do it, no dictionaries.
The prose passages I did were Thucydides (that was my first big mistake—it was fucking hard. And I mistranslated one word that recurred in the passage, rendering my translation useless anyway) and Herodotus (which went slightly better, but with some issues). Despite Greek being my ‘stronger’ language, my prose sucks. I have done a total of two—TWO!—semesters of prose. In five years. And I couldn’t even goatfuck* my way through two passages.
It’s just that, at this point, I really should be improving at this, and when the test time comes it’s not happening. I came to this program for an extra couple of years to improve my languages, because I started them both pretty late in the game and always feel like I’m lagging behind everybody else who’s been taking Latin since they were fucking babies, but it doesn’t seem like enough time.
The poetry went better though. I think I did well on the Oedipus passage (it’s right when Jocasta is telling Oedipus not to ask any more question and the passage ends right when Jocasta says ‘Poor wretch, may you never find out who you are’, one of my favorite scenes in literature), but my Medea one kind of fell apart at the end.
Well, one thing’s for sure—I am going to be reading a shitload of prose over the summer.
Not to mention that unless the Latin prose in a couple of weeks includes Tacitus’ Histories or Livy Book 1, I am so fucked for that too.
*to goatfuck one’s way through something - a term somebody in the Classics department coined, meaning to somehow muddle through a translation (or any other task) with no preparation whatsoever.
The ides of March for Classics is sort of like Pi Day for math: for one day, a number of people remember Classics, then carry on not giving a crap the next day.
