et phone home

I love it when the department holds events for the undergrads

because the grad students get to take home the leftover Subway cookies.

GRAAAADES…

are out.

Well, all of them except one (Roman Comedy).

And I did pretty much as expected, but a teeny bit better in the one subject I hated most. Take that, grad school!

Normal-people things I will do now that I am done with my Big-Ass Roman Law Test of Doom (BARLTD)

• Laundry for the first time in three weeks
• Dishes that have been in my sink since last Saturday
• Which, incidentally, was the last time I ate an actual meal, as opposed to peppermints or chips and salsa
• Cook a meal with food in it
• Watch Jeopardy!
• Look under the giant pile of papers and books hoping my couch is still under them
• SLEEP
• Restart cycle of madness tomorrow, but this time with a different big-ass paper for my Greek seminar
• Yay grad school

I swear to God by the time I am finished with this program

• I will not be able to look at anything over 700 years old without throwing up
• I will not be able to see or hear any Greek or Latin without wanting to self-harm
• I will have developed a debilitating drinking habit
• I will have become extremely good at hiding said d.d.h.
• I will have taught myself how to cook exactly four recipes, but absolutely nothing else
• I will have learned to open beer bottles with my teeth
• I will have looked upon teaching high school as a realistic goal
• I will have tried to measure my self-worth by the number of Oxford Classical Texts I own
• I will have fallen asleep one evening and woken up the next morning inside the Classics seminar room drooling on a Loeb
• I will have considered the previous item a win

Classics MA Reading List or: My life from now on

Greek

EPIC
* Homer, Iliad, Bks 1-4, 6, 9, 11, 16-18, 22, 24 AND
* Odyssey, Bks 1-6, 9-12, 19, 23-24
* Homeric Hymn to Demeter
* Hesiod, Theogony

LYRIC
* Selections of Lyric Poets (Campbell)
* Pindar, Olympian 1; Pythians 1, 3

DRAMA
* Aischylos, Agamemnon
* Sophokles, Oidipous Tyrannos, Antigone
* Euripides, Hippolytos, Bakchai
* Aristophanes, Frogs

HISTORY
* Herodotos, Book 1
* Thukydides, Books 1, 2
* Xenophon, Anabasis, Books 1, 2

PHILOSOPHY
* Plato, Apology; Republic, Book 1
* Aristotle, Poetics

ORATORY
* Lysias, Against Eratosthenes
* Demosthenes, De Corona
* Isokrates, Panegyrikos

HELLENISTIC POETRY
* Kallimachos, Hymns to Apollo, Delos; Aitia, ‘prologue’

Latin

EPIC
* Vergil, Aeneid, Eclogues
* Ovid, Metamorphoses, Bks. 1, 8, 15

LYRIC
* Catullus, Carmina
* Horace, Odes, Books 1-3

HISTORY
* Caesar, Bellum Gallicum, Bks. 1, 6, 7
* Livy, Books 1, 21
* Sallust, Catiline
* Tacitus, Annales, Books 1-2
* Augustus, Res Gestae

RHETORIC
* Cicero, In Catilinam I-IV, Pro Caelio

DRAMA
* Plautus, Menaechmi, Amphitryo
* Terence, Adelphoe

SATIRE
* Horace, Satire 1.1
* Juvenal, 1, 3

ELEGY
* Tibullus, Book 1
* Propertius, Book 1
* Ovid, Amores, Book 1

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGIOUS WRITING
* Lucretius, De Rerum Naturae, Book 1
* Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes, Book 1

HOW MUCH OF THIS I HAVE ACTUALLY READ
* Not very.

More ways with which grad school is eating my brain/life

My translation work is taking up so much of my brainpower that my mind can’t handle listening to more than one song multiple times in a row.

Which means I’ve been listening to Better than Heaven for about two hours straight now, while reading Lucian’s essay about how he chose the path of Education and Culture over Sculpture and Industry. In a dream, Sculpture (represented as a manly, dusty, calloused woman) tells Lucian ‘you can make money if you come with me, and you’ll be famous not only for mere words but for your magnificent work.’

Meanwhile I’m sitting here in the library reading Greek from the Second Sophistic period, surrounded by the by-products of Culture/Education, and thinking, ‘shit, I should have gone with Sculpture.’

(Also particularly apt, Better than Heaven’s chorus goes You get sadder/the smarter you get/and it’s a bore.)