In which I give up on themes, because sometimes life feels fragmented

Which isn’t to be dramatic or anything; everything is fine, it’s just mid-term, and so I’ve got the usual midterm work-slam on top of all the normal work, and I’m stubbornly insisting on continuing to also have a life.

I graded 18 midterm projects today. Of other people’s students, I mean; I’ll grade my own last, because they’re faster. It took five or six hours of pretty intense reading and attention. And I’ll have to do it for three more days, sigh. At least this happens only twice per term.

Also, I’m taking tomorrow off because we’re going to go out and enjoy  our car-having and our beautiful fall.

***

Due to whatever these things are due to, my aquarium situation recently became a less-than-ideal one: I had one lone albino cory cat, all by himself.

(Well, accompanied by literally dozens, if not hundreds, of snails. But no other fish.)

They are a schooling fish, and it is not good for them to be alone. So yesterday, being all be-carred, I went to the pet store to get some more fish.

They had only emerald cories and peppered cories, no albino cories. But they look identical, apart from coloration, and they are exactly the same size, and they are so close that I figured they might school together. And, in my internet research, aquarists seem to feel that a mixed school is better than no school. So I got some emerald cories.

They’re very pretty and charming and active, but apparently fish are racist, because they’re not really schooling with the albino. The albino occasionally shows interest in them – which interest, to be fair, they accept and even return – but he’s keeping to himself, mostly.

***

I boldly updated to OSX Yosemite tonight. Everything looks a bit different now, although I haven’t had it long enough to figure out if anything really operates differently. I’ll keep you posted.

***

We found out today that the husband’s autistic nephew has quit college because his math and computer science classes are really overwhelming him, and he feels like he’s the only kid who doesn’t understand. He has wanted nothing but to be a video game designer for all of his cognizant life, but now he’s quit college because it turned out to be hard.

As a teacher, I can say with confidence that, no, he is definitely not the only one confused. Many students feel confused, and feel they are alone in that.

More to the point, this is a perfect illustration of the class divide as far as education outcomes in post-secondary education: kids raised in wealthy (or at least financially secure) families and/or families that explicitly value education – which lower class families often don’t do, as they are busy making sure everyone can eat and stay warm – are prepared for this. They get tutors. They go to office hours. They take stock and find solutions. Their parents know how to support them, and understand that these kinds of set-backs happen, and are manageable. Nobody gets extreme. Supports are in place.

Kids who grow up without familial or institutional systems that put a premium on education feel it as a personal failure when things don’t go as they hoped, and they give up. And their families aren’t aligned in such a way as to help them find alternatives, only to accept the kid’s assessment of the situation. So they’re just allowed to quit and fall through the cracks.

And that’s a fucking bummer.

***

On a mostly unrelated note, we learned tonight that the husband’s parents and sister use the adjective ‘welfare’ as code for black. As in, the sister stayed at a hotel in Washington DC that was apparently full of ‘welfare people,’ and she felt unsafe and scared.

I really struggle to be civil with the husband’s family sometimes.

***

I have seen lots of good articles on the web recently. Here are some, should you want to read them:

• An interesting rumination on why women are encouraged to keep mum about their pregnancies until they’re past the first trimester, and the isolation it can cause, and the damage that can do. A friend of mine remarked that it’s also to avoid the awkwardness of having to tell people you ended your pregnancy because of health considerations – although she also acknowledged that people generally tell a white lie and go with ‘miscarriage’ to avoid judgement and assholery. Here’s an idea: let’s stop making pregnancy into a moral issue for women, and let them make the choices that make sense for them, and support them in that. Revolutionary, isn’t it.
• While we’re at it, can we please acknowledge that pregnancy is not all tea and roses, and thus that forced-births are cruel and inhumane?
• Study after study has shown that women who seek medical treatment for pain are dismissed as hysterical or overreacting at far higher rates than men, so the prospect of an objective test to determine pain is compelling.
• Combining my interests in health care and race: the history of racist responses to health crises – plus ça change and all that.
• Arundhati Roy is a smart, compassionate human, and her criticisms of capitalism are worth considering, even if – unlike me – you are not already convinced that unbridled capitalism is a giant greed-encouraging Cthulhu-beast demanding constant human sacrifice.
• And in case you’re feeling overly optimistic after those, a new book reaffirms that, yes, the American dream is pretty much bunk, and you’ll mostly end up where you were born as far as wealth is concerned.
• The Supreme Court upheld the restrictive and, frankly, blatantly racist voter ID laws proposed in the ancestral homeland. RBG penned the dissent, and was joined by Kagan and Sotomayor [NB PDF].
• Another new study looks at the historical reasons for the intense segregation that mars so many urban areas – absolutely including Phila, which is just wildly segregated – and wonders why tensions like those roiling in Ferguson haven’t happened sooner, and more often, and in more places.
• And Matt Taibbi continues to be a good journalist, and a reasoned thinker, and a compassionate human, and recently reflected on why ‘justice’ plays out so differently if you’re brown than if you’re a banker. Also, he continues to strike me as arrogant and assholish, but that’s neither here nor there.

***

I sometimes think I spend more than my fair share of time wondering about the futility of life, and how we keep going in the face of the basically incontrovertible evidence that basically nothing matters. That is, we all die, and an extremely high number of us die violently and with great suffering (especially if you open things up beyond humanity and think about life as a whole), and we’re just a random blip in the universe.

(And those links probably explain a bit about why I end up there so often: so much of what I read is about humans failing each other!)

But somehow I continue to believe that doing our best to be kind and humane in the face of all that is important and means something. It’s utterly inexplicable. I suspect it feels a bit like it must feel to have faith in a god.

Something about autumn light and chaotic autumn skies reinforces all of that

In which I ended up rejecting a theme after all

See, I was considering doing a post on the uncomfortable fact that sometimes terrible people make gorgeous and important art.

But now I can’t even remember exactly what got me on that topic earlier. I mean, I got off on a tangent about how Zardoz used the second movement of Beethoven’s 7th as its bookends, and that kind of incongruity is certainly interesting, but rather different.

I couldn’t actually find the closing scene of Zardoz, to my surprise – it’s such a hate-loved movie – but a more familiar clip from A Clockwork Orange will illustrate the same principle, as well if not better (and, though you probably know this already, this clip will not be SFW):

I took a great class in college with Anne Prescott that read all different kinds of fantasy literature – The Man in the High Castle, Dorian Grey… other greats that I’m blanking on right now… and A Clockwork Orange. Except I didn’t read A Clockwork Orange, because I was scared, because that story is relentlessly brutal.

I still haven’t read it, although my mom says it’s really an incredibly well written book.

I take her word.

In any case, I didn’t feel like being focused.

I do recall where the Beethoven’s 7th reminder came from, incidentally: I told the husband about James Urbaniak’s podcast Getting On, and he listened, rather randomly, to episode 11, and it involves the second movement of the 7th. And hearing it triggered some memory about its use in a movie, so that’s where that came from.

It’s a good podcast, by the way. The husband asked if it was comedy, which is kind of hard to say. Sometimes it is. But mainly it’s story, and we’re a story-loving species.

One new story is that my niece is now a belly dancer: her school offers it as a PE class, I guess, and she’s taking it (which I obviously endorse whole-heartedly). Tonight was her first performance, and my sister sent me a short snippet of footage, and I don’t know that I’ve ever been more delighted.

My niece was premie, and has always been smaller and a bit less coordinated than her age-mates. So I wasn’t sure how she would be as a belly dancer – a dance form that is best suited to sinewy curves and a bit of jiggle with a side of precision. But she’s lovely. Her hip accents are sharp in spite of the fact that she has no noticeable hips.

I’m so proud of her, and excited for her.

Also, that essay I wrote back in January is finally public – the new issue of the journal it’s in went live yesterday. I’m surprisingly anxious about having it out there. But one friend has already read it and dubbed it ‘lovely’, so that’s nice.

Anyway, tonight’s post is breaking all the rules, and I’ve been doing all sorts of other things in the spaces between writing, so I have no idea where we stand as far as time, so let’s just call it a day, for the sake of simplicity.

Tonight the kids submit their midterm projects. Tomorrow begins a stressful and unpleasant week of super-human feats of grading.

Today I drove my mom’s car down the Main Line on various errands. The Main Line – Lancaster Ave, or route 30, is the old route that connected Phila to its suppliers. If you drive west from Phila down 30 today, you’ll hit the heart of Amish Country. But I was a lot closer in.

(I know, I know: as someone who always bitches about drivers being careless, it’s incredibly irresponsible of me to be taking pictures while driving. In my defense, I got the camera ready at a red light, and there wasn’t much traffic, and I didn’t frame the picture at all – I was watching the road, and just holding the phone up optimistically, and it only works because of the ‘crop’ function. But it’s still not a great idea, and I have mixed feelings.)

And how’s that for non-focused.

And I’m off to do something relaxing and mindless for a bit before I go to bed, so goodnight all, and, since it’s a thing and I like things, good luck —

Smacks-down

(1) Alas, I have to start with my own students. I had to put the smack-down on my international student class today, because, try as I might with reprimands in the moment, they persist with their many and noisy side conversations when we’re trying to do work as a class.

(Plus, when it came time to do one regular class activity, it turned out only one student had actually brought the book, rendering the exercise basically useless. I skipped it, and went on to the next thing with what, to me, was obvious frustration and annoyance, and what, to them, was probably just no comment.)

(That wasn’t the smack-down.)

At the end of class, before I sent them on their way, I reminded them that participation makes up 10% of their grade, and that participation means more than just being physically present in class, that it requires active and attentive presence. And that their behaviors were disrespectful to each other and to me. And that they needed to step it the fuck up.

(I didn’t say ‘the fuck’ in class, I promise. I just said, y’all need to step it up. But I thought ‘the fuck’ really hard.)

(1a) Anti-smack-down: my midday class, as usual, was amazing and brilliant and collaborative and curious, and made up for almost everything. And the race class is pretty strong and rewarding too, on the whole.

(2) Smack-down to systems: I read two very different articles today that make a very similar assertion: fixing the symptoms is no way to actually promote long-term improvement in structural flaws.

(2a) In the controversially titled “The Parable of the Unjust Judge or: Fear of a Nigger Nation,” Ezekiel Kweku analyzes our national reaction to race read through the lens of Michael Brown’s death. And he concludes that we’re still hung up on requiring black people to ‘prove’ themselves worthy, to ‘argue’ that their lives matter, that their deaths at the hands of cops should make us outraged – that, to use his words, they aren’t just niggers we would be wasting time worrying about.

He points out that, each time this happens, we get hung up on the particular incident, losing sight of the larger – and far more important – fact that it’s not an isolated problem. It doesn’t really matter all that much, ultimately, if Darren Wilson gets prosecuted, or if George Zimmerman gets off scot-free. That changes nothing.

To use the language of my students, that is an example, not an argument.

Rather than getting angry about official state-representative individuals who kill other black individuals, we need to figure out how to restructure society so that black lives automatically matter qua lives. Where black people are people first.

(I can’t say it gives me hope that Kweku basically ends up where James Baldwin and Josephine Baker and W.E.B. du Bois and so many others ended up, and seriously considers the idea that there might be no hope for us, and that we might need to throw in the towel on the whole experiment. But he closes with a glimmer of hope, and I’m going to take that as enough of a promise, I guess?)

(2b) In the much less emotionally titled, although equally as emotionally potent, “Gender Problem in Academia Tip of Iceberg,” P.L. Thomas makes an analogous point about academe and its well-known and long-standing issues with equity: try as we might, it’s still, by and large, an old boys’ network, and women and non-whites continue to face many obstacles.

Like Kweku, he argues that just hiring more women or black people doesn’t solve the problem. There has to be a shift in values at the core of the system so that the system itself stops privileging whiteness and maleness. He at least closes with a prescription: “We must ask, we must listen, and then we must act. Otherwise, we are saying that we really do not take gender inequity seriously (again).”

Although it’s hard to see how that prescription could actually be implemented.

If we figure it out, though, we should tell everybody about it, so we can do the same for race in the larger society.

(3) Smack-down on the PSD: the powers in charge of the Phila schools continue to phail us spectacularly.

Let me remind you that state policies – compliments in no small part of our governor Tom Corbett (who, incidentally, is up for reelection in a few weeks, ahem) – have made it so that most public schools in this city mostly have no librarians, no secretaries, no assistant principles, no guidance counselors, and no nurses. At least two students died at school last year because no nurse was on hand to deal with their health issues. Many schools have no budget – literally zero dollars available – to buy books and classroom supplies, and teachers use what they can find open-access or pay out-of-pocket. Many classes are packed with upwards of 60 students – more students than desks, so that students have to sit in windowsills and on the floor.

Meantime: “the child poverty rate in the city still hovers near 40%.”

Also, the School Reform Commission (SRC) canceled Phila teachers’ contracts on October 8. Because fuck you, that’s why.

It is all phantastic. As in, it is literally hard to believe that this is a reality in America’s fifth largest city in 2014.

Then, this week, to celebrate parents’ night, the SRC offered a screening of a movie that demonizes teachers’ unions, and students – god bless their revolutionary hearts – stomped and screamed and made a scene about it. And – allegedly – the SRC chairman told them that they were all basically little felons.

I would say that I’m speechless with outrage, but this has been going on for so long that we all found our words ages ago, and still nothing has changed.

Two schools in my immediate neighborhood were closed – one elementary, one high school. Nothing says you’ve given up on and thrown away a whole community like deserted school buildings in the midst of a bustling neighborhood.

There are threats of a student-teacher-parent walk-out/protest. I am neither student nor teacher nor parent in this system, but I will so gladly join them if I can.

This is no way to support and encourage a prosperous and just and useful society. This is just a few people getting rich on the backs of the poorest, and it’s gross, and it’s going to cost us all when these kids are the ones who are supposed to be in charge.

(3a) Anti-smackdown: even in the face of all that, some things remain above reproach:

He’s only been with us 5 months, but he’s nearing his first birthday, by the vet’s best guess!

fallen

fallen

There was a beautiful quality to the light this evening as the sun set

The shadows you see on the buildings are cast by this old power plant and its neighbors

Such things keep our spirits up and render our smacks-down manageable.

Obligations; offerings

Offering:

My mom is in Colorado this weekend.

(Or she’s supposed to be; her plane was scheduled to leave at 6:20, but apparently the pilot was MIA – not an encouraging sign! – and she was still in the airport at 7:45.)

As usual, she generously offered to let us use her car while she’s away. Which was perfect: we were actually planning to rent a car this weekend and drive out to Jim Thorpe – about which more another day, because it’s a fascinating and strange little town – and admire our beautiful northeastern autumn and what-not. So now we don’t have to rent a car!

Plus I can do a big load of laundry easily at my favorite laundromat, which is too far to walk to regularly but very convenient by car.

Obligation:

The idea was that mom would leave the car at the train station, which is easy to get to and convenient, and would herself take the train to the airport, which is actually easier and cheaper than driving. But, as she often is, she was running late, and ended up driving, so I had to go out to the airport to pick up the car.

I had planned to tell you a story that I believed perfectly encapsulated my mother: first, the above about being late and all that, then about how she put the parking ticket in her purse instead of leaving it for me. Because I swear I looked everywhere for that ticket.

But apparently it was in the glove box. And I just missed it.

Not nearly as good a story. And it may ultimately say more about me than about my mom.

Offering:

Here are some useful resources for those of you planning to warm your winter with some Sappho reading:

You can find the Sappho Loeb here. It’s an old public domain translation, but does provide testimonia – that is, all the ancient evidence we have about Sappho, so you can find out what Strabo and Athenaeus and Ovid had to say about our girl. In English and Greek.

(If you follow back to the main page of that site, by the way, you can find quite a treasure trove of public domain Loebs, should you be interested in such things.)

And this is a useful and informative – and oddly beautiful – review of If Not, Winter by Dimitri Yatromanolakis [NB PDF], a professor at Johns Hopkins who sadly will not have the opportunity to be my colleague, since I am not applying for that Hellenist job they’re advertising right now.

And here is a review of several Sappho books by Emily Wilson, whom I know, because she teaches at Penn here in Phila. She’s a fierce and lovely human, and dead fucking smart.

I know not everyone likes to read book reviews before they read the book in question, but it can be useful, especially when you’re dealing with something as foreign as fragmentary archaic Greek poetry.

Obligation:

I have such a needlessly and uselessly strong negative reaction to emails from students asking questions that I not only addressed in class, but actually emphasized because I knew the issue was confusing or difficult. They apologize when they ask me questions in class, to which I always respond, never apologize for asking questions, understanding is the whole point, and helping you understand things is literally my job. They apologize when they come to my office hours, to which I respond, never apologize for taking advantage of resources that are freely and willingly offered to you.

(It doesn’t hurt to say thank you, incidentally; that’s always nice. But an apology is definitely not needed.)

They never apologize for writing me emails asking stupid questions. I know each email doesn’t take that long to respond to (and, frankly, I don’t respond to the most unpressing, but instead address them in class) but they do take some minutes. And I have 48-odd students, and even if only half of them email me on a given day, that’s an hour gone. Wasted, frankly.

So I get wildly frustrated with unnecessary emails.

Offering:

That movie about Dan Harmon’s cross-country… revival might be a word for it? Anyway, you can now pre-order it.

And, yeah. I get that he’s not a healthy man. He is a man who is prone to dangerous levels of alcohol consumption. A man who might be dangerously narcissistic in some ways. But he’s also a genuinely curious and compassionate human, and he’s deeply, genuinely interested in other humans, and that frequently makes for really interesting conversations. Maybe especially when they get into dangerous territory, which frequently happens.

So I really do  recommend his podcast, with the admittedly significant caveats that you need to be comfortable with a lot of blue language, and a lot of sometimes awkward laying bare of controversial subjects, to enjoy it.

Obligation:

Somehow I arbitrarily set this up so that I need to have one more set of obligations and offerings. I guess because three is a magic number. But I can’t think of another major obligation that is bugging me.

I mean, I may or may not be asked to revise my talk into an article for this collection my program is putting together, but my boss is my boss, so nothing about it is transparent or simple, and I don’t have any straight answers.

And next week will be a wild orgy of grading-while-teaching: the directors decided, with exceedingly good intentions, that it would be nice if we instructors could actually enjoy the school’s fall break (or spend it traveling and giving a professional talk, whatever), so they pushed back the deadline for the midterm project.

But now I have to grade 80 midterm projects while teaching and holding office hours. So, awesome. Next week should be loads of fun.

Offerings:

Nor do I have a final offering.

Although I did watch this video earlier of this red panda playing with a pumpkin, and, um, it’s kind of amazing.

Happy fall, y’all.

And then I remembered that Slavoj Zizek, a difficult and confusing and troublesome and very smart man, recently did an online public-chat-interview-thing, and – this being the internet – someone asked him about cats, and his response was all that is good about the world:

vicarious mic drop

What persists; or, being a brief introduction to the poet Sappho

At the risk of redundancy – I know I’ve talked about this passage before, probably several times – I’ll let Virginia Woolf walk us in:

But the Greeks remain in a fastness of their own. Fate has been kind there too. She has preserved them from vulgarity. Euripides was eaten by dogs; Aeschylus killed by a stone; Sappho leapt from a cliff. We know no more of them than that. We have their poetry, and that is all.

(whence – this is from the second paragraph)

I was thinking earlier about how Sappho comes down to us. Manuscript traditions can be very messy and haphazard things, and hers is no exception. For something like Homer, often the problem is an embarrassment of riches (relatively speaking): several early Medieval versions of the complete text with competing readings. Or a lot of math and science texts come to us because the Moors were kind enough to translate them into Arabic while we in the west were busy not knowing Greek and dying of plague and what-not.

(I tease, I tease. My Medievalist friends would despair if they saw that.)

Sappho’s manuscript tradition is more typical, and less romantic. There are basically two sources, both problematic in their way.

(1) Citations in other ancient sources preserve many excerpts and lines.

For instance, Longinus, in his treatise On the Sublime – a 1st c. CE discussion of literary excellence and style – quotes the partial poem we now romantically call “Fragment 31″ – the poem that inspired Catullus’ 51, and about which we shall have much more to say down the line. And Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing in the 1st c. BCE, quoted what is now “Fragment 1″ in its entirety. And many other lines and phrases and excerpts are quoted in other authors as a way of making a point about grammar or poetry or history or what-have-you.

Which tells us (a) that Sappho cast a very long shadow, and (b) that her fame persisted, since even some 7 centuries after her death people could still assume at least a passing familiarity with her and her work. But only one of them is complete. The rest are only snippets, and we have to reconstruct something about this revered figure from them – a nearly impossible task, really.

(2) Scraps of papyrus found in the ancient 2nd-3rd c. CE trash-heaps near the Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus, quite accidentally, expanded our Sapphic corpus enormously.

This is the famous Oxyrhynchus, the collection of which makes up a large and storied part of the Ashmolean Museum archives in Oxford. This is 1895, and Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt spare no expense (or consideration for preserving Egyptian heritage in situ or anything) (although, in their defense, they were all pre-post-colonial and all, and likely just doing the best they could with the context they had been given) for digging up all the papyri they can, and shipping it all back to England. There were so many that they’re still being deciphered and published.

These are exactly as unromantic as they sound in practice: scraps of papyrus tossed on a dung heap after their second use had been satisfied, and with no thought whatever for their first use. So some had been reused for things like grocery lists and memos. Others had been stuffed into sarcophagi as cartonnage. Still others were basically the equivalent to the newspaper in which your local grocer wraps your fresh fish.

(There are also two recent finds, about which I don’t know many details just now. You can find more here; Dirk Obbink is publishing them, and, while they incited the classics world quite a bit at first, people seem to be more or less convinced at this point of their legitimacy, to my knowledge. More on that to come later. In the meantime, here’s a picture [whence] of it:

Right? Not exactly the most readable text I’ve ever come across.)

Anyway, that’s what comes down to us from Sappho: some 250-odd fragments, most little more than a line.

About Sappho herself, Woolf’s observation stands: we have her poetry, and that is all.

Here are the ‘facts’ we have of her:

She’s probably from Lesbos, likely from a wealthy family, may have lived in Mytilene in the late 7th and early 6th centuries BCE, may have been exiled to Sicily based on family connections and political ties, and she was famous for her lyric poetry – that is, her poetry sung to a lyre accompaniment.

That is tenuous enough; everything else we make up. Or, to put it more generously, extrapolate from very thin and questionable evidence.

Her famous homosexuality, for instance?

Maybe, but nothing in her poetry argues for it, really. And nothing in the contemporary reception of her work suggests it, and in fact it’s some centuries later that she becomes associated with homosexuality.

(Judy Hallett has a very compelling piece in a volume of essays on Sappho if you want to read more about how we should think about these ‘charges’ of homosexuality: “Sappho and her Social Context: Sense and Sensuality,” in Reading Sappho: Contemporary Approaches, edited by Ellen Greene (1996).)

By the Hellenistic period, when Alexandria is the centre of learning in the Mediterranean and the wealthy are obsessively collecting books (well, papyrus scrolls, but you take the point), she’s called the Tenth Muse, and her poems are collected into nine books of poetry, organized mostly by meter. Not all of them were all that long, but it’s clear that we’ve lost the vast majority of her corpus.

I was also looking at another book earlier that I found compelling and well-written: Margaret Reynold’s The Sappho Companion (2000), which treats Sappho as a responsible scholar should, but also addresses her legacy and influence and after-life. It’s quite an interesting book.

As Woolf brought us in, we’ll let Reynolds play us off with some of the sections that caught my attention earlier:

The real Sappho, if not the first Sappho, was a poet. And her name was not ‘Sappho’ – as we pronounce it – at all. Today, in English, she is all soft sibilants and faded f’s, but in fact she is ψαπφ ‘Psappho’. In ancient Greek – and, indeed, even in modern Greek – if you hear a native speaker say her name, she comes across spitting and popping hard p’s. Ppppsappoppo. We have eased off her name, made her docile and sliding, where she is really difficult, diffuse, many-syllabled, many-minded, vigorous and hard. … ‘Sappho’ is not a name, much less a person. It is, rather, a space. A space for filling in the gaps, joining up the dots, making something out of nothing. (2-3)

Partly it is the sense of her being there at the beginning of world literature, unknown, strange, and yet dimly recognizable, faintly imaginable – a real person whose relics we may yet be able to recover. … Like the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa, Sappho seems known to us, familiar, capable of being translated into our everyday lives. Yet still she remains utterly remote – if anything, all the more insinuating and full of meaning because she is, and always will be, absent. (6-7)

It has been important to many modern commentators to place Sappho in relation to the works of classical Greece conventionally regarded as ‘mainstream’ in order to get her away from the categorization of ‘women’s poetry’ from which she has suffered in the past, and which is included to make her work seem flowery and pretty. In fact, it is neither, and some of the more recent translations … attempt to convey the cool yet impassioned tone, the concrete imagery and the spikiness of style of Sappho’s original Greek. (23)

You can attempt to convey her technical devices, the use of the Sapphic stanza (essentially three long lines, followed by one short) or her distinctive method of enjambment (carrying the thought across from one stanza to the next, as in Fragment 1, where the ‘whirring wings’ of the sparrow that drive Aphrodite’s chariot carry her down to earth across stanzas three to four). But sometimes the vocabulary remains intractable or doubtful. Even Sappho’s very first word, the beginning of her Fragment 1, the ‘Ode to Aphrodite’, is the subject of dispute. Is it poikilotron, ‘many-coloured throne’, or poikilophron, ‘many-minded’? As with any translation, the question that faces the writer is whether to naturalize the language and make Sappho into a native – which is what most early versions do – or make the English strange and let Sappho stay foreign – which is what more recent versions do. (24-5)

So we’ll let that serve as an introduction to our mysterious poetess.

I probably won’t actually start on the Carson reading for a few weeks more, incidentally, I just had some time today and figured I would bone up on my background in preparation. So we’re not fully diving into the SapReAd yet, just dipping our toes.

We’ll talk another night about the tradition of poetic biographies in antiquity; they are quite fascinating, and Sappho’s suicidal leap from the White Rock is high among them. But for tonight, we’re at exactly 30 minutes, so I shall wrap this up, and close with an image of Sappho from the mid-5th c. BCE, among her students:

(whence)

Unfortunately, no unifying theme emerged

I don’t know what to call this post yet. Usually I name them first, based on some theme or idea I have for the heart of the post (or based on the fact that I have no unifying theme). Tonight I’m going the other way, because I have no theme in mind, but I’m optimistically hoping that one might arise organically.

***

So here’s a nice thing:

This morning I got an email from an associate professor in a classics department at a nearby school. Apparently he saw my talk on Saturday, and found it thought-provoking and interesting, and wondered if I might share my slides with him so he could revisit some of my suggestions as he works on implementing them in his spring classes.

So that’s incredibly gratifying. And a useful little morsel to drop into the casual email to the boss reporting that all went well, and my receipts are available, should anyone want to look them over and throw a bit of cash my way. Seeing as I’m spreading the program’s word and all that.

***

I just realized that I hadn’t checked the discussion boards for my classes since before the weekend.

(I run these discussion boards and [mostly] check them every night in a mad attempt to forestall countless emails from students asking the same questions. Theoretically, they post questions to the board instead of emailing me, then other students can also benefit from the clarification. It works reasonably well, and gives me an excuse to be annoyed at student emails asking questions about homework or policies.)

So I checked it.

We tried a new interface for an assignment last week, and it did not go well. I received upwards of two dozen emails on Thursday from students panicking because they couldn’t get the new site to work.

One of the things students do not realize they are learning in college is how to fucking deal with unpleasant surprises and unexpected problems without expecting someone else to fix it.

It’s so funny, though: they email me in a panic to report that they don’t know how to exchange papers with their classmates. I think, well, you emailed me to ask, don’t you think you could just email them?

In some ways, to pick up a thread of conversation from some time ago (and I think not even from TDP but on a friend’s blog), the Excellent Sheep book is really spot-on.

***

I learned today that I have some brand-loyalty I didn’t expect. For the last almost-three-years, I’ve been rotating the same three pairs of Capezio seamed convertible tights for ballet. One has a slight hole at the left ankle where I fell after slipping on some ice two years ago, but other than that – and other than being a bit faded in their color – they are good as new. No runs (not even around that hole!), no sagging elastic, just perfect, consistent performance.

This morning, as I was getting dressed, I realized they were all dirty (going out of town last weekend threw off my laundry schedule; I had the husband wash my black leotards with his clothes, but I didn’t want to include the tights because I knew they would get further discolored in such a load).

And I remembered that my mom got me new ballet stuff for my birthday last year, and I haven’t even opened the tights yet! So I pulled out a brand new pair of tights by Bodywrapper. I’ve worn Bodywrapper wear before, and been satisfied with it. But man, these tights are no match for Capezio.

For one thing, the color and the seam are weirdly garish. I know the color will fade with some washings, but still: these tights are really pink. And the seam is weirdly pronounced. Now I will say that I quite like the texture of these tights – it’s almost reminiscent of fishnets – but the very first time I sat down on campus today – on a cement ledge, granted, but one on which I’ve sat countless times in my Capezio tights – they snagged, and now there are three pulls on the left calf:

hmmph

When it next comes time to buy new tights – which shouldn’t be for ages, given that the Capezios are still going strong and I’ve got two more unopened Bodywrappers pairs – I’ll be splurging on the quality Capezios.

***

My Sappho book arrived today. I’m so excited. Carson has chosen to put each fragment on its own page, so some pages have only one line of text. I love this. It reminds me of the importance of stillness in dance.

I won’t lie: I’m a little anxious about having anything useful to say about fragments, which – by their nature – resist bold claims, but I am hopeful that we’ll have some fun with this. If only to reflect on the choices of translation, which are exponentially compounded when you’re reconstructing badly damaged texts. And I think we could not find a better guide than Carson for this messy foray.

***

Greg Proops names his podcast episodes, as far as I can tell, by choosing an evocative word or phrase that he picks out on re-listening and editing. Alas, that trick has not worked for me, and I remain, as so often, without a singular focus.

So it goes.

Scholarships; and, Anne Carson, from ‘The Life of Towns’

I have spent the day doing two things: (1) cooking (shepherd’s pie and a spaghetti squash-spinach-artichoke thing) (I am still being careful to eat soft foods so my jaw is as little exacerbated as possible); (2) reading old scholarship.

In a way, I love old scholarship. It’s so overwrought, overwritten. Hysterical, almost. Entertaining, definitely.

I am reading specifically late 19th century scholarship on Mediterranean archaeology. I suspect there are interesting conversations going on between that burgeoning ideology of feminism and this blossoming discipline of digging up the ancient past.

It was such an amazing period, the late 19th century. Almost entirely driven by questionable (at best) colonialist impulses, but so fruitful.

America attempts to patch up its Civil War wounds. Italy becomes a unified nation. Greece is still extricating itself from its various entanglements with the Ottoman Empire and it’s failed King Otto, and entangling itself with England and Europe.

And then Troy is discovered. Knossos. Mycenae. Linear B. The Athenian Acropolis is “rescued” by England. Pompeii. Egypt. This whole world of antiquity is literally opened up. Indo-European is posited as a unifying source of the majority of Western languages and much of Western culture.

And German and England – with America as a distant, distracted third – are tripping over each other trying to align themselves with Greco-Roman antiquity. The slavering praise of the Greeks in particular is astonishing. Consider:

Hence, in consequence of the numerous centres of civic life, that rapid growth of independence and the spirit of freedom which characterized the Greek. This was already innate, doubtless, in the Hellenic character, but it was fostered into an almost feverish activity by their circumstances social, geographical, and political. What a contrast do they present to the Egyptian, Chinese, and Semitic national communities!

The full article from which that paragraph was taken is available, if you’re wanting more.

Or how about this excerpt from a piece called “The Experiment of Universal Suffrage,” by an American who rails against the government in ways that often sound quite contemporary and modern (a do-nothing Congress, anyone? anxieties about the influence of the monied classes?). The piece is almost unreadable, really, but I was fascinated by how he slipped in a bit about the ancient Mediterranean origins of our civilized world:

The high civilization of modern times is the product of intense intellectual activity, and a noble development of the moral sentiments. The constituents and the agencies of modern civilization are largely the applications of conceptions which constitute the body of the sciences and arts. All those modern improvements and advances which signalize the culture of the Mediterranean race, which have facilitated so amazingly all the useful operations of industry, which have brought communities, cities, states, and nations into rapid inter-communication, almost annihilating space and time, which have made the experience of all the instruction of each, which have introduced all grades of organized and cooperative activity, which have permeated all nationalities with a common feeling of sympathy, and consolidated mankind into a brotherhood of love and co-working — these achievements are intellectual and moral. This fact cannot be too deeply pondered.

On the one hand, I haven’t yet found much explicit evidence that classics informed turn-of-the-[last-]century feminism very directly. On the other hand, classics informed pretty much every aspect of European – particularly British and German, with America as that distant third – culture in that period, so I can reasonably hope to find something promising eventually.

In any case.

Tonight’s poem from Anne Carson, since she’s on my mind. An except from The Life of Towns, about which I know no more than you (or no more than you will once you’ve read it, because I did read it). She’s a puzzling and enigmatic figure.

I’m sure I’ve told this story, but I will tell it again.

At the big annual conference some years ago – perhaps 2008ish? – I saw Anne Carson give a talk (for she is indeed still a practicing classicist). When she finished, at that point at which speakers square their papers and look out over the audience to field questions, she squared her papers and informed everyone that she would not be taking questions, and sat back down at the presenter’s table. And the next speaker was introduced.

I loved her so much in that moment.

So you should go look at the whole Life of Towns, which is typically puzzling and enigmatic, and also intriguing and occasionally hints at deep emotionality. But here are a few bits I liked:

…

I am a scholar of towns, let God commend that. To explain what I do is simple enough. A scholar is someone who takes a position. From which position, certain lines become visible. You will at first think I am painting the lines myself; it’s not so. I merely know where to stand to see the lines that are there. And the mysterious thing, it is a very mysterious thing, is how these lines do paint themselves. Before there were any edges or angels or virtue — who was there to ask the questions? Well, let’s not get carried away with the exegesis. A scholar is someone who knows how to limit himself to the matter at hand.

…

Wolf Town

Let tigers.
Kill them let bears.
Kill them let tapeworms and roundworms and heartworms.
Kill them let them.
Kill each other let porcupine quills.
Kill them let salmon poisoning.
Kill them let them cut their tongue on a bone and bleed.
To death let them.
Freeze let them.
Starve let them get.
Rickets let them get.
Arthritis let them have.
Epilepsy let them get.
Cataracts and go blind let them.
Run themselves to death let eagles.
Snatch them when young let a windblown seed.
Bury itself in their inner ear destroying equilibrium let them have.
Very good ears let them yes.
Hear a cloud pass.
Overhead.

I will not be taking questions.

No lessons have been learned.

***

One last note for my friend who is currently deep in ancient textile research: I read this article today, and of course I thought of you because it included this paragraph:

Terra cotta whorls, both plain and with an incised ornamentation, were found again in great abundance. Twenty ornamented ones were found in one heap just in front of temple A, which circumstance leaves no doubt in my mind that such whorls were used as votive offerings to Pallas Athena, the tutelary deity of Ilios, who, in her character of Ergané, was the protective divinity of the working-women, particularly the weavers.

But more to the point I saw this piece on spinning and weaving in history. Let me know if it’s any good.