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(no subject) [Dec. 7th, 2009|12:47 am]
[Mood |frustratedfrustrated]
[Music |Rebetika-Athinaiki kompania - Misirlou]

Why is this so depressingly true? UGH.
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(no subject) [Aug. 19th, 2009|11:31 pm]
[Music |Laibach - Francia]

Poll #1446168
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 11

When I am a rock star, do you think I will be able to balance the competing demands of my international superstardom and being a classical archaeology student?

View Answers
Yes
9 (81.8%)
No
2 (18.2%)
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(no subject) [May. 21st, 2009|07:43 pm]
Brief update:
Going to Poros this weekend and climbing Mt. Olympus (yes, that one) next.

Saw New Model Army live last night. Was amazing + I can't believe I almost didn't go. Can't wait for their new album!



Down beneath the swoosh of the turbines, the long grass blows in ripples
There's a beautiful spiral of roads that leads the lost up here
I was watching the birds taking off to swoop down over the city
They find and take just what they need and turn, turn, turn

The movers move, the shakers shake, the winners write their history
But from high on the high hills it all looks like nothing
The movers move, the shakers shake, the winners write their history
But from high on the high hills it all looks like nothing

That afternoon on Hustlergate with all the TVs flickering
While behind the sky was moving liquid crimson gold
Brothers, sisters, pay no heed to the unfaithful messengers
For theirs is a prison world of lies, lies, lies

Where the movers move, the shakers shake, the winners rewrite history
But from high on the high hills it all looks like nothing
The movers move, the shakers shake, the winners write their history
But from high on the high hills it all looks like nothing

The keening wind it blows through me, it blows through me
My time it must be almost done, be almost done

All these things you fear so much depend on angles of vision
From down in the maze of walls you can't see what's coming
But from high on the high hills it all looks like nothing
But from high on the high hills it all looks like nothing, nothing
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the boring entry [Mar. 29th, 2009|12:36 am]
Well, I guess I am actually updating this thang, but only because I am bored. (Alternatives: go clubbing; read the last 100 p of the Traveler's History of Athens - blech.) Anyway... I guess it's Saturday night now - crazy.

On Thursday, the flight landed at around 1:05-ish, and leaving the airport was (of course) a breeze. There wasn't even anyone vaguely on duty at customs. (On the other hand, going through security in Frankfurt took like half an hour - the Germans are thorough. They went through your bags and took like 80% of people aside for a hand-held metal detector scan and stuff.) After waiting around for, like, an hour while slackers from some Oregon-y program failed to show up, we left for our apartments. (Mine is pretty crappy. It's small and the ceiling light/fan doesn't work. Of the two other rooms I've seen, both were far larger and nicer. Grumble!) Then I guess everyone pretty much just waited around and went shopping and stuff before we went out to dinner at 8, which was all right. You know how much I love big groups, but most of the people on our trip at least seem to be pretty fun.

Hmm... I guess yesterday we had our 'walking orientation' to Pangrati (the area we live in). It was spiffy, and at the end we went to a farmer's market, but it was super-crowded and I didn't buy anything even though the apples looked really good. Next week! We then got gyros at this place in Varnava square (just down the street from our apartments), and they were delicious. Then after some time passed and much boredom was had, a bunch of us went to get coffee and read Stoneman (blech. Sidenote: This book we have to read before our first class, Richard Stoneman's A Traveler's History of Athens, is so mediocre that I don't know what to say about it. It's not horribly offensively bad, but it's so amature-ish. The best description of it I've been able to come up with is that it's about the quality of book I would have produced in about tenth grade if someone had made me write a history of Athens. There are only a few out-and-out mistakes, but some things are extremely misleading; it's clearly cobbled together from his (admittedly quite extensive for a mass-market 'history' book aimed at tourists) reading list; it's poorly written in the sense that the tone of the writing varies wildly, presumably depending on what source he happened to be looking at when writing any given paragraph, but is also sometimes well-written in the sense that it is actually fairly exciting here and there; and so on. Basically I get the sense that he wanted to write an exciting history book in a quite old-school style and just doesn't have the knowledge or intelligence or skill to actually pull it off. In other words, for all I know it might be the best history of Athens specifically that's not a rushed overview or hideously long and dry (also, I do commend him for actually covering the history of Athens, and not just doing 250 pages on ancient Greece and then about 5 on the Byzantine period, 2 on the Ottoman period, and a few sentences about the Colonels.), but it's still crappy.)

Anyway...where was I? Oh yes. Varnava square, reading Stoneman. That was a good time - naturally we didn't actually get much reading done. Then we had dinner, okay, too many people, etc., and then afterwards a bunch of us went on a pretty long walk up to the acropolis and along the south side. I got to see the new acropolis museum, which apparently opens on June 21st (and you know they're trusty because they've put a date on it...). So maaaaybe I can actually manage to go when I'm leaving the country in July. I guess we'll see. I don't care that much to be honest. ANYWAY. We passed this hilarious club called "Club Lollipop," which apparently some people ended up actually going to later that night, and they described it as mostly older men with their hot young wives. Quality.

Today we had a 'walking orientation to central Athens', which was handy because now I know how to get from Pangrati (in which I know how to get around) up to Monastiraki/Plaka (an area in which I know how to get around) in the most efficient manner. Spiffy! After this (otherwise useless) tour was over, Stacy, Tony, Paul and I formed a splinter cell, got gyros, and went to chill at the Kerameikos for a while (well, Tony ended up leaving before we went in). Ohh yeah. I'm glad it only cost one euro to get in, because it was less sweet without Richard to ramble about everything to his heart's content, but it was still coo' to see everything, and since the Kerameikos is probably my favorite site in Athens (okay, okay... obviously the Agora is way more important, but, hey, I'm allowed to have another favorite!) I didn't want to wait until a month and a half later when Alain takes us there for class. Also, Stacy's cell phone went off really loudly as we were near the exit of the museum (this is funnier if you know that her ringtone is the Indiana Jones theme). It was amusing. Anyway, then we meandered homewards (stopping for coffee) and Stacy and I stopped at some sort of cafe/bar for a drink, and the waitress either misunderstood us (entirely possible) or just sort of decided we should get some food, because our order ended up coming with this plate of delicious appetizers (saganaki, tomato, some sort of potato things, these delicious little sausages...), which was mystifying but ultimately excellent. After some more quality Stoneman time, some of us went to dinner at Movries, which was actually slightly confusing (don't laugh at me, Carrie!) since unlike every other taverna I've ever been to in Greece, one apparently orders as one enters and there are random sides you can get and stuff? It was strange. But it did end up being pretty tasty, so I am sure I will be back in the near future. Oh, I also went grocery shopping several times (it's extremely close, so every time I thought of something I might need, I just went there to get it) and apparently they don't sell any newspapers there - very strange! And, hmm... what else? I guess that's about it. I read a bunch of Stoneman and chilled with Stacy and Tony for a while. And now I am doing this. Exciting...
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(no subject) [Mar. 22nd, 2009|01:44 pm]
[Mood |bored]
[Music |CAKE - Satan is my Motor]

As most of you probably know, I am going to Greece. I just made a "travel blog" even though I doubt I will update it much: ektaxis.blogspot.com
(It seems like the thing to do.)

Also, three-day breaks are stupid. Unpacking is lame. And I still have to do my term paper for Heraclitus. Lame.
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Oh. Snap. [Mar. 4th, 2009|03:14 am]
[Mood |sleepy but feeling accomplished for no real reason....]

Oh snap. I have a BA adviser and a BA topic (well...pending his approval). Take that, uncertainty! Now all I have to do is write it. And...do all the research. (These things, they are scheduled to begin in...oh, July.) Yay! Also I have summer plans and grant applications and everything! (Totally uncertain summer plans that depend on me actually getting accepted into things and getting money and stuff, but summer plans nevertheless!)



In archaic Greece, particularly the 6th century, the phenomenon of “tyranny” swept through Hellas; in poleis throughout the Greek world, individuals seized power, apparently sometimes simply capturing important points in the city (such as its acropolis) with a handful of troops. Probably more commonly, however, they relied on disaffected segments of the population to support them. The rise of tyrants seems to be connected with the solidification of the polis­-system, the growth of the economy and trade, and even the spread of coinage. They may often have been exceptional leaders (rather than despots, as the modern use of 'tyrant' connotes) even though in most places tyrannies only lasted for a few decades at most. There are, in short, many extremely interesting things about tyrants.
In my BA, however, I will examine only one of them. One of the most salient and common features of tyrannies was their love for public works. Polycrates, the mid-6th century tyrant of Samos, constructed the three most impressive feats of engineering in the Greek world, according to Herodotus: a giant mole in the harbor, the water-tunnel of Eupalinos (the most impressive facet of which is the 1-km tunnel dug through a mountain, from both ends – meeting in the middle with only a few meters' error), and perhaps most famously, the Heraion, one of the largest temples in the Greek world. Meanwhile, in Athens, the Peisistratids oversaw the city's first forays into monumental architecture, while in the 7th century, the Corinthian tyrant Cypselus built a treasury at Delphi.
With a focus on the archaeological material left by such public works projects and a view towards the larger historical panorama of the Archaic period, I hope to make some small progress towards answering questions such as: why was tyranny so common? why did tyrants so frequently engage in these large expenditures? how were they related to the way the tyrants and the polis­community wanted to be seen (and how did those differ)? how is the rise of monumental architecture connected to tyranny and what is the connection between both of those things and the economic developments of this time? These big questions are of course extremely expansive, but they are the sorts of questions that motivate the study of history. Under the supervision of Emanuel Mayer, I will examine, in my BA, some of the available evidence from the time of the tyrants and work from there to explore these issues.
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ERICOLOGY! [Feb. 23rd, 2009|12:37 am]
[Music |U2 - White As Snow]

TRANSPLANTED MEME! OMG!

( muahaha )
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(no subject) [Feb. 2nd, 2009|11:46 am]
[Mood |perplexed]
[Music |Starsailor - I Don't Know]

I had one of the most inexplicable dreams I've ever had last night. It started with some sort of social event, at which Emanuel Mayer - an assistant professor who works on Roman art history/archaeology - talked to me for some reason or another. Then it suddenly shifted to us having a conversation on AIM. This is already weird enough, as not only have I not thought about Emanuel Mayer consciously for several months, but I've never actually spoken with him in my life. However, this conversation was extremely strange and we acted as if we were good friends for a while, and then he started hitting me up for information about something or other - apparently in my dream I had compiled a bibliography for or about a certain work (the abbreviation was OLE or something...) or something, and he was looking into it and was asking me for help because apparently he thought I was an expert on the subject, and I had to bluff my way through the conversation because I didn't actually (dream-)remember making this bibliography and my dream-self suspected that Richard had made it and told me to put my name on the final submission or something. Anyway. VERY STRANGE.
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(no subject) [Jan. 25th, 2009|01:54 pm]
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/01/25/gaza.legal.defense/index.html

Is it just me, or is this tantamount to an admission of guilt?
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(no subject) [Jan. 18th, 2009|03:37 am]
[Mood |confused, annoyed]

WTF? So I was just sitting in my room at my computer. The door opens a crack; I think, "huh, that's odd, I guess it wasn't completely shut." Several seconds elapse. Then there is a clanging noise, and the sound of people talking and laughing. I turn around, thinking that it is Andrew and Falko or something. A cloud of very fine, yellow particules is billowing up from the base of my slightly-ajar door. At this point I am still mostly just confused and slightly amused, since I thought it was just dry ice or something. So, I let several seconds pass before doing anything - as I approach the door, it becomes clear that it is not, in fact, dry ice; plus the perpetrators are clearly moving away at speed. I follow, but halfheartedly, so I have no idea who was responsible, although there is also a substantial quantity of what is presumably the same substance on the second-floor landing in section one. I am now sitting in the hallway on my laptop with an irritated throat from inhaling whatever this substance is, wondering what the fuck just happened.
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(no subject) [Jan. 10th, 2009|12:07 am]
[Music |Veruca Salt - Blissful Queen]

It has come to my attention that I don't actually update my livejournal very often. I might attempt a remedy to that; for now, my traditional start-of-quarter ramblings will have to suffice.

First, the classes: Modern Greek was cancelled, vexingly - thus making Athens the University's only study abroad program in a country whose language is not taught here, other than Cape Town (a more ambiguous example, since English is one of about ten official languages of South Africa, but only 8 or 9% of the population speaks it, whereas Greek is the official language in Greece but nearly everyone under a certain age, at least in Athens, also speaks English quite well). However, I shall attempt to at least keep my memory of last quarter's material fresh.

Another class I'm taking is Heraclitus; while this is going to be a lot of work and I'm not exactly obsessed with the topic (I am taking it because I expect to get more interesting over the quarter, I have heard good things about the professor, and I want to take as many Greek classes as possible, plus the fact that it is a graduate seminar in Social Thought doesn't hurt), I think that once I get over my trepidation it will be enjoyable.

Next is Roman Satire. To be honest I don't actually have any interest in this. Roman literature is almost without exception boring compared to its Greek counterpart; and while the satirists are amusing, vulgar, and scathingly incisive, I would much rather be reading a historian. However, it's growing on me, so we may yet see my opinion changed. The class is also a bit large for my taste (18 people registered) and the professor has a rather wrong-headed way of doing things in my opinion, but he's amusing nevertheless.

Intermediate Greek is an improvement of sorts. We are reading (and actually scheduled to finish, although that would be a miracle and we've already decided to skip one choral passage) Sophocles' Trachiniae, which is cool - it's the first time I've read an extended amount of Greek not by Plato or Xenophon. Unfortunately so far my classmates are turning out to be even worse on average than last quarter, if that's possible, so class itself is sort of turning into a MWF-ly torture session where I have to sit around listening to people being incompetent for half of class. (Don't get me wrong; it's not like I'm some kind of Greek master, but these guys are either really just clueless or don't understand that they're supposed to prepare the text ahead of time.)

Finally, my favorite class so far is Introduction to Greek Epigraphy. Our books were devilishly expensive but they're both very much worth it. Five people are enrolled in the class (a number much more to my liking) but so far only three have actually shown up (apparently one of the missing persons no longer intends to take it and the other may be unable to return to Chicago this quarter for some reason - or so I gathered from the professor's mutterings on the subject). I'm the only undergraduate, which is bemusing as it's a 200/300-level course on a perfectly interesting subject. I'm a little bit intimidated by this class as well. Bresson is giving us not just a final but also a "Control" which I gather is going to be some sort of midterm to make sure we've been doing our readings and know about the various types of documents and so on. (We also have to make presentations and write a short paper. Mine is going to be a bit longer, 10-12 pages, because I'm also using it to fulfill the Classics department's stupid new "research skills paper" requirement by means of which they apparently want to make sure you know what a footnote is before sending you off to write the BA.) Anyway, I'm not sure what I'm going to do my presentation/paper on, but right now I am excited by the idea of looking at something related to the collection of the laws of 'Solon' at the end of the fifth century in Athens...
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(no subject) [Jan. 5th, 2009|12:01 pm]
[Mood |very annoyed]
[Music |Klimt 1918 - Just In Case We'll Never Meet Again]

So apparently Eleni, my Modern Greek instructor, decided late last week that she just didn't really feel like teaching the second quarter of Greek - now the class is going to be cancelled unless the Classics department can miraculously find someone willing to take over the course in the next 36 hours. Thanks a lot, Eleni (who didn't even bother to let us know).


Edit:
Oh snap - Helma managed to find someone. Now the College has to decide whether they want to fund the course (presumably this will be a yes since they were already going to? But who knows...)


Edit 2:

No, it's been cancelled. Way to go, University of Chicago - apparently you piss out hundreds of thousands of our tuition dollars on shitty student activities no one cares about, but can't afford to pay a grad student $5000 to teach a course seven people are enrolled in.
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(no subject) [Dec. 29th, 2008|03:21 am]
( 25 songs meme )
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(no subject) [Oct. 14th, 2008|05:16 pm]
[Music |Morrissey - America Is Not the World]

( awh yeah son )
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(no subject) [Sep. 2nd, 2008|09:17 pm]
[Music |neurosis - stones from the sky]

( yoink! )
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(no subject) [Aug. 29th, 2008|02:05 am]
bored bored bored
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(no subject) [Apr. 1st, 2008|12:05 pm]
[Music |Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Moonland]

Anyone interested in downloading all of the pictures I took in Greece may do so by clicking here: https://webshare.uchicago.edu/users/edris/Public/Greece.zip Be warned that the image files are both very large and somewhat numerous, so this ZIP file is about 520 MB.
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(no subject) [Mar. 30th, 2008|05:33 pm]
[Mood |tired]
[Music |Arab Strap - Pica Luna]

Hey! So I'm back from Greece.

( Part I: Account of Trip )

( Part II: A Selection of Pictures Taken in Greece )
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(no subject) [Mar. 15th, 2008|07:22 pm]
[Music |Electric Six - Danger! High Voltage]


Which Bollywood Actress are you?

You are Mallika Sherawat. You are bold and beautiful. You pour your heart out. Some people might think of you as arrogant, but we think you are the most beautiful women. Have you ever wondered about pairing up with Shah Rukh Khan on-screen?
Find Your Character @ BrainFall.in


Yeah that's right.


EDIT:


Which Bollywood Actor are you?

You are Aamir Khan. You might be termed The Perfectionist by the media, but according to us you are more than just a perfectionist. Your attitude speaks for itself, and your style is something that any woman would desire.
Find Your Character @ BrainFall.in
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(no subject) [Mar. 13th, 2008|11:52 pm]
[Music |New Model Army - Wipe Out]

argghhhhhhh why is the Beazley archive so slowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww?????????
And why does Dyabola have such a useless search function?
And while we're at it, why is Perseus down half the time?
I'm convinced this is all proof that Classics and computers should never mix.

Argh.
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(no subject) [Mar. 9th, 2008|12:19 am]
[Music |The Tragically Hip - Grace, Too]

So, I reorganized my room. As it turns out, the room actually is wide enough for the bed - by a margin of about an inch (or more if you put it somewhere there's no radiator...but that's exactly nowhere, and if it were somewhere it would cut the room in half retardedly). It's not strictly better than my old arrangement (drawbacks include: slightly difficult access to the lowest shelf on my bookshelf [in the nook behind the headboard of the bed, off frame to the left in the first photo below], covering up yet another of the room's shittily-placed power outlets, possibly others I haven't discovered yet), but in almost every way imaginable it's better. I like it waaaaaay way way more. I feel like an idiot for not realizing how much better this layout would be earlier though. Anyway, it was really hard to take a good picture and I failed pretty miserably, but my two attempts are here and here. (Yeah, for some reason the second photo has several strange visual artifacts. I dunno.)
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(no subject) [Feb. 21st, 2008|10:07 pm]
[Music |Fates Warning - A Handful of Doubt]

Pick two of the following!

( classes )
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A new proof concerning the inevitability of entropy [Jan. 29th, 2008|12:35 am]
[Mood |amused]
[Music |Warren Zevon - Splendid Isolation]

Gentlemen of the Royal Society, I present to you a new demonstration of the merciless forces of entropy.

( 2.5 weeks ago )
( now )
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE [Jan. 22nd, 2008|02:56 pm]
[Music |The 3rd And The Mortal - Spider]

Embracing faculty from a broad spectrum of University life -  from the most rigorously hardnosed mathematical chemists to the softest of literary scholars - within its bosom, the newly-formed University of Chicago Alchemy Department seeks to problematize interdisciplinary boundaries and, indeed, erode those very distinctions by returning scholarship to its pan-disciplinary origins in the Renaissance. At the same time as this move revitalizes intellectual discourse through a return to origins, it must be contrasted with the University's ever-forward looking gaze; propelling alchemy into the 21st century, we hope to re-examine the bedrock assumptions that underlie modern science, such as the immutability of matter, while synergistically combining that very science's insights with a humanistic worldview and methodology.


Who's with me?!
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(no subject) [Jan. 11th, 2008|06:10 pm]
[Music |Leonard Cohen - Alexandra Leaving]

So...  my Beowulf is definitely much easier than I had expected. There were only two places I had to consult a translation in ll. 53-98. And I only have sixteen more lines for Monday, which should only take about 45 minutes. Sweet. Of course, next week when I have three times as much homework it might be a little dicier. Also it's really quite sweet. Even in a 'masterful' translation like Heaney's supposedly is (I've never seen what the big deal is...he incompetently uses the alliterative style, by which I mean he uses it whenever he feels like it, and randomly includes various Irish words as part of his political programme lurking behind the entire translation, and the shifts in poetic tone are really quite ridiculous. His translation is definitely brilliant in places but I feel it's a misrepresentation of Beowulf itself.) or one of the older badass-archaic ones, the way everything fits together on the line-by-line level only comes across in the original. As just one totally unexceptional example chosen literally at random, consider the following lines (64-7a):

þa wæs Hroðgare heresped gyfen,
wiges weorðmynd, þæt him his winemagas
georne hyrdon, oðð þæt seo geogoð geweox,
magodriht micel.

A literal translation of these lines would be something like:  'Then military success, the glory of war, was given to Hrothgar, so that his followers eagerly listened to him until at length the youth grew into a great band of young warriors.'

On the other hand, a direct word-by-word paraphrase would be:
'Then was to Hrothgar military success given,
the glory of war, so that him his retainers
eagerly obeyed, until those youth grew,
a large band of young warriors. '

Note how, say, in the first line, the compound verb "wæs gyfen" is split up around its two objects (direct, what is given, and indirect, to whom the giving is done), encapsulating the entire action within the form of the verb itself; or how then the object is elaborated on immediately afterwards, expanding on the idea of 'heresped' (= heres sped = army's success) as "wiges weorðmynd" (= war's 'weorðmynd', glory or worldly honour, but also basically a compound meaning "honor's remembrance" or "deeds' remembrance" or something...gemynd is kind of like Greek kleos), thus specifying that, say, Hrothgar wasn't just given good luck in war or something, but obtained glory, honor, and everlasting memorials.  Then later in the line is the neat "him his" repetition, one an accusative pronoun and the other a possessive adjective, but obviously very similar-sounding and closely related. It's just all very cool...and of course I haven't even talked about the purely technical craft displayed in the alliteration and stress patterns.

Now here's Heaney's translation:

'The fortunes of war favored Hrothgar.
Friends and kinsmen flocked to his ranks,
young followers, a force that grew
to be a mighty army.'

Note, first, the typical looseness of the translation; one sentence is broken into two, an entire clause is removed and new meanings added in, and so on. Now note that the first line and a half, on which I focused above, are totally distorted here. In Beowulf, military success is given to Hrothgar, and not just "military success" but "memorials of deeds done in war" (not a good translation of 'wiges weorðmynd' but a good explanation of the meaning). Heaney misrepresents this entire idea as "the fortunes of war favored..." Next I'd like to point out how in the original there are no 'friends and kinsmen flocking to Hrothgar's ranks', but only followers eagerly obeying him as he proves his worth, and not growing into a mighty army as more people arrive, but growing into a mighty army because they follow Hrothgar. It's a matter of skill and wisdom, not numbers. In short, Heaney completely mistranslates this passage.

As far as the poetry itself goes, Heaney's translation here is fine (and pretty typical overall), but I would comment that it overly simplifies and lacks the depth of ideas within the words themselves present in the original. I guess that's pretty difficult to match, though.

And I will say that Heaney's translation (overall) has a certain sort of direct, poetic force to it when read aloud (especially by him!).
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(no subject) [Jan. 8th, 2008|03:41 pm]
[Music |MC Solaar - Qui sème le vent récolte le tempo]

Well, I've now had all of my classes once; I feel qualified, therefore, to expound upon them.

First up is Latin; we're reading Seneca's Thyestes. It seems like it will be pretty much the same as last quarter, except that the class itself will be much less enjoyable. This is because (a) there are way too many people (there seem to be only 17 registered, but I'm pretty sure there were almost 20; either is significantly more than last quarter, where I think we started out with like 16 supposedly but ended up with only about 12.), and (b) Shadi Bartsch may or may not be a much better teacher than Clifford Ando, which would not be an especially impressive achievement, but she definitely seems like she will be much less entertaining. (Cliff was fond of going off on long, ranting diatribes; for example, one class started more than fifteen minutes late because he had spent the preceding twenty-five minutes explaining to us in great detail just what was wrong with college sports and their relationship to academics and the universities more generally.)  It might also be a little bit more work. After I press 'post entry' I shall be going off to do my first set of translation, so we'll see how it goes.

Next I have Classics of Social and Political Thought. Of course, for the second quarter in a row I have a professor who apparently thinks that the class just isn't enough work as is and therefore assigns extra work. (For Tarcov, we had to write five papers instead of the paltry three or four of other professors, plus there was a final; there was also a little more reading. For McCormick, we, of course, can't make do with reading just Hobbes, Locke, and two books by Rousseau. No, no, we also have to read more Machiavelli. So we're opening up with two weeks of the Discourses, and then presumably compressing the ten weeks of other material into the eight weeks actually remaining. On the other hand, we only have to write two papers. On the third hand, everyone, including McCormick, thinks that he's a complete hardass grader who only dispenses good grades for absolutely superb writing, yet manages to give useless feedback. I'm not especially concerned, but I will have to spend some more time planning and polishing than usual if I still want decent grades.)  So far, you know, we're just reading Machiavelli (again...some of it is a repeat from the extra stuff Tarcov gave us last quarter) which I guess is all right.

My third Monday class is Beowulf; it meets for three hours late Monday afternoon. Fun...  It's, obviously, going to be a hell of a lot of work, not least because I wasn't exactly top-notch on my Old English even at the end of the term back in, oh, June. (Meanwhile, almost everyone else in my class just finished OE last quarter. Fortunately they nevertheless seem as inept as myself.) So for every week we're going to be translating about 200 lines (well, according to the syllabus; our assignment for next week is only 114 lines, or 62 if I don't redo the opening 52 lines which she did in class for us. But even 114 lines is more than we were doing per week by the end of OE itself... And then we didn't have to do other work besides the translation.) plus we have to read articles for each meeting, and there's also both a final and a term paper. It makes sense as the class is just 'Beowulf', not "Old English 2: Beowulf' or something, so it's not purely translation, but I'm still more than a little terrified of the amount of head-bashing I'm going to be putting myself through between having assloads of translation for both Beowulf and Latin.

Finally, the class I'm most excited about (even more so after it met) was earlier this afternoon: Greek Sculpture. I still don't have a formal syllabus (although he claimed to have written one last night), but the description of the class was roughly this. For the first three weeks, he's basically just going to lecture, taking us through the history of Greek sculpture from the Geometric period up to Hellenistic. Then the next 3 weeks will be seminar-style. He's going to print out his forthcoming book on Greek sculpture for us and we'll be reading and discussing it, one chapter per meeting. Finally, for the final four weeks of the quarter, class doesn't meet. Instead, we'll be doing independent work This is because during our trip to Greece we are all going to be making two 20-30 minute presentations about a work. (It sounds like we get to choose one piece and he'll more or less tell us what to do for the second one.) For this we're expected to produce a handout with a comprehensive bibliography about the statue, which is to be used as a guide for discussing the history of scholarship on the piece; then we are supposed to tell 'everything one might want to know' about the sculpture itself. Although this actually sounds pretty cool, and I'm sure it will be a good experience and blah blah blah, I'm actually a little miffed because in all of the course descriptions he said we would be writing a paper and 'giving presentations on site'. So my guess is that he changed his plan for the class from writing one major paper and giving a presentation on its subject on site to just having two presentations. I suppose they're roughly equivalent amounts of work, but I'd rather have a 20 page testament to all of the work I did than just be able to say 'well, I gave this presentation to the other six people in our group...'  Oh well! I'm still very excited. (Also, I get to go to Greece. Sweet.)

So I should go off and start my Seneca translation. Lame...


EDIT:

So as it turns out, Seneca is pretty easy compared to Ovid. Sweet. Still takes me way too long to translate, though...Alas.
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(no subject) [Jan. 6th, 2008|07:21 pm]
[Mood |deeply amused]
[Music |Four Star Mary - Shadows]

Let me just say. I hope that Pattee Library appreciates that I just spent every cent I made working there over winter break on my books for this quarter. XD

( said books... )
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(no subject) [Jan. 1st, 2008|10:59 pm]
[Mood |morosemorose]
[Music |The Tragically Hip - Vaccination Scar]

I guess I'm a day late or something. Oh well.... ( Read more... )
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(no subject) [Dec. 25th, 2007|03:36 pm]
[Music |Dollheads - It's Over, It's Under]

I'm sure my kitchen buddies will be pleased by my latest cookbook acquisition: the soup bible. Prepare for 200 straight nights of soup.... ;)
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I could beat up 29 five year olds. [Dec. 21st, 2007|12:13 am]
[Music |Porcupine Tree - Collapse the Light into Earth]

29

Looking for payday loans?




I'm so badass.
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That meme everyone is doing. I'm bovine. [Dec. 10th, 2007|11:27 pm]
[Mood |boredbored]

Also, it's a cool meme.

Band's name: Moravia
Album name: Dimeriella sacchari

1. Elastic cartilage
2. Ra Cailum class battleship
3. Female muscle growth
4. Montague, Ontario
5. Lačni Franz
6. Square-spot Rustic
7. 6th Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment
8. Bao Gong An
9. Aardvark-Vanaheim
10. Odeyme Palma
11. St. Catherine's Church
12. Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg
13. Dombes Group
14. Lambi
15. Nine Pearls


(Obviously, a decidedly and endearingly eclectic indie rock group.)
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(no subject) [Nov. 24th, 2007|10:43 pm]
[Music |Sex Pistols - No One Is Innocent]

The downside of watching seven hours of Buffy per day for a week is that now I have like three times as much work to do before Wednesday as usual.... Rawr. I love my Greek Art class, but the papers we have to do are really quite lame. Oh, and I hate bio. And I don't really feel like doing my Latin homework, either... hmm... Winter break, how I long for thee.
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(no subject) [Nov. 20th, 2007|12:47 am]
[Mood |amusedamused]

Man...let me tell you. The Latin in Buffy? Straight out of Gildersleeve. Oh yes.
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(no subject) [Nov. 6th, 2007|01:57 pm]
[Music |Demons & Wizards - Gallows Pole]

Oh baby...spring '08 timeschedules is started. http://timeschedules/index.cfm?term=73&submit=Submit
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(no subject) [Oct. 31st, 2007|04:38 am]
[Music |U2 - Please (Single Version)]

Do do do.... I can't sleep. Bored bored bored bored bored bored bored!

I made delicious, delicious pumpkin soup for dinner tonight, and I just had another bowl. Yummy.

Also, behold: ( the suicide of ajax )
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(no subject) [Oct. 26th, 2007|04:00 pm]
[Music |Rammstein - Te Quiero Puta!]

Now that Chicago has finally realized it's no longer the height of summer, the grounds - on the cusp of autumnal glory - are at their loveliest. I wanted to go wander around on 56th street too but I was lazy. My attempts to find professors I have were also universal failures (curse you for never ever being in your office, Richard Neer). But anyway. Here is my photo tour of life walking around the University.

( hella pics )
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(no subject) [Oct. 20th, 2007|01:30 am]
[Mood |amused, pensive]
[Music |Grave Digger - Scotland United (Live at Wacken)]

So I just backed up all of the work (translations aside, I suppose, but including about half of my math problem sets) I've done in the past three and a half quarters here onto my USB stick. It took up about 1.4 mb.


Kind of puts things in perspective.
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