Stage Fright

On Tuesday, I have to give my presentation to my research seminar. I'm really nervous. However, my nerves do not come from a lack of speaking skills (I was a nationally ranked debater) or a lack of preparation (my research is done, my talk will be done soon). So why the nerves? Well, it's the people.

When I gave parts of my thesis at conferences my senior year in college, I knew that some of the people in the audience would know my topic thoroughly, while others may have only had a passing acquaintance. In those circumstances, I tried to aim my talk directly at the middle; I included enough details to sound well-researched while providing enough background to make it interesting for everyone else. Here, I'm not so lucky. The audience is only about 15 people. They are all fellow students in various arenas of classics, but I have no idea what to expect in terms of their knowledge about Plato. If I assume too much knowledge, my Q&A will be embarrassingly silent. This is what happened when I gave a totally unrelated presentation in my Sallust class a few weeks ago [1]. Conversely, if I try to go to broad, my topic will look like a wild generalization rather than a careful and nuanced interpretation.

I'm just ranting, really. My topic is set...nothing I can do now except hope it goes well. And, at least, I get to run an interpretation of a couple of geometric art pieces past a couple of specialists (there are two girls who work on early Greek art in the seminar). And who knows, maybe I'll get lucky and someone will passionately disagree with my reading and we'll have a nice discussion.

I've got my fingers crossed...

Endnotes

1. I gave a presentation on an article by R. Sklenár called "La République des Signes: Caesar, Cato, and the Language of Sallustian Morality" (JSTOR). The people in my class had read the article, and I assumed they had a passing familiarity with Saussure (I didn't want to talk down to anyone). Anyway, most of the class had been confused by the article so even when I dissected it more thoroughly (after asking if people had understood the portion about Cato to which I got a resounding "no"), my discussion questions still elicited silence from almost everyone except my professor. As everyone in the class is intelligent, I worked really hard to come up with complex and interesting perspectives so that I would bring something interesting to the table, but I didn't consider my audiences' lack of sleep, etc and it backfired.

On Being Misplaced

I spent the weekend at a conference which focused on women in the ancient world. I thought it would be significantly easier to navigate than the Indo-European Linguistics conference because I would understand everything that was going on and have read many of the texts being discussed. Yet, it was actually harder. Although I was engaged in the content of the papers, the people were more intimidating because I was engaged in the content. I felt that if I were to talk to anyone, I would have to ask some intelligent question about their talk in order to prove myself. A bubbling resentment arose; I should be in graduate school right now. Thinking back on it, not being in graduate school is not my problem.

Not being in graduate school is actually a great thing right now. I get to explore the academic world. A friend told me about a book, Phrasikleia, a book he was reading for his thesis and I just picked up a cheap copy I stumbled upon and started reading it. I have the ability to visit conferences, art exhibits, and enjoy my discipline from many angles. My difficulty is that I cannot prove I belong somewhere by just saying the name of the graduate school that I attend. This, of course, makes the little failures (like my recent translation of Horace I.37) a little bit sharper. However, it also means that I have the time to iron out problems before I find a graduate school.

Considering this my misplaced irritations, I thought about the benefits and detriments of misplacement of words, emotions, etc. My first thought went to Horace-- poets often transfer or misplace (more accurately, displace) epithets to heighten certain passages and make them more artful. A lot of Latin poets used these misplaced epithets.

Since Sharon James' opening lecture at the conference, I have been thinking a lot about comedy (her lecture was on citizen women in Roman comedy). During the question and answer session, Amy Richlin brought up violence in Roman comedy. She explained that although it comes close, in no extant Roman plays is there any physical violence between husband and wife. Rather the violence is misplaced-- or displaced-- to slaves. According to Richlin, this is because it was no longer funny, even to a Roman audience, if the director showed violence between husband and wife onstage. In more modern humor, there is the same displacement of insults, etc., in order to create comic scenarios.

So misplacement (or displacement) is a common theme. It does not make my discomfort and the conference any less silly, but it illuminates how common it is in the human experience.

Lions and Tigers and Conferences, Oh My!

I'm going to be spending the weekend at an Indo-European Studies conference with Propertius II (see my blogpost), so I will probably only be around sporadically. Back to blogging Monday (and perhaps before). Have a good weekend everyone!

Sulpicia vs. Conference vs. Sourdough Starter

So, I got rejected from the UBC conference (not a surprise since it is for grad students) and wait-listed at Cornell (which is probably good because I can no longer get financial aid to go there since I got so much for the St. Thomas conference. However, I was accepted to the Willamette conference, and I will be presenting my final chapter of my thesis! This chapter is the one where I unveil my crazy theories about Platonic dialectic, so it should be interesting to see what the classics community thinks of it. On the other hand, I need to finish my third chapter first. Wish me luck.

The second major project I'm endeavoring right now is making my own sourdough starter. Cerinthus loves sourdough, and I also would like to be able to not have to buy commercial yeast all the time (it's expensive!). So, I'm making some. My roommate, Cynthia (1), does not look pleased, but she was excited by the prospect of sourdough bread.

I now have a use for my old pasta sauce jar! According to Cerinthus, in the US reusing is more efficient and better for the environment than recycling so I'm trying to reuse as much as possible. I'm going to reuse my yogurt containers to grow fresh basil. Yum.

Here is the inside after eight hours:

It still looks like lumpy oatmeal (2). What did I do wrong? Maybe it's just not warm enough in my apartment. I'm going to give it a 48 hour testing period to see what I can do with it.

Endnotes:

1. Cynthia is Propertius' lover from the Monobiblos and the two successive poetic cycles (although I believe not in Book IV). She is characterized by a philandering heart, a wild temper, beauty, flightiness, spontaneity, some minor intellectual prowess, and controlling strength. My roommate, whom I love dearly nonetheless, fits this description very well.
2. According to Steve from Breadcetera, at the beginning it should look like lumpy oatmeal: http://www.breadcetera.com/?p=58
   

What Do You Think About the Alignment of the Planets?: Unseasonably Warm in Fredricton, New Brunswick

It was dark and cold when I arrived in the tiny Fredricton airport, walking off a little cigar-tube plane onto the tarmac. This was Thursday, about a quarter after midnight. I was tired. It had taken three plane flights and well over 12 hours to get to New Brunswick. I was excited about the conference and the days ahead-- not knowing at all what my first classics conference would be like. The power shut on an off a couple of times when I was waiting for my bag-- although the emergency lights did not go off, just the main lights. Anyway, when I finally got my bag, I got into a taxi and told them I needed to go to the Best Western. I asked if there was only one in town, and the cab driver confirmed that there was, which signaled to me how small New Brunswick was, and my first conference experience began.

In the cab on the way to the hotel, the cab driver made a little bit of conversation, asking why I was in town and that sort of thing. I explained that I was there to present at a classics conference. The cab driver did not seem to know what classics was, so explained that I studied Greek and Latin. He did not seem particularly impressed by this. After a long silence, he asked me what I thought about the planets aligning on December 12, 2012. My first reaction was, "well, I only know a little bit about Maya mythology." I remembered reading that their callender was more astronomically accurate than ours and that it predicted the world to end in 2012 and be reborn. This long cycle is known as the "great year" in many cultures and is often divided into four mythological ages. As it turns out, I'm going to do a presentation for Latin on the stoic conception of ekpyrosis, which explains that at the end of the four ages, the world will die in fire and be reborn.

Despite all of my mostly-useless and very surface-level mythological knowledge, I still had no idea what to say to the questioning cabby. He told me that astronomers have different conceptions of the phenomena. For example, some believe that it might cause more earthquakes here on earth as well as shifting tides. I remarked that this was plausible (I'm not entirely sure, but gravitational forces shifting might be reasonable). He explained that the last time that it happened was 26,000 years ago. Then he asked me if I had heard of a book series called the Earth Chronicles. When I said that I had not, he told me that he was not religious, but he found them very interesting and that I should read them. I paid, left the cab, and decided that these New Brunswick people were rather strange. Friendly, certainly, but definitely strange.