What is #gradschoolguru

I am starting a new series of blog posts under the label #gradschoolguru. These posts will provide information based on my experiences (and those of people around me) to help graduate students navigate the precarious position in which academia has placed us. Like with breadmaking and the other endeavors I've discussed on this blog, I am not some kind of an expert on graduate school (for that you would need to turn to someone like Dr. Joan Bolker or Dr. Karen Kelsky). However, I have made a lot of mistakes (and learned from them), so I would like to share my experiences with others who can learn from my mistakes (and occasional victories) as well.

I have been extremely quiet on this blog for a while. My life has changed in so many ways since I started writing back in my senior year of college. I changed departments, disciplines, marital status, hair style, all sorts of things. There are a few things that haven't changed: (1) I still love to bake, (2) I'm still in academia (studying ancient philosophy), and (3) I want to share things I've learned about baking and academia with those who are interested.

In that vein, I am starting a new series of blog posts under the label #gradschoolguru. When I entered graduate school, although I did not know it, I was bound to fail. I could write graduate level papers and I conducted research that interested my professors, but I could not manage my time, I was in a very bad place mentally, and I had all sorts of misconceived notions about what it means to succeed and what it meant to be an academic. I got lucky-- many people intervened in my inevitable downward spiral and helped me claw my way toward becoming a successful graduate student.

Unfortunately, not every grad student will get as lucky as I have. Not every grad student has mentors that will believe in them and encourage them (even with they screw up). Not every grad student will have friends outside their department who will direct them to other resources on campus. And not every grad student will have the amazing campus resources that I have available. However, I can tell you about my experiences, how I changed my trajectory, and provide some advice that helped me along the way.

I'm labeling these posts #gradschoolguru. I came up with the name because of the alliteration (tacky, I know, but true). However, I think that the title works really well. The term "guru" originally came from the Sanskrit word for "heavy" or "grave" (from the same Indo-European root as the Latin "gravis") ("guru" OED). It has come to mean "expert" or "authority" in English. In religious traditions like Hinduism and Buddhism, it refers to a spiritual teacher. I want to inflect a little of these meanings. Graduate school is something that requires expertise, but it also requires a sort of spiritual (in the broadest sense of this term) fortitude to make it through. In these blog posts, I will do my best to impart both practical advice and some spiritual (in the broad sense) wisdom that I have gained.

And, just for the sake of old times, here is a picture of the ciabatta that I baked earlier this week:

Ciabatta with 30% Whole Wheat Flour, January 2019

#gradschoolguru

Works Cited

"guru." Oxford Dictionary of English. Ed. Stevenson, Angus. : Oxford University Press, January 01, 2010. Oxford Reference. Date Accessed 23 Jan. 2019 . 

Changing of the Winds

I haven't posted since before the summer started. It's been a long time and there have been a number of changes in my life over the past few months. A massive one is that I've changed disciplines from classics to philosophy, taking and MA in classics and essentially starting over from square one on the way to getting a philosophy degree.

This was a particularly difficult decision. There were many different considerations on either side of the question. I will not go over them here. The main thing, is that I wanted to teach the actual philosophy in Plato, rather than only getting to teach the Apology or the Symposium as a second year Greek text. With the ever shrinking classics departments, very few positions exist for ancient philosophers and many of those have gone, in recent years, to people who work on ancient science.

I'll have some updates on my adventures in the new department and working as a research assistant for one of the big deal professors in my department. Stay tuned.

And the best part is, I just got an email that my MA diploma is ready for pickup!

How to Survive in Graduate School: Summer Funding

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm starting a series of posts based on the survival skills that I've learned in graduate school so far. Today I'm going to introduce one secret about graduate school that I wish I had learned: even if you think you have summer funding, you always need to be looking for more summer funding.

For background, last year, I wasn't eligible for summer teaching because I was on a fellowship during the year. So, I received a fellowship during the summer from my department, and I applied for a fellowship from an external source which I was fortunate enough to receive. As such, I was able to travel to Greece for the first time and it was an absolutely amazing summer.

This year, I have been TAing. I planned to stay here at my apartment for the summer so I would have access to the university library while Egnatius and I were studying for our various comprehensive exams. I was told that there was usually enough summer teaching to go around. Unfortunately, it does not look like that is going to be the case this year (although it is difficult to tell). As such, I'm kind of stuck. I applied for two other fellowships as a backup plan-- one was denied because I was not ABD (a stipulation I did not notice on the website) and the other was denied because it was the external fellowship I received last year and they rarely grant the fellowship multiple years in a row in order to spread out the funding. While waiting around to hear about those fellowships, I lingered hoping that one of them or TAing would come through. Afterward, a lot of grants and fellowships I found subsequently had deadlines that had already passed. At the moment I'm stuck with applying for two highly prestigious research fellowships that I'm unlikely to get due to the extremely stiff competition (especially of people who are further along in their PhD programs) and office jobs on campus, which are definitely not my first choice.

An even less appealing option would be to sublet my apartment and move home. Moving home might actually be nice-- I would at least have family, kitties, a dishwasher, and air conditioning (none of which are part of my apartment in grad school). Subletting, however, is a massive nightmare. I sublet last year and it was this horrible game of trying to hook someone who was going to stay for long enough in the apartment to cover my rent while I was gone. We're not allowed to rent our apartments for any more than we're paying for them, which makes it difficult, especially because the rent increases at the beginning of every July so you have to work out some detailed math to explain to the person renting. Moreover, the renter is responsible for any damage that the person subletting might inflict and the people who run campus housing won't help with disputes but they do insist on approving the person subletting and forcing everyone to go through a massive paperwork process.

So here is my advice: the second the summer is over, start looking for funding for the following summer. Some of the more prestigious and desirable fellowships have deadlines in October or November, so it's important to hunt those down. Even more importantly, keep continually searching for alternative possibilities. Bizarre things are constantly popping up all over the place, you just have to find them.

Good luck!

For those of you who are, like me, in the humanities, here are some possible summer funding links (all of these have passed as I post this, but they will be around next year):

• NEH Summer Seminars and Institutes (February deadline)-- these hold two to three spots for graduate students. Click these links for General Information, a list of programs.
• ACLS (November deadline): I swear that I once saw a predissertation fellowship for general travel, but I must have been mistaken. There is currently a predissertation fellowship for summer travel in China. They also have a summer + 1 year fellowship in American Art.
• SSRC: There is a large list of fellowships, including some that include summer funding.

How to Survive in Graduate School: Starting with a Joke

I have now spent two long but great years in graduate school. I have learned a ton of information in my classes. But I've also learned a lot about how to survive the process of graduate school itself. I'm going to write a series of blog posts as I go through graduate school with the hope of helping anyone out there survive the process.

I thought, however, instead of starting with advice, I would start this series with a joke. Two friends of mine (also graduate students) showed me the FAQ: The Snake Fight Portion of Your Thesis Defense. Seriously, this is a great parody. Since I'm going to have to convene an orals board for my masters thesis defense this summer, I thought that this was the perfect thing to post.

Homemade Vegitable Stock

Vegetable Refuse (top left), Vegetable Stock (bottom left), Chicken Marsala (right)

You can see that I took this picture myself (without help from the wonderful Servia who has a much better eye and camera than I do).

This post could also be entitled Graduate School Soup or How Not To Waste Your Vegetables.

Not wasting food is something that is generally important to me. But I'm just one person and there are a lot of things that I have to buy in greater bulk than I can eat it (especially because, one of the nice things about graduate school, is that most events have lots of food). So, how does one solve this problem? I find that vegetables are especially tricky because they go bad so fast.

I found my inspiration for making this vegetable broth from Oh My Veggie and Poor Girl Eats Well.

Freezer Bag Vegetable Stock

• In the weeks before you make the soup, keep a large plastic ziplock in your freezer. When you have vegetable scraps put them in there.  
• Please note: you want your vegetables scraps to be edible (i.e. not rotting and washed), and to not include things in the cabbage family which will make your broth very bitter.  You can put in things like herbs, but they will change the flavor of your broth, so keep that in mind. I suggest things like green onion ends, carrots that have dried out, etc.
• You want to make your stock when  you have about 12 cups of vegetables in the freezer.
• On the day you make your soup, put two tablespoons of olive oil into a broth pot and heat on medium heat.
• Chop about half a sweet onion, and sautee it in the bottom of the broth pot.
• When the onion is aromatic and soft, add the 12 cups of vegetables and 12 cups of water.
• I then simmered the broth for about 3 hours until it became medium brown and stock-like.
• If you want to make broth, you can season your stock now with salt, pepper, and whatever other herbs you like. However, you don't need to season it if you want stock.
• When the stock is done, strain it into a bowl. 
• Ta da! You have your very own stock.

I made a wonderful mushroom risotto with my stock. According to Egnatius, it was the best risotto I've ever made (although part of that may have been that we were gifted some wonderful shitake mushrooms). We ate it so fast that I didn't even take a picture.

Random and Fascinating Things on the Internet

As I'm sure everyone knows by now, I am a devotee of audio books, and especially of Audible. As I was browsing through Audible today looking for my monthly book (I picked Peter Brown's Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD because I'm studying for my Roman History comprehensive and one of the writers is a Late Antique scholar). However, while I was there, I found some other interesting things.

I don't know if I've mentioned Charleton Griffen before; he is one of the narrators that reads a lot of the classics including the Iliad and the Odyssey as well as Livy, Tacitus, and many others. While his readings are conveniently unabridged and great for studying for my history of literature exam, unfortunately I am not the biggest fan of his voice. He read slowly and has an accent I'm not keen on. However, I noticed when I was there that Charleton Griffen also did the reading of the 9-11 Commission. Interestingly, when I looked at that, I realized that not the commission itself, but the audio recordings of the transcripts of the interviews are actually free for all Audible members, which I think is pretty cool.

On a totally separate side note, I have recently become addicted to the History of Philosophy without Any Gaps.

Notes from My First Year as a PhD

The year isn't over yet, but I'm closing in on the finish line. It's been a long but I have really enjoyed (at least parts of) it. I've learned more than I thought possible. Most of it is academic, but I thought that I would share the nonacademic bits.

My first installment will be on recipes-- I've learned a lot about how  to preserve veggies before they go bad.  It should be debuting when I get back from this conference.

The Simple Things: Multigrain Scones

I really have been enjoying graduate school so far. The one thing that I miss is cooking for people. And the fact that I don't have people for whom I can cook means that I need to make things either (1) in small enough portions that they only feed me or (2) make things that can be easily saved for another time.

As such, I have really become fascinated by the simpler foods: things that can be made simply, but still taste delicious. So, here is my first post on the simple things that make me smile.

Scones

I loosely adapted these multigrain scones from my favorite white-flour scone recipe. I actually cannot find where the scone recipe originated-- but it might have been something like My First Baking Book. I didn't have any currants, and, in my view, white flour scones without currents are really boring. American scones-- those wedge-shaped frosted things you find in coffee shops-- tend to have all sorts of flavors added to them to combat this problem. I, however, wanted something simple, so I rummaged through my cupboard and tried something out. It worked and I really like them.

The following recipe has many different possible variations. Play around with it! I will put the variations in endnotes so the recipe is easier to follow.

Multigrain Scones (can make between 8 and 16 scones, depending upon the size)

Ingredients

• 1 cup white whole wheat flour [1]
• 1/4 cup red whole wheat flour [2]
• 1/4 cup grains (I used Bob's Red Mill 10 Grain Hot Cereal) [3]
• 2 1/4 teaspoons (or 1 tablespoon) baking powder
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/3 cup sugar [4]
• 1/4 cup unsalted butter, cold (1/2 of a stick, 4 tablespoons)
• 3/4 cup milk [5]
• 1/3 cup currants [6]

Method

• Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.
• Mix together the flours, grains, salt, baking powder, and sugar in a bowl.

Dry Ingredients

• Cut the butter into pieces and add it to the mixture. Use a large fork to mix the butter into the dry ingredients until the mixture is the consistency of bread crumbs.
• Then add the milk (and optional currants).
• Mix until a sticky dough forms. If it is not sticky, add more milk. Only mix until the dough forms and all the dry spots are gone. Do not overmix.

Sticky Dough

•  Drop them onto a pan in chunks between the size of chestnuts (produces about 16) and the size of half a tennis ball (produces about 8). I do not tend to shape my scones. However, you can shape your scones like wedges, like Southern biscuits, or in various other ways.
• Bake for 15 minutes at 375 degrees F or until they are brown around the edges.
• Eat within 24 hours. 
• They can also be frozen to preserve freshness. Wait until they cool completely and then put sets in airtight containers and put in the freezer. You can warm them in a toaster oven directly from frozen (bake at around 325 until hot all the way through and brown on top-- usually 3-4 minutes in my toaster oven). Otherwise, you can thaw them for a few hours and eat them at room temperature.

I really love these scones. They are faster to make than bread and I can freeze a bunch of them and toast them fresh each day.

Endnotes:

1. By this, as per usual, I mean whole wheat flour from white wheat (as opposed to red wheat). You can use either hard or soft wheat for these scones. The harder the wheat, the more dense the texture will be. I tend to use hard wheat because it's what is available to me (as I am restricted to the grocery stores within walking distance). However, soft wheat is generally more flavorful. Beware though, if you use soft wheat, you must reduce the amount of liquid in the recipe. 
2. If you like the richer nuttier flavor, switch amounts for the red wheat and the white wheat in the recipe, or just make the entire thing red wheat. If you do this, you will have to add a little bit more liquid. If you want lighter/whiter scones, replace this with white flour. 
3. You can use any multigrain mix which appeals to you (or obviously mix your own). The important thing is the courseness of the grind. You need the pieces of grain to be about the size of an amaranth grain). If you've never seen amaranth, I highly recommend adding it to breads that you plan on toasting, but another reference might be about 1/2 the size of a piece of toasted wheat germ. If it's too big, it will be crunchy. 
4. If you like sweeter scones, you can add more sugar either into the mix or on top. I sprinkled about half a teaspoon of cinnamon-sugar on the top of each of my apple scones when I made them (replacing the currants with chopped apple). You can also glaze them, if you so desire. Sue has some creative ideas about glazing in her various scone recipes.
5. I use nonfat milk because I like my scones lighter (and also because it has less calories). However, you can also use any other kind of milk. I made the most recent set (the ones pictured with the currants) with lowfat buttermilk because Servia had some left over from Christmas. They were a little heavier and more tender than the ones that I make at school. If you like heavier scones, try with buttermilk or cream.
6. Currants are optional. You can also substitute raisins, fresh chopped apple, chopped nuts, dried fruit (cranberries, etc), fresh blueberries, etc. I tried them with chopped apple once and I quite liked them. However, if you want a distinctly apple flavor, you may want to try adding more apple than 1/3 cup or substituting a small portion of the milk with apple juice or apple cider.

Forthcoming

So classes recently started in my PhD program. The last little while has been a whirlwind of orientation, meeting new people, setting up all of the administrative things, and trying desperately to navigate a new public transportation system (which seems to me to make very little sense). In fact, things have been so crazy I missed 2 out of the three trains home on Friday due to inexperience and bad luck.

I did bake my first bread in my new oven as well as a set of English muffins with the same dough.  I will be posting that in the next few days. They were very simple but very delicious.

Also, I just wanted to say that I made some pumpernickel bread with Sue today (I will be posting that bread soon as well). It was a lot of fun and it tasted pretty good for a rye bread, although the loaves were really ugly. She brought over some of her baking for the blog for Servia and me to try. I won't spoil the surprise because she's posting it later this week, but I have to say that it was absolutely delicious. I will put up some sort of alert when she posts it.

However, it may be a few days before I post because I'm buried under all of the reading that I put off this weekend (oops). For now, check out Sue's microwavable chocolate cupcake recipe, which I'll probably succumb to making some night when I'm up late studying.

And They Say Philosophy Isn't Relevant Anymore

Apparently, two Russian men got into an argument about a week ago. It became so heated that on man shot the other repeatedly. You can read the basic facts here, and there is a wider discussion here.

At graduate orientation, two of my friends and I were taken to the university pub by a philosophy PhD first year (in logic) who bought us all beer. Apparently, this guy recently won $1000 in Vegas betting on the particular part of Kant about which the argument took place. I didn't even know one could bet on things like that. Anyway, I guess philosophy can make money after all.

A Lesson to Be Learned

Much of the time, I am communication-o-phobic: I hate calling people, I often don't carry my phone with me or neglect to answer it, I'm not great at replying to emails (and especially bad about sending them to people whom I have not met), and I just generally avoid dealing with things. I try to be sociable and reasonable about modern communications, but it's not one of my skills.

However, today I considered posting this status on facebook: "I called to talk to the head of an office that deals with 28,000 students at my new university and he instantly recognized my name. Lesson to be learned: If you don't confirm that my paperwork is received, I will keep harassing you until you do."

I realized that that was dumb, so I refrained. It just shows that, when I have the impetus (in this case, making sure the money from my fellowship was going to cover my tuition), I can move mountains. The best part was that the head of the office laughed when I called-- he didn't seem annoyed that I was worried about my information. So, as of today, I'm trying to turn over a new leaf.

I'll post some more bread in the next few days-- my family and I just finished off the wonderful SFBI loaves and so we'll be needing more bread.

News

While I'm still waiting to hear from all of my institutions, I have some good news from others. Egnatius just got accepted to a big university in Canada for a PhD! That's pretty cool. He is still waiting to hear from everywhere else. Also, a friend of mine in the program got accepted to one big-name California school and has an interview via Skype and a campus visit each with big Ivy League schools. It would undermine anonymity to provide any more information, but I'm really excited for them, and since no one seems to be posting on the Grad Café, it seemed right to let people know that certain schools were out.

While I wait, I have some breads I'm planning on making, so I'll keep you updated on that as well.

Thought it was over already?

So I thought the application process was over and now it would just be waiting to hear from graduate schools.

Nope.

It turns out this was a problematic assumption. Transcripts seem to have vanished into thin air on the way to a number of my schools. I finally had to fed-ex some to one of the schools because they are making their decisions next week. Seriously, this is insane.

I did a lot of things wrong during this process, and now I know better. Maybe I'll post some helpful hints for others once it's all over.

Now that I've sorted about half of these problems out, I am going to go back to making and posting about bread and other wonderful tasty things.

An artsy photo of the grain mill surrounded by King Arthur Flour

One last thing: I was given a wonderful hand-crank grain grinder for Christmas. It's totally awesome, and I've found that with some of the fancier grains, it's a lot less expensive to grind your own flour. I've only made one loaf with hand ground flour, but it was pretty cool. However, I can't secure the grain grinder to the table because the power needed to work the hand-mill is simply too much for my table. If anyone has any ideas on how to build a solid workbench, that would be awesome. More news on the mill soon!

Getting Ready For Battle

Planner: Calendar

When I was in high school, I used to love the weeks leading up to school. Although I often dreaded going back for another year and I certainly dreaded the summer homework, I absolutely love school shopping. It is almost like, I would imagine, a fashionista buying a dress for the party of the season: finding something flashy, but at the same time something in which she feels comfortable enough so she won't regret her choice at the end of the evening. Anyway, I would do the same thing with school supplies. Something cool and enticing, so I would want to use it, but also something that served a definite function.

In seventh grade I started color coding my classes and my homework and I am convinced that this was essential to my high GPA throughout my middle school and high school career. The strict organization permeated every aspect of my school life and even if my room was a mess, my binders were always pristine and my homework was always highlighted in the appropriate color in my planner.

In college, this system degraded. I tried a number of organizational systems that did not work very well. Detailed syllabi replaced my planner, for the most part. The subjects of my classes varied widely from semester to semester and it was difficult to maintain the rigid color scheme. I no longer had a system that allowed me to organize my homework and keep my school books separate from the mess that sometimes engulfed my room. Both junior and senior year I tried to revamp my system to limited success. I became more organized and improved my work and efficiency and my class and thesis notes were fabulous. However, I still could not replicate my high school organizational successes.

This year, I am going to try again. I bought myself a new planner (see one page above) and a new set of pens (instead of highlighters) to color code it. I have assigned colors to my classes and various other work for the remainder of the summer, although I know these will change again as the Fall begins. The new university at which I will be taking classes has a more traditional system than my alma mater, so perhaps the rigidness of the organizational system will fit it well.

Planner: Week

Good luck on the school year, everyone (in school or otherwise), and may you enjoy your preparation as much as I am!

Prioritizing Intellectual Projects

I only have a few weeks of summer left. I have to start prioritizing my intellectual projects. It seems I have had a number of weeks the seemed to evaporate with little progress at all. However there are a number of things that I simply must do before I finish the summer.

1. Review my Greek Grammar and vocabulary in Hansen & Quinn.
2. Review my Latin Grammar and vocabulary in Moreland & Fleischer.
3. Finish the Crito.
4. Read more Homer.
5. Finish the Medea.
6. Write a draft of my personal statement.
7. Work on thesis revisions (for graduate school writing sample).

This means that a lot of other endeavors will fall by the wayside including Xenephon, Infinite Jest, most of the works on my reading list, re-vitalizing my French, etc (although some short lived things I may do just for fun now and then).

I have only seven weeks to prepare for my Greek and Latin exams (to get into the classes I desire). Wish me luck!

Gore, Fire, and Random Updates: A Collection of Thoughts

For politicians in the United States, Friday is affectionately known as "take out the trash day." The reason for this is that media outlets have some number X column inches to fill and if you give them one story on Friday (as less people read the headlines over the weekend) they will fill it with that, but if you give them five stories, each story is only X/5 column inches. So, in general, politicians dump their negative stories in the Friday trash.

In that tradition, I thought I would jumble a bunch of stories together for today's post. This is just because I have a couple of things on which to follow-up as well as some general thoughts and I have been rather busy in the last few days as there is now a deadline for transition in my life: I am going back to school in the Fall. I now am trying to prioritize what i need to do before beginning school.

Gore: By "gore" I mean the noun version of "gory" rather than the former vice-president. Last night I spent a while typing up a preliminary version of my reading list for my graduate school applications. Many of the grad schools require that applicants send a list of all of the texts that they have read in the original classical languages. As I was hunting down syllibi and typing up my list, I realized that I have little memory of any of the texts that I read for my Latin Civil War class. I was stressed and tired during my final semester in college and poured myself into my thesis more than anything else. I also had terrible insomnia because of all the stress and my memory became very poor. I almost think it's insincere to write down the whole number of pages I read in this class. My original solution was to reread it. But then I remembered: I also really did not enjoy the reading. The class itself was ok. The teacher was great and I remember loving her military diagrams. However, we read Caesar and Lucan's account of the civil war in Rome. Caesar's account is a complete bore and the battle plans are often hard to follow (hence the military diagrams). Lucan's account is interesting for about the first 200 lines until he starts talking about the civil war. At that point it becomes so melodramatic and gory that it's just completely joyless to read. For context, Lucan the nephew of Seneca the Stoic philosopher, and a writer in Nero's court. Lucan was one of Nero's contemporary and rumor has it that Nero sentenced Lucan to death because Lucan was a better writer than the emperor. To be fair, Lucan was probably involved in an attempt to depose Nero. Furthermore, Lucan's Latin is tough: he writes Silver Epic and the commentaries are almost completely useless except for intertextual references. This is partially because no one likes Lucan: his content is overblown and his hexameter is boring. I may reread excerpts or read them in English so I don't babble like an idiot when asked about them.

 

Fire: There was an interesting article about Mercury today in the New York Times.

Random Updates: If you have been following my blog, you probably remember that last semester I took a Calculus class at a local community college for fun. I enjoyed most of the class, but I found some of the relearning more difficult than I had expected. Worse, when I showed up for the final, half of it was completely foreign and I left feeling dejected, as I had spent a long time studying. To my great surprise, I actually did well on the final and got fairly good grade in the class. Woohoo! I am even considering taking the next calculus class when I get the chance.

Graduate School

Cerinthus reminded me recently that I have to start getting my graduate school applications together and take my GRE. It's going to be a long slog: I have to do a lot of research into which departments have professors with whom I am eager to work, have strengths in my areas of interest, and provide funding, as well as trying to figure out how to rank schools by my choice and by the likely hood of acceptance.

It's going to be a really long process. Some of the schools want a 15-20 page writing sample while others allow it to be up to 30 and each seem to have slightly different requirements. Some universities give strict guidelines about statements of purpose or lists of ancient texts read by the applicant, while others provide vague parameters or use odd terminology. Luckily Propertius II and Herodotus II both journeyed quite successfully through this process and will be of some help, although I will greatly miss meeting over skype to translate with both of them (they will be very busy in their Greek prose survey class as well as everything else).

A professor at the wonderful school which will welcome both of my dear friends in the fall demanded a bare minimum vocabulary of 1500 words from Campbell's Classical Greek Prose: A Basic Vocabulary. I have a lot of work to do. Although I recognize quite a few works, I am having trouble with my 50 flash-card section of Greek, Classical Vocabulary Cards: Academic Study Card Set. Oy.

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.

It was terrifying enough applying to grad school before Professor Michael Pakaluk put his nose in it...

Word of warning: this post begins with a lengthy personal anecdote, you can skip to the * if you want to get to the point more quickly.

I took my first ancient philosophy class in July 2009. I was expecting to hate it, given what I deemed was the gross analytical bent in academic philosophy in the United States characterized by an examination of the logic and structure of linguistic utterance to the point of nonsens. As it turns out, although I may have been correct about philosophy at large (I have no way of knowing), I was surely wrong about this class.

The class was, in fact, analytic in its approach. However, the questions asked were lively and fascinating. We read Plato's Meno and Theatetus (with a recommendation to read Burnyeat's introduction) in small pieces and had a 2h30 discussion format in which to discuss in-depth questions on each reading. It was magnificent. And the PhD candidate running the class was incredible (and was an alumnus from my college!)

The questions, designed by the Grad student running the seminar, asked us to explore the logic behind each set of claims and exchanges as well as the reason for each story, tangent, or explanation made by one of the characters. Instead of looking at the rhretorical, historical, grammatical, and cultural meanings of the passages, the close analysis was on the logical through lines of the narrative in each particular speech or interchange. Although most of the class had a background in philosophy (many were on the cusp of graduating in philosophy) all of them seemed genuinely interested in the classical contexts of specific statements if it provided a means by which to understand the logic or the rhetorical weight of a statement (the lack of context and focus solely on language was something that had given me a distaste for analytic philosophy in my few encounters with  it). When I finished the class, I knew I wanted to go into Ancient Philosophy. The dissection at such a minute level was far more illuminating than I expected. However, I wanted to approach it from a more classical bent-- mixing what I thought was admirable about the approach to that wonderful class used in conjunction with what I found incredible about a work like Thomas Szlezak's Reading Plato [1].

Going into my senior year and without proper prerequisites, I could not suddenly jump into a philosophy-heavy program. Even so, I was not dissuaded. I still would like to work on classical philosophy in graduate school, although, perhaps move into it through a classics department.

*One of the things that the PhD candidate who lead my class showed me was Philosophical Gourmet Report: Ancient Philosophy. Although he had a great interest in the subject, ancient philosophy was not his primary field. He warned me, of course, not to take the list at face value, and helped me check through faculty lists (to survey names and specialties of the professors at each institution. Using a combination of hearsay, investigation into the faculty of a number of schools, the Classical Journal's List of PhD programs in Classical Studies (to which Propertius II directed me), Philosophical Gourmet Report: Ancient Philosophy and I have made a preliminary list. Then, in my internet wanderings I discovered this article, evaluated the Philosophical Gourmet Report: Ancient Philosophy.

The article on a blog called Certain Doubts describes a posting by Professor Michael Pakaluk on his blog Dissoi Blogoi acerbically criticizing Philosophical Gourmet Report: Ancient Philosophy (points 3-6) and excoriating any of those who choose to employ it (points 1-2). Probably much more so than the author of Certain Doubts, I do not have the guidance that Pakaluk or another professional in the field might provide. Ancient philosophy-- which consisted of one professor at my alma mater-- was decisively separated from any connection with classics whatsoever and I was, instead, discouraged from "serving two masters" by leaping into a hybrid field. Although I think criticisms 3-6 on Dissoi Blogoi were valid, the first two points which begin with the phrase "any student" are absolutely a personal attack on those students who choose to view these rankings for the sake of gaining information, even though Pakaluk's response claims that they are not. I may know the scholars I would like to work with and those I would dislike, but I have no idea whether a PhD from one institution or another is more likely to land me a better job-- or whether the recommendation of one faculty member over another is likely to do the same.

And so, the search for a graduate program continues...

Endnotes

1. If you do not like Plato for some reason or are suspicious of Plato or are tired of the old, traditional interpretations of Plato, I cannot recommend Reading Plato more highly. It is 120 pages of pure awesome. Szlezak provides incredible insight and context to a complex philosopher and revolutionized my own thought about Plato. It was originally published in German, Szlezak's native tongue, as Platon lesen. This is of course reason #87 that I need to learn German.

But for Want of a Good Coffee Shop...

I love working in coffee shops. In my mind, they provide the perfect environment because:

1. You're not disturbed, but you're also not alone (which can impede work because all you want to do is go and find people to avoid it).
2. There is coffee which increases both comfort and productivity
3. If you are hungry, there is usually food. The food costs money, so it dissuades you from eating to avoid your work, but you also know it's there if you need it so you cannot use the excuse about needing to go get food.
4. The white noise of music or conversation is there for you, but you can easily drown it out with your own music.
5. You look super cool sitting there with a scholarly book, math/science problem sets, classical poetry and a dictionary, etc
6. There might be interesting people there to notice if you need a moment of a distraction before you get back to work, and you don't look like you're paying attention to them, because you're working
7. Every good coffee shop has its own unique appeal.

I rarely went to the campus coffee shops when I was at school. The coffee was pretty great, but unfortunately I knew a lot of people who went there and worked there, which caused it to violate my first benefit of coffee shops (listed above). So instead, I used to walk about 0.8mi to my favorite coffee shop.

The shop had one long window that face the street so that the light came in and a person sitting in the chairs could see people walking by. For people-watchers like me, this was an ideal place. The coffee was generally of good quality and their multi-grain bagels were phenomenal. I used to just sit their for hours, working on my thesis or reading for one of my other classes.

The best thing about the coffee shop was the people. The baristas were lovely; they had nice senses of humor,  and they were young, friendly, and liberal. The population of the coffee shop was mostly made up of senior citizens-- most of whom had a strong christian background. The coffee shop was located in a predominantly christian neighborhood; there were seven churches in all within a three block radius of the shop. They had coffee every day. Because of the routine, they knew each other well and spent long hours drinking coffee and talking about their various childhoods as each were raised in different christian sects. There were even a christian quilting group that met there. There was also another group. There was a young web-designer, also a regular, with her dreadlocked-hair, her vulcan eyebrows, her homemade clothes, and her energetic seven-year old son. On the weekends, there were also a number of fathers with daughters and sons, often giving the children's mothers and hour or so of quiet time. And, of course, there were college students from my school and others the area. What was pleasantly surprising was the friendly ease with which the two groups interacted: the young liberal quasi-hippies and the old, christian conservatives. I do not think I have ever seen opposed groups at such peace and so pleasantly enjoying the company of one another.

I felt so at home there. I remember coming in with my laurels-- a display that I had fninished my thesis-- and one of the barristas asked what the occasion was. When I told them I had finished my thesis, the whole coffee shop applauded. It was so lovely. Then I enjoyed my coffee and bagel while reading for one of my last classes.

Unfortunately, since I moved, I do not have a new coffee shop in which I can translate. I really miss that atmosphere. There are three in the area that I have thus far discovered: one is too noisy, one is too sketchy, and one has these horrible aluminum tables that make a loud banging noise every time someone sitting at them moves. The search continues.