Slightly Ill Meditations on Textbooks

Although I have been taking good care of myself (sleep, veggies, fruits, vitamins, Greek, scholarship, a little Latin, etc), my cold seems to have relapsed and I feel rather ill. Consequently, my understanding of the world (as it always does when I am distracted by a painful throat, the sniffles, etc, declines rather sharply. Although I struggled through both some Crito and even a poem by Catullus this afternoon (110), my ability to effectively take in information sharply declined after a long art history lecture in a darkened room. As such, instead of continuing with Plato, Homer, or even reading Zuckert for my research, I have been reading a textbook.

My only mandatory class for the fall (aside from at least one course in each Greek and Latin) is a seminar on, essentially, how to produce classical scholarship. I am not sure what this entails precisely, although I seem to remember something about producing a term paper, the only book assigned for the class is a recently-published research manual by David Schaps called the Handbook for Classical Research. After I began nodding off while reading Plato's Philosophers (which quite interesting and this demonstrates clearly that I do not feel well), I decided to something with a simpler tone and point: my new textbook.

Like any good textbook, Schaps' work is engaging without being particularly challenging. Schaps has a strong personal style in his writing that is amenable, even if his opinions, at times, can be rather irritating (especially when he presents them as universal sentiments). However, there is something that feels wrong about the book. Although I am only 50 pages into the book, I get the distinct feeling that Classical research is simply not a subject that can be stuffed into the form of a textbook. Furthermore, although Schaps' distinct voice makes the book more engaging that it might be with a more distant author, it also causes me as the reader to constantly question his qualifications for writing such a book. The only place I have heard his is in one brief discussion of ancient coinage. It caused the more cynical part of me to wonder whether he has children to put through college, because certainly a general research handbook is going to sell better than the Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece.

To be sure, there are a lot of things that I still do not know. Until a few days, I had never researched fragments and my examination of the Teubner volume in the library containing Pindar 169a gave me some interesting insights (like how many times Plato's dialogues quote this fragment), but if it indeed contained the information I sought, I did not understand it. I have not gotten to examine Schaps' explanation of research with fragments yet so I do not know if he would be helpful. I certainly could have used this book in high school or early college when, while I had access to them, I did not understand what a commentary was and I sailed through my texts blindly until Propertius II helped me out in my Aeschylus class. Yet, at this moment in my career, I am less in need (for example) of a textbook that explains what scholia is than a textbook that provides a detailed understanding of different types of scholia and how to read them (e.g Ancient Greek Scholarship) or perhaps (more pertinent ant the moment) a detailed monograph on strategies to deal with textual fragments and their sources.

Maybe Schaps refers students to resources like this (I do know that he mentions Eleanor Dickey's book), but even if that were the case, it seems like a fruitless mission to write a book on a topic that is designed only as a chaperone to bigger and better resources instead of writing (or hiring someone else to write) analysis at the level necessary for rigorous undergraduates or less experienced graduate students as the book, by it's very nature (and the assumption made clear in the introduction) is geared solely toward individuals who intend to research and publish in the field. More thoughts as I get farther along (and hopefully as I become more coherent as my cold wains).

Notes 08/17/11: I was thinking that the book was declining further when I came to a chapter entitled "Book Reviews" (Schaps 57-65), but I was impressed to discover that the chapter was not instruction on how to read a book review, but on how to write one that might be accepted by a journal and what types of journals tend to publish them. However, the jury is still out.

Note 08/19/11: Once again I must add a positive addendum to my review. Although I have used many dictionaries in my time as a student of the classics, I still found Schaps' chapter on lexicography illuminating when it came to dictionaries (Schaps 69-80). It was nice to find out that there is a dictionary of Mycenean Greek (although, apparently, the best one is in Spanish) and that Woodhouse is the only full English-Classical Greek dictionary around, but other smaller ones, such as one by by James Morwood (good to know for prose composition).

The Joys of Research

Over the past few days, I have begun once again working on editing my thesis. This process is mostly for graduate school applications, but some is as a tonic for my own soul. Although my thesis certainly did what it needed to and was relieved well, it failed to entirely answer the questions upon which I wrote it. I know what I cannot spend my life fine-tuning my undergraduate thesis, as Propertius II gently reminded me, but I just do not feel like the project is finished yet.

I love researching, which I think is part of the reason that I love Plato. My favorite thing is finding that nugget of text that others missed and figuring out the possibilities of what it means. Plato is full of these little moments that could have huge interpretive significance. I have spent the last few days researching the possible dramatic date of the Laws looking for the clues dropped within the text itself because I think that Catherine Zuckert, who has a wonderful chapter on the dramatic (not compositional) date of the laws in her book does not fully address some of the complications with her position.

Through this process I realized the truth of something a friend said: she told me that not everyone is a researcher. At the time, I thought this was absurd. I figured that if someone liked the topic enough, they were bound to like researching it. However, over the past few days I've been able to see her point. Someone researching needs to not only like the topic, but rather enjoy what a blogger on the CAMPVS refers to as "the hunt." I might put it rather differently; for me it's more like a hike which is long, sweaty, and arduous (although it is invigorating as well) with the "epiphany moment" as the peak of the mountain where the hiker feel like (s)he can suddenly see the entire world (or sometimes suddenly realizes it's not the peak at all).

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.

Wine Snob: Expanding My Palate (Soon)

I had one of those days where I woke up in the morning (later than I had intended), realized that I had forgotten about all of the Horace I was supposed to read, knew I could not finish it in time, and just decided to relax for a little while and worry about life later. Unfortunately, that means that I ended up shirking my obligations with both Propertius II and Cerinthus and I feel like a complete loser (sorry guys!).

Since I am still working on my work on dramatic vs. compositional dating of Plato, see my recent blogposts, I spent most of the day looking out my window and re-reading Catherine Zuckert's chapter on the Laws. A good portion of the Laws, in my memory and in Zuckert's summery/analysis, focuses on moderation and specifically a debate between the Athenian and the Dorian views on wine. The Athenians traditionally drank a lot of wine at symposia and civic festivals like the Greater Dionysia. The Dorians, however, according to the Laws, are not allowed to be intoxicated in public. In the Laws, the Athenian Stranger proposes to only allow men over the age of 30 to drink in order to test their character. Overall, the Greek world seems to conceive of wine as an agent of forgetfulness and lowered inhibitions (i.e. to test a person's true character). Since that seems to be the theme of my day (and because we just got the wines for the holidays), I thought I might talk a little about wine.

I do not know much about wine, as I have mentioned before, but I like to learn. My mother found a wonderful site called Garagiste, which is run by a small importer in Seattle who sends wine when the customer has assembled an entire case. We sometimes assemble a single case (one or two bottles of interesting-sounding wines until we have collected  a case) and share the wines with friends at holiday gatherings. The set this year is entirely red wines, and most of them are "mystery wines." Since there has been a great glut of grapes over the past few years on the West Coast of the US, a number of wineries jumped at the chance to "undersell" their wines (i.e. selling them for much lower than the traditional/list price), packaged anonymously, without tarnishing the reputation of their label. I am looking forward to tasting the wine and reporting back on it at some point soon.

Speaking of wine, while I have been writing this, I decided to revisit one of the movies of my youth (I was raised on musicals of the Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire era), which also involves drinking a lot of wine. High Society is a musical version of Philadelphia Story, narrated by Louis Armstrong and featuring Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra. I highly recommend it, if you have not seen it (although be aware, there is some seriously 1950s-style moralizing).

Liminal Characters: A Group of Friendly, Intellectual Eccentrics

Indo-European Linguistics is a small, and not particularly popular, field. I once heard from a grad student in a history department that the historians thought the classicists were intense and intellectual in a way that was impressive, unnerving, and furthered their image as social misfits. She said that the classicists felt that the Indo-European studies students were impressive and unnerving in a similar way and never came out in the light of day [1]. In stereotypical fashion, I made the assumption that the IE people were going to be unattractive, socially-deficient, overly-technical misfits. I was pleasantly surprised at what I discovered.

Over the two days, there must have been about 70 people who were at the conference, although there were never more than 40 people in the conference room at any one time, and most of the lectures drew about 25. The group of professors in the room was diverse in specific interest, but they were primarily men over the age of 60 of European descent. In general, they were also sweet, although I think that they were a little suspicious of me [2]. The professors were split between those who were smartly dressed in suits, and those in shorts and t-shirts, which was amusing to me.

The rest of the room was made up largely of (I presume) graduate students in the field. Those of the students who were presenting could be divided into generative linguists and non-generative linguists and this correlated to hipster [3] and non-hipster (respectively). Even though I did not necessarily understand (or like) the methodology of the generativist hipsters, I found some of them charming and some of their presentations to be interesting. There was one by a particularly hipster student which used some kind of a crazy Apple-based web function that actually made me seasick because it was moving and changing sizes as he spoke, and he spoke very quickly. However, I found him moderately charming and I think I would have found his presentation interesting if he had not been speeding through it. Aside from the hipsters, there were a pretty diverse group of attendees from girls in tight suit-dresses to girls in hippie-style floor-length skirts to guys dressed like trendy business men to guys who looked as though they had hardly noticed their attires as they put it on. I noticed, oddly, that among the attendees and moderators, the gender split was about 50%-50% (surprising for an old-boys-club-style field), but the presenters were only about 20% female.

Overall, the conference was enjoyable and the people were eccentric and friendly.

Endnotes

1. At my alma mater, there were majors that were ranked in a similar fashion (although many majors such as chem, biochem, physics, classics, and history-lit seemed to all but themselves at the top of the "crazy" pyramid). There was also the opposite side of this chain, which were the majors that everyone made fun of for neither being difficult nor academically rigorous. Psychology (excepting the neuropsychology people who most people spoke of with respect) usually landed at the bottom of the heap as the most disparagingly-spoken-of major. However, above psych it depended on the person that you were talking to as to which way they ranked the departments.
2. They had some right to be suspicious. Not that I meant any harm, obviously. Rather, I overheard some one of the graduate students say that someone in the department had proposed the idea of having name-tags for the conference, but the proposal was roundly rejected on the grounds that "we all knew each other." The conference was free and open to the public, but I guess they expected no one new would show up. 
3. I find it pretty hilarious that my spell-check does not accept "Indo-European" or "neuropsychology," but it is perfectly happy with "hipster." What does that say?

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!

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.

Updates: Kindle and Free Books

I wrote two blogposts of the last few weeks which I feel are in need of updating: A Bibliophile's Review of the Kindle DX and Problems With Free Books. (I also recently updated the Blog on the Minoan Octopus Jar.)

Kindle for Cooks

One of the things that I did not mention in my original review is my use of the kindle for cooking. I use it in two ways. One is to download and put recipes on my kindle and stand it up on my counter-top. This only works, obviously if one downloads a cookbook or creates a PDF or MOBI document. I used a particular case, a platform kindle case, that allowed me to stand the kindle upright so that I could read the recipes easily. The other way that I used the kindle was to have it read to me while I was cooking. I downloaded a free version of The History of the Peloponnesian War and had the Kindle read to me while I was cooking so that I did not waste time [1]. It was pretty helpful, except for the pronunciation of the Greek names. For example, Themistocles (the-mist-oo-cleez) was pronounced (the-mis-do-cls). Although the humanoid voices can be kind of annoying, it gets the information across and entertainment can be found by poking fun at it.

As a random technological sidenote, I have had my phone for 6 years and it is finally beginning to break down (people cannot hear me when I answer the phone and I have to shout, etc). Does anyone have a good recommendation?

A Clarification and More Amazing Free Books

I realized that I never explained the meaning of the title "The Problems of Free Books." The idea is that Google Books provides some downloadable free books as well as providing essentially an enormous, no-membership-required digital library that allows the reader to browse through editions of books online for the purposes of research, as well as for the ability to preview books online. For any other book, there is the difficulty of finding the book in the first place, making sure that it is the correct edition, etc. Speaking of free ebooks, there is another Amazing Site (referred to me by Propertius II) that has a bunch of academic books marked "public" which can be read online.

Endnotes

1. At the time when I was doing this, I was taking a class on Thucydides: Book 1 in Greek, I was attempting to read the rest of Thucydies' History of the Peloponnesian War for context. Usually I would read the beautiful Landmark Edition, which was a wonderful gift from my parents, but I ended up just trying to breeze through the kindle edition, and look at the Landmark for reference.